No King’s Day’s Higher Calling
Tim Tyson, Duke University
Across America, millions rallied on Saturday to protest what Bishop William Barber called the Trump administration’s “greed, graft, authoritarianism, neo-fascism, racism, [and] warmongering.” In over three thousand communities, millions protested ICE’s violent and arbitrary actions against immigrants and American citizens, Trump’s war in the Middle East, and growing authoritarian rule. “No Kings” constitutes the largest nonviolent protest in American history, which rightly worries the Trump administration. GOP officials denounced the protests as “Hate America Rallies” marked by “the far-left’s most violent, deranged fantasies.” Of course, anyone could see that hate and violence were the farthest thing from the broad, many-sided agenda of defiance grounded in love for humanity and this nation. Meanwhile, self-styled leftist commentators dismiss No Kings as a gooey, liberal crusade that ignores American imperialism and the need for structural change. Other purportedly mainstream critics complain that street protests, which the NAACP’s Derrick Johnson once derided as “feel-good rallies,” don’t accomplish anything. But a more thoughtful look at No Kings points toward real promise in overturning Trump’s lawless and lying politics of violent domination.
We cannot listen to the misguided who disparage protest, saying that people walking around with signs need to just get out and vote. By what reasoning could one assume that protestors don’t vote or that voters don’t protest? This is just an excuse for bystanders. “Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation,” said Frederick Douglass, “are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning.” First, go to a No Kings rally and tell us how many likely non-voters you see. But it takes more than the ballots of the already-engaged; in the last national election, 150 million people voted—but 91 million stayed home. In my home state of North Carolina, Trump won by 185,000 votes—and nearly two million voters did not cast a ballot. If we could reduce that number by less than ten percent, we could easily win a U.S. Senate seat, which could matter a great deal. In the end, there is no substitute for political victory.
That victory takes organizing, not just protesting, critics might rightly say. But the mechanics of getting out the vote depend upon hordes of volunteers acting in the immediacy of a movement. If you want millions of people to get up on Saturday morning and go door-to-door, connecting with their neighbors and persuading them to turn out, you can either pay them, which is not only expensive but doesn’t work very well, or you can inspire them. Whether No Kings is a movement or not is a matter of debate, but the march of millions points toward movement-building as a tool, not just a thrill.
We need to organize a fired-up, many-sided movement large and powerful enough to defeat the far-right extremists who control our government. People come to No Kings with a wide array of concerns and commitments, but that is a strength, not a weakness. All our individual efforts to pursue justice need to persist but must also help to build this momentous movement. Our adversaries are shrewd enough to work together, and we must work together, too. Those of us who work for peace, voting rights, environmental protection, women’s rights, criminal justice reform, and so on—we must understand that we all have exactly the same enemies. Everyone seeking to gerrymander our states and suppress the vote is also fighting against us on the environment; is also attacking LGBTQ rights and dignity; is also taking away women’s rights to control their own bodies; is also trying to build private prisons rather than public schools. To turn back the extremists, we need the power that comes from a broad-based movement, less about Republican and Democrat, left and right, and more about a moral vision of right and wrong, as Bishop Barber often says.
We have to wield an electoral strategy, a litigation strategy and a protest strategy to make a realistic stand against the forces that would undo American democracy. And that takes power. “We must,” Barber said on No Kings Day, “vote our power” by organizing a “moral fusion” movement. We cannot match the billionaires dollar for dollar. We do not have an army. What we do have is what the citizens who toppled a dictator in the Philippines in the 1980s called “People Power.” As Rabbi Abraham Heschel said, borrowing a line from Frederick Douglass, we must learn “to pray with our feet.” In the words of Catholic writer and activist Dorothy Day, we must become “a revolution of the heart.”
Go online and check out the signs at the various No Kings rallies, and note now often the word “Love” appears on them. This is nothing sugary and sentimental. Love, in the largest sense, is the spiritual glue that holds us together—that holds civilization together, for that matter. Dr. King explained in Montgomery that power without love is abusive and morally bankrupt. But he added that love without power is vacant and sentimental. We must harness love to power, he concluded, and that will bring us toward justice.
All of our faith traditions honor love for humanity, even though they may rarely live it to the fullest. And activists who may not work from any faith tradition at all nonetheless labor in the service of love. Environmentalists are not merely devoted to their canoe trip, but to the children being poisoned downstream and the marginalized always targeted by polluters. Racial justice must be central to our work—it is the enduring signpost of American conscience—but racial justice warriors fight so that all our children can grow up in a democracy where they matter. Women’s rights activists devote themselves to a world in which little girls do not grow up under a shriveled sky because of vicious stereotypes and gender discrimination. LGBTQ organizations and their allies do their work for a world in which no child must live with a ruthless stigma because of who they are and whom they love. I could continue, but our movement must become that space in which we understand that it is our birthright to love one another despite our differences. Black lesbian poet Audre Lorde wrote in her essay, “Learning from the Sixties,” You do not have to be me in order for us to fight together. I do not have to be you to recognize that our wars are the same.”
When we meet in the street and see each other as we act upon our highest moral values, it may not change our adversaries, but it will change us. When we see each other in the millions, it will help us understand that we are far from alone—that there is hope. Despair is an unaffordable luxury; with hope, we can mobilize. Our movement must invite all of us to a place of belonging, a spring garden where we can cultivate our common future. When people stand together for the highest values they know, hope lives, and they become bound to one another and embrace a new and better sense of themselves. The young folks will raise their children differently and pass along our democratic legacies. All of us will find the courage to defend democracy in public, whatever the cost. And all of us will find a place of belonging. “We have all known the long loneliness,” Dorothy Day wrote, “and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.”
Many years ago, a reporter asked A.J. Muste, president of the War Resisters League, “Do you really think you’re going to change the policies of the government by standing out here alone at night with a candle.” It was a reasonable question.
Muste replied, “Oh, I don’t do this just to change the country. I do this so the country won’t change me. When I am willing to cross the line of how much I think I can love, I am changed. When I am more in touch with what I love than what I fear, I take a stand. My prayer is that more and more of us, on behalf of all of the children, will use the energy of a mother to touch the seeds of courage and love within us for the sake of the world.”