Government by Dissent

Protest, Resistance, and Radical Democratic Thought in the Early American Republic

Robert W. T. Martin

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780814745427
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

"The most thorough examination we have of how early Americans wrestled with what types of political dissent should be permitted, even promoted, in the new republic they were forming.Martin shows the modern relevance of their debates in ways that all will find valuable—even those who dissent from his views!"—Rogers M. Smith, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania Democracy is the rule of the people.But what exactly does it mean for a people to rule? Which practices and behaviors are legitimate, and which are democratically suspect? We generally think of democracy as government by consent; a government of, by, and for the people.This has been true from Locke through Lincoln to the present day. Yet in understandably stressing the importance—indeed, the monumental achievement—of popular consent, we commonly downplay or even denigrate the role of dissent in democratic governments. But in Government by Dissent, Robert W.T. Martin explores the idea that the people most important in a flourishing democracy are those who challenge the status quo. The American political radicals of the 1790s understood, articulated, and defended the crucial necessity of dissent to democracy. By returning to their struggles, successes, and setbacks, and analyzing their imaginative arguments, Martin recovers a more robust approach to popular politics, one centered on the ever-present need to challenge the status quo and the powerful institutions that both support it and profit from it. Dissent has rarely been the mainstream of democratic politics. But the figures explored here—forgotten farmers as well as revered framers—understood that dissent is always the essential undercurrent of democracy and is often the critical crosscurrent. Only by returning to their political insights can we hope to reinvigorate our own popular politics.

1

Introduction

Under cover of darkness and disguise, a carefully orchestrated band of protesters intentionally and systematically destroyed private property. On a different occasion and in a discreet context, a large, peaceful protest was marred by a handful of rioters who engaged in some destruction of private property, despite other protesters’ efforts to stop them. The former episode we praise as the “Boston Tea Party” (1773), and twenty-first-century political movements have been named after it; the latter incident we denigrate as the “Battle of Seattle” (1999), that is, if we remember it at all.

While this stark comparison is perhaps unfair in certain respects, it does tell us a great deal about the way in which American thinking about popular disorder, and political dissent more generally, has changed since our founding era. When a modern political protest aims to respect private property but does not quite live up to its goals, we call it a “battle”; our eighteenth-century forebears, on the other hand, celebrated a concerted effort at intentional, forcible destruction.¹ Indeed, they would find it remarkable, even unfathomable, that we modern Americans do not make such disorder more central to our democratic theory and practice. We are, after all, a nation that was literally created by riotous refusal.

Whether this is intentional oversight or collective amnesia, we are hardly alone in our failure to appreciate the centrality of dissent to democracy. Past political theorizing has focused on the issue of dissent episodically at best. From its very beginnings in John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1689), the theory of “government by consent” has presumed consent and marginalized dissent.² When other political philosophers have examined the nature and place of dissent, it has been primarily as a dynamic of individual expression (e.g., John Stuart Mill, Henry David Thoreau) rather than as the core of democratic life. And America has a checkered history of silencing, or at least minimizing, dissent. From the Sedition Act of 1798 to the McCarthy era in the 1950s to the White House press secretary Ari Fleischer’s post-9/11 declaration that we all must “watch what [we] say,” dissent has been seen as suspect, especially in times of danger and uncertainty. But there have also been, from the very beginning, philosophical and practical efforts to permit and even privilege dissent. It is these latter efforts that this book recovers and explores.

Studying dissent “goes against the grain of contemporary political theory,” the distinguished legal scholar Cass Sunstein has recently observed.³ Researchers have instead been preoccupied with the kind of rationality and discourse—public thinking and political talk—that is required for legitimate democracy. These are important topics, and dissent is often a kind of discourse. Yet these research preoccupations have tended to obscure rather than clarify the nature and role of democratic dissent. This book counters these trends by analyzing some of the earliest theories of dissent in American democracy. Dissent has rarely been the mainstream of American politics, but it has often been a critical crosscurrent and has always been an essential undercurrent. It has been with us since the earliest efforts to form a democratic politics. The quasi-official mobs of the pre-Revolutionary era became the official, if Revolutionary, Committees of Safety and Correspondence, which in turn gave rise to state governments; these governments joined together in the Articles of Confederation and ultimately sanctioned the ratification process for the Constitution. As we shall see, the first struggles over the meaning of that Constitution were ultimately struggles over the place of dissent in democracy.

Drawing on largely forgotten early models—real and proposed institutions as well as philosophical constructs—I explore and substantiate a theory of what I call “dissentient democracy,” that is, a democracy that values dissent as an essential core element. With this phrase, I have adapted a term that eighteenth-century writers sometimes used to describe those who disagreed with the prevailing view.⁴ A renewed appreciation of dissentient democracy suggests the need for new popular attitudes that value dissent and public institutions that nurture it. The broader challenge—for all of us—is to restore the centrality of dissent to our inherited tradition, our current political theory, and our future democratic practice.

