Contra Trump
打著紅旗反紅旗
On every side the chorus now went up that the old liberal civilization was at an end because man was vile. “There is a Hitler in each of us.” This unpolitical excuse for the Nazis seemed to gratify ex-radicals by confirming their disappointment with human nature. There was a positive acceptance of some “universal” guilt whose real purpose was to make the Holocaust ordinary, even to sweep it under the rug. In the Village, Franz Kafka was being turned into the only accurate theologian of our time. In Rockefeller Center it was announced that “the Enlightenment has come to an end.”’ How helpful to some careers it became to say so.
— Alfred Kazin New York Jew, 1978
In this chapter of Contra Trump, we focus on the No Kings protest of 18 October 2025. We start with an observation made by Chris Hedges at the time of the first No Kings protest, held on 14 June 2025 and follow that with an essay by Evelyn Quartz, a former Capitol Hill staffer who served as press secretary for The Lincoln Project, who argues that ‘the protests’ singular focus on Trump as a king runs afoul of the revolutionary spirit of the founders. The founders rejected not just one “bad” king, but a system of governance by kings that no longer served the people.’
But, first a comment on what he optimistically describes as the ‘extinction burst’ of 18 October protests by Ohh that’s RICH — former MTV News journalist and co-host of the Find Out podcast:
It’s not just that 7 million Americans came together to peel Donald Trump’s damp little fingers off the throat of our country. It’s so much more than that.
To understand exactly how remarkable this is, consider that 7 million liberals and leftists—the alleged monsters of society—joined hands as Trump is in the process of tearing apart our economy, our society, our government, our military, and our status as the leaders of the free world; a time of extreme socioeconomic trauma at the hands of rampant fraud and abuse.
A time that warrants genuine outrage.
And consider that there were exactly zero arrests in New York and Washington D.C. as these radical American-hating leftist lunatics came together, and no real conflicts with law enforcement anywhere else across over 2,600 individual protests. Even as some red state governors spent millions of our tax dollars to send troops to protect society from … inflatable frogs and walking bananas.
What fools.
Compare these 7 million to the 50,000 MAGAs who took part in Trump’s “stop the steal” rally on January 6, which resulted in over 1,500 federal felony convictions on a day protesting no crime or injustice—just the ordinary procession of politics—but still a day too much for the fragile MAGA cult to handle.
And we’re the deranged lunatics? That’s rich.
Donald Trump and the White House responded to the protest by posting an AI-generated video of Trump wearing a crown and releasing excrement on protesters from on high. We conclude with a short video of the Protest Frogs of Portland.
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The Chinese rubric of this chapter — 打著紅旗反紅旗, or ‘to wave the red flag while [actually] opposing the red flag’, a famous expression coined by Mao Zedong — echoes the tenor of Evelyn Quartz’s observations about the misdirect of a protest of ‘all against one’.
— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
20 October 2025
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“No Kings” Betrays 1776
Liberal democracy requires a 21st-century reckoning.
Evelyn Quartz
19 October 2025
The American experiment was made possible by the radical ideals of the Enlightenment. No longer subjects to be ruled by aristocracy and monarchy, human beings were recognized as possessing natural rights. The founders fought and died for a reimagined system of government — one to replace an order that no longer commanded legitimacy.
Yesterday’s “No Kings” protests were full of references to the founding fathers, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution.
Yet the protests’ singular focus on Trump as a king runs afoul of the revolutionary spirit of the founders. The founders rejected not just one “bad” king, but a system of governance by kings that no longer served the people.
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Today, the failure of democracy’s elite stewards to reckon with their own role in creating the crisis that Trump exploited is pushing liberal democracy toward illegitimacy. These same elites have found refuge in the No Kings Day protests, where moral symbolism replaces honest introspection. This allows them to perform reverence for the founders rather than confront the conditions that would have alarmed them most.
Several of the founders warned that the people turn to a demagogue once elites stop serving the public good. Alexander Hamilton wrote in 1792:
“The truth unquestionably is, that the only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion.”
Trump is the demagogue that arose not from some far-off place, but from the tangible policy failures of American governance. A healthy liberal democracy — one that delivers material prosperity and security to its people — does not elect Trump. In this framing, protesting Trump is a way of protecting the system that produced him.
The elite liberal class behind these protests — the mainstream media, the donor class, the PACs, the parties, the advocacy groups — share an interest in defining the crisis as anything other than their own failure. Worse, many of them do not see it as their failure at all. They see themselves as righteous defenders of democracy, needed now more than ever to “save” the system from Trump. Because they believe they are saving democracy, they are structurally incapable of reckoning with the decaying form of democracy that produced the crisis.
