Radicalized By Basic Decency read the sign of a middle-aged man in a ball cap and fleece jacket. Among the hundreds, maybe thousands, of people lining the main street of a small town in upstate New York on a perfect fall Saturday afternoon, this man and his words stuck with me. He was the sort of mild, ordinary-looking person you’d never notice in a crowd if not for his sign. And that was true of almost everyone. These were not the America-hating, Hamas-loving, paid street fighters that Republican leaders had dreamed up in the days before the countrywide “No Kings” rallies. Amid hundreds of American flags, I saw one Palestinian and several Ukrainian. The people were mostly over 40, many much older, some using walkers and wheelchairs, alongside parents with young children, like the woman with two small girls I saw standing slightly outside the crowd holding up a sign: So Bad Even the Introverts Are Here.
The tone of the protest was good-natured indignation, as if something these people cherished had been taken from them and defiled: This Is the Government the Founders Warned Us About; Make Orwell Fiction Again; Longtime Republican, First Time Protester; He doesn’t even own a dog; I 
USA. So many signs referred to the patriotic events of 250 years ago that you might have thought you were at a Tea Party rally. There wasn’t a hint of unruliness, let alone violence. Three town cops looked on with nothing to do. (Down in New York City, 100,000 people marched without a single arrest.) At sunset in a nearby park, after listening to a gray-bearded man read out an updated Gettysburg Address beside a giant inflatable Donald Trump, the crowd began to leave. “Thanks, guys,” a woman called to the cops, who waved and wished her a safe trip home. By nightfall, the ruling party had changed its line, while keeping a straight face, to mocking irrelevant old white people.
I don’t know if No Kings will transform from an intermittent day of protest into a political movement. But if anything can rouse the stupefied mainstream in time to stop the collapse of everything good about America, it’s a spectacle like this: dignified, irreverent, driven by old-fashioned love of country. No Kings has no celebrated leaders. It offers no political platform or strategy, but instead a reminder, an example, and a rebuke. It presents a vision—perhaps a mirage—of what once was and might still be. Hope in a dark time is enough to make you want to cry, and I found myself on the verge of tears. There was something moving about the modesty of the idea, and the quiet depth of feeling—anger, longing.
My wife and I were in town to visit our college freshman during Family Weekend. At the rally, he was sad to see relatively few people of his generation. “No one my age has any hope,” he said. I stifled a parental urge to argue him out of hopelessness—for he was right. To be young in America is to come of age with the old gods of democracy, equality, and upward mobility dead or discredited. At school and in the culture, his generation learned that the famous words of 250 years ago no longer mean anything and probably never did. The older generations, the “OK Boomer”s and Gen X ironists, took everything for themselves and left nothing for the young. Why fight for your country if all it stands for is power and greed?
The dominating public figure of our son’s young life is counting on his generation’s cynicism. Trump has made a bet that Americans no longer think of their country in moral terms at all—that the words of the Declaration of Independence don’t stir them, that the specter of a king doesn’t appall them, that they expect their leaders to be corrupt and cruel. The day’s rallies were such unimpeachable displays of patriotism that Trump couldn’t possibly outdo them in honor and dignity, so he had to go the other way—as far down as his imagination could take him. That night, he released an AI-generated video of himself, flying a plane called the King Trump, dropping an immense load of shit on a crowd of protesters in a city street, covering his fellow Americans in his filth.
Even for this lowest of all presidents, the image was shocking—yet it makes perfect sense. This has always been and always will be Trump’s answer to basic decency. The question is whether the rest of us still care enough about our country to be radicalized.
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