‘No Kings’ May Be the Turning Point We Desperately Need |
Just when you think we have lost the plot, we get a glimmer of hope that we have not.
The estimated 9 million people who took to the streets in more than 3,000 locations across the U.S. on Saturday in the largest public protest in American history sent a message of hope.
Beyond their chants, banners, placards, and speeches calling for “No Kings,” an end to the abuses of ICE, and a halt to the illegal war in Iran, the demonstrators conveyed a deeper message: we are increasingly coming to understand the meaning of historian Timothy Snyder’s observation that democracy is not a noun but a verb.
The reality is that America has never really been a democracy, not for everyone within our borders. Rather, at our best, we have aspired to have a government by, for, and of the people. But it was always an iffy proposition, as Benjamin Franklin pointed out: “a republic, if you can keep it.”
It wasn’t just the malevolence and naked hungering for unchecked power of Donald Trump, his billionaire sponsors or his acolytes that sent this country spiraling toward dictatorship—to the point where we now have a corrupt, racist, misogynist, mentally defective would-be king living in our White House.
No, the complacency of the American people played a big role in opening the door to the crisis we now find ourselves in. We were self-satisfied. We were the richest nation on Earth. We were entitled to our “exceptionalism.” For eight decades, we have applauded ourselves and boasted of our status as leaders of “the free world.”
We were the home of the free and the land of the brave, as if that freedom were only dependent on our standing up to threats from abroad, threats to our ennobling, elevating, God-given Americanness.
But the greatest threat, as the country’s leaders warned from the beginning, came from within us.
You can only imagine that, upon seeing the thousands of protestors surrounding the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall on Saturday, Lincoln himself might have........