Why the No Kings movement needs to keep its head.
On 18 October, two percent of America’s voting-age population took to the streets to tell President Donald J. Trump to, respectfully, fuck off.
Their message was simple.
No Kings.
Not now. Not ever.
That’s important. But it’s not enough.
Resistance on that scale sends a message to America’s leadership, and to its allies around the world. It also strengthens the will of Americans who oppose what’s going on because they see power in numbers and realise they’re not alone.
Because behind the scenes, the system that supports American democracy is being devoured from within.
As Trump plays useful idiot and distracts attention by posting AI-generated clips of himself literally dumping shit on his fellow Americans, his handlers are hard at work in the background, transforming America into a zombie democracy.
The destruction of the East Wing of the White House – the People’s House – is a ghastly metaphor for what’s being done to American democracy right now.
Whatever’s left will walk like a democracy. It will talk like a democracy. But it will be a shell of its former self.
Zombie democracies are ‘guided’ democracies.
It’s like a zombie wasp.
Bear with me. It’s a good analogy. I promise.
First, the zombie wasp stings its victim—a large insect like a caterpillar. Once it’s paralysed, the wasp delivers a neurotoxin to the victim’s brain which quashes its fight-or-flight response.
With its ability to exert free will gone, the wasp leads the insect to its burrow, where it lays an egg that hatches into a grub which consumes the host’s internal organs while it’s still alive.
To the casual observer, the caterpillar is just an ordinary—admittedly sluggish—caterpillar. But all the things that make it a caterpillar are gone, other than its skin.
This is what the Trump administration is doing to America.
The zombie wasp has laid its egg right behind the Resolute Desk.
It’s tempting to think that Trump has been sent as a test for American democracy. If that’s the case, after the past nine months, I mark it a big, bloated, fat-cankled ‘F.’
Trump pushes norms and defies all the standards expected of people voted into high office. That’s his signature move.
He’s the bull sent into the china shop by the voters who landed him in office.
But those voters are starting to realise that bulls aren’t selective on their path to destruction.
Trump’s tariffs are sending farmers and small businesses to the wall. Industries are collapsing as migrant workers are driven into hiding by ICE crackdowns. Ordinary Americans are struggling to pay skyrocketing prices at the cash register. The list goes on and on.
These people voted for Trump because they believed he would make their lives better. But if even he can’t fix things, the reasoning goes, what hope is there for the system?
If there’s one thing that unites the people who did vote for Trump, and the people who didn’t, it’s their shared belief that American democracy is not serving them well.
Because in a zombie democracy, it looks like business as usual. If things are falling apart, what else is there to blame, except the status quo? The temptation is to think that what’s broken is democracy itself.
That’s Donald Trump’s greatest– and most destructive – legacy.
He’s shattering American ideals about the strength of the union and the foundations underpinning it. He’s exposing the nation’s soft underbelly to the predators massing in the shadows.
Democracies aren’t broken. They rot from within.
It’s like a cavity. A tiny brown spot on enamel can hide a half-rotten tooth. When democracy loses its teeth, the best it can do is try to gum its opponents into submission.
When you look behind the façade, you find the instruments of government have eroded away. Think Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Victor Orbán’s Hungary.
Elections in zombie democracies are just for show. It’s whacking on spray-tan to face the world. It’s Tony Soprano going to confession right before popping a cap into Big Pussy.
Media becomes propaganda as voices who refuse to toe the line are shut out and silenced, replaced by sycophants who shout the party line from the rooftops, and self-interested commentators who have reasons of their own to promote the ruling party’s agenda.
Personal liberties are chipped away as the regime divides and conquers the population by setting up a corrosive “us vs. them” mentality, demonising minorities and violently oppressing the “other.”
But it doesn’t stop there.
State institutions from the military to the judiciary are stacked with toadies whose only question when told to jump is “how high?”
Any meaningful resistance is dismantled as opponents are tossed into jail on trumped-up charges, and electoral boundaries are manipulated to deliver the results the would-be dictator wants.
Electoral results are challenged and overturned.
The rule of law for all becomes the rule of law for the few.
