OBSERVATIONS ON NO KINGS by Marc Brazeau

PROTEST GOES MAINSTREAM

I was watching THE BULWARK livestream commentary during THE NO KINGS PROTESTS around the country. Of my takeaways, the most striking change in polarity is simply the mainstreaming of protest. That is crucial because that's a big part of how authoritarian governments are pushed out of power. 

I want to talk a bit about what a big shift this is. Anyone who has read HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE by Ziblatt and Levitsky knows that where a cross-center coalition arises, where the center-left and center-right can coalesce to defend democracy against authoritarianism, they have been successful. The norm is the opposite.  People stay in denial about the threat that authoritarianism poses and continue to fight over what the left and right fight over in normal times while the authoritarians consolidate power. The size and demographics of NO KINGS should give us hope. As should the pro-NO KINGS point of view across The Bulwark. It was kind of mind-blowing to see Bill Kristol talk about his experiences at a Waltham, MA NO KINGS rally. A lot of us remember Bill Kristol as a neo-conservative cheerleader of the invasion and occupation of Iran. If we want to beat Trump, we should see it as a good sign that he is in the pro-democracy coalition. People who think that the pro-democracy is to big and we need to kick out people we have fundamental disagreements with or who took what we see as ghastly positions in the past have not learned from the history of what it takes to beat back ascendent populist authoritarianism. They may be vocally antiauthoritarian but they are functionally pro-authoritarian and Trumpism thrives on that viewpoint even as it hates what it professes out loud. It is beyond the scope of this essay to cover all the ins and outs of the 3.5% Rule. As a rule of thumb, it shows why we should take NO KINGS seriously, even if the aims seem a bit overbroad and the ask as unfocused. The 3.5% rule is a concept in political science that states that when 3.5% of the population of a country protest nonviolently against an authoritarian government, that government is likely to fall from power. The rule was formulated by Erica Chenoweth in 2013. It arose out of insights originally published by political scientist Mark Lichbach in 1995 in his book The Rebel's Dilemma: Economics, Cognition, and Society. For the United States that would be 12 million Americans in the streets. June 2025 NO KINGS brought out an estimated 5 million protestors. October 2025 brought out 7 million. March 2026 included more than 3,300 organized events across the country that drew a combined estimated 8 to 9 million protestors. In a country that still has functioning elections where Republicans, even in red and purple areas of the country have been getting trounced, those numbers should give us hope.

PROTEST IS UNPOPULAR IN NORMAL TIMES

Protest is a form of irregular politics. Regular politics consists of voting, electing, legislating, lobbying, OP/EDs, letters to the editor, civil lawsuits. Stuff like that. Irregular politics is protest, marches, candlelight vigil, boycott, strike, hunger strike, etc. 

Most people, in normal times, don't participate in irregular politics, they barely participate in regular politics. Many distrust and dislike irregular politics. Irregular politics is what you have to fall back on when you feel your cause is righteous but you can't get the job done through normal channels. The Civil Rights Movement provides a string of examples: the Freedom Rides, lunch counter sit-ins, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, The March on Washington. Because majorities in the South supported Jim Crow, it was not going to be simply voted out of existence. Change had to come through building power and  leverage to force changes, either through drawing attention from national audiences to build support among a national majority or to change the incentives of local business elites to work toward the goals of the civil rights activists. 

The Civil Rights Movement wasn't popular at the time. Even outside of the South most Americans agreed with the goals but always thought it was pushing too hard, too fast, creating too much disorder. MLK's Letter from a Birmingham Jail,  wasn't written to persuade opponents of the cause of civil rights. It was written to White liberals who claimed to support civil rights but always thought that the methods should be less disruptive, provoke less violence. 

Until recently, most people were very suspect of causes that couldn't be achieved through voting and lobbying. People in incumbent groups really don't understand why you can't just vote, lobby, and take your lumps if you can't organize majorities. When conservative states started criminalizing protest and making it legal to run over protesters breaking the law to be in the street, I had a conservative friend who really couldn't see what was wrong with that. The idea that America tolerates civil disobedience —that if you break the law, the punishment is the same if you are jaywalking or marching without a permit— just made no sense to him. Jaywalking was a civil penalty. Jaywalking for political reasons now carried a criminal penalty. He couldn't see an issue with that logic. You were breaking the law, why shouldn’t that be a crime? Nor did running over and killing someone  marching without a permit seem out of line to him. He didn’t see it as legalized murder in order to raise the stakes of protesting, riskier, and less likely to draw anyone but the most committed activists. My friend didn't see irregular politics as a legitimate part of a culture of democracy. I don't think he was that far outside of what most people thought. To see the crowds at The Villages in Florida was amazing. They were much bigger, to my eye, than they were back during Trump's first term. To get the crowds Indivisible turned out in the states and cities that aren't deep blue took turning out people who would ordinarily never turn out for protest. There may be groups that align in their particulars better with your politics. I don’t know who else, other than Indivisible, that could have turned out over 8 million Americans and vast crowds in The Villages.  

One of the things that the Bulwark commentators took for granted was that, "Of course the bulk of the protesters were 50 and older. That NPR crowd of normies has more free time, the stability in their lives to plan and be somewhere when they want to be." That is certainly true. But I went to big protests in Washington DC when I was in college, for homeless issues and for reproductive rights. Those crowds skewed young. It wasn't middle class, middle-aged folks and retirees that showed up, it was young people and activists who showed up. During the first Gulf War, the antiwar marches I was at were organized by college kids in Cambridge and Boston, not the core, comfortable NPR listener. 

I think there was the beginning of a shift during GW Bush's invasion and occupation of Iraq. Crowds went from a left-wing activist demographic to more vanilla liberals who owned homes but who found themselves in the street at big antiwar protests. 

It's still the case that conservatives just see protests as a form of public disorder and illegitimate in a democracy where they are used to getting most of what they want from responsive politicians. There is a reason why they saw the Black Lives Matter protests and January 6th as two sides of the same coin. Violent protest and non-violent protest accompanied by opportunistic looting and arson look exactly the same to them. Even without opportunist looting and arson, non-violent protests that provoke the police to riot and commit violence against peaceful protestors are identical to January 6th to them because it is all protest, disorder, and violence. 

To see these crowds for NO KINGS drawn from people with moderate and even center-right politics for what were essentially 'process' issues until Trump ordered the illegal invasion of Iran has been amazing. That is, to stand up for democracy and the rule of law is to stand up for what is essentially a set of process issues, none of which are a big deal in isolation and certainly not normally as salient as housing or civil rights or reproductive rights. 

We really are in a different time. It feels like American fascism is no longer on the rise. They are still in power, but that power is slipping away.