Why Protests Don't Work

Unless you do this one thing

The first #NoKings protest posted record numbers of participants, drawing from every corner of the country. The second one has gone on to surpass that record turnout even more so, and indications are it has done exactly that.

This is all well and good, but here’s the problem: The civil rights movement and every other successful mass movement in the United States operated nothing like this. Rather than a single day or so of protest with a designated time and date, it was an unrelenting, often spontaneous campaign of civil disobedience and direct action. A series of direct actions accompanied by specific demands—desegregation and full voting rights for black americans.

When everyone else went home, the Freedom Riders stayed on the buses. They were beaten, jailed, and burned out of buses, but they persisted. They had a plan. They had a list of demands. They knew exactly what they wanted and exactly what they would not accept. And that clarity made them dangerous—not to order or tradition, but to the people who relied on both to maintain their power.

The No Kings protests, by contrast, have no apparent specific demands other than a generalized sense of anger and discontent with Trump. They are what amounts to a performance of activism, a catharsis disguised as a campaign. Everyone is angry, but no one is certain at what, or toward what end. The crowd chants “No Kings,” but the slogan, like incense, evaporates into the air as soon as it’s uttered.

The One Thing

Freedom riders, in Montgomery Alabama, 1957

What’s missing is the “or else.” Every effective movement must have one. “Give us what we ask for—or else.” Without the threat of continued, coordinated, disruptive action, a protest is merely a parade. It reassures the participants of their virtue while leaving the powerful entirely unbothered. They will wait out the weekend, issue a statement about respecting democracy, and resume business Monday morning as if nothing happened.

This isn’t to mock the impulse behind the protests—it’s to diagnose it. The people who fill the streets are not lazy, nor are they apathetic. They are, rather, the victims of a political culture that has confused expression for action. We’ve inherited a strange faith that visibility itself—tweets, streams, marches—constitutes resistance. We believe that to be seen is to have done something. But the civil rights activists understood something subtler and harder: that the point is not to be seen but to make oneself impossible to ignore.

What it Takes to Be Successful

Every successful mass movement in the United States—abolition, suffrage, labor, civil rights, marriage equality—has shared three indispensable traits: clarity, endurance, and leverage. They knew precisely what they wanted, they refused to stop until they got it, and they understood how to make noncompliance more costly than change.

Take the abolitionists. They were not content with mere moral posturing or the genteel disapproval of slavery from afar. They built networks: presses, churches, safe houses, and political parties. Their movement fused moral conviction with practical machinery, culminating in the Republican Party itself—an organized vehicle capable of translating outrage into law.

The labor movement followed the same logic. Its strength was not in rallies or slogans but in its capacity to disrupt. Strikes, sit-ins, and collective bargaining made production itself contingent on justice. Employers and legislators could ignore speeches, but not halted factories. The threat of persistent, organized refusal—of withholding labor—made their demands unavoidable.

Then came the civil rights movement, maybe the most disciplined of them all. It succeeded not because it appealed to conscience but because it forced a confrontation. Boycotts hit local economies; marches clogged streets; jails overflowed with those who refused to obey unjust laws. Each act of defiance was paired with a concrete demand: desegregate this lunch counter, register these voters, end this law.

Even the more recent movements—like the fight for marriage equality—followed the same rhythm. Years of legal challenges, community organizing, and personal storytelling converged into a single, unmistakable demand: full legal recognition. When the Supreme Court finally ruled, it did so under the weight of sustained, strategic insistence.

In every case, success was not the product of sheer numbers or moral fervor alone. It was the result of precision. These movements understood that power yields only to pressure, and pressure requires direction. A movement that merely expresses dissatisfaction may capture the headlines—but a movement that organizes it can change history.

How to Matter

If the No Kings movement wishes to matter, it must trade spectacle for strategy. It must decide what it actually wants and what it will actually do if it doesn’t get it. Until then, the protests will remain an elaborate act of political theater—moving, even inspiring, but ultimately ornamental.

The cameras will roll, the hashtags will trend, and the crowds will disperse. And those in power will smile, relieved. Because the most convenient revolution is the one that ends on time.