Powerful and wealthy men and women who hold the reins of power in the commercial world read the tea leaves. They know their business models rely on currying favour.
Friends and cronies are rewarded, and perceived enemies persecuted.
Corruption is no longer frowned upon. It becomes a way of life.
Most of all, there is no limit to the authoritarian leader’s power.
And when the people just trying to get by see what’s going on around them, they throw in the towel.
‘If you can’t beat them, join them,’ is the reasoning.
Thomas Paine, the English revolutionary who was one of the loudest voices of the American Revolution described the allure of autocratic rule in the form of monarchy like this:
[I]t is one of those evils, which when once established is not easily removed; many submit from fear, others from superstition, and the more powerful part shares with the king the plunder of the rest. Common Sense, 1776.
Zombie democracies rise through a potent mix of fear, superstition, and self-interested parties supping at the table with the would-be king and enjoying his spoils.
Would-be kings know no limits
The levelling of the East Wing of the White House—the People’s House—is the nail in the coffin for many Trump critics.
It’s a fitting visual metaphor for Trump’s attitude to anything that doesn’t fit his worldview. He flattens it, because he doesn’t care.
There’s no debate. No mediation. It’s Trump’s way, or the highway.
That’s not democracy. That’s autocracy.
And here’s the problem. Unfortunately for those of us who like the idea of representative government, democracy is exhausting. It’s a delicate flower that must be nurtured to bear fruit.
Sometimes, it’s easier to check out.
I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the Middle East and have spoken to plenty of people who lived under Saddam Hussein’s rule.
It always surprises me how many express their wish that things had been left as they were. It’s like Mussolini: at least he made the trains run on time, right?
Democracy isn’t easy. It’s also an endangered species. Because the world is developing a taste for jackboots.
According to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s annual Democracy Index, in 2024 less than 7% of the world’s people lived in a ‘full democracy.’
Another 38% live in a ‘flawed democracy.’ Yes, that’s where America now sits according to the survey.
More than half the people on the planet survive in authoritarian regimes, or countries so close they may as well be.
Democracy is the oddity.
Under authoritarian rule, there’s no speaking your mind, identifying as a Jedi in the census, or voting for the More Beer Party (yes, for a brief golden moment, that was an actual political party in Australia).
People living under authoritarian rule have no say in the laws that govern their lives.
Authoritarian leaders aren’t elected. They seize power. It could be a military junta like Myanmar, or a religious theocracy like Iran. There are socialist autocracies like North Korea, and hereditary dictatorships like Azerbaijan, where the only credentials you need to lead the nation is that you had the right father.
But throughout history, this model – the rule of one, rather than the rule of all – has been the norm.
Why are we so ready to hand over the reins of power?
Well, we’re not, necessarily. But strongmen have a way about them. If there’s one thing they’re exceptionally good at, other than graft and corruption, it’s marketing.
Rule number one, the logic sandwich. It’s all about sending messages that satisfy both sides of the brain: the rational, and the emotional.
If you want to sell someone something, you identify a problem, trigger negative emotions, and offer them a solution. It’s the roadmap for almost every ad you ever see.
This is how you lay the foundation of your very own dictatorship, if you’re so inclined:
Problem? Genuine financial, social, and emotional suffering.
Negative emotions? Fear, powerlessness, and sense of victimhood.
Solution? Identify and neutralise the threat.
The threat in this equation is always external.
The “Other” is blamed for everything.
Groups who would never support the leader are identified and demonised; migrants, LGBTQIA+, latté-sipping liberals. They’re called vermin. Scum. Garbage. Terrorists.
Can’t afford a home? That’ll be all the illegals.
Can’t get a job? Blame the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion hiring policy.
Cat ran away? Haven’t you heard? They’re eating the cats… they’re eating the dogs.
The would-be dictator wants his subjects angry because anger is self-perpetuating. It nurtures a sense of victimhood, which – you guessed it – makes them angrier, and even more emotionally dependent on their leader because he is, he assures them, the only one who can fix the problem.
Anger also directs attention outward and makes people incapable of rational thought. Black-and-white thinking doesn’t allow the critical reasoning required to solve the real problems people are facing.
