Image by Bradley Andrews.

I attended the downtown local No Kings Day festivities in Northampton, Massachusetts, and estimate that some 1,500 people came out. I liked the crowds but the character and will of the people rather collided with the self-serving ambitions of Democratic Party speakers who hogged microphones that might have been given to ordinary people. The potential for a spontaneous, free flowing expression of public feeling remained unrealized. What does No Kings Day represent? How does a loosely affiliated collection of organizations achieve a viable identity, a sense of unity and a vision that goes beyond a mutual feeling that we ought to do something (anything!) as fascist momentum gathers in all its ugly certainty?

If it were up to me I would not have any public speeches at No Kings Day delivered by Democratic Party office holders. This is not because Democrats have become historically unpopular with Pew Polling showing only a 27% approval rating among registered voters, but, rather, to break with the centers of political and corporate power in favor of an association of grass roots individuals and factions. Australian journalist, Caitlin Johnstone took the most conceivably hostile view of No Kings Day, by posting a photo of a sign at a demonstration that read, “If Kamala Had Won We’d All Be At Brunch.” While I certainly don’t dismiss the value of No Kings Day in Johnstone’s summarily contemptuous manner, I am skeptical of performative nostalgia. The idea that “we’d all be at brunch” obviously labels the sign holder as a bourgeois dilettante who views activism as an inconvenience, but more critically, the longing for the public civility of Kamala Harris, Obama, Biden or Clinton trivializes The No Kings Day movement.

We are living within the most ominous........

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