Civil Resistance Confronts the Autocracy

While MAGA’s spin was both insane and revealing, the No Kings Day 2 Marches were a major step towards taking our country back.

Last Saturday’s No Kings Day 2 was awesome to behold. The very best of America shone through. From coast to coast, in big cities and small, in red states as well as blue states, Americans peacefully marched to uphold our humanity as a country and to show our solidarity against autocracy and lawlessness.

And also awesome were the right-wing attacks on Kings Day 2 participants in the days before the rallies. They were so extreme and so unhinged, so utterly disconnected from reality, that they defeated their ostensible purpose of intimidating the marchers into silence. While the rest of us saw families, old people, young people, folks in funny costumes, many of them waving the Stars and Stripes, MAGA saw criminals and America-haters.

But I have a theory about the deeper purpose of the MAGA attacks on No Kings Day 2. America, I’d argue, is currently operating in a strange condition -- what I would call a “bubble autocracy.” Donald Trump has not yet consolidated anything like absolute political power. But parts of our society — the Republican Party and a number of supposedly independent institutions like, say, CBS — are in effect living inside a bubble in which they operate as if he has. Within that bubble, a cult of personality around Trump has been built, a cult of personality worthy of Kim Jong Un. And to show their fealty to Dear Leader, Republicans must engage in bizarre rhetoric.

Before I explain my theory of how the right lost its mind, some personal observations.

I attended Saturday’s No Kings Day march in Manhattan, for several reasons. As a citizen, I felt it was my duty. As a journalist, I wanted to see with my own eyes the mood, and whether there was violence either by or, far more likely, against the protestors. And I was, to be honest, feeling some anxiety about crowd size: a disappointing turnout would have been a significant blow to our chances of saving American democracy. No surprise that Trump attempted to discourage participation by declaring in advance that “I hear that very few people are going to be there,” while his lackeys spouted insane conspiracy theories.

I needn’t have worried. The march I joined was immense. G. Elliott Morris and the independent science newsroom Xylon estimate that 320,000 people protested in New York, and their median estimate is that more than 5 million protested nationwide. As Morris says, Saturday’s events were very likely “the biggest single-day protest since 1970.” Furthermore, the event was completely nonviolent: The New York Police Department reported zero arrests:

And reports from across the country indicate that there were only a handful of arrests nationwide. If I had to describe the mood in one word, it would be “joyous.”

But these observations raise two questions. First, what are we to make of the completely unhinged things Republicans were saying in advance of the protests? And second, do people marching and carrying signs matter, even if they number in the millions?

On the first question, let’s review what Republicans said. CNN has a good rundown of the craziness coming from leading Republicans in advance of No Kings Day 2. Mike Johnson, the speaker of the house, called them “hate America rallies” consisting entirely of the “pro-Hamas wing” and antifa. Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary — remember when people thought he was the adult in the room? — said that the demonstrations would involve “the most unhinged in the Democratic Party.” And Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, attacked the whole Democratic base:

The Democrat Party’s main constituency are made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals.

These claims were all self-evidently absurd. So why make them? CNN says that it was a “weird strategy”: Calling grandmothers Hamas terrorists won’t convince anyone who isn’t already deep in the MAGA tank and will backfire as those not in the tank see the disconnect between this rhetoric and the reality of the protests.

But it all makes sense once you realize that what we have been seeing in operation isn’t the Trump administration’s strategy for dealing with its critics. It is, instead, the strategies of individual MAGA apparatchiks for dealing with He Who Must Be Obeyed.

A couple of months ago Henry Farrell had a useful post explaining why people around Trump shower him with ludicrous compliments. Farrell cited work by the political scientist Xavier Marquez, who pointed out that autocracies that build a cult of personality around their leader are subject to “flattery inflation.” Marquez’s examples go all the way back to the Emperor Caligula, but the logic has remained the same over the centuries. (Trump hasn’t yet appointed his favorite horse as consul, but he did make Pete Hegseth secretary of defense war.)

Here’s how it works. The ruler’s lackeys and courtiers believe that they must praise him to the skies, proving their loyalty by offering paeans to his wisdom, character, and golf game. And they must continually up the ante:

How do you show your loyalty? By paying the costs of humiliation. The more grotesquely over the top your praise, the more credible it is as a signal of support for Dear Leader.

…

Apparatchiks’ willingness to degrade themselves will hurt their reputation with other people. But for exactly that reason, it serves as proof of loyalty to the one man who counts, Donald Trump. The more appalling the self-abasement, the more effectively it will serve this purpose.

What I would argue is that a similar process of self-reinforcement applies to telling lies that serve the autocrat’s ego. Call it “mendacity inflation.” Trump insists that he’s overwhelmingly popular and that only a lunatic fringe disapproves of his presidency. Well, to show loyalty his hangers-on must go further, declaring that grandmothers and parents pushing prams down 7^th Avenue are illegal aliens and violent criminals. The humiliating absurdity is a feature, not a bug. Simply lying about demonstrators isn’t enough; to prove their MAGA mettle people in Trump’s orbit must tell lies that are grotesque and ridiculous.

Again, what’s historically odd about this is that while Trump’s personal depravity may match that of historical autocrats, his power doesn’t. Call him Caligula, if you like, but he can’t order Senators — even Republican Senators — to commit suicide. (Dear historians: yes, I know that many of the stories told about Caligula were probably exaggerated.) He’s only able to act as if he has absolute power within a limited enclave, a bubble created by greed and fear.

And on that point, my second question arises: does it matter whether people are out there marching and carrying signs, even if they number in the millions? Well, there is a solid body of research by political scientists like Erica Chenoweth about the effects of civil resistance -- nonviolent shows of opposition to those controlling or attempting to control the government. The clear answer from this research is that demonstrations like No Kings Day can make a big difference. They are a show of the depth and popularity of a movement, reassuring those who are opposed to a nation’s direction that many, many others share that opposition.

Moreover, if a broad cross-section of society is represented in the demonstrations — and the crowds I saw consisted of a mix of seniors, middle-aged liberals, families with children, students and other unthreatening types — they can induce defections from the ruling regime, because the protestors can’t easily be “othered,” portrayed as strange and alien. So protests with a wide base of support can ultimately pierce the regime’s bubble. In fact, in the aftermath of the massive scale and breadth of the demonstrations, the MAGA propaganda machine has gone remarkably quiet, although Mike Johnson has claimed that the demonstrators were all Marxists.

And Trump himself is in denial. From CNN:

The president shows no sign of changing course. He called Saturday’s mass protests a “joke” and described them as “very small, very ineffective.” The people who took part were “whacked out,” Trump said.

“When you look at those people, those are not representative of the people of our country,” he told reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday.

Maybe Trump even believes that. But it was the opposite of the truth.

What the No Kings Day 2 demonstrations showed me is that we continue to be a great nation, despite how Trump and his minions try to separate, divide, gaslight and intimidate us. Saturday’s marches were a giant step towards taking our country back.

MUSICAL CODA