No Kings and Letting Ourselves Hope

Yesterday, walking with my family down 15th street for Denver’s No Kings protest, I felt like we can win.

Not that we have won. There are more than three years to go. It doesn’t even mean Trump is losing, because the executive still had a lot of levers to pull, and those the constitution grants to the other branches, those other branches seem to have handed de facto control to him. His MAGA movement, which exists primarily to give abusers powers society was working to deny them, can still inflict quite a lot of abuse.

Trumpism and the Status Anxiety of Abusers - Aaron Ross Powell's Blog

MAGA, at its core, is a cult of abuse. The right to abuse, the justification for abuse, the dopamine rush they get from abusing others, is built into every policy, every program, every line of rhetoric. They identify with abusers because they want to abuse people.

But marching in that crowd, it was obvious there are a lot more of us than there are of them. And we have decency on our side. It’s cliche, but there was love in the air. Or, if not quite love, then friendliness. Camaraderie. Compliments on signs and outfits, gracious gestures of letting people into or out of the crowd. People watching out not to step on the rather long tail of my son’s inflatable dinosaur costume.

The closest thing to conflict I saw was when the group in front of us, chanting “Hey hey ho ho,” turned a corner and ran into a group chanting “Whose streets?” And everyone kind of awkwardly paused, because people couldn’t figure out which chant to continue or to follow. It resolved without violence or hurt feelings.

What I saw instead of conflict was passion, and anger, and a real desire to help each other. To look out for each other. To get through this together. I saw grandmas in frog costumes, kids with their families, and kindness. And signs like this one, pointing to decency in these dark times beyond the conspicuous splendor of millions upon millions taking to the streets to remind the country what it actually stands for.

None of that means we’ve won. But none of that means they’ve won, either. And the meltdown so many MAGA had, including Trump, his vice president, and many of his most prominent allies, showed that they know they haven’t won, and that victory is a lot harder than they’d like. They know America loathes them, except for the 30% or so who are too immoral, or just too ignorant, to walk away from fascism and return to patriotism. Thirty percent’s tiny, though. Not enough to hold a country, or at least not be certain they can.

So it was reasonable, yesterday, to feel hope. We have three more years, and that’s three more years where the people who hate America the most have control over many of the government’s most dangerous mechanisms for immiserating and degrading the nation. But that also means we have three more years to show our government, and ourselves, and the world the real America. For the real Americans, the ones who actually represent this country, in its thriving and messy and beautiful diversity, to make our voices and our values heard before we eventually reassert them and take our country back.

Yesterday was a good day for America. And it was good, nine months into all this, to have a day were feeling good, where feeling hopeful—in the midst of inflatable costumed silliness—felt earned.

I saw a frog marching down Denver’s streets, shouting “This is what democracy looks like!” and I thought, yes, it sure as hell is.