Stacking the Tides
Although I was disappointed not to be able to attend, on Saturday, millions of people across the United States and around the world took to the streets as part of the second round of “No Kings” protests. For those who are unaware or don’t remember, the first round of protests was launched in June as counterprogramming to the grotesque military parade President Trump demanded to celebrate his birthday. Since then, “No Kings” has grown into a “movement rising against [Trump’s] authoritarian power grabs.” Despite MAGA Republicans’ preemptive attempts to portray the event as a “hate America” gathering, the legion of videos of the protests show that in fact they were a moving, sometimes whimsical, often mocking but peaceful expression of the simple but essential organizing principle underlying our Constitution: “America has no kings, and the power belongs to the people.”
Seeing so many people put aside their other, innumerable differences and take the time and—in this climate of increasing political violence—put aside their fears to protest the Trump Administration’s slide into demagoguery and tyranny gave me a bit of hope. And yet, as I’ve written before, I sometimes wonder what all this protesting means, whether it accomplishes anything at all. Certainly, the White House likes to pretend it doesn’t, initially offering just a two-word response to Saturday’s events: “Who cares?” And in one of those it-seems-too-crazy-to-be-true-but-actually-is moments, Trump himself posted an AI-generated video showing him wearing a crown while flying a plane and dropping literal shit on protesters’ heads.
When doubts creep in, I try to remind myself and my fellow skeptics that things add up, that protests can have a cumulative effect and eventually influence public policy in a positive way. After all, we’ve seen it before even in my lifetime, during the civil rights movement and Vietnam War.
Last weekend, a powerful nor’easter brought high winds and heavy rain to the Jersey shore and other coastal areas along the East Coast. During the storm, I saw a local forecaster on Facebook use a weather-related term I’d never heard before: “stacking tides.” The term refers to the potential flooding impact of a slow-moving storm that lingers for multiple tide cycles. Under normal conditions, high tides fill bays along the coast two times a day, and the water heads back out to sea during low tides. During a storm, however, strong east or northeast winds not only push excess water into bays during high tides, they slow the water down as it drains out during low tides. That means excess water is still in the bays when the next high tide hits, so each new high tide starts at a higher level than before and the risk of flooding increases—what is called a “tidal stacking effect.”
Despite their fake bravado, Trump and his minions must know that—like recurrent, unrelenting storm tides—repeated, widespread protests have a similar stacking effect, growing the flood of Americans who oppose their policies. Experts estimate about 5 million people participated in the first “No Kings” rallies in June. Organizers have reported 7 million participated in the protests on Saturday. According to USA Today, if that 7 million figure is confirmed over the next few weeks, the October 18th “No Kings” action would place among the largest protests in the United States in the last 60 years.
Protests alone won’t be enough to save us from the anti-democratic forces at work in our country. In her gripping book Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, Pulitzer-prize winning historian and journalist Anne Applebaum makes clear that 21st century autocracies operate differently than those in the past and are supported by “sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, surveillance technologies, and professional propogandists,” as well as corrupt companies and law enforcement agencies. To fight those forces, we need serious policy changes, not just opposition movements. But a rising tide of unflinching resistance can’t hurt—and may well force Republicans to repudiate the worst of Trump’s autocratic impulses until that inevitable day when he finally leaves office and America’s recovery from the “Trump-era” can finally begin.