When the Chant Fades, Who Builds the Future?

The movements of the 1960s built lasting institutions. Today’s movements need more than moral clarity: they need leadership and coordination...

No Kings Kansas City

The No Kings Day protests last weekend were breathtaking. Seven million or more Americans filled streets across the country explicitly condemning the way Trump has been running our country. They carried handmade signs, sang freedom songs, and for one afternoon reminded the nation that resistance still burns hot.

But here’s the hard truth: that energy, that passion, that righteousness means very little if it doesn’t translate into structure and leadership. Movements that fail to coalesce around leaders and build institutions typically die in the glare of their own moral light or fail to produce results.

We’ve seen it before. The Women’s March drew millions. Occupy Wall Street electrified a generation. Black Lives Matter shook the conscience of the nation. But without leadership, durable organizations, funding networks, and consistent strategy, these movements faded from the political field as quickly as they filled it.

Protests without public faces and follow-through are like fireworks. Beautiful, brief, and gone before the smoke clears.

The last time I saw my late buddy Tom Hayden was when we were both speaking in Dubrovnik, Croatia some years ago. I was doing my radio program live from there and we reminisced on the air about SDS, the organization he helped start with the Port Huron Statement and I was a member of in East Lansing.

Like the American Revolution, the Civil Rights movement, the union movement, and the women’s suffrage movements before it, SDS’s success in helping end the war in Vietnam didn’t just come from mass mobilizations (although they helped), but flowed out of an organizational structure and local and national leaders who could articulate a single specific demand to end the war.

As Frederick Douglass famously said in 1857, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” That demand must be loud, specific, recurrent, and backed by organization and leadership.

When the Occupy movement, for example, was taken over by a group of well-intentioned people who insisted that no leaders or institutions emerge within it, they doomed it to obscurity.

Trump’s neofascist administration understands this dynamic; it’s why they came down so brutally on student leaders in the campus anti-genocide protests. They succeeded in preventing either institution or leadership from emerging in a meaningful way.

Modern protests often reward attention, not action. Social media loves the march, the chant, the sign, and the photo that goes viral. Trump’s people complain and mutter about “hate America marches” but generally tolerate them, assuming they’ll fizzle out like Occupy did. The click feels like participation.

But power never bends to viral content. While the George Floyd protests did produce some changes, those (particularly DEI) are aggressively being rolled back by Republicans with little protest because there’s no institution or leadership to lead the protest against their retrograde actions.

Authoritarian politicians understand this better than anyone. They know that a protest can be permitted because as long as it limits itself to protest it burns itself out. A million tweets feel like movement, but they evaporate by morning. The noise is cathartic, and the system stays the same.

Real change doesn’t happen on the screen or even in the streets. It happens in the precincts, in the county offices, in the long nights where volunteers count ballots or knock on doors. With education, spokespeople, and specific demands.

The campaign of Zohran Mamdani for New York City mayor is a great example; here we’re seeing real leadership and an effective organization that he’s built around his candidacy. It’ll be an inspiration for an entire new generation.

That’s the difference between the America that not just marched in movements but also created organizations with structure, leadership, and a specific vision of the future they’re fighting for.

The movements of the 1960s, for example, changed America because they had leadership, structure, and strategy. The civil rights, labor, and antiwar movements were powered by organizations like the SCLC, SNCC, SDS, and the United Farm Workers. Leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, Tom Hayden, and Dolores Huerta trained others, built networks, and turned protest into policy.

Those marches were not spontaneous. They were the culmination of years of organizing in churches, union halls, on campuses, and in living rooms. King’s March on Washington was not the movement; it was the exclamation point on a decade of strategy.

Today, our movements are broader, younger, and more diverse, but also largely fragmented and leaderless. Social media spreads outrage faster than ever, but it can’t replace the disciplined institutions that have historically held movements together. If we’re to save American democracy, we can’t only have bursts of energy without long-term direction.

It is not that people lack courage; they lack coordination. The rightwing oligarchs intent on destroying our democracy built their empire from the ground up with the Powell Memo and, more recently, Project 2025 as specific blueprints.

For more than forty years, the Republican Party has been playing a long game. While Democrats chased the next election cycle, conservatives built a media empire.

They invested in talk radio, cable news, think tanks, and local media outlets. They funded the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, ALEC, and a constellation of dark-money groups that shape laws before most people even hear about them. They worked the school boards, city councils, and state legislatures. They didn’t just build candidates. They built infrastructure.

And it paid off.

When a bought-off, well-bribed Clarence Thomas delivered the deciding vote in Citizens United v. FEC in 2010 to legalize bribery of judges and politicians, that decision’s infrastructure became their weapon of choice. Suddenly billionaires and corporations could pour unlimited, even anonymous, money into the political bloodstream. And, most significantly, the right already had the arteries and veins in place.

While progressives held rallies, conservatives bought the megaphones, built the institutions, and found, elevated, and empowered leaders and spokespeople. The result is a minority rightwing movement that dominates America through structure and leadership, not popularity or protest.

