As a 12-year-old in 1970, I attended an Earth Day protest in Chicago. It didn’t seem like much then, and that’s not just because I was a kid. There’s usually no direct cause and effect with protests. But Earth Day made possible the creation of the EPA and immense and under-appreciated progress in cleaning up the environment. So it can be in our own time. The first “No Kings Day” didn’t change anything in the short-term, and the second one one won’t, either. But “No Kings” is a brilliantly conceived shorthand for building a mass movement to save American democracy. It is exactly the kind of protest that over the last half century has indirectly led to a doubling of the number of democracies in the world.
More immediately, if one fifth of the five million people who showed up for “No Kings” in June decide to help get out the vote in the midterms, it would be a larger political organization than the one Barack Obama famously assembled in 2008.
The June 14 “No Kings” protest was the second-largest one-day demonstration in U.S. history after Earth Day. The “No Kings” events in hundreds of locations on October 18 must exceed that. So please attend one in your area. Democracy depends on it.
