More than 3,100 anti-authoritarian protests are scheduled across the US and at least 15 other countries on Saturday. All these events will take place under a single banner: No Kings.
Formally launched in June to fight back against Trump administration policies, the No Kings movement has grown with astonishing speed – its second and most recent mass protest in October drew an estimated 7 million participants. Organizers expect Saturday’s events to be the biggest protest in American history.
But the movement is also leaderless, broad in cause and hasn’t advanced any policy demands. Some social movements experts recognize No Kings’ momentum but question if it needs clearer goals.
“There’s not any one way to get people into a movement. You want to have as many doors open as possible because you have to reach people wherever they are,” said Hahrie Han, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University and the co-author of Prisms of the People: Power & Organizing in Twenty-First-Century America. “The bigger challenge is, once they’re there, how do you keep them there, and then how do you channel that engagement in collective ways?”
But organizers say they are aware of such critiques and that these choices are all by design.
“The name No Kings is, in and of itself, a demand. It is a direct repudiation of this administration, of this regime, of its unconstitutional, illegal, immoral and frankly profane actions,” said Hunter Dunn, an organizer with the 50501 movement, one of the groups behind No Kings. “It’s a declaration of intent that we are going to return power back to the people.”
No billionaires or AIPAC is better
Go to the protests: you’ll see them all.
There’s room for everyone.
That’s a problem, no? OWS failed because it had no clear goal and was just a catch-all for general dissatisfaction. And OWS was a sustained protest, not a four-hour long jaunt before everyone goes home.
No. It is a deliberate choice; the article itself is about why. The sub-headline of the above article, emphasis mine:
What you are looking at is the dead center of propagandist’s difficulty to categorize and discredit/smear/twist a tightly defined goal, while issuing a broad enough invitation to all: No Kings.
That’s specific enough for me, and it was specific enough for millions more the last time, and I expect it to be specific enough for even millions more than that tomorrow. Personally, I think it’s genius and I would not have it any other way.
But if the anti-authoritarian thought “No Kings” is not enough for you in itself, or you believe that is somehow non-specific in the face of encroaching authoritarianism and a rapidly coalescing fascist government, maybe you should rethink your own strategy.
And Occupy Wall Street did not fail, seeing as how we’re still talking about Occupy fifteen years later not in terms of failure, but of its current relevance. Maybe you didn’t want people to realize you were talking about Occupy?
I think NK is definitely valuable as a way to inspire people who otherwise wouldn’t even know where to begin with protesting, and I think it’s a great way to organize people or at least build awareness of local activist/mutual aid groups. Outside of that I would argue that a protest planned for a specific time on a specific date with a specific end point is little more than cathartic. There’s personal value in catharsis but not societal value; it feels good but doesn’t create change.
And no, assuming that the goal of OWS was to create actual change, it definitely and unfortunately failed. It’s relevant to the extent that it shows people what doesn’t work.
But it does avoid all manner of exclusionary purity tests by making them almost impossible – something that is usually fatal for the left – while robbing the opposition of an easily attackable goal. Imagine if No Kings were riven with all the infighting and clashing of sub-goals other protests have been. That’s why I think it’s genius: it’s an unashamedly large tent, so much so that no one group or ideology retains a right to define, and therefore enforce, any given direction.
But that’s just me, and I think we look at this differently, but I appreciate you taking the time to explain what you meant. I will think about what you said, because you’re coming with nuance I had not considered and it’s a complex issue. Thank you for the reasoned response.
This has been the guiding principle for protest movements around the world for well over a decade and most have completely failed. That includes Occupy! Wall Street faced no consequences for the recession they caused and inequality has continued to rise unchecked. You can argue that Trumps first win was a direct consequence of American’s feeling abandoned by their government after 8 years of Obama failed to address the fallout of the 2008 recession. Occupy did nothing to stop that.