 Daniel Cole/ReutersPresident Donald Trump’s first term saw a flowering of left-wing and liberal protest, culminating in 2020, after George Floyd’s killing, in what is often described as a “racial reckoning.” Democrats embraced it. They remembered how the Tea Party movement — a marriage of well-funded libertarian groups and grassroots conservatism — reinvigorated the GOP during the Obama years. Hillary Clinton had struggled to fill the sort of venues that, two months after her loss, hosted a massive Women’s March. The 1970s activist Angela Davis, whose ideology skews communist, was invited to that event to tell demonstrators that they could “prevent the dying cultures of racism [and] hetero-patriarchy” from rising again. By 2020, liberals had devoured The 1619 Project and endorsed the removal of statues that honored Confederate figures, as well as some that honored founders of the US. Saturday’s patriotism-splashed No Kings protests, however, told a new story: one in which the founders tried to create a “more perfect union,” and liberals are honoring them by working on the “more” part. “In 1776, with extraordinary courage, the founders of our country announced to the world that they would no longer be ruled by the King of England, a king who had absolute power over their lives,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said at the Washington edition of No Kings on Saturday. Sanders has made the same connection at his “Fighting Oligarchy” events this year, putting himself remarkably in sync with the mainstream liberals he was once an alternative to. He suggested that honoring American ideals meant enacting his agenda, to “guarantee health care to every man, woman, and child,” and to “make public college tuition free.” In fact, every No Kings speaker offered a version of this, portraying pluralist liberalism as a way to follow in the founders’ footsteps. Americans rebelled against a king, then applied that same thinking to abolish slavery, then dismantle segregation. In Washington, No Kings organizer Ezra Levin told protesters they were the latest in a long line of people who honored the founders by protesting and changing the country: “The abolitionists, the suffragettes, the heroes of the civil rights movement, the leaders at Stonewall, the leaders in the Dreamer movement.” In this sense, Democratic rhetoric has grown more conservative, with more appeals to tradition, than it was during Trump’s first term. (It’s also clear that this rebranding is getting under some Republicans’ skin, 100 hours after the Saturday rallies. If President Donald Trump “was a king,” his eldest son quipped to Fox News, he “probably would just reopen the government.“) But Democrats’ goals, as elucidated at No Kings rallies, have not changed. Defending the rights of immigrants who entered the country illegally was a theme everywhere. Participants at the day’s biggest rallies called for higher taxes on the wealthy and more permissive immigration policies, while defending the diversity of urban life. There were also some calls for radical economic change. Many speakers invoked what progressives call the “Race Class Narrative,” a messaging project from Trump’s first term that characterizes deportations and rollbacks of transgender health care as distractions from the damage exacted by the GOP’s supply-side economics. In Seattle, Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., said that Republicans were attacking “trans people and immigrants and Black people and poor people to distract you from his real agenda.” In Boston, Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., draped a trans pride flag over his button-down shirt and declared that “trans rights are human rights” — a nod to his primary challenge from a congressman who’s suggested that Democrats should be open to restrictions on trans athletes. The message there was not just that Democrats represented the spirit of 1776; it was that progressive Democrats, specifically, were the patriotic revolutionaries. Perhaps the newest Democratic policy demand, compared with 2017, has been for the federal government to leave liberal cities alone — casting Trump as George III and urban liberals as the Minutemen. But it’s meaningful that the party is so broadly adopting a more small-c conservative image. One year after its 2024 defeat by a Republican Party that believes it can stop progressivism from ever winning back power, at least Democrats are no longer arguing over what signs to hold. | 
