I did not march last weekend. It is not that I don’t support the demonstrations, and I still feel guilty about not “doing my part,” but I am a permanent resident in the US. That makes me a barely-tolerated foreigner in the United States with the flimsy armor of a Green Card to protect my rights. If I am arrested, I will surely be deported and, as much as I would dearly love to go home, I would rather it was not under those circumstances. I like being able to feed myself and pay rent, and my job is here in the United States.
I supported the demonstrations, however, and I did what I could to amplify and encourage their message while watching from the sidelines. It is an ethical imperative to take to the street against oppressors, indeed, what an earlier generation of Americans would surely have recognized as tyranny. This is where we secure justice for ourselves and for our fellow citizens; change happens in the street… And this is true, even if justice and change are still beyond the reach of the courageous millions who marched for all of us last weekend. Change will come; the “No Kings” marches will be a part of that change – but it will not come right away. The marches were only the beginning of a long struggle.
Demonstrations are good and necessary, but “resistance” to the oppressor is rarely a simple matter of standing up, speaking truth to power, and getting the tyrant to back down. He knows (it’s always a “he” or a collection of “he’s”) that he has violated the social contract (this is, after all, the Lockeian definition of “tyranny”) and that the majority of his subjects do not consent to his rule, which is why tyrants invariable wield some kind of force to keep everyone in line. So, the regime also wants demonstrators out in the streets so it can deploy force against them.
As a general rule, if a regime such as ours permits protest, it is because it either regards it as impotent, or as a chance to demonstrate the awesome power of the state. Violent oppression requires resources and finances – after all, the soldiers and policemen have to be paid, and ammunition must be replenished. So, the regime is generally inclined to look for opportunities to make large public “examples” of how it treats dissent.
So, Mexican President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz hoped that the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre, where 300 demonstrators were gunned-down, would dissuade middle-class students and young people from forming a mass movement around the Communist Party and the Party of the Poor leading up to the Mexico City Olympic Games, and the Chinese Communist Party intended the slaughter of thousands in Tiananmen Square in 1989 would quash all that “democracy” nonsense once and for all.
They were right in both cases. The full stories of neither massacre – the number of dead and how they died – has ever been made public, but they did not have to; the smell of gunpowder and the fact that sons, daughters, friends, and spouses never came home was enough to do the work. A single massacre becomes the threat of the mailed fist of tyranny looming in our imaginations, and that is a lot more cost-effective than killing all of us. (Although, to be fair, the Mexican government did actually attempt to do just that during the dirty war.) The threat can be more powerful than the fact, and a threat with a precedent… Well, that’s how you do power.
At the same time, regimes predicated on authoritarian domination may also regard protest as a valuable safety valve for dissent and believe that the marchers will go home afterward, pick up a pizza for dinner, feel good about themselves, and go back to sleep. And, in almost all, but not all, historical cases this is exactly what happened.
The demonstrators who marched on Washington did not end the Vietnam War, but they did get married, raise families, and vote for Reagan in 1980. The street warriors at the Battle of Seattle and the Battle of Quebec are now stockbrokers, college professors, social workers, and the ravages of neoliberal global colonialism and the despoilment of the planet went on. The marching season in President Trump’s first term lasted a little more than six months, with the Women’s March, the March for Science, and a few others mostly petering out by late July 2017.
The Black Lives Matter demonstrations three years later, following the murder of George Floyd were both an exception and, in some ways, far more consequential than the first flush of anti-MAGA marches in 2017. They created a new slogan to unite the left – “Defund the Police” – demonstrated new possibilities of street organizing, and even inspired some serious discussion about, and even practical movement toward police reform. But, once everyone went home, either skeptical about the promises of change or, more likely, satisfied that they “put their bodies on the line” and “answered their consciences,” the promises of police reform just evaporated. Law enforcement officers can still brutalize civilians and murder unarmed Black men with impunity.
It’s almost as if power expected people to go home and stop paying attention. And it is difficult to maintain vigilance after the marches are over; we all have responsibilities, bills to pay, jobs to go to, families to raise, and any number of new horrors, from Gaza, to the collapsing economy, to the looming world war. Resisting power and neo-totalitarianism is like playing the last levels of Space Invaders – you can’t keep your eyes on all of the aliens, and eventually one is going to get through. The regime is counting on that.
