9,728mm
B O L D V I S I O N S I N E D U C AT I O N A L R E S E A R C H
Civics Education for the 21st Century
Mordechai Gordon (Ed.)
Quinnipiac University, Hamden, CT
Reclaiming Dissent is a unique collection of essays that focus on the value of dissent for the survival of democracy in the United States and the role that education
can play with respect to this virtue. The various contributors to this volume share
the conviction that the vitality of a democracy depends on the ability of ordinary
citizens to debate and oppose the decisions of their government. Yet recent history in the United States suggests that dissent is discouraged and even suppressed
in the political, cultural and educational arenas. Many Americans are not even
aware that democracy is not primarily about voting every four years or majority
rule, but about actively participating in public debates and civic action. This book
makes a strong case for the need to reclaim a tradition in the United States, like
the one that existed during the Civil Rights Era, in which dissent, opposition, and
conflict were part of the daily fabric of our democracy. Teacher educators, teacher
candidates, new teachers, and educators in general can greatly benefit from reading this book.
Reclaiming Dissent
Reclaiming Dissent
B O L D V I S I O N S I N E D U C AT I O N A L R E S E A R C H
Reclaiming Dissent
Civics Education for the 21st Century
Mordechai Gordon (Ed.)
Mordechai Gordon (Ed.)
ISBN 978-90-8790-884-3
SensePublishers
SensePublishers
BVER 27
Reclaiming Dissent
Bold Visions in Educational Research
Volume 27
Series Editors:
Kenneth Tobin, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA
Joe Kincheloe, McGill University, Montreal, Canada
Editorial Board:
Heinz Sunker, Universität Wuppertal, Germany
Peter McLaren, University of California at Los Angeles, USA
Kiwan Sung, Woosong University, South Korea
Angela Calabrese Barton, Teachers College, New York, USA
Margery Osborne, Centre for Research on Pedagogy and Practice Nanyang Technical
University, Singapore
W.-M. Roth, University of Victoria, Canada
Scope:
Bold Visions in Educational Research is international in scope and includes books from two areas:
teaching and learning to teach and research methods in education. Each area contains multi-authored
handbooks of approximately 200,000 words and monographs (authored and edited collections) of
approximately 130,000 words. All books are scholarly, written to engage specified readers and catalyze
changes in policies and practices. Defining characteristics of books in the series are their explicit uses of
theory and associated methodologies to address important problems. We invite books from across a
theoretical and methodological spectrum from scholars employing quantitative, statistical, experimental,
ethnographic, semiotic, hermeneutic, historical, ethnomethodological, phenomenological, case studies,
action, cultural studies, content analysis, rhetorical, deconstructive, critical, literary, aesthetic and other
research methods.
Books on teaching and learning to teach focus on any of the curriculum areas (e.g., literacy, science,
mathematics, social science), in and out of school settings, and points along the age continuum (pre K to
adult). The purpose of books on research methods in education is not to present generalized and
abstract procedures but to show how research is undertaken, highlighting the particulars that pertain to a
study. Each book brings to the foreground those details that must be considered at every step on the way
to doing a good study. The goal is not to show how generalizable methods are but to present rich
descriptions to show how research is enacted. The books focus on methodology, within a context of
substantive results so that methods, theory, and the processes leading to empirical analyses and
outcomes are juxtaposed. In this way method is not reified, but is explored within well-described
contexts and the emergent research outcomes. Three illustrative examples of books are those that allow
proponents of particular perspectives to interact and debate, comprehensive handbooks where leading
scholars explore particular genres of inquiry in detail, and introductory texts to particular educational
research methods/issues of interest. to novice researchers.
Reclaiming Dissent
Civics Education for the 21st Century
Mordechai Gordon
Quinnipiac University, Hamden, CT, USA
SENSE PUBLISHERS
ROTTERDAM/BOSTON/TAIPEI
A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-90-8790-884-3 (paperback)
ISBN 978-90-8790-885-0 (hardback)
ISBN 978-90-8790-886-7 (e-book)
Published by: Sense Publishers,
P.O. Box 21858, 3001 AW
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http://www.sensepublishers.com
Printed on acid-free paper
All Rights Reserved © 2009 Sense Publishers
No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or
otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material
supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system,
for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.
For Joe Kincheloe
Who filled the world with insight, hope and unmitigated joy.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First of all, I would like to thank Peter de Liefde, my publisher at Sense
Publishers, who has given me a tremendous amount of support throughout
the work on this book. It has been a pleasure to work with Peter on this
project. I would like to personally acknowledge all the contributors to this
volume: Marvin Berkowitz, Sean Duffy, Gloria Holmes, Michael James,
Bill Puka, Sarah Stitzlein and Joel Westheimer. This book would not have
been possible without their dedication and efforts to bring it to fruition.
