No Kings AND No Government

On March 28 Americans and others internationally took to the streets in the millions and across the country in No Kings protests. These protests are directed against the Trump administration which has been using ICE to terrorize communities across the country according to an ethnocratic antiimmigration agenda and launched an illegal war on Iran with the help of Israel which will negatively affect cost of living for Americans. The Trump administration has done these things and much more because it is a far-right administration bent on effectively abolishing separation of powers and civil rights and thereby creating an ethnocratic autocracy in which white American cishet men with conservative values are the only people who are allowed outside the cultural, political, and economic margins. So, if you are not a far-right racist there is much to protest and even if you are the results of this administration's policies are fantastic evidence of how far-right racism will also negatively impact the lives of far-right racists.

That said, the No Kings protests are going in a specific ideological direction which is problematic from the standpoint of really understanding Trumpism for what it is so that it and ideologies like it can be defeated. No Kings gets its name from the fact that what it is protesting is Donald Trump's illiberalism. The United States as it stands, like most western states, is a liberal democracy in which representative government including the separation of powers (a branch of government that makes laws, another that interprets them, and another that enforces them) is combined with civil rights (e.g. the first and sixteenth amendments to the constitution). The current global wave of populism, xenophobia, misinformation, and inequality is producing democratic backsliding in which while constitutional democracy might still be a very common form of government separation of powers and civil rights are rapidly being eroded creating illiberal forms of democratic rule.

The "no kings" motto is effectively a commentary on the fact that Donald Trump is eroding liberal democracy which thus valorizes liberal democracy as an ideal to fight for and protect from Trumpian attacks. Liberal democracy, however, requires forms of social domination and inequality which despite being swept under the rug in liberal democratic societies are none the less comparable to forms of repression and inequality in illiberal, or even non-democratic societies. For instance, liberal democracy is supposed to be the peak of political participation, allowing key state officials to be chosen by public elections which are protected by constitutional law. However, the bureaucratic hierarchy of a modern liberal democratic state is no less impressive than that found in an autocratic state.

The main difference is simply that bureaucrats in the latter are subject to the dictates of the autocrat, whereas in the former they are constrained by a relatively narrow public mandate and the legal guarantees set out in the constitution. Similarly liberal democracy is supposed to protect the freedom of the individual, but it only does so in specific abstract ways. In the United States you have the freedom to express yourself without being censured by the government, but your access to the material means of self-expression are limited by commercial property rights which are also legally guaranteed by the state. So, you can't freely express yourself at work if you are employed by someone else, or even on social media unless you own your own platform.

Liberal democracy is also supposed to be egalitarian, but modern liberal democracies legally protect many forms of public and private bigotry, significant wealth inequality, and as nation-states exclude non-citizens from the residence, work, and representation opportunities given to citizens. This is because collectivizing the ownership of robotics, servers, land, tools, warehouses, etc., physically barring racist and cissexist political ideologues from public spaces, and assuming administrative control of communities under a regime of voluntary association, are illiberal and illegal activities by the lights of modern liberal democratic states. Liberal democracies are guided by expert consensus in which elites foster social compromise among groups of different class and social status such that attempts by one to socially dislodge the other (whether this takes the form of the lower status and class groups overthrowing the system of class and hierarchical social status, or those with class and status privilege acting to further marginalize, or exterminate those without) are proscribed against by the coercive force of the state (police, military, courts, and prisons). Liberal democracy is thus extremely fragile having been created out of regimes which were much more violently elitist and tending to devolve back into such violent elitism.

Hungary, for example, achieved liberal democracy after the collapse of the Soviet Union in which a totalitarian state enforced the rule of a communist bureaucratic ruling class. In 2011 the parliamentary victory of Victor Orban's far-right Fidesz party allowed it to alter the Hungarian constitution such that Fidesz has enjoyed autocratic rule for over a decade. Huge swathes of the world have never even seen liberal democracy develop being historically beset by autocracy, the most common form of government in world history. It's not hard to see why this is the case.

Liberal democracy was the result of historic concessions made by ruling classes in the west to movements against class domination and autocracy and for civil rights, public participation in social administration, and egalitarian distribution of social benefits. Whenever ruling classes could resist or roll back these concessions, they happily did so. Trumpism is just the latest attempt to do so which is so insidious precisely because it has seized on populist anger at the procedural elitism of liberal democracy. Right-wing populists have thus managed to sell huge swaths of the population in the global north the idea that racial and gender minorities as well as women's civil rights are part of an elite plot to hold down the morally upright common man. This narrative thereby ironically empowers global north elites to lean into autocratic methods of upward wealth redistribution and exclusion of the masses from political participation.

From this vantage point there is nothing to "protect" in liberal democracy. It was a temporary concession from the ruling class to the rest of us, one that they are now attempting to roll back in a point of crisis for the elitist power structures of the capitalist world-system. Yes, we should resist autocracy, but as Anarchists have historically argued, we should also resist democracy. It is not enough to have a say in who bosses me around at what time, or to have a set of rules which decide when coercive forces at the behest of a tiny, but powerful section of the population get to kill me. We should only be satisfied when we have become ungovernable.

Sources
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eNPAOsEKXw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BY7bchcJ3p0
Politics, Tansey and Jackson
Democracy, Zack
https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/illiberal-democracy-and-the-struggle-on-the-right/
Anarchism, Honeywell
Populism, Mudde and Kaltwasser