After No Kings, It’s Time to Escalate
We need bigger—and more disruptive—nonviolent campaigns that can go viral and peel away Trump’s pillars of support
American democracy is on the ropes. Trump and his billionaire backers are doing everything possible to transform our country into an authoritarian state like Hungary or Russia, where the trappings of institutional democracy mask brazen autocratic rule.
Our president’s sinking popularity numbers might not matter so much if his administration is either able to ignore electoral results or to distort the electoral map so badly that there’s almost no way to vote Republicans out.
Far too many Democrats and union leaders naively hoped that the courts would save us. But the Supreme Court has given a green light to Trump’s power grab, and it appears poised to overturn Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the last major legal roadblock to prevent Republicans from disenfranchising millions of Democrats and Black voters across the South.
Are we cooked? Trump would certainly like us to believe he’s unstoppable. Faced with the administration’s relentless offensive against immigrants, free speech, public services, and majoritarian rule, it’s normal to sometimes succumb to despair. But there’s no need to throw in the towel — and there are concrete next steps we can all take to win back the country through nonviolent resistance. As Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) president Stacy Davis Gates reminds us, Trumpism “won’t be stopped just in the courts or at the ballot box.”
Reasons for Hope
Of the many good reasons why you shouldn’t give up hope, the first is that popular resistance is growing, as seen in the recent Indivisible-initiated No Kings day protests, the largest in US history. Second, Trump’s policies are unpopular, and large numbers of Americans are searching for a viable alternative. Third, if opposition to authoritarianism and economic mismanagement becomes wide enough, an anti-Trump electoral wave in 2026 and 2028 might still be large enough to swamp electoral machinations. Fourth, Trump is very old, and it’s not obvious that MAGA can survive its megalomaniac ringleader.
There’s also a fifth, less-discussed reason for avoiding despair: authoritarian episodes abroad have tended to fail. A recent research paper by Marina Nord and four co-authors analyzed all authoritarian episodes since 1900 and found that a surprisingly large number have been stopped and reversed within five years — a process they call “U-Turns.” Their paper found that “52% of all autocratization episodes become U-Turns, which increases to 73% when focusing on the last 30 years.” (See Figure 1)
Autocratization can be defeated through peaceful resistance. And in 90% of the documented cases of U-Turns, democracy levels were either restored to their previous heights (70 out of 102 cases) or they improved (22 out of 102 cases).
Global precedent, in short, suggests that we still have a fighting shot to save American democracy. As the authors somewhat dryly note, their findings show “that authoritarian consolidation is perhaps more difficult than the existing literature sometimes posits. A second implication is that democratizing agents stand a decent chance of turning autocratization around.”
America has certainly entered a dark period when fifty-fifty odds to save democracy is the good news. But these chances should be more than enough to encourage us to push back rather than succumb to endless doomscrolling.
Time to Take Risks
Anti-Trump resistance is not futile. But it is risky. To meet this moment, more individuals and organizations are going to have to leave their comfort zones. We can’t just continue with business as usual.
Some individuals have already risen to the occasion. Look at the countless Chicago residents who are peacefully confronting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. Look at federal workers like Ellen Mei and Paul Osadebe, who put their jobs on the line by becoming whistleblowers and exposing how the Trump administration is undermining pivotal services like anti-discriminatory housing enforcement and SNAP food benefits.
Unfortunately, most progressive groups, unions, and churches have not yet seriously pivoted to the new terrain of rapidly consolidating authoritarianism. With some notable exceptions like Indivisible, far too many progressive and left groups remain stuck in their siloed, small-scale ways. And most unions — with notable exceptions like the CTU — have kept their heads down due to institutional inertia, a fear of provoking Trump’s wrath, or worries about alienating pro-Trump members. This is not a minor limitation. “History shows us that when authoritarianism rears its head, whether it takes root depends on the labor movement’s response,” note Jackson Potter and Alex Caputo-Pearl in an important new piece on how labor can meet the moment.
After No Kings, people are rightly wondering what comes next. These marches have been great at showing large numbers, but defeating Trumpism will require even broader participation and more bottom-up disruption. That’s how we shift popular opinion enough — and how we create enough of a crisis for elites — to overcome MAGA’s electoral machinations in 2026 and 2028.
Our biggest obstacle remains a pervasive sense of fear and powerlessness, especially among working-class people. To turn that around, we should start experimenting with disruptive, nonviolent, attention-grabbing campaigns that are easily replicable and that can go viral nationwide — something in the same wide-scale grassroots spirit as the immigrant rights upsurge of 2006, Occupy Wall Street in 2011, or Black Lives Matter in 2020. And because we have to sustain this energy beyond flash-in-the-pan mobilizations, we’ll have to lean on the momentum of these actions to build on-the-ground organization capable of further expanding and escalating the movement.
How could we spark such a mass nonviolent movement today? Here are two concrete tactics that may have the potential to galvanize a broad-based national upsurge against authoritarianism.
Eric Blanc
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