The Revolution Will Be Organised
What the “No Kings” marches taught us: the antidote to tyranny isn’t fury - it’s laughter, clipboards and muscular decency (and there's probably a Gantt chart somewhere).
This is Bearly Politics - an independent publication about power, politics and the fine art of collective overreaction. I’m The Bear, and today we’re discussing a man who wants to be king, a crowd who told him no and why that’s the healthiest thing I’ve seen all year.
We have a king in the UK.
He seems a pleasant enough man, though rather unimportant in the grand scheme of things. We swear to him when we as immigrants become citizens (though admittedly, I swore to his mum when I became one), but for the most part, he’s just sort of there. Him and his whole family (with the exception of a certain younger brother who has some very uncomfortable questions to answer) are just a kind of background noise to the constitution (as it were) of the United Kingdom.
Which largely I would say is the point of them - ceremonial monarchy, decorative continuity, a kind of national tea cosy1 that’s there to cover things in a bit of pomp now and then. For the most part, I think we just all roll our eyes, get the bank notes redesigned now and then and move on. Nobody lives in fear that Charles III will have a conniption fit at a bad headline and dissolve parliament by lunchtime. The crown, for all its antique silliness, knows where the line is.
Which is why it was so incredibly titillating to watch the US - a country that literally owes its existence to avoiding anything crowny - spend a whole weekend reminding its president that he is not, in fact, a king2. And my God, what a reminder it turned out to be!
Vast, all encompassing, diverse and, above all, very, very adult. Nearly 7 million people across 600 cities with stewards, legal observers, first aid volunteers, pram lanes, marching bands and, God bless ‘em, laminated routes so everywhere knew exactly where to be and when to be there. It was the ultimate in displays of democracy, but with what I presume is a very, very well-organised Gantt chart, and given the chance, you could probably have balanced a pint on the sharpness of the logistics3.
Watching it all happening, the mood of it all was the headline - it wasn’t dread, anger or rage - not the froth of a football4 riot or vindictiveness of a migrant hotel protest. It was joyful - a patriotic, slightly nerdy/dorky joy. Think along the line school bands, witty placards, inflatable crowns being worn ironically, veterans holding signs about their oaths to the constitution and teenagers chanting along with their grandparents. If you add a bit of bunting and squint slightly, you’d be forgiven for thinking this was a bit like a Jubilee party - except instead of waving at hereditary privilege because they just gave you a day off5, people were defending the extremely valid idea that nobody gets to claim it.
All of this bringing to my mind another massive crowd event in the US - January 6, when it felt like the US had, quite publicly, shat itself in public, and it’s a contrast that’s not just aesthetic, but diagnostic.
On the one hand, we had an event this weekend that was peaceful, well planned, entirely lawful, multiracial, multigenerational and pretty profoundly unfashionable in its faith in process, while on the other hand we had what was, in essence, a massive and violent fannywobble6 by men in camouflage trousers and red hats, led in turn by a man who thinks executive power means “do crimes faster.”
One group bought with them marshals, water stands and de-escalation training, while the other bought gallows and bowel movements onto desks. If there was ever a neat infographic on what democratic health looks like, and doesn’t, that would be it.
The January 6 behaviour, as shocking as it was, was understandable - because it’s exactly what happens when you have a movement led by a man who has the attention span of a goldfish on a Red Bull drip and the institutional comprehension of a particularly slow scatter cushion.
In Trump’s head, “the Constitution” and “laws” are basically a moody waiter keeping him out of the kitchen. He doesn’t want to govern, he wants to be adored, and nothing in him bends toward the actual work of democracy - the slog, the compromise, the boredom and the obligation to be smaller than the law. That, according to Trump, is “weakness” - the rest of us know it as “civilisation”.
And so, completely unsurprisingly, when confronted with millions of citizens behaving like adults and protesting his growing authoritarianism, he responded like a sulking adolescent by posting an AI video of himself as an airborne monarch dumping brown sludge on protesters below. It’s rare to see a personality disorder embodied so boldly, but there it was - the authoritarian id unfiltered for all to see with overt contempt for citizens, an erotic fixation on dominance and a zero-sum understanding of power in which the only joy available is humiliating the people you’re meant to serve.
