Stuck in a Neutral Gear of Watered Down and Whitewashed Prefigurative Politics: How 'No Kings' Takes the 'Move' Out of Movements

By Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright – Oct 22, 2025

You cannot defeat a king with a parade. The failure of “No Kings” is the refusal to build real power beyond a single day of protest.

“If participants are motivated by hope of psychic completion—by community and a strong sense of belonging—and such motivation is insufficiently grounded in instrumental political goals, their energies will likely go into deepening group identity over bolstering the group’s external political achievements.” – Jonathan Matthew Smucker

In his landmark speech delivered to the first Tricontinental Conference of the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America held in Havana in January, 1966, Amilcar Cabral appealed to attendees, “We are not going to use this platform to rail against imperialism. An African saying very common in our country says: “When your house is burning, it’s no use beating the tom-toms.” He continued, “On a Tricontinental level, this means that we are not going to eliminate imperialism by shouting insults against it.” Last weekend a series of events across the United States branded as “No Kings” developed by the 50501 group (vis a vis Indivisible) garnered an estimated seven million attendees. While it’s clear that the events provided many who participated with opportunities to enjoy an acute catharsis as evidenced by pithy signage and costumes and makeshift instruments to accompany marches on streets with the permission of the State through the purchase of permits, many are questioning the overarching futility of one day of “action” that provided no concrete demands save that President Trump stop hurting people and communities with his draconian policies and provocative, incendiary rhetoric aimed at his political opponents and those in the country he deems are “un American.” In sum, a growing chorus of people are wondering if we are merely beating our tom-toms or building collective power at scale to beat back interlinked injustices pronounced by rising militarism, rising emissions, and rising white “supremacy.”

A quick review of the No Kings website reveals a failure to elucidate an overarching goal or coordinated and organized campaign to get to an endpoint of collective liberation and justice. For instance, the site’s homepage makes references to the first No Kings event in June 2025 and proclaims, “The world saw the power of the people, and President Trump’s attempt at a coronation collapsed under the strength of a movement rising against his abuses of power.” This is an interesting assessment as since last summer’s No King events, the Trump administration has only tightened its grip on power and implemented even more provisions of so-called Project 2025, which the president now openly embraces after previously claiming he had no knowledge of it. We have witnessed more militarized occupations of cities from Memphis, TN to Chicago, IL, and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals just ruled that Trump can unleash the National Guard onto the streets of Portland, Oregon. Further, the president continues to attack vessels off the coasts of Venezuela, without approval from or explanation to the U.S. Congress, while also urinating on the Impoundment Act of 1974, which was enacted to prevent presidents from the deferral or recission of congressionally appropriated funds without notifying the Congress. Trump’s Department of Energy terminated grants totalling $7.5 billion that would have supported over 200 clean energy projects this month alone. This is not the collapse of a coronation, more a consolidation of authoritarianism and Trump’s exercise of the unitary executive theory, which stipulates that the president holds sole authority over the executive branch of government – basically, unchecked power to do whatever the president pleases with all federal officers and agencies. And this is due largely to the fact that, right now, there is no collective organized and sustained opposition to Trump’s machinations, which the No Kings actions are largely proving.

So the question becomes, what is the point of No Kings and what is the end game? Proponents of the No Kings actions commonly claim that these actions can and do serve as an entry point for those who have had enough and are ready to take action. This is a very nice sentiment, and everyone does need to get started somewhere. But as a colleague recently impressed upon me, the way we enter the work of social justice also reveals the level of one’s privilege. She also pointed out that this privilege, via entry point, largely determines whether the work becomes a lifestyle that fosters an impulsive culture of social justice, in the vein of Asatta Shakur’s directive of our duty to fight for our freedom, that is sustained for the long term, or if it fosters a culture of ephemeral social justice manifested through a series of disconnected and intermittent activities that are characterized as “organizing” despite lacking a clear program to seize, build, and maintain independent social and political power for poor, working class, and oppressed peoples. Clément Petitjean articulates how one’s level of privilege informs and influences their approaches to, and methods used in, social justice work in their book, Occupation Organizer, writing, “Like any of us, community organizers are not free-floating rational individuals; they are shaped by the multilayered social conditions in which they live; like any of us, their social attributes and positions within relations of power (in terms of race, class, gender, sexuality, age, and citizenship, for instance) affect the work they do and how they conceive of that work.”

As authors Liz Theoharis and Noam Sandweiss-Back discuss in their latest book, You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take, “…many of this country’s most significant, positive social changes have emerged from the bottom of society, with ripple effects that have ultimately yielded broad social benefits.” They go on to say, “This kind of progress is never linear or promised – it is demanded by those who for their very survival, are first compelled to take transformative action.” This is key as if you compare the entry point into social justice work of freedom fighters subjected to the human rights denying iniquity of Jim/Jane Crow to those who first enter the work from a place of higher privilege via events and actions like No Kings, it becomes more clear why material conditions have not changed, but, rather, diminished since the first set of No Kings actions last June. Whereas there was little to no option for those who participated in confronting the execrable conditions of Jim/Jane Crow to take part in the work intermittently during the 1960s Civil Rights epoch- people were confronting power and white “supremacy” because the lives of themselves, their family, and their communities depended on it and, as such, civil and freedom rights became a sustained lifestyle of consistent struggle with clear goals and political strategies (i.e. the Civil and Voting Rights Acts) – the vast majority of people who enter “struggle” via entities like No Kings, as well as those who view it as a legitimate confrontation of power, have the privilege and social location to take part in social justice work when it’s convenient, and check out of social justice work when it becomes inconvenient.

