Eight to nine million Americans took to the streets yesterday. That figure, if accurate, represents the single largest day of protest in the history of the republic — a number that ought to inspire something more than a modest, collegial pride in the capacity of a citizenry to inconvenience municipal traffic. And yet, when one examines what was actually said, what was actually demanded, and what the organisers have advertised as the desired outcome, a terrible deflation sets in. The crowd was enormous. The imagination animating it was not.
There is a distinction — one that the liberal mind has spent the better part of a century carefully avoiding — between the politics of expression and the politics of leverage. To march, to carry a sign, to chant in unison, is to engage in the former. It is to signal one's preferences, to perform one's values, to exist, for an afternoon, as a moral actor in a public space. It is not without worth. It is not, however, power. Power is not the expression of a preference; it is the capacity to impose a cost upon those who ignore it. And the cost that eight million Americans imposed on Saturday upon the systems that govern their working lives, their wages, their healthcare, their housing — was precisely nothing.
History is not generous to those who mistake visibility for leverage. Consider what actually broke the back of American apartheid — not the marches alone, magnificent as they were, but examples such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955, which lasted three hundred and eighty-one days and drained the municipal transit system of the revenue it depended upon. The citizens of Montgomery, Alabama did not merely express their contempt for segregation; they withdrew their economic participation from the machinery that enforced it. They hit the system where systems are built to feel: in the accounting ledger. The result was a Supreme Court ruling that the segregation of public buses was unconstitutional. This was not sentiment. This was organised economic coercion of the most disciplined and principled kind.
Or consider the Flint, Michigan sit-down strike of 1936 and 1937, when workers of the United Auto Workers occupied the General Motors plants at Fisher Body and refused to vacate. They did not petition. They did not rally in a public square and disperse at dusk. They seized the productive apparatus of the then largest corporation in the world and held it for forty-four days until General Motors recognised their union and their right to collective bargaining. The lesson was not lost on American capital, which is precisely why it has spent the ninety years since methodically dismantling the legal and institutional framework that made such actions possible.
The South African anti-apartheid movement succeeded not when it generated sympathetic international coverage, though it did, but when the combination of internal labor strikes and external sanctions made the maintenance of apartheid economically irrational for the white business class. In each of these cases, the mechanism of change was identical: the withdrawal or threatened withdrawal of productive participation. Not the expression of grievance, but the imposition of its costs upon those with the power to remedy it.
The question must then be put, with all appropriate directness, to the leadership of the organised American liberal center: why does it consistently channel these energies away from that mechanism and toward the electoral ballot box? The answer is not flattering, and the evidence for it is voluminous. The Democratic Party since Obama's election has had multiple opportunities — unified control of the federal government, enormous popular mandates, genuine public appetite for structural change — and in each instance it has deployed the language of transformation to deliver the reality of management. The Obama administration inherited the worst financial crisis since 1929, the product of a deregulated banking sector whose executives had enriched themselves catastrophically at public expense. Not one senior financial executive went to prison. The banks were recapitalised. The executives kept their bonuses. The foreclosure crisis was managed with instruments carefully calibrated to protect creditor interests. And the Democratic Party called this a rescue.
The party's record on war is, if anything, more damning. It was Obama that expanded the drone assassination programme into a bureaucratised machinery of extrajudicial killing across seven countries, that prosecuted more whistleblowers under the Espionage Act than all previous administrations combined, that continued the military presence in Afghanistan for another decade before a chaotic and humiliating exit, that armed the Saudi coalition in Yemen and presided in silence over one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes of the century. It was under Biden that the genocide in Gaza was not simply ignored, but prosecuted, funded, and armed.
The progressive base of the party organised, marched, donated, and delivered electoral victories — and received in return a programme that any honest foreign policy analyst would recognise as the managerial continuation of American imperial prerogative under a more articulate and palatable executive.
The corporate Democratic Party currently functions to absorb the energy of popular discontent, to translate it into electoral mobilisation, and to return it to the existing order shorn of its structural ambitions. It is the most sophisticated mechanism of co-optation in the democratic world, and it has been performing this function with remarkable consistency for five decades. The unions that appear at rallies like No Kings are not there as power-wielding institutions making demands upon the system; they are there as props, lending their iconography to a movement whose explicit horizon is a midterm election in which the same party, with the same donors and the same structural commitments, seeks to return to office.
None of this is an argument for despair, and anyone reaching for that conclusion has misread both the historical record and the present moment. Eight million people in the streets is not nothing. It is a vast reservoir of organised human will, and reservoirs can be redirected. The Minnesota general strike earlier this year — workers withdrawing their labor in explicit response to a specific act of state violence — demonstrated that the infrastructure for production-side politics exists, that it can be activated, and that it produces a qualitatively different kind of political pressure than any march. The task is not to condemn those eight million people but to argue, with all available force and clarity, for a different theory of change. And the point is to perpetuate such actions beyond a mere performative twenty-four hours.
That theory begins with the workplace. Not the polling station, not the consumer boycott, not the performative gestures against creeping authoritarianism — though these have their limited uses — but the site of production, where the worker's indispensability is a structural fact rather than a sentimental aspiration. A sustained general strike with clear demands imposes immediate and quantifiable costs upon the powerful in ways that eight million cleverly-worded signs do not. The rebuilding of genuine trade union power, particularly in the service sector, logistics, healthcare, and the supply chains upon which the entire economy depends, is the long-term project that a serious Left must pursue with the same discipline and patience that the Right has brought to its judicial and legislative programme over the past fifty years.
Alongside this, the municipalist tradition offers a more immediate path. Cities and counties can be won, administered, and used to build counter-institutions: public banks, community land trusts, public ownership of resources, and other such cooperative enterprises that remove productive assets from the speculative market and place them under democratic control. This is not utopian; it is the patient, unglamorous, brick-by-brick construction of a parallel economy that reduces dependence on the goodwill of a federal government and a corporate class that have repeatedly demonstrated they do not share the interests of the people who marched on Saturday.
The choice, stated plainly, is this: eight million people can return to this arrangement every few months, expressing their displeasure with ever-greater articulacy and ever-diminishing effect, until the next election cycle absorbs them and a party machine converts their passion into donations and voter turnout for candidates who will govern in the interests of the existing ruling class. Or they can ask the harder question — not who shall we vote for, but what shall we refuse to do, what shall we withhold, what shall we build in the spaces the present order cannot reach. The first path is comfortable, photogenic, and historically futile. The second is slow, difficult, unglamorous, and the only one that has ever actually worked.
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