No Kings and No Message

By James Moore

“It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.” (James Baldwin, 1972).

The poetry and the profanity of the “No Kings” marchers was beautiful, and maybe even a touch profound. As many as eight million people were in the streets declaring they’d had enough of Trump violating the law and urinating on the Constitution. There was a universal cry against what had started as authoritarian drift and has become a putative dictatorship. A troubling emptiness, however, occupied the core of the inspiring gatherings across the land. The stirring moment lacked the kind of visionary agenda that had once defined the great protest movements of the past. Beyond getting rid of Trump, what did the protestors want? Do they have a vision to share with their fellow citizens?

The No Kings Marches had, for me, a ghostly resonance of gathering nearly sixty years earlier when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. climbed into the pulpit at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967. The Vietnam War was burning up Southeast Asia, but King’s words that night also scorched the American conscience. His sermon, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” was not just an indictment of war, but a rebuke of the spiritual poverty that had allowed injustice to masquerade as patriotism. On that spring day, King warned us that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

More than his “I Have a Dream,” speech, I have felt for all these unfolding decades that the Riverside sermon marked a turning point for King. He understood that condemning his own government’s Vietnam War policy would cost him allies in Washington and possibly end his relationship with President Johnson, who had delivered the Civil Rights Act the reverend had fostered with his speaking and his followers. Regardless, he spoke from New York over network radio with a sense of moral necessity, and, exactly one year to the day later, April 4, 1968, King was murdered in Memphis. The symmetry feels almost biblical, as if history itself underscored the price of speaking the truth too clearly. Maybe his end was about something more prosaic. King’s family has said publicly they believe he was murdered by the F.B.I. under orders from J. Edgar Hoover.

The Riverside sermon had called for a revolution of values, one that would replace greed and militarism with compassion and justice. His assassination sealed that plea in blood. His declarations from the pulpit in New York City remain one of the most radical pieces of moral clarity in modern history, and, as justified and important as the No Kings March was, it feels like a diminished echo of the reverend’s vision. The protestors had energy, outrage, and sincerity, but lacked a coherent moral argument for what comes next. Their distilled essence of No to Trump is not a framework for policy. Movements do not survive by opposition alone. They endure, historically, when they can say “Yes” to a vision of what justice and prosperity should look like.

The Democrats, as the nominal stewards of Dr. King’s dream, seem stuck in the same pattern. Their platform, waiting patiently in the wings since the days of King and revived by thinkers like Bernie Sanders and Thomas Piketty, calls for something meaningful. Although they have not effectively articulated their platform, the demands include a humane economy, rooted in fairness, community, and democratic control. Somewhere, however, between the think tanks and the television panels, the soul of that message has been lost. When King spoke at Riverside, he didn’t merely condemn a war that would end up killing almost 60,000 of his fellow Americans, he mapped a path toward economic justice and spiritual renewal. He called for an end to “the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism.” The critique wasn’t partisan, either; it was, in the truest sense, existential. He wanted an America where moral progress matched technological achievement, where wealth served humanity rather than ruled it. Trump has taken us in the opposite direction.

King’s vision has remained remarkably consistent among progressives ever since the Riverside sermon. The policy scaffolding involves a return to progressive taxation with a marginal rate near 80 percent for the ultra-wealthy; universal health care and a publicly trained medical corps; publicly funded elections with no billionaires and no advertising, only debates and position papers; free higher education and equitable investment in early learning; restoration of the Fairness Doctrine and public-service media; a national bank through the Postal Service to compete with Wall Street; and a modern rail system and green infrastructure to link the country again. These aren’t utopian fantasies. They are the bones of an America that almost existed, and still can.

For decades after World War II, the top marginal tax rate hovered around 91 percent, which wasn’t socialism; it was realism. The wealthiest Americans still thrived, but their fortunes were tethered to the health of the middle class. That high rate didn’t crush innovation, either; in fact, it fueled the greatest expansion of opportunity in U.S. history. We built highways, universities, and the space program. Workers bought homes. CEOs still made fortunes, but they also paid their dues. The economy was humming healthily along because it worked for everyone.

And then came Reagan, and the slow dismantling he began to execute. Taxes were slashed, unions weakened, public education underfunded, and media deregulated. The Democratic Party, rather than defending King’s moral economics, tried to sound “reasonable,” a character flaw from which they still suffer. Boldness was traded for electability, imagination for pragmatism. The result is the hollow space we now inhabit, a society rich in gadgets and poor in meaning, a party that remembers its slogans but not its scripture.

The 80 percent marginal rate isn’t a punishment; it’s a recalibration. Wealth won’t be confiscated but balance will be restored under that rate. When the richest citizens are taxed proportionately to their gains, society as a whole benefits. Historically, high marginal rates coincided with strong GDP growth, low inequality, and expanding opportunity. Those years funded the GI Bill, the interstate highways, and the scientific research that built the modern world. Reducing the wealth gap also curbs political corruption. When billionaires have less disposable capital to purchase influence, democracy breathes easier. The real punishment comes when a nurse or a teacher pays a higher tax rate than a hedge fund manager. How did we let that happen?

