A fickle anti-royalism
Saturday’s No Kings protests would have been more persuasive if they had also been held in the Biden years
No Kings protesters gather in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 18. Associated Press / Photo by Allison Robbert

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The first thing to say about No Kings Day is that it is one of the most privileged protests possible relative to its posture. One would expect brave rebels against a dictatorial figure to face the same kind of danger to life, limb, and property the American founders did. That is manifestly not the case here as the modern contestants organized to castigate the current occupant of the White House with no real danger of any kind. To successfully and peacefully spend a day calling out the president as a king while receiving no real pushback is a kind of self-nullifying event. However, I think one can safely predict there will be further iterations of it. In politics, especially American politics, the mobilization of the base of voters is the heart of the battle. If you can get people to spend their Saturday in a big protest crowd, you can probably get them to vote.
No King’s Day had, according to its organizers, some seven million participants. The protests on Oct. 18 were preceded by similar events in June. Seven million is a big number. Organizers say it represents 14 times the number at Trump’s two inaugurations. Of course, such a statistic bears the opportunistic and bombastic imprint of most political stats, which is to say it compares a local event in Washington, D.C., to a national one in many cities. Nevertheless, let it be conceded that seven million is a lot of Americans and that many people are upset with Donald Trump’s leadership.
While the safety and relative peacefulness of the protests seem to undercut the #nokings claim, there is another complicating angle. Donald Trump won the election in both the Electoral College and the popular vote, with neither being a razor’s edge kind of thing. In addition, his party has solid control of the U.S. Senate and narrow control of the House of Representatives. Despite his victory (coming after an assassination attempt that narrowly failed) and the victories in Congress, President Trump is currently mired in a protracted government shutdown. The shutdown is occurring because of the super-majoritarian aspect embedded in the U.S. Senate, which requires 60 votes to accomplish the fiscal objective of funding the government.
I must pause to note that this narrative I am describing does not seem at all to correspond to the plenipotentiary rule of some king or power-hungry dictator. Rather, it seems all too typical for an American president who is constrained by the maddeningly deliberate and plodding mechanisms (a feature, not a bug) of the U.S. Constitution.
For further context, let us examine the term of one President Joseph Biden. Biden repeatedly tried to forgive hundreds of billions of dollars of student loans in a nakedly transactional act designed to win voters. While the attempt was manifestly unconstitutional, he continued to make the effort via every twist possible. He did this even after having previously said he didn’t have the power to do so.
More notably, Biden engaged in supreme indifference when it came to attempting to police the American border despite his status as the top enforcer of the federal law. Many complaints from the #nokings protesters have to do with the effort by the Trump administration to bring order to an immigration situation that has largely escaped any orderly process. Once the number of lawbreakers reaches the millions, then ideas such as due process become almost imaginary. One imagines the point was to break the system so completely it would essentially be the same as changing the law.
In addition, President Biden presided over a very personal kind of administration of justice when it came to his own son. He waited until voters could visit no reprisal upon him and then pardoned his son and family members, thus ensuring investigations into influence peddling would hit a brick wall of immunity. All of this is to say that the previous occupant of the White House would appear vulnerable to complaints of kingly behavior. Yet, there were no similar complaints from the people so motivated on Saturday.
If the No Kings organizers really want to make a difference in American politics, they should stop playing this political shell game that exposes the pea when a Republican is in office and hides it when a Democrat presides. They could do far more good if they held the event every year and insisted upon a return to fealty to our constitution. You don’t want a king? Then let’s go back to having a constitution. The way you avoid dictators is by building up respect for the governing documents, not by winning partisans to a side that will just turn around and enthusiastically use power in a different direction.
Protest is a good thing in a free society, but let’s not put on airs. Saturday’s gatherings were a prelude to a midterm election. They were retail politics, not the Washington civil rights march.

These daily articles have become part of my steady diet. —Barbara
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