Finally, I want to thank my wife, Gabriela Gerstenfeld, who since she often
disagrees with me, has helped me come to appreciate the value of dissent.
vii
CONTENTS
Introduction
Mordechai Gordon
1
Part I
DISSENT UNDER ATTACK
1
The Meaning and Value of Dissent in a Democratic Society
Mordechai Gordon
2
Historical, Political, and Legal Efforts to Squash Dissent
in the United States
Sean P. Duffy
27
“But They Chose Segregation:” A Case Study of Mexican
Immigrant Resistance in California
Michael E. James
49
Unfit for Mature Democracy: Dissent in the Media
and the Schools
Joel Westheimer
65
3
4
11
Part II
DISSENT AND EDUCATION
5
Dissent: Pulling Teachers off the Sidelines and Back
Into the Democratic Game
Sarah Stitzlein
6
Dissent and Character Education
Marvin W. Berkowitz and Bill Puka
7
Power Concedes Nothing without Demand: Educating Future
Teachers about the Value of Dissent in a Democratic Society
Gloria Graves Holmes
8
Toward a Pedagogy of Dissent
Mordechai Gordon
89
107
131
153
About the Contributors
167
ix
MORDECHAI GORDON
INTRODUCTION
The first amendment of the United States Bill of Rights states that:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech,
or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to
petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
There is little doubt that the founding fathers of the United States were
aware of the value of dissent for the life of a democracy when they decided
to mandate, in the very first amendment of the Constitution, the fundamental
human right of free speech. For freedom of speech, as the first amendment
is written, implies a commitment by the government to value diverse opinions,
the ability to demonstrate and voice opinions that are not popular, and the
right to dissent against a government decision or law.
However, recent events in the Unites States suggest that the government
has not lived up to its promise to protect and value dissent. For instance, the
2001 USA PATRIOT Act has legitimized the use of warrantless wiretaps,
expanded the use of detentions, and led to the restrictions on the access
of the media and protestors to the President and other national and world
leaders. In this way, this Act has made it more difficult to organize and
voice opposition to the actions of the government like the war in Iraq, since
ordinary citizens may now be more afraid of being targeted. More importantly, the PATRIOT Act has led to a weakening of the spirit of dissent in
the United States by creating an atmosphere in which any opposition to laws
or actions that are intended to “defend” America are deemed unpatriotic or
un-American.
Besides the United States government, the mainstream media has also
played a key role in undermining dissent in this country. For one thing,
analysis from critics such as Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman, and Seymour
Hirsch is noticeably absent from the opinion pages of our major newspapers.
Equally troubling, is the fact that the mainstream media does not cover many
of the burning issues like healthcare, immigration or the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan in a thorough and balanced way. Many important issues that
are raised by the media are covered in a cursory and often biased manner,
M. Gordon (ed.), Reclaiming Dissent: Civics Education for the 21st Century, 1–7.
© 2009 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.
GORDON
thereby giving their audience a superficial picture of the problem. Moreover,
the mainstream media like to pretend that they are merely reporting the
news; they are not typically aware of the fact that they also serve as
knowledge producing agencies. The point is that most of the media in the
United States not only do not cover the voices of opposition, but also, through
their surface coverage of important news items, reduce the likelihood that
ordinary citizens will rise up to engage in acts of dissent.
Finally, the education system in the United States shares the blame for
not helping students develop critical thinking skills and learn about the value
of dissent in a democratic society. As John Gatto (2002) writes in his book
Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling.
The logic of the school-mind is that it is better to leave school with a tool
kit of superficial jargon derived from economics, sociology, natural
science, and so on than with one genuine enthusiasm. But quality in
education entails learning about something in depth… Meaning, not
disconnected facts, is what sane human beings seek, and education is a
set of codes for processing raw data into meaning. Behind the patchwork
quilt of school sequences and the school obsession with facts and
theories, the age-old human search for meaning lies well concealed.
(pp. 3–4)
Thus, most schools in this country still emphasize the study of disconnected
facts and isolated skills rather than getting students to learn about important
issues in depth. As Gatto noted, students leave these institutions with very
little enthusiasm to engage in the kind of thorough examination of issues and
civic action that are essential for a thriving democracy.
This book focuses on the value of dissent for the survival of our democracy
and the role that education and schooling can play with respect to this
virtue. The idea for this book comes out of my interest in politics and education and my deep concern about the erosion of democracy in the United
States in the last several decades. One of the most striking characteristics
of this erosion is the fact that dissent is discouraged and even suppressed
in the mainstream media, in our public schools, and in public debates in
general. Particularly troubling is the way in which conservative leaders and
groups are pushing schools to support their reactionary agenda, one that
emphasizes standardization, traditional notions of authority, and blind
patriotism. Such an agenda undermines the development of those skills and
facilities students need to become critical and active citizens in a democracy.
As a result, the meaning and value of dissent for the life of a democracy is
lost upon most students and citizens in the United States. Indeed, as one of the
key democratic virtues, dissent seems to be all but forgotten in this country.
2
INTRODUCTION
Most books on civics or democratic education fall into three general
categories. The first category attempts to address the following questions:
Who should have the authority to shape the education of future citizens?
