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The Pointlessness of Protest Culture
Days after President Trump called a reporter “piggy,” a group of women boarded a bus in Ohio for a 36-hour “turn and burn” trip to Washington DC to fight for “regime change.” At least a half dozen protesters were dressed as Miss Piggy. They carried handmade “Impeach, Convict, Remove” signs, transgender pride flags, and others wore the red hooded cloaks and white bonnets made famous by The Handmaid’s Tale. A mother of three teenagers, one of them transgender, explained “Something has to change, and we have to start somewhere.”
I feel bad for her, and the others. They just don’t understand how naive they sound, wanting to believe some signs and a long bus ride might affect anything, never mind something as extreme as forced regime change in a democracy. They are not alone in their naivety; elsewhere, colorful ribbons in the red and green of the Mexican flag weaved into twin braids have emerged as a new symbol of “resistance” among Latinas.
Part of the perceived pointlessness of such protests comes from how institutionalized protest culture has become. In the Midwest labor demonstrations and coal mine strikes of the 19th century, protesters risked their lives to hold up signs while hired Wells Fargo thugs beat them. In New York and elsewhere, draft protests during the Civil War were put down by having the regular U.S. Army fire indiscriminately into the crowd. Anti-war protests during the Vietnam era often turned violent, most notably in Chicago 1968, with phalanxes of helmeted cops breaking up crowds with batons and tear gas. And there was the massacre at Kent State University in Ohio, where National Guardsmen used their service rifles to gun down four and wound nine unarmed college students in 1970. All those at any protest risked rough arrest.
For the women now seeking regime change, what once carried genuine risk turned into political pageantry. Cities now issue permits for marches, police escort crowds along predetermined routes, and the media broadcasts images of the wittiest signs and t-shirts. Everyone takes pictures and the whole typically dissolves into a carnival atmosphere. Bring your kids and the t-shirted dog.
Old protests were dangerous because they seriously threatened entrenched economic or governmental power. New protests are safe because they do not threaten power at all, because power does not take them seriously. Ask the Pink Pussy Hat marchers of 2017, whose efforts failed to stop Trump across multiple administrations. The question is if these actions (along with petitions, social media blasts, hashtags) never deliver outcomes, why do people continue to pour time and moral purpose into them? “This will probably end up in history books, if we have real history books,” said one of the Ohio protestors, dressed as a handmaiden. “I’m glad I was able to be a part of it instead of watching it on TV.”
They are united in a visceral hatred of Trump, and see him as a stand-in for everything they dislike or disagree with. It is not like they adore illegal immigrants, it is just that Trump is opposed to them. They protest seeking nothing short of “regime change” because calls for regime change are easier than the long, unglamorous work of civic participation. People feel they have done something, but the machinery they are pushing against barely notices. Sincerity alone is not a strategy. There is a brutal mismatch the protesters do not see between the scale of their efforts and the scale of actual power.
For example, when Marine One flew over the Ohio women as Trump returned to the White House, fists and middle fingers rose into the air. Though signing your name, holding a sign, or shouting in the street feels good, legislation, budgets, and institutions rarely move by feelings alone. The protest thus becomes not a strategy but group therapy. It is catharsis disguised as activism. The social reinforcement of gathering, even if it is just 36 women from Ohio, validates their own sense of moral vision, that they are part of something meaningful instead of residents in a decayed industrial wasteland.
Notice what the protesters are asking for: regime change here, “No Kings” before that, “End the Patriarchy,” amorphous issues like that. There is little anyone can do about those things, if they are even real. The pointlessness of the act of protest is built into the act itself. So when the next end-of-democracy event arrives, such as a Supreme Court ruling that goes against someone’s wishes, protest becomes a way of reconciling oneself to the absence of change and the reality of failure. Faced with no tools other than a vote statistically very few of them ever exercise, and that only available every few years, protests are a psychological palliative to nihilism. Like calling to make up new rules if a presidential election goes the wrong way, like the Electoral College should be done away with, or that the president should be chosen by the popular vote so Democratic Southern California will decide every election for Ohio women, it is all an alternative to doing truly nothing about the status quo.
The women protestors from Ohio have good reason to dislike the status quo, one enforced on them for the last several decades as the Heartland became the Rust Belt. One protestor, a 36-year-old from Georgia, said the president’s treatment of women was a big factor in drawing her to Washington for her first-ever protest. Yet she described herself as the wife of a disabled veteran and a mother of six who relies on SNAP. Another protester in the group was described as “currently unemployed after spending years on an assembly line building steering wheels for Ford vehicles. Her husband is a fully disabled Navy veteran dependent on benefits from Veterans Affairs. She said she is protesting for him and also for other women like her, for her LGBTQ+ family members, for immigrants in her community and for her 69-year-old mother, who relies on subsidized housing. A constant question that runs through her mind, she said, is, “When is it going to come for me?” Answer: it is already here.
Their socioeconomic precarity makes them vulnerable to political fear, while protest offers them some shred of meaning in a world where they feel little control. Their personal struggles only serve to highlight the unclosable distance between their needs and what symbolic activism can deliver. In the age of Trump, the real engine behind protest culture is not hope but fear. Some hope that their voices matter, sure, but with fear of discovering they do not at its heart. It was a 36 hour bus ride back to Ohio. Maybe they had time to think about some of these things on the way back, before the next protest.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
No Kings Marches are Just Memes, Empty as Social Media “Content”
I’m behind on the news. Did the No Kings marches across America finally change everything? Did Trump vanish, Greta ascend, and democracy restore itself?
