OPINION:
Throngs of protesters in our quiet downtowns make one point clear: Slogans sell, even when they say nothing. Take “No Kings,” the moniker of a movement animated less by principle than by opposition to imagined threats.
While it casts President Trump as its central villain, it targets anyone dissenting from liberal orthodoxy. The voice is stirring, yet the message is thin, curiously ignoring substantial executive overreach under liberal administrations.
“No Kings!” the crowd chants, yet the United States hasn’t had one in centuries. The slogan gestures toward a tyranny it never defines and sounds less like a claim than a generalized grievance. This reflects a Manichean tendency to collapse complex political questions into melodramatic binaries.
In a worldview elevating performance over substance, one side is permanently on the “right side of history” while opponents are cast as malevolent.
The result is a moral absolutism, where purity of intention replaces careful reasoning. Conviction, however fierce, is not an argument.
Remarkably, the “No Kings” movement lacks self-awareness. While denouncing imagined authoritarianism, it elevates the authority of the crowd. This arbitrary lord uses raw numbers as a proxy for legitimacy. Yet majority sentiment is no more inherently just than the power of a monarch. Legitimate power always demands justification.
In a society grounded in free speech, empty chants are blunt instruments designed to bully rather than persuade. As historian Jacob Burckhardt warned, these are the tools of “terrible simplifiers” who reduce reality to misleading fragments. Ironically, in rejecting the idea of a king, the movement invites a different absolutism seeking to wield the very unconstrained power it condemns.
Our Founders didn’t dislike just kings; they opposed arbitrary power in all contexts. Today, the real question is not whether we have kings but rather how power is constrained.
The temptation to dismiss these protests with a sneer must be resisted. A healthy political order requires active engagement with ideas, even bad ones.
When slogans become king, politics drifts toward a smug idleness that portends genuine tyranny. As we approach our 250th anniversary, our nation deserves better.
GLEN AUSTIN SPROVIERO
President, Educational Reviewer Inc.
Fair Haven, New Jersey
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