Just when you think we have lost the plot, we get a glimmer of hope that we have not.
The estimated 9 million people who took to the streets in more than 3,000 locations across the U.S. on Saturday in the largest public protest in American history sent a message of hope.
Beyond their chants, banners, placards, and speeches calling for “No Kings,” an end to the abuses of ICE, and a halt to the illegal war in Iran, the demonstrators conveyed a deeper message: we are increasingly coming to understand the meaning of historian Timothy Snyder’s observation that democracy is not a noun but a verb.
The reality is that America has never really been a democracy, not for everyone within our borders. Rather, at our best, we have aspired to have a government by, for, and of the people. But it was always an iffy proposition, as Benjamin Franklin pointed out: “a republic, if you can keep it.”
It wasn’t just the malevolence and naked hunger for unchecked power of Donald Trump, his billionaire sponsors, or his acolytes that sent this country spiraling toward dictatorship, to the point where we now have a corrupt, racist, misogynist, mentally defective would-be king living in our White House.
No, the complacency of the American people played a big role in opening the door to the crisis we now find ourselves in. We were self-satisfied. We were the richest nation on Earth. We were entitled to our “exceptionalism.” For eight decades, we have applauded ourselves and boasted of our status as leaders of “the free world.”
We were the home of the free and the land of the brave, as if that freedom were only dependent on our standing up to threats from abroad, threats to our ennobling, elevating, God-given Americanness.
But the greatest threat, as the country’s leaders warned from the beginning, came from within.
You can only imagine that, upon seeing the thousands of protesters surrounding the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall on Saturday, Lincoln himself might have thought America had finally understood the message of his 1838 Lyceum Speech: “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
Note that Lincoln did not warn of the threat posed by a single person or political movement. Rather, he spoke of the collective responsibility we share for maintaining the freedoms we seek to claim.
On Saturday, in almost every city and town in this country, Americans stood up and said: We will fight for what we value. We will not let it be stolen by the career criminal in the White House or the gang of thugs hiding behind him, seeking to carve up the country among their friends and to deny its benefits to anyone whose looks or origins or beliefs they do not like.
Will those same Americans be there in November, when what is truly the most important election in our nation’s history is held? Will they be there in two years to ensure that the next occupant of the White House will work to restore the rule of law and our fundamental rights?
Saturday was an encouraging sign, but the history of apathy and laziness of American voters is too long-standing and deeply ingrained to be written off as a thing of the past. After all, it is what led to our failure to convict Trump for past crimes, then re-elect America’s worst, only twice-impeached president to the country’s highest public office in 2024.
Polls suggest American sentiment is saying we’ve had enough. Whether motivated by Trump’s mismanagement of the economy or our foreign policy, by his greed or his racism, by his failure to uphold his promises or his serial violation of laws and treaties, there is an ever-growing sense that U.S. voters have finally gotten the message. Perhaps they will step up to restore our shattered democracy before it is too late.
But we are not there yet, and we should not make the mistake of thinking one or two election victories will undo the damage done for the past half-century or the forces that were the architects of that damage.
We must truly accept that participation in our system of government is not a part-time job or one that, like joining your town’s volunteer fire department, only calls for action when flames appear on the horizon. We must all recommit to being activists, and not just when organizers call. The only way the “No Kings” movement works, as it turns out, is if every day is No Kings Day… for all of us.
Furthermore, we need to recognize that what brought us to this point was not just Trump or MAGA. It was powerful forces in our country—the rich and big corporations and key institutions—seeking to seize ever more disproportionate power and to rig the system so that they could claim even more wealth and power.
We have been a nation caught in a vortex of vulture capitalist greed and white Christian nationalist designs that sent us swirling ever downward toward the place of inequality and injustice we find ourselves today.
As if that weren’t enough, the same forces have led us to make deeply damaging national choices that have threatened not just our form of government but the very leadership role, prosperity, and global power that fed our fat and happy national complacency.
Because not only is democracy a verb not a noun, but so too is national greatness. So, too—if it matters to us as it should—is national goodness.
For decades, we have been inattentive to these factors as well. The current misbegotten, ill-conceived, illegal war in Iran is a reminder that in this century, we have squandered more than $8 trillion on foreign wars while damaging our national interests, including both our standing and our alliances. In the same period, we have spent nearly $20 trillion on defense budgets pumped up by military-industrial complex-fueled threat inflation and out-of-control mil-spec thievery.
China did not do that. They didn’t distract themselves with those foreign wars. They, our so-called great rival, spent about a fifth of what we did on defense. Instead, they chose to invest vastly more than we did on infrastructure. They raised standards in education while ours fell because of the idiocy of our “culture wars.” Due to our misspending, they were able to close the gap on R&D spending fast and now we are turning away scientists and other brilliant minds from our universities, cutting our investments in science and technology while they forge ahead. And China is not alone in taking advantage of our grotesque, profound strategic missteps.
We have been coasting along like a fat, lazy, rich failson riding high on the bounties he inherited from his parents. And now the fat, lazy, rich, failson who is our president is presiding over a moment when either we will wake up, remember our aspirations, and put in all the work to make a brighter future possible for our children and grandchildren or, in the years to come, the demonstrations in our streets will be a symptom of the unrest of a dying great power.
Saturday, March 28, provided a respite from disturbing and disheartening headlines. It offered at least a momentary hope that we can not only save our government, but also engineer the changes in our attitudes and approaches that will wrest power away from those who have weakened and compromised America. In the speeches we heard across the U.S. on this one day, there was a sense that maybe, just maybe, we might be on the verge of a long overdue sea change in this country.
If we can turn such hopes into hard work and embrace the right kind of leaders—a new generation of leaders—for a change, and if we are wise and lucky and resolute in equal parts, perhaps the years immediately ahead will see us introduce the kind of strength-from-within, future-oriented policies that start, like our salvaged government, to serve the many, as intended, rather than a coterie of oligarchs who represent the greatest enemy this country has ever faced.
The greatest enemy, that is, other than our own complacency.