The last time marginal rates were this high, corporate boards didn’t respond by fleeing the country or collapsing under debt. They reinvested in workers, expanded benefits, and built the middle class. Wages rose in step with productivity. With effective tax rates on the wealthy today lower than they’ve been in a century, we’re seeing the reverse. Profits are hoarded, wages stagnant, and public trust eroded. A just tax code isn’t envy, it’s architecture and builds the house in which we all live, and with such a strong foundation, it would never be likely to fall down.

The Democratic Party’s communication failure is not that they lack ideas, it’s that they are absent a narrative. The right has mastered storytelling, which is a fable of rugged individualism under siege by bureaucratic elites. Democrats respond with data, nuance, and PowerPoints. Voters don’t feel nuance, though; they feel belonging. Making a declaration against kings is powerful. If we also said, “We the People will build a nation that serves all of us,” we would likely find it transformative.

Imagine if Democrats framed their policies in moral terms. Universal health care becomes the right to live free of fear; public education is the seedbed of democracy; progressive taxation becomes gratitude made tangible; a national bank is freedom from predatory capitalism; military restraint is defined as courage rooted in humanity. Dr. King spoke that language fluently, fusing spiritual and civic rhetoric until they became indistinguishable. “True compassion,” he said, “is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.” That line alone could anchor a century of Democratic campaigns, if only someone had the courage to say it again.

The No Kings March may yet prove to be a beginning for Democrats and progressive thinking rather than just an end for Trump. Every generation is compelled to rediscover the moral vocabulary of democracy. I see the protestors’ anger as the raw material of progress, and it only needs shaping, direction, and hope. The task before Democrats is not simply to oppose Trump, or authoritarianism, or the Supreme Court’s reactionary rulings. They must articulate an affirmative vision: to make clear that government is not the enemy, but the only tool capable of solving problems too vast for the market or the individual alone. Government is the organizing principle of a civilized and advancing society.

Democrats also must reclaim the language of faith in one another, and the belief that a shared investment in justice is not naiveté but patriotism. They must speak again, as King did, of the beloved community, and show how policies like fair taxation, universal health care, and strong public institutions make that community real. They need to remind America that freedom is not the absence of government, but the presence of fairness.

The story of these two events, King’s sermon and the No Kings March, in my estimation, is the story of America itself. Our idealism has been forever at war with convenience while moral courage is posed against political calculation. In 1967, King broke with allies and risked his reputation to tell the truth about his country. In 2025, marchers filled the streets to tell the truth about their fear of losing it. Until, however, someone steps forward to unite those truths, to link the protest against tyranny with a program for justice, this nation will keep marching in circles.

Democracy, King taught, is not inherited. It is renewed, again and again, by those willing to speak of love and fairness in the language of policy. The Democrats have the words. They only need to find their voice.

This article was originally published on Texas to the world.

 

James Moore is the New York Times bestselling author of “Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential,” three other books on Bush and former Texas Governor Rick Perry, as well as two novels, and a biography entitled, “Give Back the Light,” on a famed eye surgeon and inventor. Mr. Moore has been honored with an Emmy from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for his documentary work and is a former TV news correspondent who has traveled extensively on every presidential campaign since 1976.

He has been a retained on-air political analyst for MSNBC and has appeared on Morning Edition on National Public Radio, NBC Nightly News, Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, CBS Evening News, CNN, Real Time with Bill Maher, and Hardball with Chris Matthews, among numerous other programs. Mr. Moore’s written political and media analyses have been published at CNN, Boston Globe, L.A. Times, Guardian of London, Sunday Independent of London, Salon, Financial Times of London, Huffington Post, and numerous other outlets. He also appeared as an expert on presidential politics in the highest-grossing documentary film of all time, Fahrenheit 911, (not related to the film’s producer Michael Moore).

His other honors include the Dartmouth College National Media Award for Economic Understanding, the Edward R. Murrow Award from the Radio Television News Directors’ Association, the Individual Broadcast Achievement Award from the Texas Headliners Foundation, and a Gold Medal for Script Writing from the Houston International Film Festival. He was frequently named best reporter in Texas by the AP, UPI, and the Houston Press Club. The film produced from his book “Bush’s Brain” premiered at The Cannes Film Festival prior to a successful 30-city theater run in the U.S.

Mr. Moore has reported on the major stories and historical events of our time, which have ranged from Iran-Contra to the Waco standoff, the Oklahoma City bombing, the border immigration crisis, and other headlining events. His journalism has put him in Cuba, Central America, Mexico, Australia, Canada, the UK, and most of Europe, interviewing figures as diverse as Fidel Castro and Willie Nelson. He has been writing about Texas politics, culture, and history since 1975, and continues with political opinion pieces for CNN and regularly at his Substack newsletter: “Texas to the World.”