I actually swung by the local No Kings march. A lot of the crowd were seniors, almost all white in our blue state, decked out in tie-dye for the women, grey ponytails for the men, and bandanas for the dogs. To them he was Donny Dementia, Impotus, Orange Man (many variations), Mango Mussolini, Hitler stuff, The Lying King, Cheeto Benito, Comrade tRump, and many more unprintable here. Back in the day many of these same marchers could only come up with “Tricky Dick” to call out Nixon.
Their signs reflected the variety of issues under protest, including some oldies but goodies like reprising endless demands around abortion rights, freeing Palestine again, Defund the Cops and Black Lives Matter, Abolish ICE, of course, and multiple ones saying if Kamala or Hillary were president we’d all be having brunch now. One adjacent said “No Kings, Maybe a Queen Someday.” They don’t seem to fear dictators who’ll dictate the right way, I guess. Points for funny slogans to attract “likes” for the sign; there was a “No Kings But Burger King” and one which read “Tylenol Over Tyranny.” A favorite was “Ikea has a Better Cabinet.” Leftists could even get away with homophobic mockery about Putin they’d condemn from the other side.
It was clear almost anything fit under the No Kings meme. In fact the whole thing was simply a 3-D version of what Democratic social media has become. Everything was perfect until Trump and anything from your Netflix bill to war anywhere could be fixed today if Trump would disappear. Words like “fascism” were just pop synonyms for “stuff I don’t like.” What stood out most of all was the sense that the people may be united, not on the range of topics represented, but on their childish hatred of one man.
At the same time as all this righteous anger, the protests offered no road map for restoring institutional balance or civic trust. The lack of cause specificity in the signs was not accidental; it was integral to the movement as emotional glue to attract enough marchers to secure TV coverage. Like many modern protest movements, No Kings thrived as social media, where symbolism and identity matter more than outcomes. The movement’s decentralized nature allowed anyone to participate without hammering out a specific agenda. However, that same openness made it difficult to hold anyone accountable or to sustain pressure on political institutions. And once the marches ended, participants returned to comfortable partisan echo chambers.
It was thus no surprise that in the crowd ignorance was bliss, as random conversations with marchers suggested a wet blanket-like naivety about real Nazism and Hitler, or the mechanics of impeachment or the 25th Amendment, both of which had their supporters. Both crews seemed under-informed that successful employment of either would lead to an equally-hated President Vance that same day.
What made the protest’s moral certainty most jarring was how little awareness there was of how ongoing and bipartisan the “king problem” has been. There seemed no sense that Trump’s didn’t “create the danger of presidential dictatorship, he inherited it.” No one remembered any No Kings marches when George W. Bush granted himself vast powers of domestic surveillance, and to imprison people without due process after 9/11. No one protested much when Bush, without a word from the Supreme Court or Congress, tortured prisoners at secret dark sites and then allowed his CIA to destroy most of the evidence. Obama ordered wedding parties in Afghanistan drone killed while sipping coffee in the Oval Office, and authorized the assassination of American Citizens via those same drones without any due process. He started and/or continued undeclared wars in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Afghanistan. His use of the Espionage Act against journalists was egregious and authoritarian. Joe Biden essentially cancelled his party’s presidential primaries and tried to appoint a chosen successor. His FEMA workers improperly collected data about political affiliation of disaster victims. The politicized distribution of hurricane aid money before the 2024 election was no “isolated incident,” a Homeland Security report concluded. Nobody wants to admit America has a bipartisan comfort with executive over-reach on their side. The new boss looks a lot like the old boss, just at times poorly mannered.
“Millions flooded the U.S. streets for the No Kings protests,” wrote one Substack pundit, “to oppose a monarchy which does not exist without making a single tangible demand. Power was not challenged in any meaningful way. The status quo wasn’t disrupted in the slightest.” It was catharsis, self-therapy for political anxiety. It was theatre. It was a self-delusion that watching Gavin Newsom lose in 2028 would be an act of revolutionary resistance. The good news is the No Kings I observed broke up on time, as an unrelated Pride group had a permit to march right after them.
The sad thing is this group of people actually thought they represented moral America. They ignored with gusto the reality that roughly half of the nation voted for Trump and a large number continue to support Trump and his broader political philosophy, especially on immigration. There was no attempt among the marchers to persuade anyone, simply to condemn ideas, many deeply held by the Republican electorate. The marchers served as little more than a reminder of how the Democratic party lacks any real affirmative vision beyond opposition. Without sustained engagement in electoral politics or detailed proposals for reform, No Kings, like Occupy Wall Street and BLM before it, is just neo-hippie ritual rather than a catalyst for lasting change. Like the people who post nothing but AI-created anti-Trump memes repeatedly to their Facebook accounts (and this was indeed a Facebook crowd, not a Trader Joe one) there is an immediate sense of accomplishment, that infamous social media dopamine feedback rewarding performance over accomplishment. You know, like holding a march.
That all this is the face of the opposition party is news mostly only to the marchers. Democrats’ struggle to articulate an issues-driven agenda has created a dangerous dichotomy the Wall Street Journal already noted months ago: although many voters are unhappy with Trump, they trust Democrats even less. Only a third of Americans view them favorably, the lowest for decades.
“Who cares,” the White House deputy press secretary wrote about the marches. But the emptiness of No Kings matters because it mirrors the state of politics heading into an election year. If Democrats hope to win over a divided country, they need to move beyond memes and into policies that actually improve lives. Instead, they are deepening the hole by sustaining a government shutdown over an issue few Americans prioritize. If they want to win in 2026 and beyond, they must relearn how to govern for the majority, not just oppose on behalf of a minority. Otherwise it’s just talk — and noise isn’t power.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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