No Kings, No Roadmap

Marching Without Machinery

Published on April 6, 2025. OLYMPUS CORPORATION, PEN-F. Free to use under the Unsplash License. Photo by Barbara Burgess on Unsplash

No Kings, But Still No Power

This past weekend’s protest offered a striking image of civic engagement. Between five and seven million people gathered across the country to express their shared concern that our system of government, one ostensibly grounded in checks, balances, and constitutional limits, is drifting toward a model where executive power overshadows deliberation, oversight, and restraint. It was a moving display, and one that reflected a genuine desire to reclaim something foundational about the American political experiment.

But alongside that hope sits a healthy skepticism, one rooted in both political history and institutional reality.

Opposition to the current direction of government is visible, vocal, and often sincere. Yet it remains unclear whether this opposition can coalesce around a clear, actionable agenda capable of sustaining itself beyond symbolic action. Competing visions still divide the pro-democracy camp: one looks back nostalgically to a time of presumed national consensus, bipartisan stability, and procedural decorum. The other pushes for a more candid reckoning, not just with the present, but with the deeper historical trends that led us here.

The first vision imagines the years before this current political era as a golden age of cross-aisle cooperation and institutional trust. But that image often overlooks the deep exclusions and systemic compromises that made that era appear “stable.” The second vision is less nostalgic, more critical, and perhaps more uncomfortable. It acknowledges that many of the fractures we face today were not abrupt breaks, but slow erosions long in the making.

(Generative AI)

This coalition, if it can be called that, will have to choose: whether to paper over these tensions for the sake of unity, or to confront them directly and forge something more durable. That means grappling with the reality that the political center, once imagined as a safe and neutral space, is increasingly seen as insufficient to meet the scale of today’s challenges.

We may be leaving behind an era marked by confidence in procedural politics, steady economic growth, and a shared media ecosystem. In its place, we face uncertainty, fragmentation, and a growing awareness that our institutions are not self-correcting by nature.

The “No Kings” protest captured this moment of transition, from comfort to conflict, from consensus to contestation. But turning that emotional and symbolic power into real structural leverage will require more than rallies. It will demand clarity of vision, organizational depth, and a willingness to learn from history, not to reenact it.

Until then, those who consider themselves part of the democratic opposition may continue to produce moments of powerful expression. But without a strategy, those moments will remain just that: moments.