Dissent can be easy to take for granted, however. Sometimes it hides in plain sight, as we expect and can thus ignore it: the candidate’s stump speech, an impassioned letter to the local newspaper, or the lonely dance of las madras—the women whose sons or husbands have “disappeared” at the hands of a dictator’s thugs. But dissent also flies below our radar screens: two friends arguing over coffee or consumers’ silent refusal to buy food made from genetically modified organisms. Dissent is any practice—often verbal, but sometimes performative—that challenges the status quo (the existing structure of norms, values, customs, traditions, and especially authorities that underwrite the present ways of doing things).⁵ Thus, the religious “dissenters” of eighteenth-century England—Unitarians, Baptists, Quakers, and many others—are an example, a sectarian subset, of the general practice. Politically, dissent opposes the status quo, but it is more than “the opposition.” It is more than—though inclusive of—“the opposition” because opposition has often been thought of, at least since the nineteenth century, as the “loyal opposition,” and dissent need not be, and occasionally is not, unquestioningly loyal. Furthermore, “opposition” is generally conceptualized as political in the strict sense of governmental and institutional (e.g., “the opposing party,” “Her Majesty’s Opposition”). Dissent is better understood as political in a much broader sense; indeed, one of the norms it often opposes is precisely the cramped view of what is political.⁶

Dissent, then, is a broad category. What makes it even more complicated (from an analytical standpoint) is that it is also relative. It is a matter of degree but also is contextual. For instance, in a world order of global capitalism, socialist views constitute dissent. Yet in some contexts (certain enclaves of academia, say) defending capitalism is a practice of bold dissent. Complicating matters, of course, is the fact that the academy is part of that larger, capitalist world. As even this one instance suggests, it will be more helpful to avoid narrowing definitions and to stick to powerful examples; that is how we will proceed.

What matters most is how genuine dissent acts, what it does. Rarely do even the most impassioned and insightful acts of dissent prove to be substantively effective; dissenters often fail to bring about the changes they seek. More important from the perspective of democratic theory, though, is dissent’s procedural efficacy: its ability to oblige people to rethink their own views, conceptions, and underlying assumptions and to actively (re)consider other people’s views, conceptions and assumptions, especially when those other views challenge the status quo. But to be procedurally effective in this way, dissent must have some prospect of substantive success. Just as an election in which there is only one candidate is not truly democratic, so a challenge to the status quo that is genuinely hopeless is scarcely dissent.

Dissent, like the electoral process, is not always perfect or perfectly just. They both can be manipulated by defenders of the status quo; they often are.⁷ Nevertheless, genuine dissent, like a genuine election, is a necessary but not sufficient condition for democracy. This may seem obvious, or even tautological, and thus of little import. But it is not. The eighteenth-century political theorist Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously envisioned a democracy—an active, egalitarian, and participatory democracy, no less—that was meant to be free of dissent; indeed, dissent was, for Rousseau, antithetical to democracy.⁸ Similarly, many early American theorists such as Alexander Hamilton defended a version of representative democracy in which elections were essential but dissent inimical.

This is not to say that Hamilton did not dissent—he did, sometimes loudly—but rather that he did not value dissent as a necessary feature of popular government. Any theory that values and even privileges dissent per se I call dissentient. The Anglo-American religious dissenting sects were certainly dissenters because they actively refused to follow the existing religious orthodoxy, a powerful pillar of the status quo. But I do not consider them to be dissentient as they did not espouse the principle of dissent. Puritans in America, for example, championed their own dissenting view, without valuing dissent itself, but rather in the conviction that their unorthodox faith was the only truth. Accordingly, any opposition to their correct view was by definition misguided and therefore forbidden. Even nondissentient dissenters like the Puritans and Hamilton will play a role in this analysis because they often provided a first step in opening up needed challenges to the status quo, and also because they sometimes proffered important objections to those thinkers developing genuinely dissentient theories.

The nineteenth-century English political philosopher John Stuart Mill is often understood as the paradigmatic example of a theorist of the principle of dissent. In On Liberty (1859), Mill defended unorthodox, and even dangerous, dissent on the grounds that its consequences are virtually always advantageous to society. Even the false views of a dissenter are, on balance, productive because they make the rest of us reevaluate our own views, making what would otherwise be “dead dogma” into “living truth.”⁹ As we will see, theorists of the early American republic anticipated many of Mill’s arguments over a half century before his famous essay. More important, the thinkers recovered and analyzed here developed a theory of dissentient democracy. The main thrust of On Liberty, on the other hand, is that individual liberty is threatened by, and thus always in tension with, an empowered democracy. The problem is not simply Mill’s elitism, which is perhaps most evident in his later theory of “plural voting,” whereby educated citizens get more votes than uneducated ones.¹⁰ The deeper issue, from our perspective, is Mill’s moral goal: not democracy, but the “permanent interests of man as a progressive being,” that is, human social progress.¹¹ A laudable goal, to be sure, and, according to Mill, representative democracy should be part of this goal, but only a part. He is thus best understood as a theorist of dissentient society, but not of dissentient democracy.

