‘No Kings’ isn’t the Tea Party, but there’s some overlap

A chronicle of Donald Trump's Crimes or Allegations

‘No Kings’ isn’t the Tea Party, but there’s some overlap

The chant on Saturday from left-leaning crowds across the country was “no kings.” There were dudes in tricorn hats (in addition to those in inflatable frog costumes), slogans embracing the revolutionary spirit of ‘76 and lots of talk of precious liberty. 

That’s a long way from “elections have consequences,” “government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together” and “you didn’t build that.”

Yes, add to the list of the political miracles worked by President Trump is getting a bunch of liberals to start talking like libertarians and turning a country that was quite comfortable recently with a very powerful federal government into a “don’t tread on me” nation.

Gallup has been asking Americans whether they think the federal government has too much power since 2002, back when the left was at the beginning of a previous liberty-loving phase, that time about the Patriot Act and wartime powers. The number has risen and fallen on some predictable lines, including the current surge of anti-authority sentiment.

But what a surge it is. In the latest survey, the percentage of Americans who said the federal government has too much power hit an all-time high, with 62 percent taking that view. Just 30 percent, the lowest ever, said it’s about right and a very consistent 6 percent said they wish the government had more power — presumably a bipartisan mix of socialists and nationalists. 

The composition of that 62 percent supermajority is the interesting part. Two years ago, Republicans had returned to their previous historic high of about 80 percent saying the government was too powerful, which was pretty typical of the Obama era for the GOP. 

As soon as Trump took office the second time, those numbers cratered. Just 58 percent of Republicans said they were concerned about federal power now, as low as they have been since before the pandemic in Trump’s first term.

The pandemic had the opposite effect on Democrats, who had been expressing steadily rising levels of discomfort since the start of President Obama’s second term and into the Trump era. By 2019, half of Democrats were concerned about federal overreach. But when COVID-19 came in, Democrats clamored for more federal power. Trump or no Trump. The number was cut in half to 25 percent by 2021 and stayed low throughout the Biden years.

Now, for the first time since 2007, the percentage of Democrats concerned about federal power is larger than that of Republicans, 66 percent compared with the GOP’s 58 percent.

Looked at one way, this is just another example of how brain-dead partisanship is ruining our civic life. Like those right-track/wrong-track numbers that magically invert every time there is a change in party in the White House, a lot of anti-government sentiment is just a reflection of party affiliation. When your team is at the helm, it’s full-steam ahead. When the other side takes the wheel, it looks like time to throw it in reverse.

And that, of course, is exactly how America lost its Congress and has ended up with an executive branch that declares wars, spends money and imposes taxes without authorization. If you only oppose overreach when it’s from the party you disagree with, you don’t actually oppose the abuse of the Constitution, only its abuse in service of ends with which you disagree.

That’s the story of how America stopped being a true republic and ended up with this jury-rigged version of a parliamentary system. In a real parliamentary system, the party that wins the national elections gets control of the whole government and gets a chance to implement its platform. In the design of the American system, the branches are divided as a check on authority, which means that, usually, bipartisan cooperation within the legislative branch and between the branches is required to do the ordinary work of governance.

But if the parties seldom work together in Congress and almost never work together between the executive and legislative branches, then things start to fall apart. The government, for instance, might not be able to meet ordinary funding deadlines and would turn basic legislative tasks into epochal-seeming battles.

What happens, then, when we get back to unified party control? All the pent-up demand for government action bursts through. Gridlock gives way to projects of transformational change and the president acts more like a prime minister, directing his party’s legislative activities and assuming the imprimatur of the other branches as he reaches for new powers.

Like H.L. Mencken said: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”

That has been the norm so far this century, so there’s little reason to think that this new, largest eruption of concern about federal power is anything other than a repeat of the previous cycles of selective outrage. Many of the Republicans who once called Obama a tyrant for using his pen and his phone now explain why it’s actually OK for Trump to order the killings of suspected drug runners, direct the prosecution of his foes or to raid the Treasury Department during a government shutdown to pay for his preferred priorities.

The smart money says that when Democrats get back in power, they will do unto Republicans — and the Constitution — what Republicans did unto them. Certainly Democrats weren’t able to restrain themselves during the Biden years and it would only be logical that the reaction to the even broader, more enthusiastic abuses of power in Trump 2.0 will be much more intense. 

But that’s only a guess based on what we’ve seen in two very choppy decades of American politics. For now, though, the small-government types typically on the right ought to welcome the arrival of the Tea Party style protests on the left, even if it’s only a situationship. 

Getting Congress back on its feet is going to take all the folks in the tricorn hats, regardless of proximity to inflatable frogs.

Stirewalt is the politics editor for The Hill, veteran campaign and elections journalist and best-selling author of books about American political history.