By Ronald Brownstein / Bloomberg Opinion
The “No Kings” rallies scheduled for Saturday will likely rank among the largest mass demonstrations in American history. But to truly contest President Donald Trump’s assault on constitutional safeguards, opponents may also need to revive an edgier tool of protest that has largely vanished from the nation’s experience: the general strike.
For this weekend’s rallies, organizers are expecting more people to turn out than the estimated four to six million who showed up at some 2,150 events during the first No Kings demonstrations in June. No one would claim those protests, which were timed to offset the military parade Trump hosted the same day in Washington, have deterred his drive to centralize presidential power and transform the federal government into a vast mechanism for rewarding allies and punishing adversaries.
Yet Ezra Levin, co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible, a liberal grass-roots group that has taken the lead role in organizing the marches, says the movement can point to real progress, including a growing network of activists, declining support for Trump in polls and the shift toward stiffer opposition among elected Democrats, who were initially loath to confront the president. “The difference between [Senate Democratic Leader] Chuck Schumer and Democrats surrendering six months ago without a fight and digging in right now,” over funding the government, says Levin, “is the mass display of people power and people organizing.”
The fact that House Speaker Mike Johnson last week disparaged the upcoming No Kings events as a “hate America rally” is an ominous escalation of the efforts by Trump and his allies to delegitimize dissent. But it is also a backhanded acknowledgment that they consider the movement an obstacle to Trump’s attempt to normalize actions that wildly depart from the nation’s democratic traditions; such as openly pressuring the Justice Department to indict political foes and repeatedly deploying National Guard troops into city streets.
What the protests have not done, though, is make it clear to enough Americans how profoundly Trump is straining the rule of law. In polling, most Americans agree that Trump is exceeding his authority as president; but in a national New York Times/Siena College Poll last month, only 46 percent of registered voters agreed that his “actions go so far that they are a unique threat to our system of government.” The risk for Saturday’s rallies is that even a massive turnout won’t convey the urgency of the moment because it involves something Americans have seen many times before: large numbers of people peacefully marching on a pleasant weekend afternoon.
That’s why discussion of a general strike, though still faint, is intensifying; as a supplement, not a substitute, to mass public protest. The general strike involves workers from sectors across the economy simultaneously staying off the job for a period of time, with the goal of fundamentally disabling economic activity, either locally or nationally. As one advocate of the idea wrote recently, “The strategy is simple, but effective: disrupt routine services until workers’ demands are met.”
The general strike has almost completely disappeared from the American consciousness. The most prominent precedents in U.S. history are “kind of ancient,” Nelson Lichtenstein, a prominent labor historian at the University of California at Santa Barbara, told me. They include the general strikes in Seattle in 1919 (sparked by shipyard workers) and San Francisco in 1934 (initiated by longshoremen), as well as efforts led by auto workers in Detroit during the late 1930s and department store workers in Oakland immediately after World War II.
The few American general strikes have prioritized economic demands. Shawn Fain, president of the United Automobile Workers Union, wants to revive that tradition by urging unions to negotiate contracts that will conclude simultaneously on April 30, 2028; then, he argues, they can launch May Day strikes across multiple industries focused on core kitchen-table demands including wages and health care.
But, as Lichtenstein points out, general strikes have often been used abroad by coalitions that extend far beyond labor unions to resist authoritarians. Mass work stoppages during the 1980s were crucial to the transition from dictatorship to democracy in both Poland and Brazil. More recently, large public protests helped foil the attempt by South Korea’s former president Yoon Suk Yeol to impose martial law.
In those international cases, Lichtenstein points out, “when you have a general strike it’s not just the workers, you end up with large sectors of the political establishment, the political leadership, the church” and elements of the business community that become involved because they too see “the state as being dysfunctional and repressive.” During Trump’s first term, Lichtenstein made the case for reviving general strikes as a means to “demonstrate the meaning of solidarity to millions entirely unfamiliar with unions or any other form of collective action” in an article titled, provocatively, “No More Saturday Marches.”
Discussion of general strikes among Trump critics has usually focused on nationwide action. But it’s difficult to imagine successfully organizing enough people to stay home to make a dent in the economy nationwide. Concentrated local action is more plausible. If Trump ultimately deploys the National Guard into, say, Chicago, it’s easier to envision unionized teachers declaring that the risk of violence from those forces justifies shutting down the schools for a day or two, which then prompts other municipal employees and sympathetic businesses to join in a broader work stoppage.
The obstacles for a modern general strike, even at the city level, are substantial: Since 1947, federal law has banned formal “sympathy strikes” where unions officially walk out in support of other union work stoppages. Whether in unions or not, workers who walk out would risk discipline, the loss of pay, or even dismissal if their employer opposes participation in a general strike. Yet in the right circumstances, enough people nonetheless might be drawn to the idea to sustain a critical mass for action, just as they did in Brazil and Poland, despite even greater threats of retribution.
The greatest asset of an American general strike in 2025 would be its very novelty. More than even mass protests, thousands of people across a city withdrawing their labor and disrupting economic activity would send a dramatic message that the threats to the American constitutional order are so dire that they demand an unusual, even unprecedented, response.
Levin says that in the movement’s weekly planning calls participants often ask about organizing a general strike. “It is possible to execute on that, but it requires a much greater level of planning and infrastructure,” than even this weekend’s rallies, he told me. Nonetheless, Levin added, “I suspect it is where we are going.”
Ronald Brownstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He is a CNN analyst and the author or editor of seven books.
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