There's no King in No Kings
When did we get so fucking polite?
Today, I find myself reading Letter From a Birmingham Jail in the hope of finding some familiarity. The essay by Dr. Martin Luther King doesn't deal much in metaphor, unlike his speeches. Instead, I get a grounded look into the practice and purpose of protest.
Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.
— Letter From a Birmingham Jail by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Contemporary political movements like No Kings (no relation) are, I fear, intentionally divorced from Civil Rights tenets. Though, its polished brand assets and pithy single-sentence messaging do allow the Indivisible-funded org to go toe-to-toe with any Texas megachurch. National protests have scaled well, too. Most of the No Kings' homepage is dedicated to comparing crowd sizes to Trump's inauguration.
But, at its core, No Kings is a Potemkin Village. There isn't much holding up that logo and color palette. Its messaging doesn't belong to any grander mission.
It lacks crisis, it avoids disruption of the status quo, and discourages direct action.
The No Kings organization operates exclusively within the grooves of political decorum, careful never to spill over onto the laps of those we are protesting. It's this proper behavior that a No Kings march strives to achieve, evident in what it chooses to highlight.
The message No Kings conveys is the complete opposite of what I remember the discourse being in the 2010s, when the resist movement was set to make history.
It's less we ate! and more “did we keep our elbows off the table?” (And for that, it infuriates me when I hear No Kings participants scold the youth for their absence in these marches. Especially when we judged how they fight against the Palestinian genocide, as if direct action was so completely unrecognizable to us that it's offensive.)
Maybe we got old.
A core principle behind all No Kings events is a commitment to nonviolent action. We expect all participants to seek to de-escalate any potential confrontation with those who disagree with our values and to act lawfully at these events.
No Kings invokes “non-violence” as an HR policy against civil disobedience and direct action. But, that’s not how Dr. King defined the term, and it's important we regain that knowledge because we're marching our way into a power vacuum without any viable opposition to take the reins (more, later).
During Jim Crow, the unlawful act of sitting in a “whites only” diner meant patrons, store owners, and police officers would retaliate against you, often violently. Non-violence from the Civil Rights era is a discipline that showed us how to respond after scalding hot coffee was thrown in our faces. Today, it teaches students to remain calm, even after they're assaulted with pepper spray, bottles, and fireworks. Non-violence is a necessity when disrupting the status quo, because doing so invokes violence in others.
The No Kings' declaration of “non-violence,” therefore, is a perversion of the original term, because the movement discourages the inciting incident necessary to enact change. Its footer manifesto dictates we stand outside the diner with a sign, staring through the glass with all the demands we aren't willing to go inside and take for ourselves.
If an organization lacks a call-to-action, or it foregoes any opportunity to compel decision-makers to come to the table, then what we see on our Instagram feeds the next day isn't protest. Its content.
I remember when the resist movement, young and bold, was about more than one king. We stood for healthcare and education. We fought for living wages and equal pay for equal work. We marched for Black lives. We were going to defund the police state and fund our communities. Sure, it was a “liberal” movement, before we made such distinctions, and things like direct action were fuzzy concepts. Before official culture tuned our rainbows into millennial-gray slop. But, it was ours, and we were headed in the right direction.
No Kings, MeidasTouch, The Lincoln Project—these are corporate-approved think-tanks just trying to keep neoliberalism alive until the next election. They convinced us that Branded Activism™ has billionaires shaking in their boots.
They've distilled all our problems down to a Trumpian sludge to better grease the wheels of reactionary politics. They warn us that abolition is political poison and they champion reforms that end up rotting in the Senate.
So what we get is a movement content with the cogs of fascism so long as they get to pull the levers. It's the antithesis of activism. It's deactivism.
And yes, anything that generates a crowd can potentially be a great thing. Talk to your neighbors, network with activists, take those lemons and make lemonade. I get it. That's not the problem.
I'm telling you, dear reader, that the machine behind that No Kings website, the people asking you for your name and email address, will never guide us towards real systemic change.
I fear the resist movement has become a way to keep the masses busy and feeling accomplished. Because the moment Trump is out of office, these organizations will vanish. And of course they will. They've made their mission clear from the start. That might be fine for those propping up a rotting neoliberalism corpse like the worst sequel to Weekend at Bernie's ever made. But it's not enough for us, and it's certainly not enough for those who exist in the margins.
This moment calls for more than an anti-Trump brand assets zip file. We need a movement that isn't so focused on one man's whims, because that man has an expiration date, and all the problems he exposed will far outlive him.
Perhaps we don't know any better because we lack a true revolutionary leaders guiding us towards successful outcomes. Perhaps we should reacquaint ourselves with our Civil Rights leaders of the past to better prepare ourselves for an inevitable future—a power vacuum we're ill-prepared to endure.
Because, if neoliberalism dies tonight, what'll be there in the morning to take its place? Crowd size statistics?
