There’s a debate about how much today’s No Kings Day will matter. It’s the third such event, the success of the previous two having already astonished not just the organizers, but America’s leadership class and the American people more generally.
What though do I mean by “success”? For now, I refer to the numbers, only to the numbers. To the surprisingly large, remarkably large turnout: some five million people for the first No Kings Day held last June, and some seven million people for the second No Kings Day held in October.
It’s not a common occurrence that social movements emerge seemingly out of thin air. I’ve therefore considered the No King’s Day protests to be significant, a possible if not probable harbinger of a Republican rout to come. And I’ve thought of the primary initiators and coordinators of the No Kings movement (Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin) as political players to be taken seriously. (For some of my earlier posts on these subjects see the links below.)
But the question that inevitably comes up is, notwithstanding their enormous size, do protests such as these make a difference? Given that they are amorphous in their political demands, and that they lack a clear and coherent political agenda, what can possibly be their tangible outcome? Will anything be different this Monday morning from last Monday morning? The king – the president of the United States, Donald J. Trump – will still be sitting on his Oval Office throne. And his subjects – most importantly Republican members of Congress – will continue as they have been, craven. So, what’s the point? Does it suffice to register distrust, displeasure, and dissatisfaction? Does it suffice to vent? Or are the protests fatally flawed for lack of a precise political plan?
To these questions I do not of course have clear answers. So I will simply venture the following. First, size matters. Harvard University’s Erica Chenowith has evidence for this, evidence that peaceful protests that reach a certain critical mass have measurable, concrete political outcomes. (See the BBC article describing her work, also linked below.) Second, for today’s No Kings Day to be assessed a success it will have to have one to two million more people protesting than the last one. Specifically, this time the crowd must be estimated to be at least eight if not nine or even ten million strong. And third, given that the next congressional election is now only half a year away, if the No Kings Day crowds are to have an actual impact they will have to translate, to transform, their indirect, performative passion into direct, political action. Not in the fullness of time – but in the next few months.
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