I attended the downtown local No Kings Day festivities in Northampton, Massachusetts, and estimate that some 1,500 people came out. I liked the crowds, but the character and will of the people rather collided with the self-serving ambitions of Democratic Party speakers who hogged microphones that might have been given to ordinary people. The potential for a spontaneous, free-flowing expression of public feeling remained unrealized.
What does No Kings Day represent? How does a loosely affiliated collection of organizations achieve a viable identity, a sense of unity, and a vision that goes beyond a mutual feeling that we ought to do something (anything!) as fascist momentum gathers in all its ugly certainty?
If it were up to me I would not have any public speeches at No Kings Day delivered by Democratic Party office holders. This is not because Democrats have become historically unpopular, with Pew polling showing only a 27% approval rating among registered voters, but, rather, to break with the centers of political and corporate power in favor of an association of grassroots individuals and factions. Australian journalist Caitlin Johnstone took the most conceivably hostile view of No Kings Day by posting a photo of a sign at a demonstration that read, “If Kamala Had Won We’d All Be At Brunch.” While I certainly don’t dismiss the value of No Kings Day in Johnstone’s summarily contemptuous manner, I am skeptical of performative nostalgia. The idea that “we’d all be at brunch” obviously labels the sign holder as a bourgeois dilettante who views activism as an inconvenience, but more critically, the longing for the public civility of Kamala Harris, Barack Obama, Joe Biden or Bill Clinton trivializes the No Kings Day movement.
We are living within the most ominous moment in American history—it would hardly be hyperbolic to imagine that biological history squirms on the pitchfork of American fascism. Scientists give us bleak updates while our fascist leaders literally pour gasoline on a five-alarm apocalypse. We need as broad a coalition as possible, but, paradoxically the scope of the resistance movement creates its own set of roadblocks. How do we create an alliance that unites organizations deeply tied to the US political establishment with grassroots movements and ordinary people that have a deep suspicion of the Democratic Party and its satellite organizations?
We need to swiftly transform No Kings from a Democratic Party spectacle to a grassroots resistance movement.
I believe that the No Kings Movement has three fundamental tasks: 1) to assure that the Democratic Party does not gain control of the coalition, 2) to expand the coalition to include those without an institutional voice (the poor, the unhoused, the unregistered and nonvoters, and most importantly, the millions of undocumented US residents at risk for MAGA’s genocidal zeal). The third task is the most difficult and subsumes the goal of limiting the influence of the Democratic Party. 3) The No Kings Day project must take the critical jump from protest to civil disobedience.
The Democratic Party members have habitually seen their role as one tied to the election cycle. They see their goal as flipping the House and Senate in the midterms and electing a Democrat for president in 2028. With the Project 2025 technicians disassembling electoral structures, we should expect that dreams of our continued back-and-forth power transitions no longer exist as a realistic aspiration. Nor should that have ever been a goal—the Democratic Party created the very conditions that made Trump in the first place. Chicago’s Democratic Mayor Brandon Johnson called for a nationwide general strike, suggesting that some small contingent of Democrats now understand that conventional political tactics no longer address the dire nature of our predicament.
We are almost certain to see an escalating and annihilating orgy of state violence directed toward immigrants, dissidents, and even garden variety Democrats who stray into Trump’s retributive field of awareness. The role of the No Kings Movement has yet to take effective shape. The expansion from 5 million to 7 million from the first No Kings Day event ought to give us hope, but an increase in numbers must be tied to a more expansive collective vision. I believe that people who might be reticent to commit to a movement perceived as an astrotuf project of the Democratic Party will eagerly embrace real grassroots activism. The US population has grown weary of corrupt politics—the No Kings project absolutely must offer more than a facelift to the moribund Democratic Party.
The Northampton No Kings Day event manifest a microcosm of our shortcomings—we had a performance dominated by Democratic office holders and media figures in the local party sphere. Jim McGovern, our national congressional representative, spoke, so did State Rep. Lindsay Sabadosa, Northampton Mayor Gina-Louise Sciarra, Northampton City Council Member Garrick Perry, and local talk show host Bill Newman. I would have rather passed out microphones to random demonstrators. No Kings has to do more than encourage requisite platitudes from those in power.
McGovern is the face of Massachusetts progressives, but he is a politician and not a grassroots figure. Sabadosa has taken a moderate stance on most issues, and the Northampton mayor has been accused by responsible observers as having shamelessly harmed the city in a highly suspicious deal to buy a gutted church from a notoriously unethical landlord. City Councilor Perry is well known as one of the mayor’s many sycophants. Northampton has cut school staff, violated IEPs, and gone head over heels for the “strong towns” approach to gentrification. Are these the people who ought to define the quality of No Kings Day resistance?
The Communist Party USA had a table with brochures at the event, but no CPUSA representative addressed the crowds. Why? No one from “Demilitarize Western Mass” spoke, and no one from “Veterans for Peace” addressed the gathering. Northampton has a large community of anti-war activists who wage an ongoing struggle to evict a major arms dealer (L3Harris) from our midst, but no one spoke about the issues vital to our civic identity. Instead, the microphone defaulted to the most reactionary forces of our city. Centrist Democratic figures simply lack the credibility and charisma to inspire resistance. Is No Kings Day really about campaign speeches for dreary local politicians and their corrupt plans to gentrify Northampton?
More critically, No Kings Day, in its future events, will need to prioritize acts of civil disobedience, define the role of local government’s ability to resist Immigration and Customs Enforcement, mobilize public confrontations against invading federal forces, and explore the role of unions as the country mobilizes for an inevitable general strike.
I am not going to discount the value of having 7 million people show up to protest the fascist, genocidal Trump regime, but we need more from No Kings Day. We need to swiftly transform No Kings from a Democratic Party spectacle to a grassroots resistance movement.
