Is the No Kings movement the new Tea Party movement?
That’s certainly the opinion of some Never Trump conservatives. In the more than 7 million people who protested against the Trump regime, they see the highest ideals of the Tea Party, chief among them limited government, individual liberty and the sovereignty of the people.
But that’s the thing. Those highest ideals were darkened by the fact that the Tea Party was an artificial construct. It’s sometimes called “astroturf” to distinguish it from a real, organic grassroots movement.
The Tea Party was funded by billionaires, conspicuously by the Koch brothers. It may have had the veneer of high-mindedness, but in truth it aimed to spread fear, hate and lies about the first Black president in order to expand and consolidate the power of those self-same elites.
So no. No Kings is not the new Tea Party if we are talking about the Tea Party in terms of the noblest principles of the American republic.
Because it wasn’t. It was, however, a political movement against elites. In this, No Kings has something in common with the Tea Party.
The key difference, of course, is that No Kings has the potential to reject the legitimacy of elites generally. The Tea Party wanted us to believe that the “elites” were all those wine-and-cheese liberals on the east coast who forced “real Americans” to live under the rule of a secret Muslim and covert Marxist by the name of Barack Obama, who was himself a mere puppet of a global conspiracy against America.
The Tea Party movement was a gigantic shuck and jive – a means of distracting Americans, but especially white Americans who are (um) receptive to such messaging, while actual elites pick their pockets.
While No Kings is mainly focused on Donald Trump, it holds the promise of expanding its scope to include all those elites that the Tea Party was intended to serve. Indeed, the circumstances are changing rapidly. No Kings could evolve into a mass movement against oligarchs, which could turn into a mass movement against billionaires, which could turn into a mass movement against the monopoly control that all those billionaires now have over the institutions of democracy.
And like the Tea Party, No Kings is emerging from an economic emergency. Back then, it was a crisis of collapsing assets, mainly housing, and how that impacted jobs. The crisis now is much, much greater, as inflation and cost of living affect vastly more people than unemployment ever did. It’s so bad that retailers that manage to hold their prices down are being celebrated as champions of the people!
No Kings is already huge. Its recent one-day march was the biggest in American history. Everyone who is not capable of bribing a president is struggling to pay for the necessities of life. Many of those folks are going to be open to a movement that gives them someone to blame. A protest of seven million-plus people could double before you know it.
Donald Trump looked at the Tea Party and found ways to harness its energy. (He chose “birtherism,” because he understood what it was really about.) Ambitious Democrats are surely doing the same regarding No Kings. One of the most ambitious is Gavin Newsom.
In an interview with ABC’s Jonathan Kark, California’s governor said we ought to be standing up for the noblest principles of the American republic. “The founding fathers did not live and die to see us as cowards,” Newsom said. Then he identified the cowards, broadening the scope of the No Kings movement to include “the richest, most powerful people selling their souls and selling out this country.”
He then implied a list: the Republicans in the Congress, Wall Street and the corporate media, elite universities and elite law firms. Missing was the supermajority of the Supreme Court, but Newsom’s message was otherwise clear. Americans should be “disgusted” by the “cowards” who have monopoly control over the institutions of democracy.
Newsom borrowed from the No Kings by saying that the language of liberty is requisite to fighting for it. “It’s a revolution that’s going on in this country and I think you have to start using those words,” he said. “[Trump] is attacking every single institution of independent thinking and he’s succeeding because we’re still playing by the old set of rules.”
“The old set of rules” is hotly debated among liberal folk, but at its root, it refers to a status quo that, by dint of being a status quo, gives certain elites every advantage they could hope for in preventing the Democrats from developing into a fully realized opposition party.
It means continuing to make room for certain elites who (in good faith, let’s say) wish to stop the Democrats from becoming “too extreme,” which really means stopping them from centering the interests of the people. Once these are set aside, Newsom suggests, the Democrats can “fight fire with fire” for the purpose of establishing a new normal.
The language of revolutionary freedom in the context of old rules serving elites is important to understanding what Newsom says in the very next breath – that once order is reestablished, “we will continue to build on the legacy, I would argue, of the former president, who I think was one of the most successful presidents of the last century.”
He meant Joe Biden.
Far too few realized Biden was the bridge between the past and the future that so many Americans want to see in their president. His economic policies in particular were transformational, as they reversed the priorities of previous administrations, including Obama’s.
Biden privileged workers over “job creators.” (He was the first president to cross a picket line.) He oversaw a dramatic increase in hourly wages. (They outpaced inflation for the first time since the 1960s.) Unemployment, especially Black unemployment, had rarely been lower. By the end, inflation was returning to pre-pandemic levels.
For these reasons and more, elites hated Biden.
The hatred was especially sharp among corporate bosses. Biden championed their workers. He regulated their industries. He put the national interest above theirs. Most of all, they hated that Joe Biden threatened to stem the tide of consolidation. Capital will concentrate if left alone. Biden didn’t leave it alone. He knew that the unchecked concentration of money and power spells doom for democracy.
He was right. We know he was right. Look what’s happening now.
And that brings me back to No Kings. It has the potential to clarify history. The conventional wisdom is that Biden, through his hubris, brought himself down, paving the way for Donald Trump’s return.
With enough effort, another story can come to light – that the elites who are now lording it over us, who are now planning to pal around with a criminal president in his new gold-plated “ballroom,” conspired against a truly working-man’s president. Yes, he was old. Perhaps he overstayed his welcome. But no one can dispute the stone-cold fact that elites across the spectrum attacked him virtually from the start.
And from that betrayal of democracy and the common good arose the stirrings of an organic grassroots movement against not only despotic rule but against “the richest, most powerful people selling their souls and selling out this country” – those who made despotism possible.
Newsom didn’t bring up Biden only because he’s still popular with the Democratic base. He did so also because he knows that what the former president did is the foundation on which to build the next chapter of American history as well as the history of the Democratic Party – and whoever the base chooses to be the party’s next leader.