Some people are asking an important question after millions of people participated in the No Kings protests.
Once the joy and sense of community that came from rallying to say no to Trump faded, the question arose: Are these protests making a difference?
A better question is: can these protests make a difference?
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History and movement research tell us that successful protest movements make a difference.
Earlier this yearBrookings assessed the possibility of the success of protests against Trump and wrote about the research of Professor Michael Lipsky: “In 1968, Professor Michael Lipsky wrote an influential article entitled “Protest as a Political Resource”, in which he compared effective and ineffective movements. He argued that successful movements have clear strategic goals, use protest to expand coalitions, seek to enlist more powerful individuals in their cause and link expressions of discontent to broader political and electoral mobilization. Lipsky cited the civil rights movement as a classic example of political activism that met all of these conditions and achieved historic policy and political success.
Lipsky’s research was done decades before No Kings and focused on the civil rights movement, poor people’s protests, and other movements of the 1960s.
Our world has changed since the 1960s. We are both less of a physical community, and more connected through technology than we have ever been as a nation.
I wondered whether or not No Kings was a political movement or a protest movement.
The No Kings movement has currently only met one of Lipsky’s benchmarks for success, but it’s an important one, perhaps the biggest of all in 2025.