Your Protest Needs Cringe Middle-Aged Women

I know your mom went to No Kings and you thought it was dorky, but it's time to grow up.

Photo by Masha S on Unsplash

If you’ve been paying attention to politics this week, the countrywide anti-Trump protest movement known as the “No Kings” protest was a big success, as far as Trump’s favorite metric goes: the crowd size was tremendous, with numbers in the millions of people (Trump would pronounce this “meeyons,” by the way.)

No Kings is good for many reasons. First of all, love the name. It’s snappy. Immediately, you know what they mean. The rejection of the “King” concept is also very patriotic in a way that feels accessible to lots of Americans. But perhaps that’s the problem. Within a few hours of the protest coverage, I started seeing takes pop up about how the protests “weren’t really doing anything,” (unlike all the edgier protests that took place in the past five years, which clearly made amazing progress, right?) that they were “full of winemoms” and of course, that they were “cringe.”

Jerusalem Demsas

said it better than I ever could with her viral essay, No Kings Wasn’t Cringe. But don’t judge just by the title, because that’s only a snippet of her point. Ultimately, she’s not defending the protests as exceptionally cool or hip, but rather addressing the point that it simply doesn’t matter if a mass protest or movement is cool to a subset of edgy Internet people (most Americans are watching Young Sheldon, after all, she reminds us) and that judging the protest as “cringe” is ultimately the most cringe move of all.

I will “yes, and” her, although she does sort of make this point too: if any protest (or political faction, for that matter) is concerned with being exclusive, hard-to-understand, super-academic, edgy, or anti-mainstream, anti-cringe in any meaningful way, it will simply not be successful. Of course, “success” is hard to define when it comes to nonviolent protests since most of them do not achieve overnight goals, but presumably turnout is important (politicians and businesses notice when millions of people show up!) and turnout is directly tied to, well, the number of people who feel they’re welcome. Most Americans are a little bit cringe. For a protest to be big and impactful, you need the cringe.

But when people say “cringe,” about any particular political movement, it’s usually abundantly clear what kind of people they’re talking about. They’re not talking about eighty-year-old men in wheelchairs holding wacky signs. They’re not talking about forty-year-old men with their kids. And they’re definitely not talking about twenty-year-old men. They’re talking, of course, about women—especially middle-aged women. But if any protest is going to make a meaningful impact, you need the Karens. The Karens, the Susans, the Debbies, and the Donnas.