The national No Kings rally took place on Saturday, Oct. 18 and forced its way into the national consciousness. Seven million Americans in all 50 states lined up to protest and condemn the escalating authoritarianism of Trump’s administration, including more than 200,000 people who marched down New York’s 7th Avenue. I attended this unabashedly liberal event with a 50-member DSA contingent. My role was to hand out DSA flyers advertising left-wing events taking place after the rally. 

I expected a mostly positive reception from liberals, and instead received a universally positive one. DSA, Zohran Mamdani, and the left in general were explicitly praised by numerous liberals I talked to. Frustration with the Democratic establishment was expressed. Palestinian flags were held side by side with Ukrainian ones. Anti-oligarch chants came alongside anti-Trump ones.

As a political activist who wants to both advance socialism when possible and defend against the rise of fascism when necessary, this was incredibly heartening. The left’s reflexive criticism of resistance liberalism as ineffectual and at odds with left-wing objectives is oblivious to how much the terrain has shifted since Trump’s re-election.

On November 5, 2024 Trump’s second victory hit with crippling force. Millions of American liberals had been promised for years and years that if they were just good soldiers for the establishment, if they just abstained from criticizing Democratic Party leaders for an indefinite period of time, if they just always showed up to vote, the orange-haired monster would eventually go away. Trump’s re-election, secured this time with a popular vote victory, shattered this laser-focused vision into a million pieces. 

The Democratic Party establishment still could have spun this calamity to their advantage just as they did following their 2016 defeat. They could’ve fallen back on a centrist vision of governance blaming the “extremes” of the right (which wants fascism) and the left (which wants Medicare for All and a Green New Deal). They could have rerun the same resistance liberal hits from Trump’s first term and appeased a large part of the party’s base. 

Instead, every powerful, mainstream American institution that resistance liberals had believed would hold against Trump’s fascistic project –– the mainstream media, big business, universities, and most stunningly, establishment Democratic politicians, began to cave. Moderate Democrats tried to execute a breath-taking flip-flop, aggressively playing down the threats posed by Trump, accepting extreme right-wing positions, particularly on immigration, and inexplicably making a big deal about how they were going to “play dead,” in the words of former Bill Clinton aide James Carville. Even worse, Democratic leaders like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), were often nowhere to be found, hiding away as Trump and Elon Musk gutted the American state. 

It only took until last March for the final betrayal to come in the eyes of liberal voters, when Schumer backed away from a debt ceiling showdown with Trump, sacrificing his leverage for zero concessions. A Democratic electorate that until very recently was devoted to their party leaders saw that trust collapse in a manner unparalleled in modern American history. 

Anti-System Politics

Democratic voters have gone from overwhelmingly wanting the party to get more moderate to overwhelmingly wanting the party to get more progressive. A supermajority of Democratic voters now want their party leaders to be replaced, and, according to polls, are now even more incensed at their establishment than Republican voters were in 2009, at the dawn of the Tea Party. 

Leftists are more and more filling the anti-Trump vacuum. Bernie and AOC’s “Fight Oligarchy” tour drew enormous crowds. That same desire for a break with the past helped Zohran Mamdani become New York’s first Muslim democratic socialist mayor-elect, buoyed in part by mainstream liberals who admire figures like Brad Lander. In Seattle, Katie Wilson, a longtime community organizer and socialist, has ousted a centrist mayor who was close with that city’s political establishment. As we look to 2026, an exhilarating new wave of left-wing primary candidates is taking shape from coast to coast.

Liberals have never been more open to radicalization and more excited about anti-system politics. When socialists offer a comprehensive repudiation of every single thing Trump has done, liberals will vote for socialists, so socialists should offer them that in return. Fuse the cause of No Kings with No oligarchs. Such a move would come with numerous positive knock-off effects. Middle and upper middle class liberals always vote, even in incredibly small elections; they have disposable capital, which we could use as a small dollar donation base, and they still have considerable cultural power. Such a pivot could allow the left to win over more moderate voters without actually making any substantive ideological compromises.

There are already examples of smart leftists embracing this excitingly new political reality. The featured speaker at DC’s No KIngs was not an establishment liberal, but Bernie Sanders. AOC has been masterfully courting this wing of the party for years with performative anti-Trumpism, much to the chagrin of anti-electoral leftists, but much to the delight of establishment liberals who adore her. 

Perhaps the most pressing test of this newfound jokerfication of American liberals will be taking place in Maine next year. In a critical Democratic primary to contest a Senate seat held by Republican Susan Collins, the left is rallying behind Graham Platner, a young populist outsider endorsed by Bernie Sanders, while the Democratic party establishment is backing Janet Mills, a consummate establishment boomer liberal. Platner has been under fire for offensive Reddit comments he posted in the 2010s, as well as for a tattoo that he got while he was in the Marines that has links to Nazism (he said he was unaware of the tattoo’s meaning until earlier this year). At any point between 2016 and 2024, that would have been the end of his candidacy. Yet, most polls show him still consistently leading both Mills and Collins in head-to-head matchups. That’s a sea change in a state with an older, mostly white population that has previously shown little interest in left wing candidates. In this brave new era, there could be a lot more of that coming soon.   

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