Echoes of the Masses: From Tarde to Desmet, Unraveling the ‘No Kings’ Rally’s Hidden Currents

The “No Kings” rallies, vibrant progressive outcries against authoritarianism, reflect a web of psychological and sociological forces fueling collective fervor. Gabriel Tarde’s The Laws of Imitation (1890) likens the spread of viral ideas to a contagion, escalating isolated grievances into a mimetic storm. Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895) reveals how these rallies dissolve individual reason into irrational collective emotion. Sigmund Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) casts leaders as primal father figures, their absence or threat forging libidinal bonds that bind followers in shared delusion. Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) warns that such spectacles herald a mass society where isolation breeds vulnerability to mob ideology, eroding the public sphere. Mattias Desmet’s The Psychology of Totalitarianism (2022) diagnoses these rallies as products of modern mechanistic loneliness, spurring a desperate quest for meaning through ideological hypnosis. Together, these works frame the “No Kings” rally as more than protest but a microcosm of humanity’s seductive, destructive dance with the crowd. Yet, anchoring oneself in the eternal—timeless values or spiritual truths—can break the spell of ideological hypnosis and restore individual clarity and resisting the crowd’s fleeting sway.