Why “No Kings” misses the point about who’s really running things
The “No Kings” signs at protests look good on television. Revolutionary-era costumes, tri-corner hats, flags with rattlesnakes. It is the visual language of a country that believes it is repeating the 1770s. People are scared, and they are reaching for the last time Americans stood up to a tyrant.
But the framing is wrong. And the wrong framing matters.
America is not becoming a monarchy. Nobody seriously believes Donald Trump has a dynastic birthright to rule this country, or that his children will inherit the office by bloodline. The problem is not that we are sliding into the 18th century. The problem is that we are living through the logical endpoint of the system we already have.
Capitalism does not need kings. It has something more effective.
The official story
The official story says this is about one man seizing power. About norms collapsing, institutions weakening, democracy fraying at the edges. The language of monarchy fits neatly into this narrative. It implies a deviation, an aberration from the natural order of things. A king is a historical accident, a correction waiting to happen.
This framing is comforting because it implies a simple solution: remove the king, restore the republic.
But what if the republic was the problem?
What is actually happening
A billionaire, backed by other billionaires, funded a campaign to capture the executive branch. Not because Trump represents a break from capitalist politics, but because he represents an intensification of it. Corporate donors, foreign interests, media consolidation, legal systems that settle with cash instead of principle, these are not bugs in the American system. They are features.
The media platforms that host his critics are owned by billionaires who decide who gets air. The lawsuits that should test the boundaries of executive power are settled with money from private interests. The regulatory agencies meant to constrain corporate power are staffed by executives from the industries they regulate. Foreign money flows through PACs, shell companies, and lobbying firms.
This is not monarchy. It is the normal functioning of a political economy where capital has accumulated enough power to override democratic constraints.
The language of monarchy lets everyone pretend otherwise.
The harm in misnaming
When you call something a monarchy, you suggest the solution is a republic. When you imply a deviation, you imply a restoration.
But there is no prelapsarian democratic moment to return to. The corruption, the regulatory capture, the revolving door between government and industry, the media owned by three corporations, the campaign finance system that is legalised bribery, all of this predates Trump. It predates the current crisis. It was built into the architecture of an economy that treats money as speech and corporations as people.
The monarchy framing does active harm because it personifies the problem in one figure. “No Kings” suggests that removing the king fixes everything. It lets the broader structure off the hook.
A king can be deposed. A system of capital accumulation cannot be deposed. It has to be dismantled.
The pattern is not new
The enclosure movement in England did not require a king. It required landlords, parliament, and courts that understood property as sacred and people as disposable. The Luddites were not fighting a monarch; they were fighting an economic system that was replacing skilled labour with machines and calling it progress.
Capital has always found its political champions. Sometimes they come with crowns. More often they come with campaign donations, media endorsements, and think tank fellowships.
The monarchy analogy gives people a satisfying villain at the cost of obscuring the actual machinery. And the machinery is what keeps running.
What does it cost to name it correctly?
Calling the current situation what it is (the eventuation of capital over time) is politically uncomfortable. It means the enemy is not one man but a system that most Americans have been taught is natural, inevitable, or the best we can do. It means the solution is not an election but a transformation.
But that discomfort is the price of clear thinking.
A movement that believes it is fighting kings will fight with 18th century solutions. A movement that understands it is fighting capital will fight with the tools capital fears: solidarity, striking, mutual aid, disruption of business as usual, and a refusal to treat the current arrangement as legitimate.
We do not need tri-corner hats. We need an accurate diagnosis.
The question
The people in the streets know something is deeply wrong. They are right to be angry. But who they are angry at, and what they believe the solution to be, depends on what they think is happening.
If they think a king has taken the throne, they will wait for someone to remove him.
If they understand that capital has been consolidating power through every channel democracy offers (elections, media, courts, regulation, lobbying, campaign finance) then they might start asking harder questions.
What do you call a system where the richest people in the world can fund campaigns, own the news outlets that cover those campaigns, pay to silence legal challenges, and appoint regulators from their own boardrooms?
It is not monarchy. There is a word for it. We already know what it is.
The question is whether we are willing to say it out loud.