Size matters

What the weekend’s demonstrations tell us about dueling visions of America in an uneasy era

Organizers estimate that more than 5 million people turned out this past Saturday to more than 2,100 rallies nationwide as part of the No Kings protests. Crowdsourcers and independent observers concur, suggesting the demonstration was the largest single-day show of opposition to the Donald Trump regime so far and possibly one of the largest single mass mobilizations in American history.

Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., support proved to be thin for the U.S. Army's 250th Birthday Celebration — Trump’s birthday military parade. Attendance was sparse, with observers estimating that only “tens of thousands” turned out for the event, far short of the expected 200,000 guests. (Donald Trump spokesman Steven Cheung, however, claimed optimistically that 250,000 people attended.) For an aspiring strongman notorious for his keen sensitivity to crowd size, it surely matters.

As Paul Krugman wrote, it also matters because the theater of size is an essential part of how power works now:

[C]rowd sizes matter a lot because competitive authoritarianism rests largely on self-fulfilling expectations… the victory or defeat of competitive authoritarianism will depend to a large extent on which side ordinary people believe will win. If Trump looks unstoppable, resistance will wither away and democracy will be lost. On the other hand, if he appears weak and stymied, resistance will grow and — just maybe — American democracy will survive.

But what does the small turnout in D.C. mean if the real military parade is what’s been happening in Los Angeles?

The deployment of National Guard troops and Marines is also a kind of theater — a show of force, not just against the protestors who turned out to protect their communities from ICE, but in defiance of the political power of the people of California and their elected representatives. As California Governor Gavin Newsom wrote:

“We didn’t have a problem until Trump got involved. “This is a serious breach of state sovereignty — inflaming tensions while pulling resources from where they’re actually needed.”

The federal response isn’t about Los Angeles’s police force being incapable of handling even large-scale peaceful protests on its own. It is about creating the impression that the protests were something sinister — a foreign invasion, or an operation by paid agitators — and to imply that the governments of Los Angeles and California were illegitimate, even that they were in open insurrection against the federal government. That is to say, it’s political theater aimed at creating the impression of an ongoing emergency that demands a different kind of government. This is what’s behind Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s threat (the one that Sen. Alex Padilla challenged before he was ejected from her press conference) to “liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership.”

And that threat — to replace democratically elected representation with a very different kind of regime — is what’s really important, as Ruth Ben-Ghiat wrote this weekend in The New York Times:

Mr. Trump appears eager to create optics that support his claim that public dissent constitutes an existential threat to the nation. He also apparently seeks to get the American public used to seeing our armed forces in a new light. In the president’s version of America, the military should be seen less as an apolitical body loyal to the Constitution. Rather, it should be viewed as an institution that serves at the behest of a leader and his ideological and political agendas, regardless of how much these depart from democratic understandings of the military’s role.

In a way, this is the dark side of social proof — these large-scale displays are aimed at creating among Americans the sense that this new authoritarian order is the new normal, that these false solutions to invented crises, from the ICE raids that triggered the protests in the first place, to the federal troop deployments themselves, are what’s required to meet the moment — and that’s just the way things work now.

Look at the weekend, then, as a referendum. The disappointing turnout at Trump’s birthday parade may be a signal that, even among the president’s supporters, nobody voted for this, at least not enthusiastically enough to turn out in symbolic support for a festival of military might.

The No Kings rallies, on the other hand, amounted to an enthusiastic vote of no confidence in the MAGA agenda — a rejection of Trump’s notion of normalized military might. The next step, as historian Tim Snyder wrote today, is to build from there, not just practically in terms of coming up with political solutions, but to make it clear that the majority of Americans reject Trump’s attempt to remake what’s normal.

The "no kings" protests come first, and then we do further work for freedom afterwards. We protest to show ourselves that we can. We protest to show others that we do not think that all of this is normal. And we also protest as the beginning of other actions. Whether that be with Indivisible, or Interfaith Alliance, or labor unions, who helped organize; or just with any small initiative where we know something and are together with other people and find ourselves doing something rewarding we weren't doing before.

Visit the links below to check out some of our recent coverage of the protests in Los Angeles:

In L.A., an attempt to “end politics”

A senator's warning before his arrest

WATCH: Los Angeles is America

Lights. Camera. Occupation

WATCH: Bursting the police state’s trial balloons

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Today, Tuesday, June 17, at noon Eastern, we’ll talk with Texas Congressman Greg Casar; then immediately following at 12:30 p.m., we’ll have a piano-side conversation with musician, activist, and author Adam Met. Then on Wednesday, June 18, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, Omar El Akkad, author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, will join our Book Club meeting.

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Photo by Etienne Laurent/AFP via Getty Images