His chorus of yes-men and women fell straight into their familiar roles ahead of the march - Ted Cruz, a man who looks as though he has not had a solid bowel movement since 20167, frantically clutched at a Soros bed-time story, while Mike Johnson, the human embodiment of “generic white man” called the protests a “hate-America rally” as if civic participation and protest is like setting the flag on fire.
The algorithmic cesspit known as X also spewed forth with conservative influencers cherry picking the worst examples they could find - a bad sign here, an unhinged gesture there - trying, pretty unsuccessfully, to alchemise nearly seven million largely cheerful and disciplined into a baying mob.
And when that didn’t stick, because nothing caught fire, nobody stormed anything and not a single wall was adorned with human faeces? They quietly moved on and chose to ignore the whole situation. Why did they do that? Because their specific authoritarianism runs exclusively on fumes of rage8, and joy and organisation is kryptonite to them.
Modern day authoritarian politics needs chaos, violence and hate like a vampire needs night - the movement is completely unable to thrive in competence, in good faith, in cheerful volunteerism that refuses to scream back at it. It needs broken glass for the B-roll, somebody in a hoodie9 carrying a telly to, above all, keep the donations coming in from people who fear a chaos that doesn’t really exist.
The No-Kings marches completely denied them this opportunity, and if you want to understand just how seething they are about this, just listen to the thunderous silence. They were denied enemy footage and narrative, and were instead given pictures of families, flags and about a million different versions of “no one is above the law”.
Now, there is, as ever, going to be a crowd of people who will be asking “but does this protest change the policy tomorrow and improve things now?” And the answer is no, but that’s also not necessarily the point in it.
Mass peaceful protests and assembly change conditions - it stiffens the spines inside of institutions, and you may just find today that there will be a judge facing a decision they’re wavering on because it goes against administration orthodoxy glancing at the news and thinking “I’m not alone”.
Authoritarians largely rely on atomisation - they need you on your sofa (or couch in US parlance) doing your doomscroll, feeding your sense that nothing matters - because isolated people find it that much harder to resist. Marches and protests, beyond being demonstrations of power, are also anti-loneliness devices, and this weekend there were seven million bodies in the sunlight who announced “the public is joining together”, and that matters far more than any one speech.
All of this is important to us in the UK as well, and not because we need to stand up to our King (he’s honestly just pottering about, probably outside a garden show), but because we’ve got our own set of kinglets cheering on strongmanism like Nigel Farage, a man who has spent years and years performing resistance against “unelected elites” while quietly angling for peerages10 and making friends with oligarch-adjacent chancers.
Reform UK is a coalition of grievance merchants who on the one side promise “power to the people” while simultaneously drawing up lists for of people the people should fear. Their project that’s running apace in the UK is nearly identical to Trump’s in everything but scale - convert public frustration into a crown for the man with a microphone and a show on telly.
Both of these movements are also propped up by the same media ecosystem - in the US it’s Fox News, Posobiec, Libs of TikTok all busily pulling at Musk’s rage slot machine, while in the UK it’s GB news and the comment pages of publications that now seem to exist with the sole purpose of furrowing a brow at a random noun and labelling it woke11. The function, in both cases, is identical - flood the zone with nonsense, launder paranoia into public policy and punish the dull but important work of institutions with outright ridicule until that dull work looks like treason.
This is the reason why the No Kings aesthetic - joyful, organised, boringly lawful - now feels kind of subversive. It reclaimed the word “order” from people who love to shout it at their imaginary enemies and clarified, firmly (and probably a bit pedantically) that “order” is not men in black body armour barking threats at all and sundry, it’s citizens choosing decency and tidying up after themselves.
“Ah”, I expect someone to say, “but didn’t some BLM protests in 2020 turn violent?”
Yes - some of them did. Tens of millions of people marched in the middle of a pandemic, of course there were incidents - and none of that invalidates a broader truth, that movements that commit to stewarding their own behaviour change public perception.
The No Kings coalition knew this - they put marshals at every corner, coordinated with legal observers, trained volunteers and designated safe zones while treating public space like commons that are there to be cared for. And it worked, which is most evident from the distinct lack of tantrums from their opposition.
This joyful protest is also not just the gimmick that cynics might want you to believe it is - it’s a strategy, and a brilliant one at that. Despair is the product of choice for Authoritarians - the creation of a world that only the Great Orange Man can fix, and cheerfulness and community completely annihilates that market.
