The first thing to say about No Kings Day is that it is one of the most privileged protests possible relative to its posture. One would expect brave rebels against a dictatorial figure to face the same kind of danger to life, limb, and property the American founders did. That is manifestly not the case here as the modern contestants organized to castigate the current occupant of the White House with no real danger of any kind. To successfully and peacefully spend a day calling out the president as a king while receiving no real pushback is a kind of self-nullifying event. However, I think one can safely predict there will be further iterations of it. In politics, especially American politics, the mobilization of the base of voters is the heart of the battle. If you can get people to spend their Saturday in a big protest crowd, you can probably get them to vote.
No King’s Day had, according to its organizers, some seven million participants. The protests on Oct. 18 were preceded by similar events in June. Seven million is a big number. Organizers say it represents 14 times the number at Trump’s two inaugurations. Of course, such a statistic bears the opportunistic and bombastic imprint of most political stats, which is to say it compares a local event in Washington, D.C., to a national one in many cities. Nevertheless, let it be conceded that seven million is a lot of Americans and that many people are upset with Donald Trump’s leadership.
While the safety and relative peacefulness of the protests seem to undercut the #nokings claim, there is another complicating angle. Donald Trump won the election in both the Electoral College and the popular vote, with neither being a razor’s edge kind of thing. In addition, his party has solid control of the U.S. Senate and narrow control of the House of Representatives. Despite his victory (coming after an assassination attempt that narrowly failed) and the victories in Congress, President Trump is currently mired in a protracted government shutdown. The shutdown is occurring because of the super-majoritarian aspect embedded in the U.S. Senate, which requires 60 votes to accomplish the fiscal objective of funding the government.
I must pause to note that this narrative I am describing does not seem at all to correspond to the plenipotentiary rule of some king or power-hungry dictator. Rather, it seems all too typical for an American president who is constrained by the maddeningly deliberate and plodding mechanisms (a feature, not a bug) of the U.S. Constitution.
Click Here to Read More (Originally Published at World Magazine )
Hunter (J.D., Ph.D.) is the provost and dean of faculty at North Greenville University in South Carolina. He is the author of The End of Secularism, Political Thought: A Student’s Guide and The System Has a Soul. His work has appeared in a wide variety of other books and journals. He is formally affiliated with the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission; Touchstone, the Journal of Markets and Morality; the Center for Religion, Culture, and Democracy; and the Land Center at Southwestern Seminary.