What’s Next for the No Kings Movement? Strategic Non-Cooperation

The “No Kings” movement is shifting gears to counter what they’re calling the “authoritarian breakthrough” of Donald Trump’s second presidency.

On Wednesday evening, the No Kings movement hosted a video conference call for more than 130,000 pro-democracy activists. The call seeks to build off the success of mass anti-Trump street protests — which also continued Thursday evening with more than 1,600 nationwide “Good Trouble Lives On” demonstrations, inspired by Civil Rights icon John Lewis.

The 90-minute video conference was organized to train activists in principles of “strategic non-cooperation,” which aims to gum up the works of the increasingly dark and dictatorial Trump administration. The call was organized by the progressive grassroots organization Indivisible, and featured a trainer from Choose Democracy, Daniel Hunter, whose bio touts past work with pro-democracy activists living under authoritarian regimes, such as in Myanmar. 

The tone of the conference was significantly more somber than similar recent webinars organized by Indivisible. It painted United States’ democracy as confronting an existential crisis — and pegged the odds of overcoming Trump’s ambition at not much better than a “coin-flip.”

“We’re in a moment of authoritarian breakthrough,” said Hunter, who defined that term as a “window in which a would-be authoritarian is attempting to rapidly consolidate power” in an effort to “eliminate checks” that prevent them from operating with impunity.

Hunter ticked through six characteristics of authoritarian breakthrough, all of which are currently in play. This dictatorial to-do list includes “directing investigations against critics”; “giving license to lawbreaking”; “regulatory retaliation”; “deploying [the] military domestically”; “federal law enforcement overreach”; and holding tight to power, i.e. “the autocrat won’t leave.” 

Trump is hewing to this well-worn playbook, Hunter said, by pardoning violent Jan. 6 felons, sending masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to round up law-abiding immigrants, deploying the National Guard and Marines into Los Angeles, making “capricious threats” to deport U.S. citizens like Rosie O’Donnell, and openly plotting an unconstitutional third term.

The pro-democracy trainer offered the encouragement that “Trump didn’t write this playbook. This is a global phenomena … the growth of autocracies.” He added that the experiences of allies across the globe offer strategies that have succeeded in turning back Trumpian figures in their own countries.

But the odds of success are sobering. The training included a study of 35 countries that experienced “democratic backsliding” in the last 30 years, and their track records for overcoming the authoritarian assault. Without a movement of mass “civil resistance,” less than eight percent of countries were successful at righting the democratic ship of state. Active civil resistance — such as the movement that No Kings is building in the U.S. — has historically increased the odds to 52 percent. “I don’t love those numbers,” said Hunter, but he added that the payoff for victory can be profound. Successful resistance movements typically forge societies that are “more democratic” on the other side — offering “an advancement” rather than a return to the status quo ante.

“Our task right now is to build and activate a powerful opposition” based on “mass defiance in a lot of places,” Hunter said, with the goal of “interrupting the regime” by “getting into the gears through nonviolent tactics.” He insisted that organizers and activists need to commit themselves to resistance now: “We’re in a bit of a race against time,” he said, adding more hopefully: “We have window.”

A fellow pro-democracy organizer, Maria Stephan of the Horizons Project, assured the assembled crowd that there’s a rich history of successful resistance movements to take inspiration from. These include not only foreign examples, like Chile overcoming the brutal regime of the fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet, but also the all-American struggle that ended legal segregation. Stephan pointed to America’s “own civil rights activists who dismantled racial authoritarianism in the Jim Crow South using legal and legislative strategies, but also boycotts, strikes, sit-ins, freedom rides, and other campaigns of non-violent resistance.”

The “Achilles heel” of authoritarians, Stephan said, is their dependence on popular passivity — on normal people, who feel isolated, fearful, and disempowered, who choose to go along rather than taking risks and rocking the boat.

The challenge for pro-democracy activists is to forge connection, solidarity, and build truly popular resistance that can offer safety in numbers and embolden other Americans to fight the democratic backslide — seeking to regain momentum for a government that serves the people’s interests, not those of Trump and his cronies. 

For Stephan that means activating broad-based resistance across the different “pillars” of society — from labor and faith communities; to business interests and educational institutions; to the nation’s civil service workers and members of the military.

Trump’s efforts to cow big-business CEOs, oust university leaders, mass-fire civil servants, and deploy the military against the people of Los Angeles, demonstrate how each of the pillars is vulnerable to being co-opted into the administration’s authoritarian project. But Stephan underscored the power of popular resistance to “shift the incentives” and create a popular counterweight to presidential pressure. “We need to get the institutional enablers of authoritarianism to withdraw their support from the authoritarian system and to get behind a democracy based on the will of the people.” 

For everyday people, Stephan highlighted three main avenues for resistance: First are strategies of “protest and persuasion” (think: street demonstrations or T-shirt ready slogans like “Melt ICE”) that communicate popular resistance. Second, is building up positive local infrastructure, whether that means supporting immigrant-friendly local businesses or providing mutual aid to neighbors in need. The third is the broad category of  “non-cooperation.” This can come from outside of institutions, as with boycotts, or from inside, as when civil servants or even soldiers refuse to carry out illegal or immoral orders. 

As a small-scale proof of concept, Stephan pointed to the successful pressure campaign by Annapolis alumni and retired military commanders that beat back Trump’s efforts to strip the Naval Academy’s library of books by black authors like Maya Angelou (while leaving, e.g. Hitler’s treatise Mein Kampf on the shelves). 

The way that Harvard University’s powerful alumni network has spurred the university administration to fight Trump’s assault on academic freedom, rather than capitulate like Columbia, is another example. Stephan also pointed to ongoing consumer boycotts of Tesla (over Elon Musk’s traumatizing tenure in the Trump administration) and Target (for its rollback of diversity initiatives) as “acts of non-cooperation that are making a difference in this country” as they cost those companies billions.

The webinar was not just a conceptual orientation, but a call to action. Leaders asked participants to commit to taking the evening’s online organizing and make it physical by hosting a gathering with like-minded activists in their own communities. The organizers hoped to get 1,000 house-party pledges. The evening’s tally soared past 5,000.

The meeting closed with an energizing message from a longtime activist Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, who encouraged new participants not to get flummoxed by the lingo or overwhelmed by the opposition. “It’s not complex, my friends,” she said. “Don’t let these evil people make you feel like it’s rocket science to get to democracy — when it’s actually just fingerpainting,”  

“It’s actually our culture,” she added. “And the majority of the people in this country agree with us.”