These Days Before the Vote: "We the People — Not You the King."
Fort Atkinson, Wis. — This Saturday in Wisconsin is the quintessence of fall's beauty: crisp, clear, bright October shining on amber leaves. Today continues These Days Before the Vote, a series addressing each day before the November election a principle or position on which our liberal democratic tradition rests.
It's a No Kings Day across America. As in past area protests, people nearby go to Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, to gather with their signs on a bridge across the Rock River. This libertarian blogger found himself there again with the residents of a neighboring town.
There have been several nearby protests: Hands Off! (April 2025), No Kings (June 2025), Free America/No Kings (July 2025), Good Trouble Lives On (July 2025), No Kings (October 2025), No Kings (March 2026), and today's mobilization.
The mood has changed as the nation's mood has changed. The earliest protests had a mood of resolute but uncertain defiance; there is a committed and more confident defiance now. The Hands Off! protest in my adopted hometown — beautiful Whitewater, Wisconsin — had a tentative, uneasy sentiment. Those were the supposed beginning days of an eternal Trump Era:
...first as the election approached and then after Donald Trump’s victory, pundits and political strategists lined up to declare its cultural meaning quite expansive — a shift not just in electoral politics but also in the partisan alignment and cultural life of the whole country. This was the beginning of an era, we were told; his election was perhaps as significant as the one that once heralded the Reagan revolution or what was called the emerging Democratic majority in Barack Obama’s multicultural America.
See David Wallace-Wells, The Vibe Has Shifted Back, New York Times, June 29, 2026.
The attendees I've met at these events in rural Wisconsin are typically older, often so much so that they refer to me, to my amusement, as young or younger. They have been a stalwart band, staying for the full event, standing for the full time, cheering and holding signs throughout.
At one of the earliest protests in Fort Atkinson, a few counter-protesters came by to stand along the bridge on which we were gathered. There's no more of that, although they were (and would still be) met without interference if they came by. Now one sees only the raised middle fingers of a few passing drivers, while hearing the supportive honking of hundreds of other motorists. (The raised middle finger: a MAGA man's failed attempt at modern sign language.)
There are years ahead of us, of course, first to replace the authoritarian populists in office by democratic means, and thereafter to begin a new reconstruction to assure the vitality of liberal democratic institutions.
We've come part way; the protesters on the bridge will not be stopping now.
