Millions of us took to the streets last Saturday to participate in more than 2,000 local protests under the unified banner of a foundational American principle: No Kings. From international hubs like New York to tiny towns like Genesee, Colorado, following on the heels of the protests against Immigration & Customs Enforcement actions in L.A., Americans of all ages gathered together to protest Donald Trump.
Despite the massive turnout in Los Angeles last week and in cities nationwide for Saturday’s “No Kings” protests, though, criticisms have been leveled at the movement from left, right, and center. Conservatives deride the protests as “riots” and “mobs.” Centrists and the center-left wring their hands with concern that the protests will hurt Democrats’ electoral chances; and leftists note that the protests, though grand in turnout, did not have any tangible impact on our present reality.
I believe that each of those criticisms is wrong.
For starters, criticism from the right wing is not surprising, nor is it particularly meaningful. Of course conservatives oppose the protest movement: the right wing has traditionally been less inclined towards mass movements than the left, and contemporary conservatives do not share the belief in the equal dignity of human lives which drove many demonstrators to the streets.
Criticisms from the center and the left, though, arguably warrant a rebuttal, given that the other political positions and leanings of those critics might well lure some otherwise well-intentioned people down an asinine and counterproductive path which had more to do with getting us to this moment in history than it will ever have to do with extracting us from it. Putting aside the right-wing’s eternal well of grievance for now, I want to walk through some of the critiques from those other corners, and why I believe they are deeply misguided.
On the eve of Saturday’s protests and on the heels of a week of demonstrations in Los Angeles, one of the country’s most odious centrists weighed in. Matt Bennett is a co-founder and vice president of the centrist think tank Third Way. A former deputy chief of staff in the Clinton White House, Bennett’s primary role in the current political ecosystem is to prevent the Democratic Party from considering more progressive policies. His secondary role is as a warden of institutionalized cowardice and political amorality. Speaking to the Wall Street Journal late last week, he embodied the latter.
“The dangers outweigh the potential upsides for Democrats and for Trump, which is not a contradiction,” the man who chose to photograph Michael Dukakis in a tank told the Murdoch-owned rag. “Trump could go too far; he always does. And the protests could also – and already kind of have – go sideways for us.”
On X, Bennett lectured that “history shows” that the only proper way to protest is with “overt demonstrations of patriotism” – a barely veiled critique of the presence of Mexican flags at the L.A. protests.
As so often tends to be the case, Bennett is wrong. What American history actually shows is that almost all protest movements have initially been met by derision, disdain, and scolding like Bennett’s about how the movement will be ineffective if it doesn’t manifest in exactly the manner the scolds would choose. Even the most successful ones.
In 1961, Gallup polled Americans on whether they thought “‘sit-ins’ at lunch counters, ‘Freedom Buses’ and other demonstrations,” would hurt or help the cause of racial integration in the South. 57% believed the demonstrations would hurt. If we can look past the surprisingly antiquated racial language employed in the poll, the point should be shining through pretty clearly.
If it’s still not clear, though, here’s another one: by 1964, three years after the first poll, the percentage who believed the protests now remembered as the civil rights movement would hurt the “cause for racial equality” had risen to 74%.
Martin Luther King, Jr., meanwhile, was seen by savvy centrists as an unAmerican radical, with polls showing him garnering more and more disapproval from white folks as the movement went on. In 1963, Gallup found that 37% of respondents had a negative view of Dr. King. By 1966, that number had climbed to 63%.
The point, of course, is that Bennett’s lectures on the proper way to protest and his insistence that the protests have “already [gone] sideways” for Democrats are completely dispelled by the most successful and popular protest movement in American history. We can be certain how Bennett would have responded to these Gallup polls in the 1960s: the same way he’s responding now, by lecturing, scolding, and warning that attempts to address injustice will surely result in even greater injustice.