Here’s the central problem: because the elite class has convinced itself that its own self-preservation is a moral duty, it cannot be trusted to engage in the introspection this moment requires. What it will not confront is that this is not a crisis of Trump, but a crisis of liberal democracy — and it is not unique to the United States.
To understand this better, we should look to France. Centrist president Emmanuel Macron’s unpopularity has destabilized parliament to the point of paralysis. He now faces calls to resign from both the far right and the far left, and it is widely expected that one of those forces will replace him in the next election. Here it is not a demagogic strongman who has failed to command legitimacy, but the neoliberal centrist.
Now imagine Marine Le Pen comes to power and the French flood the streets with “No Kings (or Queens)” banners. It would look absurd. Le Pen would not be a monarch; she would be the predictable consequence of elite failure — just as Trump is here. In both countries the cause is not reducible to one leader but to decades of neoliberal austerity politics. That, not Trump, is what the No Kings protests should be confronting: forty years of governance that has pushed liberal democracy to the breaking point where figures like Trump and Le Pen are even possible.
And this is where the purpose of No Kings comes into view: it does not stop Trump; it keeps liberalism from examining itself.
So what would a protest movement faithful to the founders look like? To start, it would correctly diagnose the crisis — not as a crisis of Trump, but as a crisis of institutional legitimacy within liberal democracy. Next, it would treat institutions not as sacred objects but as reformable and accountable when they fail the people. And perhaps most crucially, it would displace the parasitic elite class that created the crisis yet now presents itself as its moral steward.
Who replaces this governing class is the crucial question. Let me offer a broad answer. The void ought to be filled by a movement rooted in social democracy — one committed to relegitimizing politics through material gains, not symbolic identity. The old class politics of the New Left have been co-opted in recent decades by a donor-aligned, NGO-filtered version of woke identity campaigns and PACs, many of which participated in the No Kings protests.
What is needed instead is a movement that organizes from the conditions people actually live in — one rooted in pluralism and respect for diversity, but also in difference. Legitimacy will be rebuilt through a bold restructuring of the social contract, where health care, good wages, time off, parental support, and retirement are guaranteed by the state.
Millions turned out yesterday. Their instincts are right — imagine if that energy were attached to a movement as serious as the one the founders began. Not focused on one bad king, but the ills of a system that produced him.
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Source:
- Evelyn Quartz, “No Kings” Betrays 1776, 19 October 2025
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Readers Respond
I think most people that participated in the demonstration I attended understood that this wasn’t just against Trump. I saw signs critical of billionaires generally. I saw signs about Christ being a liberator of oppressed people. I saw signs advocating working class solidarity. There were calls for a general strike. There was advocacy for electing public service commissioners who will keep utility prices from skyrocketing. There was more going on than just anti-Trump sentiment.
— Wesley Chambers
Author’s reply:
Absolutely! And these concerns are quite revealing. People recognize something is deeply wrong with our oligarchic society, an issue that began long before Trump. My critique is by framing all these legitimate grievances under the No Kings banner it is gets absorbed into anti-Trump instead of the system that produced him. Many of the oligarchs and allies are comfortable at No Kings because they believe they can return to power off the outrage. I’m talking neoliberal establishment.
— Evelyn Quartz
I agree that you don’t give us enough credit for understanding the complexity of the issue. There was a theme to our protest and naturally Trump was the focus of that theme. The movement is about reclaiming democracy, and that was plain to see from everyone’s signs!
— Joanie Daniels
Reply:
Hi Joanie, I’m not questioning anyone’s intelligence or intentions here 🙂 If anything, I’m defending the people who protested by arguing they deserve better. The founders didn’t waste rebellion on symbolism, they confronted the root cause of the rot, which in this case is the policy failures that enabled Trump. I think today’s protesters are animated by the same instinct — they’re just being pointed at the wrong target by an elite class who wants to retain power instead of meaningfully addressing the ills of our society.
— Evelyn Quartz
I feel like a lot of people in the comments are either misreading the piece or being far too sensitive to critique. The reality is that grassroots opposition to Trump was easily co-opted by liberal elites during his first term. As a result, the so-called “resistance” was less about protecting democracy than about protecting the leaders who presided over the neoliberal order that created the conditions for authoritarianism in the first place. If “resistance 2.0” is going to be successful, it has to open itself up to the kind of critique Evelyn is making and be suspicious of a protest that, yet again, is attracting the enthusiastic support of the elites who authored this crisis. America isn’t being oppressed by a “king”—it’s being oppressed by a new nightmare form of neoliberal capitalism that’s trying to crush what remains of democracy.
— Michael
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