The turnout and character of the weekend’s No Kings demonstrations speak for themselves and at great volume. But I wanted to say something about the naming and the focus of No Kings, which is emerging as something between a protest and a protest movement. It is a great good fortune for the country and the anti-Trump opposition that it has emerged in the way that it has, by which I mean the name itself, a deceptively resonant name and slogan with the deepest possible roots in American history. This brings with it a critical inclusivity, which grows out of the name itself and the lack of those specific and lengthy sets of demands that often characterize and ultimately fracture such movements.

I’ll say a few things here that favorably distinguish No Kings from what we might call “traditional” liberal or left-leaning protests. That includes some of those that featured prominently during the first Trump administration. But I’m not disparaging those. It’s simply that this is a specific moment in history and requires an especially broad tent. Its purpose and specific character must be different.

I titled a recent Editors’ Blog post The Age of Monsters. I’ve been thinking about that post and theme again because I keep seeing more confirmation, more evidence of this dimension of the world we are currently living in. I stress again that the idea here is not that these “monsters” are bad people, though I would say that most of them are in varying degrees. The issue is their gigantism. They are so much more powerful than ordinary people, mostly but not in every case because of wealth, that they distort the whole fabric of society and politics. They are like big, clumsy and lumbering oafs who nonetheless have power that make if not the whole game than all the center of gravity be about them.