The No Kings March and the Abusers
They are accelerationists, just walk away from them
When you have an abusive partner, there is nothing you can do to make him happy. There is no meal you can cook. There is no proper way to make the bed. There is no proper way to clean the floor. His goal is not clean floors or a well-cooked meal. His goal is to exhaust you, to break you down, to keep you forever performing a perfection that never arrives. You cannot appease your way out of abuse. You must leave.
This is the logic of disaster patriarchy, a political orientation that does not want reform, does not want stability, does not want democracy to function. It wants crisis. It wants exhaustion. It wants the institutions of collective life to fail so that a strongman (who they imagine themselves to be) can rise from the rubble and claim to be the only one who can save you. And if you find yourself arguing with its adherents about if your protests are “enough,” you have already lost. Their complaint is not that you are doing too little. It is that you are doing just enough, enough to maybe, possibly, defend the conditions under which ordinary people might build something better. And that, for them, is the unforgivable sin.
On March 28, 2026, millions of people committed that sin. They gathered in over 3,000 “No Kings” demonstrations across all fifty states—not just in the coastal cities that the media expect to protest, but in rural towns, suburbs, and right-leaning districts. From Minneapolis–St. Paul, in small-town Florida, people were on the streets! It was the largest single-day protest in U.S. history, building on earlier No Kings mobilizations in June and October 2025.
The grievances were real. Opponents of authoritarian governance and concentrated executive overreach went out on the streets, but so did people facing militarized immigration enforcement, ICE raids in their neighborhoods, and the daily stress of rising costs for housing, food, and healthcare amid war, tariffs, and austerity. The crowds in urban and suburban New Jersey were more culturally diverse than in the previous marches.
These were not abstract concerns. They were the lived contradictions of a political-economic system that redirects state resources toward policing and militarization while social reproduction, the basic work of sustaining daily life, is left to rot.
What I’m going to do right now, in many ways, is a waste of time for the person who claims the issue is, “You’re not doing enough?” But I’m going to continue.
A material dialectical analysis starts with actual conditions, not ideas. And I clearly defined those conditions in the aforementioned graph. The march arose from a crisis of reproduction, the system’s struggle to sustain labor power while intensifying extraction and coercion. But the slogans mattered too. “No Kings” isn’t just catchy. “No Kings” summarizes in real-life concerns. In dialectical terms, authoritarian figures act as personifications of class. The rejection of “kings” continues to be a rejection of the State prostrating itself to capital, of law suspended for greedily accumulation, of coercion usurping consent, and legitimacy eroding. It turned abstract domination into lived experience. This is real. ICE agents in the neighborhood, soldiers on the street, price hikes at the grocery store. And that translation was materially productive, it turned diffuse economic pain into collective political antagonism.
Not that I agree with the idea that pain has to preface a collective conscious change, but in this case, it did.
The scale of March 28 marked a qualitative shift. Participation grew from roughly 5 million in June 2025 to an estimated 8 million by March 2026, spreading across thousands of locations.
When dissent becomes socially normalized, the “exceptional protester” becomes the everyday neighbor. Dissent looks many ways, AND THIS is how mass consciousness shifts, not through elite persuasion but through shared material grievance made visible in collective action.
I know you think this was the elite. Well, next time you are in Manhattan begging for money, I hope you choke on your hypocrisy.
The actions across small-town, urban, suburban, and exurban America became a form of education. The marches were rehearsals, a preview of mass coordination. They were sites of cross-movement learning among labor, immigrant defense, anti-war, and civil liberties organizers. These marches showed that the State can be challenged and numbers do matter. And finally, solidarity reduces isolation. To paraphrase Marx, “People change circumstances and themselves through action.”
From a material-dialectical perspective, all of these things make the March 28 mobilizations positive. We are moving forward in thought and action. “No Kings” arise from real contradictions, mobilize broad cross-class participation, scale geographically and socially, and transform what appear to be individualized grievances into collective antagonism. They build capacity, not just expression, which is critical.
Do they resolve the contradictions of late capitalism or authoritarian governance? No, but progress rarely arrives in finished form (and Marx might be wrong). It moves unevenly, contested, cumulatively.
But this is precisely what the disaster patriarchy cannot abide. For them, democracy is a failed vehicle for liberation, a project that only shores up capitalism. Crisis is not a threat to be managed but an opportunity to be accelerated. They do not want the institutions of democratic life to be defended, let alone remade. They want them to collapse so that they, the strongmen, the saviors, the self-appointed fathers, can rise to the top and claim they alone can create a Brave New World.
This is why the conversation with them is circular. Their issue is not that we are not doing enough. Their issue is that we are doing just enough. We are doing enough to possibly succeed, enough to defend a democratic project they have already abandoned. When the destination justifies any means—lying, intimidation, violence, the exhaustion of everyone around them, the debate is no longer strategic. It is a trap.
Through the law and political economy lens, the March 28 protests were a democratic rupture in the legal organization of political economy, we all stood up to snatch the rule of law back for the good of the people. An LPE lens refuses both nostalgia for institutions and the abandonment of them, because those are OUR institutions. LPE insists that institutions be remade openly, democratically, and with attention to material outcomes. That is a left project—one that requires building, not breaking; solidarity, not acceleration.
Disaster patriarchy wants to break things, and it wants to break you. That is why, for them, the march will always fail and YOU will always fail. The rest of us have different work to do. We have to stop arguing with the abusive as/s/hole about whether we have cleaned the floor correctly. He does not give a fu/c/k about the floor. He wants us exhausted, alone, and convinced that no one else will come for us. But on March 28, millions of people showed up for each other. That is NOT nothing. What is important, though, to remember, this is not enough, not yet, but it is the foundation on which something more becomes possible. Another World IS Possible.
The task now is to keep building it, together, and to stop waiting for permission from those who only ever wanted us to fail.