No Kings Means No Kings
American tyranny runs much deeper than Trump
On Saturday, the President of the United States celebrated his 79th birthday with a sparsely attended military parade sponsored by Coinbase and UFC. Marines joined the federalized California National Guard and the LAPD in their efforts to brutalize protestors as the American Gestapo ripped innocent people away from their families and homes. A right-wing extremist shot two Minnesota state legislators and their spouses, killing one of the couples. And millions of people across every corner of the country took to the streets under the banner of No Kings.
The name for this day of protest carried a not-so-subtle double meaning. It referred to Donald Trump, who has been abundantly clear about his dictatorial and monarchical ambitions, even posting an AI slop image of himself wearing a crown on a Time-like magazine cover with the headline, “Long Live the King” from the official White House X account. It also harkens back to this nation’s founding, when our forefathers exercised the rights “to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle[d] them” by declaring independence from the British Crown due to King George’s “history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.”
Purging the monarchy did not end this country’s struggle against tyranny—a system of arbitrary hierarchy, where a select few accumulate power to dominate and impose their will onto others. Even when King George was gone, about one-sixth of the population still lived under the heel of chattel slavery. Many not subjected to literal human bondage were denied the right to full and equal democratic citizenship. In the nearly two-and-a-half centuries since, Americans have worked towards building a real democracy that lives up to the founding creed that “all men are created equal.” But it has not been a linear path of progress. Forms of tyranny have been quashed only to reappear under new designs. Chattel slavery was toppled by Civil War, but the new Reconstruction regime gave way to Jim Crow a mere twelve years later. Women won the constitutional right to vote in 1919, but spousal rape remained legal in some states until 1993. Workers won the right to collectively bargain when the National Labor Relations Act was passed in 1935, yet basic economic dignity still eludes millions.
And just as King George was not the only thing standing in the way of Americans seeking to overcome tyranny at the founding, Donald Trump is not our sole hindrance today. The masked ICE agents he’s unleashed upon our communities were not his creation. They, along with an ever-growing mass-surveillance apparatus, have been forged through more than two decades of bipartisan consensus surrounding the War on Terror. As ICE agents round up political dissidents, help ship innocent people off to foreign concentration camps, and even throw a sitting senator to the ground, 75 congressional Democrats joined their GOP colleagues in voting for a resolution that “expresses gratitude to law enforcement officers, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel, for protecting the homeland”.
This bipartisan consensus extends to protecting a militarized police force that had come to resemble an occupying army long before Trump entered the political scene; the number of documented incidents of police brutalizing civilians or targeting journalists seems to have no sway on our political representatives. It further extends to a system of mass incarceration in which every single state incarcerates more people per capita than virtually any other democratic country. It extends to a military-industrial complex that allows companies like Lockheed Martin to gobble up approximately one quarter of our national budget to do things like manufacture bombs to be dropped on Yemen and Gaza.
Nor are Americans only subjected to tyranny by the hand of the state. They face tyranny in their workplaces, where any semblance of democracy gets checked at the door and dictatorships reign. They face tyranny from health insurance conglomerates designed to extract as much profit as possible while exhausting every conceivable avenue to deny medical treatment. They face tyranny from landlords who provide unhabitable housing while spiking rents and who retain the power to throw people out of their homes with the armed backing of the state. They face tyranny from crippling student debt that closes off any hope of economic mobility. They face tyranny from an economic system in which they are forced to toil away for stagnant wages that leave them unable to afford basic necessities while corporate profits skyrocket.
When I went to my local No Kings protest, I saw plenty of shirts and signs with DNC-approved slogans like “TACO” that surely made more jaded and cynical eyes roll. But I also saw plenty of people who seemed far more attuned to the reality of our present situation. I saw many signs stating that “prisons without due process are concentration camps”. I can’t help but note that, even with due process, prisons where inmates are identified by an assigned number and regularly subjected to physical and sexual abuse bear an unsettling resemblance to concentration camps, but I sincerely appreciate the sentiment. I listened to speeches about the bloodshed in Gaza and participated in chants protesting cuts to the welfare state and encroachments on bodily autonomy. And I couldn’t help but get sentimental as a crowd of well over 1,000 people sang along to Woody Guthrie’s ‘This Land is Your Land’, a deceptively radical protest song that perfectly captures the spirit of American egalitarianism.