There certainly was more social location privilege on display last weekend than there were social justice principles. As journalist Arun Gupta pointed out in a recent social media post, “[No Kings] It’s an astroturf campaign to rehabilitate the image of the pro-genocide, pro-Wall Street Dems while giving libs a performative outlet to feel like they are fighting fascism while they parade about in costumes waving signs about “Save our democracy” before heading to brunch.” It’s ironic that Gupta names the theme of brunch, as Kamala Harris’s husband posed with a fellow No Kings attendee in Santa Monica, CA – a city with a median household price of $1.6 million – holding a sign that not only vindicates his assertion of No Kings acting as not much more than a staging ground for a parade of privileged liberals, it literally captures it verbatim. The lack of principles were also on display at No Kings actions as revered activist group Codepink posted an altercation with an attendee on social media who was demanding they put down their Palestinian Flag, at one point even suggesting that the person holding it was, “at the wrong rally.” And genocide was not the only issue No Kings organizers obfuscated in their official promotional materials – there was also no discussion of or focus on U.S. imperialism in Africa and South America, barely any mention of the racialized climate crisis, and no clear discussion on the war on poor and working class people being waged by a capitalist dictatorship that commands the actions of both “major” political parties that make up the U.S. duopoly.

Rather than focusing on the root causes that engendered the moment we find ourselves in, No Kings seems more focused on enchanting people through a series of endless actions that raise dopamine levels through short lived sugar highs rather than raise hell against forces that maintain oppression. This represents a watered down and whitewashed exercise of prefigurative politics. In describing the advent of prefigurative politics, the Commons Library suggests, “We understand Prefigurative Politics to be a beautiful tool for activism and we see those who use prefiguration, as an activist strategy, as activists who recognize that the means are the ends. For instance, if you want peace (i.e. the ends) you cannot get there by using war (i.e. the means). Peace begets peace. Love begets love.” This characterization of prefigurative politics has nothing to do with No Kings, who while officially staying silent on the zionist ethnostate’s ongoing genocide and ecocide against Palestine proudly affirms its solidarity with Ukraine and the imperialist, colonial war machine of NATO. And No Kings does not articulate the larger war against poor people being waged by the United States both domestically and internationally.

Yet it’s this idea of “means are the ends” that irrefutably exposes No Kings as nothing more than a liberal, Democrat Party construct that alabastardizes and reduces radical concepts of actual leftists like Antonio Gramsci as well as the radical elements of prefigurative politics into mere supplements that can be sparingly dropped into a neoliberal pot and stirred around to make its taste more attractive and amenable to leftists while contemporaneously watering down the spiciness of radicalism to appease and reassure liberal reactionaries. This has profound consequences for movements in that this watered down version of prefigurative politics hoodwinks activists into thinking they are making progress when they are actually walking in circles and going nowhere near where we need to be to dispatch of the capitalist dictatorship that catalyzes the equations of social injustices that remain unsolved and unchallenged. It also conjures a naive idea that we live in a perfect world where means are always achievable by wholly consistent ends that writer Jeffry C. Issac suggests is a feckless idea that does not take into account the current state of material conditions noting, “Such a world of absolute justice lies beyond politics.”

Jonathan Matthew Smucker in his book, Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals, describes the pitfalls of utilizing prefigurative politics, especially a watered down version of it, as the sole mechanism for power building writing, “The prefigurative politics model likewise starts with the layer of vision (also atop a material base), but it skips over—and glosses over—the layer of political strategy.” He adds, “Instead it plans actions to directly manifest the essence of its vision. As such, its actions are not tactics—insofar as tactics are steps to move forward a strategy—but are rather direct expressions or prefigurations of the actor’s vision. Means and ends are one and the same in this model.” And in his book, Building a Movement to End the New Jim Crow, Daniel Hunter compounds Smucker’s assertion by naming the need to learn the art of effective campaigning rather than getting stuck in stasis of endless actions, “However, unless we can direct our energy from reactive to proactive, we will be stuck on the defensive. Instead of adapting to the timeline of the courts, the board of pardon and paroles, or the police department’s internal investigations, we need to create our own timeline that allows us to keep building pressure and power.”

