The American democracy protests on October 18

The nationwide and international No Kings protests yesterday were impressivc, bringing literally millions of people out to protest against the Trump 2.0 regime’s creeping fascism.

The parallel No Tyrants event in Vienna sponsored by Democrats Abroad was also impressive. Even a few Portland Frogs showed up!

The labor movement was a key partner in mobilizing demonstrators for the No Kings events, which was sponsored nationally by the activist group Indivisible. Indivisible’s website estimated the turnout at seven million protesters.

BBC News reports:

Huge crowds took part in "No Kings" protests against President Donald Trump's policies in cities across the US on Saturday, including New York, Washington DC, Chicago, Miami and Los Angeles.

Thousands packed New York City's iconic Times Square and streets all around, with people holding signs with slogans like "Democracy not Monarchy" and "The Constitution is not optional".

Ahead of the demonstrations, Trump allies accused the protesters of being linked with the far-left Antifa movement, and condemned what they called "the hate America rally".

Several US states had mobilised the National Guard. But organisers said the events, which drew nearly seven million people, were peaceful. (1)

I heard a couple commentators on a Daily Beast podcast grumbling that multiple protests are less interesting than one big protest in Washington. But I’m inclined to think that the multiple nationwide protests that we’ve had this year on the two No Kings days if more politically effective at mobilizing voters to the pro-democracy cause than a single march in the national capital.

Also, organizing One Big Protest in the capital city is easier in a smaller country like Serbia or Hungary than it is in larger ones for the obvious reason that it’s much more of a challenge to go to Washington D.C. from California or Texas or Oklahoma City that it is from Richmond or Baltimore. Also, the larger the crowd, the more of a challenge that traffic and lodging become.

It's also important that protests generate interest in “red” (Republican-dominated) areas and give people there an opportunity to get together and get to know each other and – very importantly – to see that that many of their neighbors even in rural areas and small towns are as concerned as they are about crackpot policies and about brutal attacks on their immigrant neighbors by ICE goons and having a President how can’t even maintain the decorum of a five-year-old.

The Republicans have a distinct advantage in organizing and messaging in more rural states, not least because they have a network of conservative evangelical churches that do effective get-out-the-vote drives. Labor unions are still the backbone of the local get-out-the-vote drives for Democrats. But union membership has decreased drastically over the last 50 years. And the national Democratic Party has been just shamefully lazy about developing and maintaining state party organizations in more conservative parts of the country.

Laura Rozen has a good summary of views on the value of grassroots mobilization of the No Kings sort. She quotes the president of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict from a recent podcast:

In a stable democracy, you would expect that public opinion would be a guardrail on this kind of overreach; that if the public didn’t approve that, that would stop it. And again, that was a fairly stable assumption for recent decades, at least on some issues.

In a backsliding democracy, though, it’s really public mobilization. That’s the guardrail. And mobilization shows intensity, right? And it also has the capacity to impose costs. And the costs don’t just need to be imposed on the administration. They can be imposed on enablers of the administration…

So you start looking comprehensively, not just at the government, but the enablers. Those who are contracting with the government, those who are serving into it. What is the ecosystem that is supporting a tax on democracy?

There’s no one tactic that’s necessarily going turn things around. It’s going to be a lot of different people getting involved. It’s a huge country. Every state has their own political scene. So there might be heavily like very-localized responses in some cases. And then there might be cases like with [comedian Jimmy] Kimmel, where you actually can get a national scale response. [my emphasis] (2)

Notes:

(1) Goodwin, Grace Eliza & Wilson, Caitlin (2025): Millions turned out for anti-Trump 'No Kings' protests across US. BBC News 10/19/2025. <https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c93xgyp1zv4o> (Accessed: 2025-19-10).

(2) Rozen, Laura (2025): In backsliding democracy, ‘public mobilization is the guardrail’. Diplomatic 10/17/2025. <https://diplomatic.substack.com/p/in-backsliding-democracy-public-mobilization> (Accessed: 2025-19-10).