The Strategic Logic of No Kings! Protests
from Indivisible co-founder Leah Greenberg.
Over the last six weeks, we’ve gotten the occasional question about why Indivisible, together with our coalition of incredible partners, called for No Kings Day on June 14.
Why another protest? What is it going to accomplish? Shouldn’t we be [insert alternate tactic] instead?
These are good-faith questions, and they stem from very reasonable concerns. The speed, scope, and scale of the MAGA assault – on our rights, our neighbors, our democracy – is staggering. The stakes are enormous. There are days when nothing we’re doing feels sufficient to the magnitude of the horrors we face.
Protest is a tactic. And with any tactic, there’s a danger of tactical freeze, of it getting stale, of deploying it without a real strategy in mind. And it’s easy to look at any single protest and ask, “what did that even accomplish? What was the point?”
So I want to take a step back and talk about the role of a peaceful mass mobilization like No Kings in the context of our strategic analysis.
If you’ve been listening to us over the last few months, you’ve heard us talk about the idea of autocratic breakthrough – a period when a would-be dictator basically sprints to consolidate their power, crush the institutions and people who could push back, and create a chilling climate for everyone else.
For the would-be dictator, success depends on projecting power and creating an aura of inevitability. They need you to believe that Trump is the new normal, that the MAGA movement will be in power for the long haul, that the only rational move is to go along, keep your head down, and protect your own interests.
We’ve seen over the last six months what happens when this aura of inevitability goes unchallenged. Institutions – from state governments to businesses to civil society to higher education to media – start to fall in line, do what Trump tells them, and/or go silent.
Here’s the thing: The aura of inevitability is a lie. It’s all a lie. Power in American society doesn’t derive from the top down. Trump’s grasp is brittle, and he’s overreaching dramatically. He will only succeed if everyone agrees to believe the lie.
Or, as our friend Reverend Barber says: A king is only a king if we bow down.
Countering the aura of inevitability requires a hundred different tactics and strategies. It looks like making an example of Target for obeying in advance and getting rid of its DEI policies. It looks like protesting and toxifying Elon Musk until he bows out of government. It looks like students at Georgetown making a list of Big Law collaborators and organizing their peers to steer clear. It looks like federal workers refusing to obey illegal or unethical orders. It looks like building the muscles and the relationships for collective action.
In short, it requires a countless number of people in a countless number of places to do something that the Trump regime doesn’t want them to do, or to NOT do something the Trump regime wants them to do. That’s how we shake off the aura of inevitability and halt the autocratic breakthrough.
For that to happen, people need to feel like we’re part of something bigger. We need to understand that we’re part of a movement. We need to feel like we will win.
That’s where No Kings comes in. With 1,800 events nationwide, in every state, this will be the single largest protest of this Trump administration.
A single mobilization won’t turn this ship around. But it can do a few very important things:
Change the narrative. A massive show of popular opposition everywhere in the country can disrupt Trump’s effort to project strength. It shows that resistance is big, powerful, growing, and everywhere.
Bring in new people. A mobilization of this scale and scope reaches people who aren’t yet engaged, and – if done right – helps to draw them into a cycle of action and relationships on the ground.
Foster community. When you show up, you realize that not only are you not alone – you’re actually part of something enormous. And that helps to build the shared sense of identity we’ll need for the path ahead.
Spread courage. After Hands Off!, we heard from people in positions of power within institutions – law firms, universities (one big university, in fact), and elsewhere – who told us they were emboldened by the protests to push back on pressure from the Trump regime. As we often say, courage is contagious.
And No Kings comes at an absolutely crucial moment.
Trump and Stephen Miller’s vicious anti-immigrant crackdown has been escalating over the last few months. The scale of the cruelty and terror they’ve created is almost impossible to put into words. And they have been cynically, intentionally sending their masked, unaccountable ICE forces into blue cities and states, communities where no one wants them. They’ve been working overtime to manufacture chaos, so that they have a pretext to deploy military forces to crack down on dissent for all of us.
Trump’s birthday parade and his attack on LA are all part of the same agenda of fascist theatrics, divide and conquer politics, and the consolidation of power.
Trump wants to look strong. What he doesn’t understand is that true power comes from the people. And on June 14th, we’re going to prove it.
In solidarity,
Leah Greenberg
As I posted before, we are attending. I hope this movement builds and builds. I fear there will be a ‘Kent State moment’ before the regime starts to crumble. I hope not. I hope that we can eventually get tens of millions of people to protest, and that that would give the Republicans incentive to dump Trump.