Joy in protest shows that we still like each other, we still believe in this thing, we can disagree without trying to hang a Vice President and we can do politics without becoming unbearable. It is very hard to build a cult in a crowd made up at least partially of people in inflatable giraffe costumes that keeps bursting into laughter.
Which brings us back to the Orange Elephant in the room. Trump is not just a bad politician, he is a civic pollutant. Every single thing he lays his hands on he drags to the level of his own attention span - complex problems become insults, institutions become enemies and law becomes inconvenience. He openly speaks of “vermin” and “retribution” because those are the only registers he knows:
Dehumanise. Punish. Demand applause.
He is the exact opposite of a republican (small r) leader and a monarchist without the effort, a man who insists on deference over duty, and because any serious dealing with an issue reveals a void, his defenders must constantly change the subject. Hence the Soros bogeyman, the “they’re all violent” libel and the constant manufactured panic about flags, pronouns and professors.
It’s all just content that serves as a blizzard of triviality which is solely designed to hide the fact that he is completely incapable of doing the job he finds himself in without breaking the tools that make that job possible and worth doing in the first place.
The marches this weekend ripped that curtain down again, and showed that behind it isn’t a tyrant, it’s a loud man with a phone and a fan base that desperately needs new hobbies.
I suppose the main lesson from this weekend isn’t necessarily just that “peaceful protests are good”, it’s that institutions can and should be defended by mood, and that if the mood hardens around decency - not the silly soggy kind, but the muscular version that says in a firm voice that “we will be better even when it’s annoying” - then strongman politics will struggle to breathe. We can reiterate that cruelty doesn’t need to be met with more cruelty, that you can make cruelty look a bit tacky and small.
Now, it goes without saying that no single day saves a republic, but movements do build infrastructure - the networks created this Saturday will persist, the images that came out of the marches (images of flags and kids and clever signs and calm) will be there the next time a right wing commentator has a tantrum live on telly about the “anarchy of the left”, and the coalitions that marshalled seven million people can now pivot to court-watching, voter protection and legal challenges.
Here in the UK, we should learn this again, because the UK’s genius, at its best, is process - that fussy insistence on due course that makes demagogues want to tear their hair out. We must stop apologising for our insistence on doing things the right way. If we want to resist our growing cohort of local kinglets, we need to be boringly ruthless about rules, we need to keep demanding the receipts, continue celebrating the dull and tie everything to standards, audits, committees, codes and the guards at the gates.
I realise that this is turning into a bit of a ramble, so to end this off, I think it’s worth noting that for a while now I’ve said “look to America for the warning of what happens when you elect an ideologue”, and that remains true. But now I also think we should look to the US for the antidote - the disciplined, cheerful resistance that refuses to make the strong man the character.
On a personal note, I also need to be a bit more introspective on how I approach things. My default setting is pugnacious - all sharp elbows, short fuse and long receipts. And yes, anger and rage have their uses, they wake the room - but the No Kings marches reminded me that joy organises the room.
I’ll be keeping the knives, I’m just going to try to sheathe them into something a bit brighter - a bit less doom, a bit more drumline.
And if that means marching with a grin, a clipboard in hand and a song that drowns out the tantrums of the little kings - well, I can quite honestly live with that.
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Now available in “Limited Democracy Beige” from your nearest John Lewis.
Also, can you imagine how badly a crown would clash with the spray tan?
Which, coming from the UK, is basically the highest available compliment. You’re welcome.
For American Readers, “football” here means the version with actual feet, not the weird thing you do with helmets.
I honestly believe that the occasional holiday we get to celebrate something royal is the main reason we still have the monarchy intact.
A term not necessarily found in the Federalist Papers, but perhaps should be.
The medical term for this would be “chronic obfuscation”
And the occasional fundraising email sent in ALL CAPS.
Preferably with ANTIFA emblazoned on the back
The political equivalent really of shouting “down with the aristocracy!” while quietly measuring for ermine.
Coming Next: “Sandwiches - are they too woke?” - The Telegraph, probably.
Agree totally, I think the day also allowed a lot of people to look around and realise, ‘I’m not alone’ in the way I feel about what’s going on and consequently there will be so many that formed new friends they never realised they had.
The ‘silent majority’ have been awoken and are standing, dancing, singing and signing their displeasure together…..
Surely they weren’t referring to the Fuc-king orange misogynistic-douchebag-idiot-buffoon-megalomaniac-racist-asshole-shithead with Wotsits for brains were they?