Speakers at No Kings rallies across the country Saturday drew comparisons between their own efforts to mobilize with those of the Founding Fathers during the American Revolution.
Speaking on the main stage at the Washington rally, television scientist Bill Nye directly compared President Donald Trump to King George III, called his followers “confederates,” and cast No Kings attendees as heirs to the revolution of 1776. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) also directly compared the crowd at No Kings with the Founding Fathers, casting Trump as a would-be monarch.
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But the Founding Fathers, who favored a republic designed to temper the passions of large assemblies, would not have recognized themselves in the sea of subversives and malcontents at No Kings rallies — save perhaps Thomas Jefferson.
James Madison, the father of the Constitution, held that large assemblies inflamed passions over reason, and as a result, both large legislative bodies and large public gatherings risked devolving into mob-like chaos due to “the confusion and intemperance of a multitude.”
“Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates,” he wrote in Federalist No. 55, “every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”
Like Madison, Alexander Hamilton’s belief that masses were easily swayed by passions informed his preference for representative democracy, warning in Federalist No. 9 of the “tempestuous waves of sedition and party rage.”
Shaped by classical history and Shays’s Rebellion at home, Hamilton placed great value in social order and stability as essential to preserving individual liberty. The violent, mob-driven revolution in France only reinforced this belief in the years that followed.
The “turbulent and changing” masses, he remarked at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, “seldom judge or determine right.” Scenes from the No Kings rallies, including the battering of Trump pinatas and espousal of highly emotional rhetoric, would have struck Hamilton as manifestations of the mob-mentality he sought to subdue.
George Washington, too, condemned large, passionate assemblies, especially related to political parties, whose emergence he feared might topple the young republic. In his farewell address, Washington wrote that political parties serve to organize passionate factions and imbue them with “artificial and extraordinary force.” The impressive images of vast swaths of rallygoers this weekend lend the rally just such an artifice of force — the crowds were indeed large and passionate, but not reflective of the will of the country, which elected Trump overwhelmingly less than one year ago.
Jefferson, who famously wrote that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants” and supported the early French Revolution, might have been more sympathetic to large-scale and passionate No Kings rallies. And while Jefferson initially rejected political parties, he later embraced them as necessary to counter Federalist policies he viewed as monarchical.
The founders’ varied views defy comparisons between the No Kings rally goers and the revolutionaries of 1776. On the whole, the founders rejected the type of passionate, factional assemblies such as we witnessed over the weekend, just as they would have rejected the violent right-wing mob that attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
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Their genius came in designing a system to increase the chances that reason and prudence would guide the nation forward, not the passion of the moment. So they created a system of checks and balances — the Electoral College, the Senate, and the courts — which they all understood as necessary to protect against popular hysteria.
On the contrary, No Kings is not “what democracy looks like” — at least not in the founders’ republic.