Anger against a vague “other” is easy by comparison.
That “other” is the enemy; a threat the strongman promises to eliminate while reigniting an idealised – and largely fictitious – past when everything was rainbows and unicorn poop.
All he asks in return is blind loyalty, complete obedience, and slavish conformity.
Democracy can be difficult to understand.
There’s evidence that citizen-led assemblies were a thing in Mesopotamia – modern Syria and Iraq – four-and-a-half thousand years ago.
But the birthplace of a version of democracy we’d recognise today was around two-and-a-half thousand years ago in Athens.
‘Democracy’ comes from the Ancient Greek words for “people” (δῆμος), and “power” (κράτος). That’s right. The original “people power.”
All male Athenian citizens who had completed military training met forty times a year on a hill in the centre of the city. Decisions were made by a show of hands, or inscriptions scratched into stones or broken pottery sherds.
The first Athenian democracy is also the place that gave us the word ‘ostracise.’ If a voter wanted to boot someone out of the city, they scrawled his name onto an ostraca, or pottery shard.
It was how they got rid of potential tyrants, including the Athenian statesman, Megakles, who lost favour for his splashy and ostentatious lifestyle. Hmm.
The Ancient Roman No Kings movement
Meanwhile, across the Adriatic, the Ancient Romans hadn’t cottoned onto democracy yet. But they were launching a No Kings movement of their own.
They had good reason.
The last pre-republican king of Rome was a man called Tarquinius Supurbus – Tarquin the Proud.
Tarquinius began his rule by slaughtering a group of senators who clashed with him. He held the throne for twenty-five years. But after his son raped a noblewoman, Rome was done, and the family was driven out of the city in 509BCE.
With the king gone, the founder of the republic, Lucius Junius Brutus, declared: ‘I will suffer neither him nor anyone else to be king in Rome!’
His spirit lived on in his better-known descendant, Marcus Junius Brutus, of et tu, Brute? fame.
Brutus was one of twenty-three senators who stabbed Julius Caesar to death in 44 BCE after the leader declared himself Dictator Perpetuo, ‘dictator for life.’
Still, it didn’t stop Rome’s rush to authoritarianism. Twenty-seven years after Caesar’s murder, Augustus became the first Roman emperor.
The rise of human rights
Actions of better-connected groups with more direct avenues to power like the Brutus family often lay the foundations for the advancement of broader civil rights.
The Magna Carta was signed by King John of England in 1215 after his barons spat the dummy because he wasn’t consulting them on matters that concerned them. They wanted the king to be subject to the law, rather than above it.
But the kicker for ordinary people was the section of the Magna Carta that established the right to fair trials.
No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land. To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice.
It’s a principle that underpins one of the pillars of the Western legal system. It laid the foundations of the rule of law known as habeas corpus, which held that no one should be deprived of liberty without lawful judgement or due process.
It is also the law that the Trump administration is attempting to pick apart.
Heads will roll
Not long after the common men and women won themselves the right to a fair trial, great thinkers in 14th-century Italy began to look at some of the things that had been going on in Ancient Greece and Rome.
It kicked off the Renaissance – or ‘rebirth’ – of Classical thinking. With that came the idea that human beings were made in God’s image. The philosophy elevated human potential and agency and emphasised the individual.
From that blossomed the Enlightenment, and with it the rise of radical political concepts.
Pioneering feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft declared that society was missing out by making women ‘convenient domestic slaves.’ She wanted women to be trained as doctors, farmers, and shopkeepers, to free women from the ‘bitter bread of dependence.’
‘I do not wish them to have power over men, but over themselves,’ she said.
Wollstonecraft’s daughter was Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. Relevance to this story? None whatsoever. But it’s got to be a good trivia night answer, right?
All this free thinking and sense of self was heading in the one direction.
The thing many autocratic rulers frequently forget is that the rule of one over many only works as long as the many remain happy with the status quo.
In England, heads were about to roll.
Charles I and his very bad day
Everyone’s always banging on about the French Revolution and the king and queen who lost a head in height. Most people forget that the English beat them to it.
