Popular Lockeans at the "No Kings" Protests Against Trump

 

On February 19, 2025, this picture was posted on the official White House "X" account.  Trump had posted: "CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD.  Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED.  LONG LIVE THE KING!"

My wife and I participated in the "No Kings" protest in Grand Rapids, Michigan.  This was one of over 2,000 protest gatherings across the United States attracting millions of participants.  We were surprised by the size of the crowd.  There appeared to be something over 20,000 people, which is about ten percent of the population of the city of Grand Rapids.  The first rally was in the park on the Grand River in front of the Gerald Ford Presidential Museum.  When we arrived, the park was so packed with people that it was impossible for us to get in, which was also true for thousands of other people milling around the area.

We were also surprised that there were no police anywhere, as if the Grand Rapids police had decided that there was no reason to expect any disruptions from the protest crowds.  Moreover, there were no "Proud Boys" or "Michigan militia" types carrying guns who might have caused trouble.  Later in the afternoon, we heard about the political assassination in Minnesota that reportedly caused some of the "No Kings" protests in Minnesota to be cancelled.

These protests were scheduled for June 14 to counter Trump's military parade in Washington to celebrate his birthday and the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army.  I watched the parade on CSPAN.  The CSPAN cameras showed remarkably small crowds in the bleachers and on the grass.  Of course, the White House claimed that over 250,000 people attended.  But if that were true, the Mall would have been completely covered with people, which was not the case.

To me, Trump's military parade was really dull and lifeless.  Many of the spectators at the parade showed the same reaction.  Here's a picture of some of them:

The "No Kings" protests raise at least two kinds of questions.  First, what motivates millions of people to turn out for these mass protests?  What do they expect to achieve?  And how likely are they to succeed?  

Secondly, what's wrong with monarchy?  Why do most Americans--and perhaps most people around the world today--assume that monarchy is bad?  Should we take seriously the argument of some intellectuals supporting Trump (such as Curtis Yarvin) that monarchy is a better form of government than democracy, and therefore Americans should be happy to have Donald Trump as their king?

NONVIOLENT RESISTANCE AS LOCKEAN NATURAL PUNISHMENT OF DICTATORS

The people participating in these mass protests can be identified as "popular Lockeans."  I have written about that term as used by historian T. H. Breen to describe the ordinary Americans who supported the American Revolution in acting according to the principles of John Locke even though most of them had never read Locke.  In the state of nature, Locke thought, everyone has the "executive power of the law of nature," which is the natural right to punish those who violate the law of nature; and this can be expressed in both violent and nonviolent resistance to tyranny.  The American Revolution began with American nonviolent resistance from 1761 to 1775, followed by the violent resistance in the Revolutionary War from 1775 to 1783.  June 14, 1775 was the day that George Washington was formally appointed Commander of the Continental Army by the Second Continental Congress.  In July of that year, the "Appeal to Heaven" Flag was adopted as a battle flag for the American Army, which explicitly invoked Locke's term for revolutionary violence.

Erica Chenoweth and her colleagues see the "No Kings" protests as part of the growing nonviolent resistance to Trump.  As indicated in some previous posts, Chenoweth has compiled an impressive data set (from 1900 to the present) for violent and nonviolent resistance movements that shows that every campaign of nonviolent protest that achieved the active and sustained participation of just 3.5 percent of the population was successful.  As indicated on the "No Kings" website, the organizers are inspired by the "3.5 principle"--believing that mobilizing only a small proportion of the people in mass protests can overturn a dictatorial ruler.

Over the past 40 years, scholars like Chenoweth and Gene Sharp have developed practical rules for organizing successful nonviolent resistance movements.  One of the most important features of this is avoiding violence by having well-trained "marshals" at every protest whose job is to manage the crowd to suppress any disturbance that might become violent.  We saw those marshals at work at the Grand Rapids protest.

The political theory of nonviolent resistance is Lockean in being founded on the fundamental principle that all governmental authority depends on the consent of the governed, and therefore governments fall when the people withdraw their consent through nonviolent or violent resistance.

As Chenoweth has indicated, protest movements succeed when they gain momentum.  And momentum can be measured through a simple law of physics:  momentum equals mass times velocity (p = mv).  The momentum of dissent is a product of participation (mass) and the number of protest events in a week (velocity).  So as the number of participants in the "No Kings" movement increases, and as the number of protests per week increase, the movement gains momentum, and thus becomes more successful.

The test will come when law enforcement and military people are ordered to shoot the protestors.  Will they obey their orders?  If they disobey, then the protestors have won.  Even if they obey, this will provoke a moral revulsion in the country that will draw more people into the protests.

Another test will come in the mid-term elections in November of 2026.  If opponents of Trump take control of the two Houses of Congress, then the Congress can impeach him.  If Trump's Republicans cancel the elections, then the popular movement to overturn Trump's rule becomes stronger.

THE RISE AND DECLINE OF MONARCHY

But why "No Kings"?  Why are so many Americans not persuaded by Yarvin's argument that Robert Filmer's defense of divine-right monarchy was superior to Locke's theory of government by popular consent?

As I have indicated in previous posts, monarchy was the most common form of government for over 5,000 years, but then around 1900, the number of nonmonarchies began to surpass the number of monarchies.  There are two possible reasons for this.  First, monarchy has always depended on perceiving society as a rigid hierarchy in the chain of command, in which everyone knew his place.  At the top was a ruling elite--the monarch and one or two percent of the people who were nobles and priests.  At the bottom, about 80-90% of the population were peasants.  One possible answer as to why this premodern conception of natural and divine hierarchy has been undermined in modern culture is that modernity has adopted the Lockean evolutionary symbolic niche construction of the bourgeois culture of equal liberty.  "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal . . ."

Consequently, as I have written previously, the few monarchic governments that survive today--like the British monarchy of King Charles III--are not real monarchies because the king is only a ceremonial head of state without any absolute power.

A second reason for the decline of monarchy is that the development of mass communications has made monarchy unnecessary.  In the past, democratic or republican forms of government were possible only in small societies where the people or their representatives could meet all together at one public assembly--Athenian democracy or the Roman Republic, for example.  Larger societies were so disconnected that they needed monarchy as a focal point to which everyone could look as the central authority.  But then with the growth of communications technology--the printing press, newspapers, national postal systems, the telegraph, radio, television, and finally the internet--large societies have become so highly mobilized and interconnected that there is less need for a monarch as a focal point for authority.  

The internet has made it easy for popular mass movements like the "No Kings" protests to form across large societies and even around the globe.  And that's why it's so hard to preserve autocratic rule in the modern world without shutting down or at least censoring the internet.