I have seen some folks on Facebook with a fairly large following making utterly wrong and irresponsible claims about the No Kings protests. They are wrong. Our country, our future, our kids, need you to come out tomorrow. Find an event here.
1. I don’t there is much danger to attending the protests. I see absolutely no evidence that Trump intends to invoke the insurrection act and send either national guard units or federal troops anywhere that are not already there. The federal government can’t do this quickly and without warning. As far as I know, federal government does not have Star Trek style transporters than can move thousands of troops into a city without there being obvious movements that we and the press will see.
As long as the protests are peaceful, I don’t think either the police in most places let alone federal forces will interfere with them.
It is possible that right wing provocateurs will create violence. But, again, I think we would know this is coming and could plan to deal with it. Let me reassure you that folks on our side are part of most of the online groups where this activity would be organized. (We have taken advantage of this at previous events. They can’t organize counter-protests or take other problematic actions without our knowing.)
And frankly, if there were some danger, not only would we be well prepared but it would be even more important for us to all come out. Our only safety at this moment is in numbers.
There is someone on Facebook who on the one hand seems eager for violent confrontation and on the other keeps warning of it. That person needs to get a grip and so do all the people who take them seriously.
2. These protest are important. No, they are not going to stop Trump or the Republican Congress all by themselves. But political movements need time to grow. And they grow by people “seeing themselves acting together” in the words of the great historian of populism, Lawrence Goodwyn. People need to believe that there are others in this country who are ready to give of themselves to save our democracy. And the only way to show each other is to take some kind of public action. Facebook posts and emails in the comfort of your home will not do it.
It is true that we don’t know what a growing movement will need to do to save the country. It’s true we don’t have a clear strategy and that our growing grassroots movements has no central leadership to create such a strategy. And, of course, the Democratic Party which has no central leadership either, Frankly at this still early point in our resistance to Trump this is not a huge problem. A variety of distributed leaders with multiple ideas taking diverse actions is a strength at this point.
And we need to be flexible and take varied approaches because, we do now know exactly if and how Trump with seek to end our democracy and thus we don’t know exactly how it is best to respond.
We may have a chance to stop him electorally. We may need to try to cripple the economy with general strikes. We may need to push blue states into creating an alternative to the federal government’s role in many areas. (And some of us are already on this.) We may need to push blue states into withholding federal taxes. We may need to push them to soft or hard secession. We may need to take up arms.
We just don’t know now.
But we do know that we will need a growing movement to do ANY of these things and that turning out en masse in events over time is critical to building such a movement.
And we also know that Trump actually is a weak man pretending to be a strong one. He gets intimidated by shows of force. Whether protests tomorrow will do the trick, we don’t know. But they will sure help make Trump think twice.
So please, don’t listen the folks who say the protests are a waste of time. They are deeply and profoundly wrong.