At that moment, I thought about Eugene V. Debs, one of the greatest warriors for democracy this country has ever seen. In 1918, as American tyranny reared its ugly head via the first red scare, Debs was tried and convicted in federal court for the crime of speaking out against America’s entry into World War I and encouraging his fellow citizens to resist the draft, a crime for which President Woodrow Wilson would label him a “traitor to his country”. During his sentencing hearing, the labor organizer, who just six years prior had garnered six percent of the presidential popular vote atop the Socialist Party of America ticket, addressed the court with what would become his most famous speech:
Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
….
Your Honor, I have stated in this court that I am opposed to the social system in which we live; that I believe in a fundamental change—but if possible by peaceable and orderly means…
….
I am thinking this morning of the men in the mills and the factories; of the men in the mines and on the railroads. I am thinking of the women who for a paltry wage are compelled to work out their barren lives; of the little children who in this system are robbed of their childhood and in their tender years are seized in the remorseless grasp of Mammon and forced into the industrial dungeons, there to feed the monster machines while they themselves are being starved and stunted, body and soul. I see them dwarfed and diseased and their little lives broken and blasted because in this high noon of Christian civilization money is still so much more important than the flesh and blood of childhood. In very truth gold is god today and rules with pitiless sway in the affairs of men.
In this country—the most favored beneath the bending skies—we have vast areas of the richest and most fertile soil, material resources in inexhaustible abundance, the most marvelous productive machinery on earth, and millions of eager workers ready to apply their labor to that machinery to produce in abundance for every man, woman, and child—and if there are still vast numbers of our people who are the victims of poverty and whose lives are an unceasing struggle all the way from youth to old age, until at last death comes to their rescue and lulls these hapless victims to dreamless sleep, it is not the fault of the Almighty: it cannot be charged to nature, but it is due entirely to the outgrown social system in which we live that ought to be abolished not only in the interest of the toiling masses but in the higher interest of all humanity…
I believe, Your Honor, in common with all Socialists, that this nation ought to own and control its own industries. I believe, as all Socialists do, that all things that are jointly needed and used ought to be jointly owned—that industry, the basis of our social life, instead of being the private property of a few and operated for their enrichment, ought to be the common property of all, democratically administered in the interest of all…
I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.
This order of things cannot always endure. I have registered my protest against it. I recognize the feebleness of my effort, but, fortunately, I am not alone. There are multiplied thousands of others who, like myself, have come to realize that before we may truly enjoy the blessings of civilized life, we must reorganize society upon a mutual and cooperative basis; and to this end we have organized a great economic and political movement that spreads over the face of all the earth.
Millions of Americans marched in the name of democracy this weekend. This wasn’t enough to win the fight against Donald Trump or any of the other instruments of American tyranny. But it is proof that, no matter how reluctant our political leaders may be to address the crises we face, we the people are willing to continue fighting for a country that truly reflects the egalitarianism of our founding document. It is a fight we can and will win if we come together, get organized, and build the mass political movement necessary to reclaim our country from the grips of fascism. But we must remember that Donald Trump is far from the only enemy we face in doing so.
No kings means no kings. No autocrats in our halls of government. No theocrats in our courtrooms. No oligarchs lording over our national resources. No petty tyrants dictating our workplaces. No cages to warehouse the underclass. No living under threat of police baton or military drone. We demand democracy: a society run by the people, for the people.
Check this shit out:
Missouri’s Struggle to Restore Abortion Access from Melissa Gira Grant in The New Republic
Speculation in the Age of No Growth from Aaron Benanav in Jacobin
The Real Path to Abundance from Sandeep Vaheesan in Boston Review
Won’t You Be My Neighbor?: A conversation with Greg Grandin from Christy Thornton in The Baffler
Marx: The Fourth Boom from Devin Thomas O’Shea in The Los Angeles Review of Books
The meritocracy to eugenics pipeline from Pluralistic
Agit-Slop | The White House’s Numbing Aesthetic from Mitch Therieau in The Drift
The Fiscal State Under Siege: Why People Hate the IRS, and Why You Should Care from Anisha Steephen in Notes on the Crisis
You’re a Bunch of Cowards! from How Things Work
Joni Ernst Is A Piece Of Shit from Drew Magary in Defector
Adam Friedland Could Be the Millennial Jon Stewart. But Does He Want That? from Kieran Press-Reynolds in GQ
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Really good.