From Tom Paine in 1776 to Main Street in 2025: No Kings!

Just as Paine, the immigrant pamphleteer who called on Americans to break the authoritarian bonds of the British Empire, rejected the actual monarchs of his time, so the No Kings movement rejects a monarchically inclined president and a robber-baron Congress that is bent on taking from the poor and giving to the rich.

America’s 21st-century Tories govern with such swashbuckling disregard for the rule of law and the rights of the great mass of Americans that it is easy to be discouraged. But Paine and his contemporaries had plenty to fret about in 1776, when they took on the most powerful man, the most intimidating military, and the most overarching empire on the planet.

When the rebellious colonials prevailed, they established a constitutional framework that established peaceful yet powerful tools for averting an American monarchy.

Congress was given the power to check and balance presidents. Courts were charged with applying the rule of law and preventing presidents from becoming “elected dictators.” And, when Congress and the courts were too slow or too cowardly to step up, the people were afforded a right to peacefully assemble and petition for the redress of grievances.

Seizing their own power, workers and civil rights campaigners found ways to expand the scope of American democracy and extend its promise to those who were once disenfranchised by the wealthy white elites that, after the Revolution, often clashed with Paine and his allies. Proud American activists would eventually establish a multiracial and multiethnic heritage of nonviolent civil disobedience that has challenged abuses of power by economic and political oligarchs with considerable frequency—and considerable success.

Today, that heritage informs No Kings! campaigning, as does the legacy of Paine’s writing, which forged a faith that visionary and progressive Americans can accomplish anything when they reject the petty preachments of elites, and choose with their voices and ballots to become their own governors.

As Americans moved tentatively toward their Declaration of Independence in the mid-1770s, it was Paine who urged them to embrace the revolutionary spirit of an enlightened age and cut the colonial bond.

“The cause of America,” wrote Paine, “is in great measure the cause of all mankind.”

The very future of freedom depended on it.

Yes, of course, the pursuit of liberty was frightening—especially when it drew the mad wrath of King George III. But “like all other steps which we have already passed over,” Paine explained, affronting the king and the empire “will in a little time become familiar and agreeable: and until an independence is declared, the continent will feel itself like a man who continues putting off some unpleasant business from day to day, yet knows it must be done, hates to set about it, wishes it over, and is continually haunted with thoughts of its necessity.”

Times, and circumstances, change. This is an unsettled and unsettling moment, when a president has overruled the governor of the nation’s most populous state and ordered National Guard members and Marines onto the streets of a major city; and when a United States senator, California Democrat Alex Padilla, was manhandled, thrown to the ground, and handcuffed for trying to ask a government official—in this case, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem—a legitimate and necessary question. But the call to resist wrongheaded rulers, who assume the trappings of illicit and unaccountable monarchy, remains constant.

Paine anticipated Trump when he warned: “Men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent; selected from the rest of mankind their minds are early poisoned by importance; and the world they act in differs so materially from the world at large, that they have but little opportunity of knowing its true interests, and when they succeed to the government are frequently the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominions.”

It was in that knowledge that Thomas Paine called America into being with the cry: “O ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose, not only the tyranny, but the tyrant, stand forth!”

Or, to put it in another way, one that will echo across the country this weekend: “No Kings!”