Commentary
The American experiment is teetering on the brink
Saturday’s mass protests were a necessary step, but not sufficient on its own. Success requires a fusion with effective political leadership capable of translating the energy of the streets into strategy.
Against a backdrop of escalating tensions, fueled by accusations of “internal subversion” from the strategists of the “conservative revolution,” millions of Americans marched on Saturday in thousands of cities to reaffirm the values of the original American experiment – the rebellion against the British crown 249 years ago.
That experiment, as Senator Chris Murphy said from the stage in Washington D.C., is now teetering on the brink. “We are not on the verge of an authoritarian takeover. We are in the middle of an authoritarian takeover,” Murphy warned. “Our democracy is in peril, but it can be saved. But no one's riding to our rescue. … There aren't establishment responsible Republicans that are riding to our rescue. The mainstream media isn't riding to our rescue. There's no oligarchs riding to our rescue. It is up to us to save us,” the senator added, reminding the crowd that Donald Trump is following a detailed plan to progressively dismantle the largest Western democracy.
Murphy spoke about the current congressional standoff over Trump’s budget, which has paralyzed the government: “I will not vote for a budget that doesn't put some serious checks on President Trump's destruction of our democracy. In fact, no Democrat has a moral obligation to vote for a budget that just pays the bills for Donald Trump's political witch hunts. So this is a moment for the people who work with me in this Capitol to draw a moral line in the sand.”
His statement highlighted one goal of the mobilization coalesced around the slogan “No King”: to create a united front capable of reactivating repentant Trump voters and tapping into the vast pool of people who decided not to vote, upon which the populist right’s ascent was built. Saturday’s mass protests were a necessary step, but not sufficient on its own. Success requires a fusion with effective political leadership capable of translating the energy of the streets into strategy.
All eyes are now on the upcoming midterm elections, with the awareness that the MAGA project is already entering an overtly intimidatory phase to overwhelm the electoral process – just as it did eight years ago. This time, the tactics include aggressive gerrymandering, relentless propaganda about Democratic “fraud,” and the pre-emptive deployment of federal troops in cities.
This paramilitary “self-invasion” was a recurring theme throughout the day. “Imagine this – agents of the government flying in Blackhawk helicopters into Chicago, rappelling down an apartment building in the middle of an American city,” said Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock at the rally in Atlanta, referencing a recent incident. He recalled the words of Martin Luther King Jr.: “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.”
Each of the thousands of speeches delivered across the country gave the measure of the breakdown of a democracy which is now only partially operational, where abuses unimaginable until recently have now become the order of the day. Enabled by a Supreme Court promoting “unitary executive theory,” an interpretation of government power as unbounded, Donald Trump now operates without constitutional scruples. With praetorian guards deployed in “enemy cities,” he raises the pressure on the judiciary, tightens restrictions on free expression, openly persecutes political opponents, and extorts submission from corporations and universities, ruling by presidential decree like a king issuing proclamations.
Meanwhile, the ethnic cleansing of the “great deportation” proceeds, alongside a frontal assault on cultural institutions via rampant historical revisionism and the dismantling of the scientific-cultural complex that has long been a pillar of American identity and soft power. “We are confronting the possible end of our Republic,” declared Bill Nye, the popular science communicator and veteran of the Vietnam War protests. “We must stop the abuses of this petulant president and his circle of sycophants.”
Like many others, Nye’s speech highlighted the existential identity crisis facing the country, harrowed by a regime determined to radically divert it from the multicultural and at least formally inclusive path set sixty years ago by the Civil Rights Movement. Behind the charismatic figure of an opportunistic demagogue, a supremacist, fundamentalist and oligarchic coalition is executing a plan to profoundly alter the prevailing symbolic order – stretching back not just to Martin Luther King Jr., but to Franklin D. Roosevelt and, ultimately, to Lincoln.
“Today, October 18th, 2025,” said Bernie Sanders, closing the rally in front of the White House, “there are more people out on the streets in more communities over our country than we have ever seen in American history.”
He pointed to the parallels of the current struggle with the one at the nation's founding: “I'm talking about a billionaire class who believe that they have the divine to rule, and who not only want massive tax breaks for themselves, but who reject any form of accountability or checks on their power. My fellow Americans, we rejected the divine right of kings in the 1770s. We will not accept the divine right of oligarchs today.”
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/no-kings-lesperimento-americano-e-in-bilico-su-un-baratro on 2025-10-19