We’re just over fourteen months into the second Trump presidency. During that time, the administration has crossed several bright lines in its assault on constitutional democracy. It has tried to abolish the Constitution’s guarantee of birthright citizenship by executive fiat. It has arrested legal residents for attending protests or writing op-eds. It has flooded American cities with federal agents in a show of force to punish uncooperative local politicians. When those agents have killed protesters  in cold blood, it has doubled down.

And now, it is waging a deeply unpopular war in Iran — a war that Donald Trump started without even  going through the usual motions of trying to sell the American public on the idea that Iran posed some grave threat that had to be neutralized.

A fair summary of all this would be that Trump has taken several long steps toward governing like a king, who only needs to be heard and obeyed, rather than as the elected leader of a constitutional republic. And Saturday’s “No Kings” rallies gave expression to the mounting public revulsion all of this has inspired.

Organizers estimated that eight million Americans participated in more than 3,000 rallies around the country. At the one I went to in Los Angeles, there were whistles, drums, families with young children and dogs, elderly people, unionized public employees angry about cuts, and at least two protesters walking around in oversize papier-mâché Trump outfits.

Notably, the political content of many of the signs and slogans was far to the left of anything that was common in the “resistance liberalism” of Trump’s first term, or even the generic antiauthoritarianism of the “No Kings” slogan. One of the most common mass-printed signs fused that slogan with fury at the war in Iran (“No Warlords”), while references to Palestine were everywhere.

Connecting the Issues

At the flagship protest in St Paul, Minnesota, not far from where Alex Pretti and Renee Good were killed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol officers, Senator Bernie Sanders emphasized many of the same themes in his speech. He took the opportunity to argue that Trump’s authoritarianism was inseparable from the deeper problem of economic oligarchy:

This moment is not just about one man’s greed, one man’s corruption, or one man’s contempt for our constitution. This is about a handful of the wealthiest people on earth, who, in their insatiable greed, have taken over our economy, have taken over our political system, have taken over our media in order to enrich themselves at the expense of the working families of our country.

Never before in American history have so few had so much wealth and power.

He also took the opportunity to connect the dots to “the out-of-control militarism of the Trump administration — here at home, in cities like Minneapolis and St Paul — and abroad.” He denounced the war in Iran as both unconstitutional, because Trump didn’t seek the consent of Congress, and morally outrageous, because “one sovereign nation cannot simply go about attacking another sovereign nation for any reason it chooses.”

Sanders rattled off a series of grim figures: The thirteen American soldiers who’ve already died and the hundreds who have been wounded. The thousands of Iranian civilians killed by indiscriminate bombings. The thousand killed and million displaced in Lebanon. The Israeli settlers who have used this opportunity to go on a rampage against Palestinians on the West Bank with the winking approval of a government that, he took the opportunity to remind the crowd, had already “committed genocide in Gaza.”

This combination of antiauthoritarianism, economic egalitarianism, and strident opposition to war is unsurprising from a democratic socialist politician like Sanders. What’s more interesting is that he was invited to speak at the flagship rally in the first place, and that there’s every indication that the millions of Americans who went to similar rallies all around the country are more receptive than ever to that message.

This Is Our Fight

Some on the Left may be inclined to dismiss the No Kings rallies. The most credible argument is that protesting isn’t organizing, and that mere protesting doesn’t do anything.

It’s true enough that street protests by themselves don’t have the power to change government policies, stop wars, or eject authoritarians from office. But it would be a serious mistake to underestimate their value as a first step in building the energy and momentum that are necessary conditions for any other form of political action.

Many at the protests, including many in positions of leadership, may think that the only further action necessary is registering to vote, dutifully showing up to pull the lever for whatever candidates the Democrats nominate, and calling it a day. This is misguided. The roots of Trumpist authoritarianism lie in deeper pathologies of our profoundly unequal society, and merely electorally defeating that society’s worst manifestations at best postpones a reckoning with the problem (as the election of Joe Biden did).

A more effective response to the resurgent right necessarily must involve displacing the centrist leadership of the Democratic Party, which has failed to provide any compelling political vision, and offering a robustly egalitarian political program in its place.

An effective solution to the three-headed demon of oligarchy, authoritarianism, and militarism would not start and stop in the electoral realm. The movement we need must be rooted in an organized working class. But if we only make these arguments in the pages of publications like Jacobin, we won’t reach the people we need to convince. We need to make them to the millions energized to fight authoritarianism in the here and now, and we need to make them not as hecklers from the sidelines but as co-participants in the fight.

Anyone on the socialist left who thinks the fight against Trump’s authoritarianism isn’t our fight because it merely pits liberals against conservatives is very deeply missing the point. Liberal capitalist democracy is profoundly flawed, and its promises are destined to go unfulfilled. But as workers’ movements have always understood, it’s a good starting point for the struggle for something better.

If we’re going to arrive at a form of society that extends democracy from politics to economics, we need to fight like hell to defend the level of democracy we already have — which is precisely what gives us room to agitate, organize, and maneuver.

Mass Protests Against Authoritarianism Are Good, Actually

It’s been just over two months since Alex Pretti was shot and killed by federal agents. His last words, to the woman he was helping off the ground when the agents attacked him, were, “Are you OK?” Renee Good was shot while trying to drive away from agents in an SUV with the family dog, her glove box stuffed with children’s toys, her wife filming as ICE agents encircled the car and gave contradictory directions. Her last words, spoken to her killer, were, “It’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.”

Both were American citizens confronted by the agents while exercising their legal rights to observe and protest. Both were smeared as “domestic terrorists” by the Trump administration. What would it say about our society if, so soon after these crimes, there weren’t millions of protesters in the streets, defending the basic norms of liberal democracy?

The late political commentator Christopher Hitchens once wrote, in a column for the Nation, that it was a mistake to use “predictable” or “knee-jerk” as insults. “Speaking purely for myself,” he wrote, “I should be alarmed if my knee failed to respond to certain stimuli. It would warn me of a loss of nerve.”