‘No Kings’ Has No Future

By Jeffrey Blehar

Tuesday, March 31, 2026

 

Saturday’s nationwide “No Kings” rally descended on Chicago like a long-anticipated cicada bloom that I have no excuse for not planning around. I ignored all the warning signs: the regular public service announcements on NPR that week encouraging my attendance; the sudden disappearance of lunch and dinner reservations at pricey restaurants in the West Loop; the chittering din of septuagenarian Trotskyists and blue-haired grandmothers as they scuttled from their hidey-holes in the North Shore to gather agitatedly in Grant Park.

 

Yes, “Brood Boomer” reassembled downtown for a reprise of last October’s similarly senior-heavy affair, a “No Kings” protest against — well, what? Deportations of illegals? The potential quagmire of an Iran war? Our cynically mercantilist adventure in Venezuela? That tacky White House ballroom? They were opposed to all of these things, and more — they were opposed to the simple existence of the Trump administration, in all its unanswerable egregiousness.

 

And why not? Were I a Democrat right now, I’d be pretty miffed about the course of national politics. (I’m a Republican, and I’m not exactly thrilled myself.) It’s America, and everyone has a right to gripe. But all of the observations I made about the demography of the “No Kings” rally-goers back last year applied in redoubled measure to this year’s attending class: These people were overwhelmingly old, white, deeply elite progressives, and vastly fewer in number this second time around.

 

I didn’t attend the rally personally — the next time I plan to listen to Mayor Brandon Johnson speak is when he delivers his concession speech in February 2027 — but I ran into the subsequent “march” through the Loop afterward. And of course, the inevitable spillover to my neighborhood after the rally and march told the tale: I haven’t seen so many senior citizens in embarrassingly tight-fitting union T-shirts worn overtop long sleeves since I attended the DNC in 2024. I had difficulty spotting anyone my age or younger — and I’m 45.

 

This is suggestive of something, but I don’t think it has very much to do with the current state of electoral politics. Despite the fading lack of enthusiasm and focus at these anti-Trump rallies, I still expect the Republicans to be walloped upside the head in November. But there is something curiously generational about public protest now — it is intensely “Boomer-coded” and is now done with grim duty, to the commands of political organizers, rather than as a spontaneous expression of discontent. (Behind the marchers you could almost hear the faint cracks of the knout.)

 

And I don’t know if this is a good or a bad thing. The younger generation has many more discontents than their parents do right now, and it’s not as if they lack the appetite for political change themselves. I fear that, in their disillusionment and impatience with the gestural politics of boomers, they prefer more destructive methods.