Taken from a figure contained in Building A Movement to End the New Jim Crow

I would argue that Smucker’s framing of the prefigurative model may not fully apply to No Kings in that there is a political strategy – just not an effective one and one that is not going to liberate the masses from the moment we find ourselves in, nor improve material conditions, especially for poor and working class people, in ways that prevent moments like this in the future. The “political strategy” of No Kings is clear, as Gupta named in his recent social media post, “Marching protesters into the graveyard of the Democratic Party aligns with how No Kings operates. It is led by Indivisible, which is run by former Democratic Party congressional staffers.” It’s befuddling that liberals and liberal institutions like Indivisible still latch onto the idea that simply putting the Democrats back in power is an efficacious political strategy – when it’s irrefutable that for poor and working class people it’s an ineffective, pernicious and potentially deadly political strategy.

As “progressive” as the main organizers of No Kings claim to be, it’s curious that they are actually exercising a conservative process that props up the idea of an impervious hegemony of the duopoly as it pertains to political strategy. And for all the talk of no monarch and no oligarchy, by insidiously shepherding people back into bondage of the DNC plantation the organizers of No Kings are also exercising willful and massive mendacity by omitting the fact that the Democrats themselves are ruled by an intraparty pseudo monarchy and pronounced oligarchy of billionaire donors and corporate interests who influence the decisions and direction of the Democrat Party like a band of alabaster puppet masters. How else can you explain why Democrat party leaders including Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries still refuse to formally endorse the Democrat Party nominee for the New York City Mayoral election, Zohran Mamdani. The treatment of Mamdani is a continuation of what the Democrats did to Buffalo, New York advocate India Walton who won the Democrat Party’s nomination during the 2021 Mayoral election only to lose in the general to the party establishment’s preferred candidate. And the U.S. Senate candidate for Maine, Graham Platner, is being subjected to a campaign of character assassination when a series of untempered social media messages “mysteriously” and conveniently surfaced mere days after the Democrat Party monarchy’s preferred candidate, Janet Mills, entered the race – something that even Democrat Congressman, Ro Khana of California names the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee as the culprits. By insidiously directing people back into the clutches of the Democrat party, No Kings and its watered down and inert version of prefigurative politics is proving that the only thing worse than a bad political strategy is a political strategy that is rooted in abject hypocrisy and pronounced contradictions.

The End of an Empire: Systemic Decay and the Economic Foundation of American Fascism

But No Kings’ neutral gear of prefigurative politics without a defined strategy that drives the masses in the direction of building and sustaining independent social political power is starting to wear thin. Even liberal news outlets like Current Affairs, like a growing number of individuals are starting to take notice. For instance, in a recent Current Affairs piece, No Kings Protests are Just Not Enough, authors John Ross and Nathan J. Robinson write, “While No Kings protests successfully make Republicans look foolish, and provide a valuable demonstration of the scale of opposition to Trump, they are unmoored from a political program, and exemplify the worrying Democratic tendency to build an entire platform around opposing Trump.”

Additionally, they castigate No Kings for having, “…no greater vision or demand underlying the protests beyond getting rid of the “man who would be king.” Even though Ross and Robinson’s article is weakened by its inconsistencies like the idea that, “…it’s still necessary for the left to participate in acts of performative resistance,” their assertion that, “Performative resistance alone won’t change anything. Unless it is coupled with sustained organizing, events like No Kings will remain an empty spectacle that is quickly forgotten” is solid and instructive in that if there is a silver lining of No Kings it’s that a susceptibility of its attendees to be won over and more influenced by the true left has been exposed.

This exposed susceptibility also requires a principled true Left that develops and communicates an accessible political analysis and strategy rooted in not just winning elections, but also a politics of liberation that confront the root causes of the myriad and interlinked systems of oppression – capitalism, white “supremacy,” patriarchy, and colonization – that must be toppled and deracinated more than any president or political party. This requires disciplined and principled struggle from the true left, a keen and inexorable understanding of what Black Alliance for Peace means by its guiding ethos, “No Compromise, No Retreat.” It means comprehending how to distinguish between true united fronts and those, “pseudo-united fronts we see in Western ‘social democracies,’ which are fetishized as peaceful,” as articulated by the editors of the book, Historical Documents of the Popular Front, as these pseudo fronts, “on their face, are formed to block the right from gaining power, but really, they prevent the left from gaining legislative power.”

No Kings for all of its failures could represent the best chance for the true Left to fill a void of principled politics and collective power building made more capacious due to the failure of the Democrat party and its liberal institutions to provide a clear alternative to Trump and the Republicans, nor a true political opposition force. This is a paradox the hard left must not only navigate, but also take full advantage of if we’re going to put the “move” back in movements and shift the gear from neutral in order to succeed in establishing and maintaining a proletariat dictatorship, by and for poor and working class people, while usurping the monarchy of the capitalist dictatorship that’s protected by its bourgeois sentinels who form and operate the duopoly.

Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright is an international climate and environmental liberation advocate, a racial justice practitioner, and a writer and policy expert residing in the United States with his family and their mischievous cat, “Evil” Ernie. He is a proud and active member of the Black Alliance for Peace and the Movement for Black Lives. His radio program, “Full Spectrum with Anthony Rogers-Wright,” airs on the Mighty WPFW network every Tuesday at 6:00 PM EST.

(Black Agenda Report)