In fact, the MAGA movement and the neototalitarian regime that has done the most to keep the memory of the summer of 2020 alive. While many of us have moved on from “defund the police,” to “free Palestine,” to “No Kings,” trying to move from one enormity to another and back again in the dispiriting pinball game of Hell that we have been playing, MAGA has a simple, constant message: “the hippie, liberal, globalist, trans-loving malcontents want to burn shit, and they hate America!” For a certain segment of the American people – either the 50 percent who voted for President Trump, the 40-45 percent who approve of the job he’s doing, or even the sizeable majority (including independents, right-wing Democrats and DINOs, and all the rest) who have no strong opinions at all about tariffs, immigrants, or brown people – that’s enough.
The special sauce of totalitarianism is not the minority of subjects who actively and enthusiastically support the regime, but the great majority that can go along with it because things aren’t that bad for them and the fact that ruthless dictatorships do keep the trains running on time and keep order in the streets. National Socialism and Fascism did not sell their putrid ideological goods so much as they presented them as the only alternative to the Communists, socialists, Jews, deviants, racial inferiors, and malcontents who threatened the “body politic.”
My friends were out in the streets by the millions demonstrating against President Trump’s tyranny and his assumption of the trappings of an autocrat. The “No Kings” demonstrations were timed to coincide with – and to drown out – the military parade that the president believes he so richly deserved on his birthday. It was how we collectively thumbed our noses at the regime’s ambitions.
But the parade was officially meant to mark the 250th anniversary of the founding of the US Army, whatever other meanings it is associated with. Most Americans love, in fact, utterly adore their army, and you can expect that the regime will be prepared to play that angle through its official media and through the docile reporting of the major news outlets. That means that most Americans will likely regard today’s “No Kings” demonstrations as a direct attack on a beloved institution, and you can be sure that the regime will play that card.
We must be prepared for the fact that this weekend’s demonstrations will be extremely unpopular among Americans already conditioned to fear “chaos;” they will be, and already have been, denounced as “un-American,” and the regime will be able to use that to justify repression. The “No Kings” protests will probably have no greater immediate effect than to allow the regime to further demonize dissent… to its political advantage. The regime still stands, it is unweakened, the National Guard remains in Los Angeles, ICE raids continue, dissident members of even the milquetoast Democratic congressional caucus are being brutalized by thugs in uniform, and the campaign of MAGA terror exemplified by the assassinations in Minnesota this weekend will not be the last.
The five million brave Americans who marched this weekend in LA, Philadelphia, New York, Washington, and in every city, town and village in-between did not turn back American totalitarianism by a millimetre. Yet, mass demonstrations of this type almost never result in immediate, or even medium-term success. The incomplete victory of the Civil Rights Act came a decade after the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The 19th Amendment granting Universal Suffrage in the United States was only passed after more than FOUR DECADES of agitation, organization, and demonstrations. The United States abolished slavery 77 years after the first public antislavery demonstration in Germantown, PA in 1688.
Mass demonstrations rarely change the world at first, but they do set a precedent – they are an invitation to do it again. They allow dissenters to build the connections upon which all successful movements for social justice and change are built, often through many, many years of shared experience. So, Theodore Dwight Weld could point back more than a century to Germantown when he organized the Lane Theological Seminary debates that recharged the Abolitionist movement in 1834; the 1963 Washington Marchers could say “I was there in Montgomery in 1954” and “I was at Little Rock;” the Suffragists who finally got the 19th Amendment passed and ratified in 1920 could point to Seneca Falls as both inspiration and authority.
The “No Kings” marches did not dismantle the MAGA regime nor the edifice of American totalitarianism. They were never going to win over the majority of Americans who love their army and the flag, or who can tolerate the regime and utterly loathe disorder. None of that is going to happen. Rather, they were “proof of concept:” evidence that public dissent is possible even when it is unpopular, and that there is dissent in America. Last weekend was not the beginning of the end for MAGA, nor even the end of the beginning, but it was part of the beginning of the beginning of the long struggle that lies before us all.*
* My apologies for paraphrasing Sir Winston Churchill, but it seemed to fit.