Given my own political leanings, criticism from the left also feels important to address. I am two things: wary of the utility of political labels amid the internecine conflicts occurring among the left-of-center, and a leftist. It’s not a label I tout much, it’s not something I wear as either an epaulet or a chip on my shoulder, but it’s true. I have serious structural concerns with capitalist liberalism’s ability and willingness to combat authoritarianism. And every time a ballot shows up at my house, I vote for the Democrats and turn it in – because, despite my serious structural concerns, I am not an idiot.
All that to say, I often find myself having to acknowledge some degree of agreement with social media’s annoying leftist edgelords, even if I am rarely compelled by their tone, approach, or theory of change. And, indeed, many leftists were in the streets for Saturday’s mobilization. Others, though, have leveled criticisms against last week’s protests with which I strongly disagree.
“White liberal to immigrants: ‘I wish it was still my team’s turn to disappear you and your family so I could go back to ignoring it,’” a prominent left account tweeted over a picture of a protesting white woman with a sign reading, “If Kamala were President, we’d be at brunch.”
Though rooted in a real concern that Democratic administrations have not been much less cruel to immigrants than Republican ones, the critique itself is nonsensical. It ignores the thousands of non-white protesters, and the countless immigrants who protested at significantly greater risk to themselves than any native-born protester had to endure. Worse still, it represents the surrender to futility which has crippled a large swath of the left. What would the poster prefer? Would they prefer that no one took to the streets in solidarity with values which they allegedly share? Would they prefer quiet acquiescence to the administration which they criticize some Democrats for not being distinct enough from? Would they like us to tell them how cool they are for being so jaded?
Another account derided the protest movement as “just a neo liberal feel good group that doesn’t get any actual action done.” Here, too, I disagree. Worldwide, movements for justice – and, in fact, leftist movements – have never had a better tool than mass demonstrations. Yes, Trump is still in office after this weekend’s protests. If the protesters had believed he wouldn’t be, maybe their effort could be termed a failure, but that was never the hoped-for outcome of last weekend’s mass mobilization.
The fact is, protests work – and they certainly work better than not doing anything. A 2011 paper which analyzed civilian resistance movements against authoritarian governments found that nonviolent resistance movements achieved their aims 53% of the time. And the logic does not just apply to mainstream mass movements like the No Kings marches. Even more radical groups like Extinction Rebellion have employed the 2011 paper to help shape their climate-focused actions.
The paper’s authors, Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, emphasized to the BBC in 2019 that size matters in protests – and that the nonviolent campaigns they studied saw participation 400% greater than violent campaigns.
Yes, Trump remains in office after Saturday’s protests. Just like Ferdinand Marcos failed to immediately cede power in the Philippines when the People Power movement started in 1986. Just like Eduard Shevardnadze did not immediately collapse in the face of the nonviolent Rose Revolution in 2003. Just as Viktor Yanukovych clung to power in Ukraine through the long winter months of the Euromaidan demonstrations.
But Marcos eventually fell. Shevardnadze eventually resigned. Yanukovych was driven into exile. Each of them had surpassed Donald Trump’s present level of authoritarianism and corruption. Each of them seemed too big to fail. And each of them was eventually leveled by nonviolent mass movements. They didn’t all look how Matt Bennett would have preferred; some of them would have been derided by leftists; all of them were successful.
Protests don’t work like voting. You don’t automatically get your way if you get enough people to turn out. The point of protests is disruption: a demonstration that we refuse to pretend to normalcy until conditions change. A demonstration that the leader, no matter how strong-armed, cannot guarantee the regular flow of commerce, power, and politics without conceding to the crowd in the streets. They are not about persuading the unpersuaded, they are about exhausting and inconveniencing the apparatuses buttressing the leader until even they decide that this guy ain’t worth it.
That’s how protests slay giants.
Matt Bennett and his centrist ilk will continue to lecture. The annoying leftist edgelords of social media will continue to complain. But the millions who protested on Saturday did the right thing. They should be proud of it. And they should join us in doing it again, and again, and again, until the day comes when we can all take to those same streets in celebration.
“First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you.”
– Trade Unionist Nicholas Klein