Democrats have good people, good policies, and good intentions but lack a unified strategy and clear leadership. Too often, the party reacts instead of leads. It posts instead of plans. It wins headlines and loses legislatures. It’s most senior people often dither rather than project power and leadership.

Right now, when the right pushes disinformation and chaos, the left too often offers silence or even confusion. We need a structure that says: here is the America we would govern, and here are the people ready to govern it.

Money is speech, the Court told us. But that was a lie designed to cement oligarchy. Citizens United allowed the wealthy to flood elections with cash, to buy influence, to capture regulators, and to shape policy without accountability.

The result is an American political economy that serves the powerful and distracts the rest. Billionaires fund propaganda networks that pretend to be news. They back think tanks that write laws to protect monopolies and suppress wages. They fill campaign coffers so thoroughly that elected officials become their employees.

This is not a conspiracy theory: it’s an accounting statement. Follow the money and you’ll find the fingerprints of the same handful of billionaire and corporate donors behind almost every regressive policy of the last two decades.

The GOP didn’t just accept this system. They engineered it. And they exploit it to this day.

If democracy is to survive, Democrats — and small-d democrats— must build an infrastructure that competes on a similar footing. That means fundraising systems that depend on millions of small donors instead of a few billionaires. It means community-level leadership development. It means institutions that outlast elections. And it requires specific demands.

Real resistance begins with message discipline. Every Democrat, every progressive organization, every citizen who believes in democracy must be part of a single, steady chorus: defend democracy, restore the middle class, protect the planet, guarantee healthcare and education for all, and — most important — get big money out of politics while establishing a legal right to vote.

The right repeats its talking points until they become accepted truth. We must do the same, only with facts, compassion, and moral clarity.

Endurance is just as essential, and in that sense Indivisible — the one organization that’s really emerged so far to lead this movement — has gotten us off to a great start.

The movement, however, can’t fade when the crowds disperse or when social media moves on. It has to grow in the off-season, in county offices, at organizing meetings, in living rooms, and in campaign trainings that prepare the next generation of leaders.

Change starts locally, which is where you can volunteer and show up. Conservatives understood long ago that power begins on school boards, city councils, and election commissions. They built from the ground up while progressives often looked to Washington. If we’re serious about reclaiming democracy, it must start in those same local arenas where laws are written and values are taught.

We must also be clear about what we stand for. Protest is not policy.

Real policy means repealing Schedule F, protecting voting rights, restoring oversight, enforcing antitrust laws, taxing concentrated wealth, defending reproductive freedom, guaranteeing healthcare and education for every American, making it as hard to take away your vote as it is to take away your gun, and finally removing the corrupting influence of money from our political system.

These are not slogans: they’re the foundation of a functioning democracy, which has been dismantled bit by bit over the years by the billionaires who own the GOP.

And none of this will succeed longterm without strong progressive media. We need to restore and support newsrooms and platforms that report truth, tell stories that matter, and counter the billionaires’ propaganda networks. If we fail to shape the narrative, those who profit from lies will continue to shape it for us.

Finally, real resistance requires action with purpose. Outrage alone changes nothing. When the powerful refuse to listen, we must act with the same courage that fueled the labor movement and the fight for civil rights. Strikes, boycotts, confronting violence with nonviolence, and coordinated economic pressure are how ordinary people force extraordinary change.

As Jefferson, Lincoln, Douglass, Addams, King, Chavez, Newton, and Hayden (among others) taught us, history moves when citizens organize, persist, and make injustice impossible to ignore.

The right has been building its machine since the Powell Memo in 1971. The left must start today. We must be as disciplined, organized, and relentless as they are, but with a moral compass that points toward democracy to counter their fascist project.

The No King Day protesters reminded the world that America still has a conscience. But a conscience without a plan is a sermon without a church.

The next phase of this movement must be structural. We need think tanks, training programs, legal defense funds, local newspapers, coordinated communication networks, and candidates ready to lead at every level. We need to replace despair with design and get inside and animate the Democratic Party.

Democracy is not defended by hashtags. It’s defended by hands, millions of them, building, voting, organizing, and refusing to quit when the cameras are gone.

The No King Day marches were righteous and inspiring. But history will not remember the crowd: it will remember what the crowd built.

If we want a nation of citizens and not subjects, we must do the slow, steady, unglamorous work of taking back our republic, one precinct, one institution, and one election at a time.

Volunteer for your local Democratic Party and become a precinct committeeperson. Join Indivisible. Run for local office and participate with local pro-democracy organizations. Show up.

That is the revolution worth marching for.

Louise’s Daily Song: “When the March Fades”

The song that was inspired by this article is here.
My reading this article as an audio podcast is here.
My newest book, The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink is now availble in bookstores nationwide.
You can follow me on Blue Sky here: https://bsky.app/profile/thomhartmann.bsky.social