No Kings wasn't cringe

Needing to seem cool in the face of authoritarian takeover is cringe

Millions participated in cities and towns across the nation for the second “No Kings” protest to denounce the Trump administration. (Photo by Robert Nickelsberg/Contributor via Getty Images)

At 10:16 a.m., the Berkeley No Kings march kicked off. A crowd full of men, women, students, seniors, babies, and dogs left the campus meetup spot to march west through the college town.

Three young women leading the pack giggled, realizing they hadn’t fully thought through their chant strategy. They quickly conferred as they walked, leading the crowd down the sidewalk. “What do we want … democracy?” the one with the bullhorn asked her friends nervously. They seemed unable to come up with anything better.

As she began the call-and-response, her two compatriots dutifully shouted as loud as they could. The solidarity of friendship was not strong enough to sustain the chant for long. But it didn’t matter; the streaming mass of protestors that followed waved their signs cheerily as passing cars honked their approval.

In the lead-up to the Saturday protests, I had seen a handful of tweets, videos, and Reddit comments lamenting how lame, how cringe, how unradical participating in the #NoKings protest would be.

I try not to let social media be my assignment editor — which risks lending fringe accounts greater discursive power than they really have, paradoxically giving them more power — so I wasn’t going to write anything about this until I saw a piece in The Atlantic titled “Resistance Is Cringe — But it’s Also Effective.”

Who is the article speaking to? To whom is the headline admitting that “resistance is cringe?” Certainly not the millions of people protesting? No, it’s addressed to those who largely agree with the protestors but can’t help but squirm at the insufficiently sophisticated protest signs and inflatable costumes.

Now, I don’t want to be too hard on this piece. The author’s overall point is that people were too harsh on #resistlibs because in spite of their cringe behavior — like wearing pussy hats in 2017 — they do play an important electoral role.

But I take issue with the idea that there’s any value at all to genuflecting to the aesthetic criticisms of those who are primarily concerned with how edgy a protest looks. Protest aesthetics matter almost entirely as a practical matter for assuaging fears of radicalism and encouraging as many people as possible to join them.

The American people are busy watching “Young Sheldon” and “Chicago Fire” while making friendship bracelets for a Taylor Swift album release. They are not concerned with adhering to countercultural definitions of cool.

Cringe is the ur-insult on the internet, which is the home of detached irony, a posture easier to fake when no one can see you.¹ Its use really exploded in the 2000s and 2010s. Cringe, when used as a verb, means “to bend one’s head and body in fear or in a servile manner” and to “have an inward feeling of acute embarrassment or awkwardness,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. When used as an adjective it means “causing feelings of acute embarrassment or awkwardness.”

So, is #resistance cringe?

To be honest, I find this question tedious. For one thing, claims of cringiness are unfalsifiable — if people feel acutely embarrassed as they watch one of the largest nonviolent protests in American history, who am I to disagree?

The problem is that so many people find this question useful or even mildly interesting while ICE is kicking, dragging, beating, and tasing U.S. citizens. While the military is allegedly killing foreign citizens in their own country’s waters with no legal authority? While the president is illegally spending money that Congress has not authorized to insulate himself from the political fallout of the shutdown?

Most of the people admitting to their feelings of cringe argue that #resistlib cringe is a necessary but embarrassing byproduct of building a protest movement. I did not find myself cringing while reporting on the protestors. But moreover, I find any serious concern about cringeworthiness more cringe than anything anyone could possibly do while protesting the ongoing authoritarian takeover of the United States of America.

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Greg Swift, from Los Alamos, New Mexico, was in Berkeley for a memorial service but “wherever you are on No Kings Day, you have to find a protest,” he told me. He was wearing an E Pluribus Unum T-shirt and carrying a sign reading “Not our king… King of the Grifters.”

Swift was attending the protest alone. When I asked him why he came out, he said “I’m old enough to remember the time when JFK was assassinated and RFK and Martin Luther King and that was an unsettled time, but it never [before] felt like things could collapse in a more permanent way.”

Is that cringe?

A middle-aged man named David Arndt came to the protest with his teenage daughter. He was dressed in a suit, tie, and hat. The front of his sign was a large image of Donald Trump with the word “corrupt” on it. On the back, almost like a note to self, was a small sheet of paper that simply read “I Love America.” He joked that he was wearing a suit so people would know he was a “respectable person” and not an “agitator, malcontent, [or] scruffy beatnik.”

Is that cringe?

