(No) Dictators & (No) Kings
And the Important Distinction Between the Two
I am glad the “No kings” marches happened yesterday and hundreds of thousands turned out in popular protest, inspired as so many of us have been by the resistance movement in LA. However, there is a fundamental and meaningful difference between kings and dictators. It may seem needlessly semantic or contrarian to critique the slogan/framing, but the world is a text, we are tasked with writing a new one and in writing the precision of language is paramount; precision allows us to not only accurately assess the world we are living in as well as how we arrived here, it allows us to vision and craft the the world we want and people deserve.
In monarchies, succession is hereditary and a dual system of courts and states arise around the sovereignty of the king or queen. In this way, the states of monarchies are not central states in the modern liberal republican sense. Liberal democracies exist in service to the central state. Monarchical states are ancillary to the king.
In a dictatorship, states and their attendant institutions are cudgels against the people. The state exists purely as a violent form having been converted from a form which mediated social relations through a combination of violence, coercion, sanctioned participation and illusory consent.
These differences are important insofar as “dictator” implies the existence of a prior system of governance which was usurped through force or deception and then weaponized; it also illuminates the extent to which liberalism’s state worship as a moralizing form of governance (rather than an apparatus of monopolized violence to which the governed ostensibly consent) allows for a dictator to be more efficient in his terror than a king.
This is not to say some of the worst characters in history aren’t kings and queens or that monarchies are in anyway ideal forms of governance (they are terrible and silly), but it is to say that a monarchy as a political form is not inherently oppressive (though it is prone to oppression) whereas dictatorships are inherently despotic and they are so for the very reason that they have hijacked a pre-existing central state.
Dictator denotes a process as well as political form defined by violence, and in this denotation it also offers us a pathway to prevention through future world building as we call into question the need for, limitations of, and the (ir)responsibility of having, central democratic states as systems of governance.
Finally, we have to ask ourselves “what kind of framing and slogans actually crack the power structure while clearly articulating our condition and our future facing task?”
“King” as a moniker is easily refutable by the regime and more difficult to effectively sew within the public imagination for the sole reason that Trump was in fact elected in a free and fair election even if he won through deception.
Dictators are frequently elected and their election allows for them to be that much more effective at their violence and their violence to be that much more justified and obscured under the guise of legality and popular mandate. There are no such illusions in monarchies.
Donald Trump is a dictator though his dictatorship is not yet solidified. We can still stop it. The “No Kings” marches are an inspiring effort to do so, but as important as physical action in the streets is precise framing and language by which we can gain momentum in stopping authoritarianism not only through the fight agains it, but through the crafting of an egalitarian future defined by collective power.
No dictators.
No kings.
No states.
No nations.
No borders.