Today is Devaluation Day!

At the global No Kings protest, we take back the power. We devalue the pretend king. We make Trump into a sh•tcoin.

But what is a king?

I’m on Amtrak, from New York City to Boston. Leaving the misty city on No Kings Day I notice again that nothing in Manhattan’s skyline was built by Donald Trump.

Trump’s fractionally-owned parking garages may be buried somewhere back there, but the defining tower blocks of the island are the Empire State, the Chrysler Building, and some weird new Slim Jims.

Downtown is the One World Trade Center, which replaced the late lamented Twin Towers and now serves like a dull vice-president after a charming president is assassinated. I’m always a little surprised it’s still there. In any case, gridded New York City, unlike the radial church-centric towns of New England, where I’m headed has nothing at the center—no church, no mayor’s mansion, no palace. Its tallest buildings are commercial. We consent to their construction with our taxes, our consumer choices, and our participation in a hierarchy of wealth.

Liberal democracy is the worst system in the world except for all the others. There’s a new acronym, WEIRD, that, in someone’s haste to win the meme, stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. How obscene. If we must have an acronym, it should have been WIRE, as all the epithets but one are self-hating and mark the nations it designates as capitalist and imperialist. But the D, democracy, is the sine qua non of modern civilization. Even if democracy is honored in the breach more than the observance, we lump it in with “rich” and “industrialized” at our peril.

So what’s a king? To paraphrase Marx: a spectre is haunting the United States, the spectre of monarchism.