I talked with an 80-year-old woman with a USA hat and an American flag draped around her shoulders like a cape. When I ask her about it, she twirled for me and then said very seriously, “I’m taking back the flag.” At this, some of her fellow protestors cheered. “The Republicans think they own the American flag. They do not,” she added emphatically.

Is that cringe?

All I can say is I did not cringe once. Not when an elderly man with a hand-drawn picture of Trump on an upside-down crown and the words “It’s the files, Stupid!!!” told me he had never protested before. Not when I saw signs reading “I prefer my ICE crushed” or “It’s giving small dictator energy.”

The obsession with cringe is a misdirected obsession with aesthetics. The aesthetics of protest are important, but they are only important as part of the larger question of efficacy, not on their own terms.

For instance, the famous picture of Rosa Parks looking quietly out the bus window was posed, something she was reluctant to do but acquiesced due to the needs of the movement. And civil rights activists stressed the need for protestors to wear their “Sunday best” to calm fears of radicals within their ranks and signal to the TV-watching audience that they were respectable Americans.

The No Kings organizers were focused on two things: maximizing the size of the protests and maintaining their peaceful nature. The event link for Berkeley’s protest — and the official nokings.org website — states that “a core principle behind all No Kings events is a commitment to nonviolent action. We expect all participants to seek to de-escalate any potential confrontation with those who disagree with our values and to act lawfully at these events. Weapons of any kind, including those legally permitted, should not be brought to events.”

The inflatable costumes, American flags, and presence of the elderly, children, and dogs were a reflection of an intentional aesthetic choice: to present a contrast between the absurd claims that everyone participating in the protest was antifa and the stark visual reality of the utter normalcy — or at least harmlessness — of the actual participants.

Harvard Professor Erica Chenoweth’s research on the efficacy of nonviolent protest argues that peaceful demonstrations are more likely to work because they are more likely to draw in a critical mass of participants. The set of people willing to engage in a violent protest movement is smaller than the set willing to engage in a nonviolent protest. So, if your movement is seen as peaceful, it has a better chance of hitting that threshold, particularly with groups that are politically sympathetic, like women and families.

Additionally, soldiers and police are more likely to be sympathetic and reluctant to react harshly to movements with these groups present, reducing the likelihood of violent backlash — or at least ensuring violent backlash is extremely unpopular. Perhaps the most famous example is the Children’s Crusade, the 1963 desegregation protest in Birmingham, Alabama, where organizers recruited schoolchildren and trained them in nonviolent resistance. Local officials sprayed fire hoses and loosed attack dogs at the youths, images that shocked the nation and prompted then-President John F. Kennedy to appear on television to throw his weight behind new civil rights legislation.

The day before the marches, Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible, talked to my colleague Jordan Weissmann about the strategic logic of nonviolence:

“Look, the regime has a monopoly on state violence. And they would like to use it. They don’t necessarily need an excuse to use it. They’ll make up an excuse. But if you give them an excuse, they absolutely will use it. And any successful movement depends on lots and lots of people … that means you cannot just rely on the activist front … You need normal, everyday people standing up.”

And stand up they did. Data journalist G. Elliott Morris estimated that Saturday’s protests may have been the largest one-day demonstrations in over half a century. If you exclude the Earth Day protests, they are the largest in history.

Between 5.2 and 8.2 million people are estimated to have marched on Saturday and despite their size, I could find no widespread reports of violence or disorder.

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Cringe is born of insecurity and fear.

When teenagers cringe at their parents’ interests, it comes from the fear that others may judge them. When a parent cringes at their rowdy toddler, it comes from the fear that people will judge their parenting.

Even when alone, we each have constructed an internal “Arbiter of Cool” who we cringe in front of when our dad pulls out toe-socks or our toddler says something rude. The cringing party sees itself as the powerless minority, afraid of the social power of the Arbiter of Cool, who can mete out judgment and humiliation as punishment.

So, when left-leaning commentators cringe at #resistlib grandmas, who are they afraid of? Whose social power are they cowering in fear of?

It is not the people with actual power: Republicans (who themselves are trying to portray the protests as lame — a line that is in conflict with the charge that the marches were filled with antifa). After all, I don’t know of anyone who simultaneously cringes in embarrassment at a pussy hat and thinks that Sen. Mike Lee is the Arbiter of Cool.

I’m forced to conclude that the fear comes from being labeled as uncool by leftists on the internet. Fear that if you straightforwardly cover the protests as a clarion call in defense of democracy, someone will make fun of you for being a shit lib.

And what could be more cringe than worrying about that?

1. Many of us have had the experience of meeting someone we first became aware of on Twitter and being surprised at how earnest, straightforward, awkward, or even normal they seem IRL.