Nevertheless, Mill highlighted some of the challenges faced by dissent, especially a majoritarian culture that sees all dissent as threatening rather than enlightening. As we shall see, some political radicals in eighteenth-century America understood that popular government needs to make room for dissent and even to privilege it.¹² Though necessary, providing ample space for dissent was arduous, they maintained, because “whoever sets up for a Reformer of public Abuses, must expect to encounter innumerable Difficulties,” not least from those who “swim with the Current; [who] believe as others [do], and act, if at all, with the prevailing Majority.”¹³

Developing a theory of dissentient democracy requires an appreciation not only of the critical role dissent plays in democracy, but also of the myriad obstacles placed before all challenges to the status quo. There is, for a start, the power of social inertia: human life is often demanding, and simply going along with the current arrangements is almost always the easier, more comfortable path. Related to this is our tendency to defer to the status quo, to accept it and even to commend it as tried and therefore true.¹⁴ Political deference was especially problematic for the plebeian dissenters of the early American republic, who faced continuing claims that the existing elite had special access to the truth and was the only class capable of being “disinterested,” that is, unbiased. Challenging these norms and notions required a theory of popular government that went well beyond periodic elections, one that was centered on a conceptual space, the democratic public sphere, where public debate over policies and philosophies could inform and transform the views of citizens and policymakers alike. However, such debates could only be genuine—more than mere rituals of assent—if there was an appreciation for the irreducible diversity of political views and a willingness to take up the uncomfortable task of self-examination. This self-reflection is difficult because it unsettles our inclination to see our own perspective as disinterested, and thus not really a perspective, but the objective “truth of the matter.”¹⁵ Finally, beyond these theoretical and cultural challenges, dissenting views generally have to contend with a host of serious practical disadvantages structured by the myriad powers of the existing order, which has privileged access to the government, the press, wealth, legal influence, and educational advantages. As we shall see, thinking through all these typical resources of the status quo was the burden placed on the first theorists of dissentient democracy, a burden they shouldered willingly because they saw dissent as essential to the democracy they envisioned.

Current Democratic Theory

“Strikingly absent from [recent theories of democracy],” the political theorist Holloway Sparks aptly observes, “is sustained attention to the role of dissent in democratic life.”¹⁶ Indeed, a major weakness of recent democratic theory is how its debates have drawn attention away from the centrality of dissent, focusing instead on a number of issues that have been largely unproductive, distracting at best, misguided at worst. The overarching debate here is captured succinctly by the title of an essay by the political theorist Chantal Mouffe, “Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism?”¹⁷ Deliberative democrats argue that the normative legitimacy of democracy—the quality that makes it more morally valid than, say, monarchy or oligarchy—lies in its approximation of an ideal wherein everyone engages in an actual discussion leading to a consensus decision based solely on the “forceless force of the better argument.”¹⁸ Elections are not essential, and interest-group power politics is anathema. What is troubling about deliberative democracy for Mouffe and many other theorists is the extent to which this approach valorizes consensus and agreement at the likely expense of difference and the genuine disagreement it occasions. Indeed, Mouffe’s main target, the preeminent deliberative theorist Jürgen Habermas, has been faulted by many critics as stressing consensus.¹⁹ Mouffe and like-minded thinkers see politics as a contest over differences; this “agonistic pluralism” is the only alternative to a politics of consensual deliberation (hence the “or” of Mouffe’s title). She is hardly alone. Aspects of this divide have continued for at least two decades.²⁰

Deliberation and Rhetoric. There are real and important disagreements here, but they have tended to ignore or obscure the centrality of dissent to democracy. This can perhaps be more clearly seen in the related disputes over the type of discourse that is appropriate to democratic debate. Writers such as Seyla Benhabib, who defend a Habermasian deliberative democracy, have argued for the power of rational deliberation to counter self-interested claims and demagogic rhetoric, thus underwriting the normative legitimacy of the reasoned agreement that emerges from such dialogue. These views are countered by those, like Iris Marion Young, who share Mouffe’s concerns for plurality and difference and who fear the exclusions that come with a norm of dispassionate, “rational” deliberation. Accordingly, Young argues for an alternative set of communicative norms, including rhetoric and storytelling, that have often been used by marginalized groups to get their dissenting voices heard.²¹ Not surprisingly, Benhabib fears that such discursive modes will induce “arbitrariness” and “create capriciousness.”²²

Exchanges like these overlook the centrality of dissent to democratic dialogue of all kinds. To be sure, Benhabib’s concerns are well founded. Rhetoric and stories can encourage us—especially in group decisions—to make choices that we later come to realize were misguided, unfair, or irrational. But then again, so can specious rational argument, when it is not chastened by informed, thoroughgoing dissent. We do need rhetoric, storytelling, and appeals to authority in democratic discourse, even though they are sometimes ways of “lying.” As Mark Twain reminds us, there are “lies, damned lies, and statistics.” So even the most rationalized, statistical approach can distort, intentionally or unintentionally, public debate. What matters i...