The “No Kings” demonstrations last weekend were a benchmark in the booming movement against the second destructive and authoritarian Trump administration. The scale of gatherings was remarkable. Estimates vary from two to six million demonstrators across the country. Many demonstrators were older and more politically moderate than participants typical of other rallies. Better still, as JacobinBranko Marcetic observed, the demonstrations “have deeply reached the voting country of Trump” rather than being limited to “cities of massive peoples”.
Trump himself tried to play everything like a joke, saying that he did not feel “like a king” and that he had to “go through hell to apply things”. But the ugly reality is that he acted a bit like a king, often finding disturbing means of trying to bypass the need for approval of the other branches of the government.
Rather than “go through hell” to bring the congress to pass his prices, for example, he has largely managed to impose them unilaterally. American trade policies are changing day by day depending on the president’s personal whims and are justified for the basis of the bizarre claim that all kinds of commercial imbalance is an emergency requiring the use of “national security” powers.
And although its prices have been a chaotic and useless mess, increase the prices of working class consumers and keep few promises to really reshaped jobs (which could be implemented and sanction implemented more targeted), which is downright innocent compared to many other Trump catches for personal power. He sent armed National Guard troops to support the raids of immigration and customs application (ICE) in cheeky violation of the legal firewall between the military and domestic police. He had the arrest of the Ministry of Internal Security, imprisonment and threatens to expel legal permanent residents for committing themselves to the freedom of expression protected by the Constitution to defend the human rights of the Palestinians. And he sent immigrants to perpetuity in a prison similar to a gulag in Salvador without the slightest regular procedure.
And now it may be about to bring the United States into a war in Iran, which has the potential to be much more destructive than the Bush era wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition, he hurts it without even taking the trouble to ask for the type of approval from the congress that George W. Bush sought in 2001 and 2002.
There is therefore not (Sanelry) denies that the central complaint of the demonstrators was correct. Trump behaved in an extremely authoritarian way, and it is a very good thing that there was such a massive participation for the gatherings designed to highlight this fact and mobilize the opposition.
Even thus, the way in which such opposition is expressed is important. In the first months of the administration, the greatest manifestations of public indignation against Trump were the rallies of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose combat oligarchy, whose framing has combined in a transparent way against Trumpist authoritarianism with a broader criticism of economic inequality. These rallies were also often organized in red states where they attracted massive crowds. At the time, senator Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) pushed the slogan of “the combat oligarchy” on the grounds that ordinary Americans did not know what the word O. His alternative slogan proposed during this debate was. . . “No kings.”
In this case, polls show that Senator Slotkin was mistaken on the limits of the public’s vocabulary. And common sense should tell us that it would not be an excellent conceptual leap to bring people to understand what you mean when you apply a word that the media has long used to describe dangerous, powerful and ultrai in Russia to dangerous, powerful and ultra -tight people in this country. (Indeed, our oligarchs are much richer and much more powerful than their Russian counterparts.) As I suggested at the time, Slotkin’s framing was fallacious:
The question of the dispute between her and Sanders and Aoc goes further than semantics. Slotkin obviously wants to stick to that the radicals of the 19th century called the “political question” of democracy and authoritarianism, rather than approaching the “social question” of economic power and the hierarchy.
There would be nothing wrong with combining the two slogans – “no kings, no oligarchy”. But if the differently inspiring protests of the last weekend claim the replacement Framing oligarchy with closely focused on Trump’s personal seizures, as disturbing as it would be a very bad sign.
After all, the point of protests like these is less to achieve a short-term political goal than to promote a general narrative On the state of the country and start to mobilize and energize a segment of the population around this message. And if the story, the movement against Trump Coquette around the economic messaging of the “fight against the oligarchy”, it would be a disaster not only at a substantial but strategic level.
Trumpism was born precisely because we live in an extremely unequal and increasingly economically precarious and unequal society, which has made the neoliberal centrism of the dominant wing of the Democratic Party increasingly unattractive. Trump was able to immigrants scapegoats (accused of having robbed jobs or smuggling of fentanyl) or foreign nations to kiss the United States in bad transactions for problems caused by our own national oligarchs.
Democrats and liberals have largely responded to Trump’s rise with an empty defense of procedural democracy in itself without binding this defense to a real sense of the way democracy can be used to improve the lives of ordinary people. Consequently, we had years of religion of each detail of the riots of January 6, while the Democrats pretended to be powerless to even cancel the Senate parliamentarian to increase the national minimum wage. This strategy has failed so catastrophically that Trump is back in office.
Trump’s right -wing demagoguery is a particularly dangerous symptom of a much deeper rot. These first rallies of “fight against the oligarchy” had the virtue of identifying this rot and transmitting an alternative message on the same underlying social problems which raised Trumpism in the first place.
It is very good that so many people are indignant by the authoritarianism of the administration. The rate of participation in the rallies has been inspiring, and I hope that we will see much more in the future. However, we cannot allow ourselves to let the Slotkinism prevail to supervise the anti-Trump story. Our message must be clear. No kings? Absolutely. But also no oligarchy.
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