Yes Kings

George III: A Rebuke to Trump

Nobody’s been able to mount a viable alternative to the notably well-organized No Kings rallies, which, possibly because of an absence of specific demands, are drawing increasingly impressive numbers of people out to protest Trump and Trumpism. It’s a bit shocking to me that an overwhelmingly unpopular and manifestly illegal war of choice against Iran, managed more incompetently than any previous U.S. war (high bar!), with almost unbelievably dangerous ramifications for the safety and stability of the globe hasn’t triggered everything from permitted marches to nonviolent civil disobedience to direct action against government installations, with an explicit demand for ending the hostilities yesterday. But spontaneity at the scale I’m imagining is rare—and what am I doing about it, anyway? Nothing. Truly mass protest takes truly mass organizing. The No Kings organizers have that.

One of the things that makes the slogan so effective is its combination of specificity and meaninglessness. “End the war on Iran” would cause trouble in a way “No Kings” doesn’t. If you want to pitch a tent big enough to hold all of the people who oppose the current administration, you can’t exclude the Schumer-Jeffries Democrats, who don’t, really, oppose war on Iran but instead complain, somewhat, and sort of, about Congress’s being left out of the decision to make war. That type, reflexively anti-Trump, sees Iran, correctly enough, as an avowed threat to the existence of Israel, and so they remind us, also correctly, that Iran is an oppressive theocracy.

Another oppressive theocracy is the U.S. major non-NATO ally Saudi Arabia. So is our less major ally Oman.

And those allies have kings. They’re not fake monarchies, like Denmark, but absolute monarchies—and before the Islamic revolution, so was Iran. As everybody already knows, in the 1950’s the U.S. collaborated with Britain to bring down Iran’s constitutionally elected prime minister and reinstate the absolutism of the Pahlevi family. Some of the Iranian citizens who recently, with great bravery, came out to protest against the theocracy want the Pahlevi shahdom back. So do some of their supporters here.

Or: We’ve been pretty OK with kings.