I didn’t march this weekend. Family duty came first, so I only drove past a small satellite protest, stopped quick to chat up some protestors, and kept it moving. But even from the margins, I felt something I haven’t felt in a while: the sense that ordinary people are remembering how to be citizens. For the last year I’ve had a gnawing feeling that Americans didn’t have the appetite to fight for democracy, that we’d rather rationalize power than restrain it. “No Kings” is the right slogan for that feeling: a polite, pointed reminder that we don’t bend the knee.
The first No Kings back in June gave me a pulse: hopeful, but fragile. The second one hit different. Same message, more backbone–a lot more. Less spectacle, more resolve. You could see it in the way people showed up everywhere and didn’t need a headliner to tell them what to do. It read less like a protest and more like a rally–a gathering of spirit.
I’ve been helped in naming this by The Bulwark crew, who’ve framed it not as left vs. right, but citizens vs. subjects. Their read tracked what I felt driving by: this wasn’t outrage cosplay. It was calm, patriotic, neighborly. Families with flags, marshals with de-escalation, a lot of honking. “There was nothing hateful about it,” someone said on the show, and that mattered.
Authoritarianism is, in part, a spell and these crowds broke it by refusing to play the villain in someone else’s story. MAGA provocateurs got a very powerful response: nothing. They were ignored. That discipline meant that this was not merely about just showing up. It was about movement, about soldiering.
What moved me most is how joy and seriousness coexisted. Joy says we remember who we are; seriousness says we know what’s at stake. The Bulwark folks called it out: June was people shouting “No!”; October was people saying “We still here…and we are moving.”
So, no, I didn’t lace up and chant this time. I waved, prayed a little, and kept my commitment to family. But I also exhaled. The first No Kings let me hope. The second let me believe that hope might scale. If democracy survives, moments like these will sit on the timeline—not because they fixed everything, but because they proved the instinct to resist still lives in us. And the slow work of God continues.