They took No Kings to a whole other level.
King Charles I believed in a thing called the Divine Right of Kings. It meant that God himself had appointed him leader. And if that was the case, why on earth would he bother with advice from commoners?
But Charles wasn’t reading the room. While the rest of England was getting Enlightened, he was stuck in the dark ages.
Parliament issued Charles with a mighty slap known as the Grand Remonstrance. It listed 204 grievances with the way he was running the show.
Charles was not happy. He declared war on his own parliament in 1642.
Spoiler alert… he lost.
On a chilly winter’s morning in January 1649 as he waited to face the executioner, Charles requested an extra shirt. It was all about the optics. He didn’t want to shiver in the cold and have the waiting crowds think he was afraid.
The backdrop picked for Charles’ last public appearance was significant. It was the sumptuous Banqueting House in Whitehall, chosen as a symbol of Charles’ extravagance and vanity.
After the axe fell, bystanders snipped off locks of the king’s hair and dipped their handkerchiefs in his blood as a keepsake. Yes, really. What can I say? It was before Call of Duty. They had to get their kicks somehow.
But it was quite a moment. When his subjects decided to shorten Charles’ reign at the pointy end of an axe, they were flipping the bird to regal and religious authority, and the idea that one man had a God-given right to tell them what to do.
England became a republic. It ran for eleven years, and was governed by Oliver Cromwell and his son Richard.
Although the monarchy was restored in 1660, the king butted heads with Parliament. In 1689, King William and Queen Mary of Orange – Orange by Dutch name, not spray tan – took the throne and agreed to a declaration that guaranteed the English Parliament’s independence.
Before long, everyone wanted to get in on the act.
A revolting age
Not one to let the English show them up, across the Channel the French would make an artform of aristocratic bloodletting during their Revolution (1779-89).
Around 15,000 French men and women including King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette did the long walk to the now infamous device named for the man who first proposed it as a more humane way to knock people off: Joseph-Ignace Guillotin.
The French had been inspired to act by the revolution they saw unfolding in America.
The American uprising against the British monarchy followed the same Enlightenment thinking that, ironically, kicked off the English Civil War that saw the end of Charles I.
American men and women fought for the equality, and the right to personal freedom, free speech, and the right to own property.
When King George III was defeated in the war that ran from 1775-83, America laid its connection to the monarchy to rest.
As Thomas Paine described the monarchy in 1776: “the most prosperous invention the Devil ever set on foot for the promotion of idolatry.”
The only king that’s been welcome since has been the Burger variety.
But is that still the case?
No Kings
When as many as seven million Americans marched on 18 October, 2025, their feelings were clear.
Every placard and t-shirt made a declaration.
No Kings.
But as the man who would be king bucks against the law, ignores tradition, and overrides any obstacles that stand in his way, he is a law unto himself.
The best way to control a group of people is to distract them, confuse them, and divide them. A totalitarian leader rises and holds power by destroying truth and rewriting history.
The deluge of lies, misinformation, and nonsense make it next-to-impossible to form an opinion. We don’t know what, or who, to trust any longer. With AI and deep fakes, now we can’t even believe our eyes anymore.
The sense of impotence is crippling. It makes good people give up, because how can we form an opinion if we no longer have the information we need to form one?
Even the fire of righteous indignation cannot burn forever. We are exhausted into acquiescence.
Activism dies. What remains is passivism. Inactivism.
When that happens, we are putty in the strongman’s unnaturally tiny hands.
If America is being led into the wasp’s den to be transformed into a zombie democracy, that will be why.
Because America is being convinced it’s not worth fighting for.
This is when democracy dies with a whimper.
It’s not just America’s fight. It’s a fight for democracy.
Thomas Paine had something to say about that as well:
The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind. Many circumstances have, and will arise, which are not local, but universal, and through which the principles of all lovers of mankind are affected…. The laying a country desolate with fire and sword, declaring war against the natural rights of all mankind, and extirpating the defenders thereof from the face of the earth, is the concern of every man to whom nature hath given the power of feeling.