Why should they enjoy this authority? And what are the democratic purposes
of public schooling? A good example of this approach to civics education is
Amy Gutmann’s (1987) well known book Democratic Education. In this book,
Gutmann explores the practical implications for educational policy in the
United States of a democratic theory of education.
Another set of books on civics and democratic education is one that
examines the state of education in our democracy with respect to all the
citizens, in particular those people that are traditionally excluded or marginalized. These books generally argue that the well-being of the American
democracy requires a good education for all, not some, of its citizens and
that a worthy education cannot discriminate on the basis of race, gender,
nationality, religion, lifestyle, physical disability, and so forth. For instance,
Goodlad, Mantle-Bromely and Goodlad (2004) argue that “the provision
of total inclusion is a moral imperative in a democracy and,…, a practical
necessity for the health of all and for the continued renewal of a democratic
culture” (p. 7).
A third set of books that deal with the issue of citizenship and democratic
education is one that in some way engages the following question: What
are the essential capacities or dispositions that young people need to have
in order to engage in democratic activities such as deliberation and action?
Patricia White’s (1996) Civic Virtues and Public Schooling: Educating
Citizens for a Democratic Society is an example of a book that addresses
this question in depth. In her book, White identifies hope, confidence,
courage, self-respect and self-esteem, friendship, trust, honesty and decency
as those “dispositions that democrats need but that have to be shaped to take
a particular form in a democratic society” (p. 3). White devotes a full chapter
to explaining what each of these dispositions entails as well as how educational institutions might cultivate these virtues in students.
Reclaiming Dissent: Civics Education for the 21st Century does not fall into
any of the above categories of books that deal with civics and democratic
education. The uniqueness of this book is in its focus on only one
democratic virtue (dissent), which the authors use as a lens to consider the
issue of a worthy education in a democratic society. This book is divided into
two main parts, each of which includes four chapters. Part one, examines the
value of dissent for a democracy as well as historical and current efforts to
suppress dissent in the United States. The contributors to part one highlight
both the efforts to contain resistance to the government and some successful
attempts to oppose its policies and practices. Part two focuses on the
3
GORDON
implications for education and teaching that can be gleaned from a
pedagogical approach that embraces dissent as a democratic virtue.
In chapter one, “The Meaning and Value of Dissent in a Democratic
Society,” Mordechai Gordon asserts that consensus destroys democracy and
that a democratic society can only flourish to the extent that dissent becomes
an integral part of its underlying structures and processes. Gordon begins his
discussion by exploring the benefits as well as the limitations and dangers
that consent poses for a democratic society. Next, he examines the meaning
and value of dissent by focusing on the lessons we can learn about dissent
from the examples of three famous dissidents: Socrates, Thoreau, and
Angela Davis. In the last part of his chapter, Gordon reflects on a number
of limitations of dissent as well as on the main differences between
reasonable and thoughtless dissent.
In the next chapter, “Historical, Political, and Legal Efforts to Squash
Dissent in the United States,” Sean Duffy argues that the suppression of
dissent in American civic culture is fundamentally tied to national cultural
traits such as xenophobia, a desire for conformity, and a fundamental
distrust of radical movements and beliefs. In his chapter, Duffy shows that
throughout American history, legal and governmental efforts to squash
dissent have been most fervent in times of national crisis characterized by
increasing levels of immigration, economic recession and involvement in
outside conflict. At such times, governments at all levels can outstrip Constitutional checks to suspend individual civil liberties particularly with regard
to immigrants, non-nationals and radical organizations. Duffy’s chapter
traces such impulses from the first period of xenophobic crisis in the 1790s
through the Red Scares of the early 20th Century and the more recent
reactions to the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001.
Chapter three by Michael James is titled “But they chose segregation:
A Case Study of Mexican Immigrant Resistance in California.” In this
chapter, James argues that the history of dissent in American education is
not confined to highly publicized, large scale mass protests but can often be
embedded within covert actions that all too frequently go undetected by the
dominant culture. Relying on the seminal work of political anthropologist
James Scott, this chapter analyzes the ways subordinate communities protest
asymmetrical relations of power without risking direct confrontation. By
examining one case study in detail—Mexican immigrant workers in turnof-the-century Pasadena, California—James illustrates how resistance to
oppression is articulated by those who have little means of formal participation within the political process.
In his contribution to the book, “Unfit for Mature Democracy: Dissent in
the Media and the Schools,” Joel Westheimer examines the role of the
4
INTRODUCTION
media in revealing or concealing dissent following the September 11, 2001
attack on the United States and the impact of this attack on schools. Through
an examination of media trends, civic education policies, and curricular
changes during the seven ensuing years, Westheimer’s chapter focuses on
the place of dissent in democratic societies and the threats to democratic
deliberation resulting from an ever-narrowing civic agenda. Westheimer’s
chapter asks what we might demand of the media and the schools for a
proper “mature democracy” to flourish.
The remaining four chapters of this volume focus on what a pedagogical
approach that embraces dissent might mean for the education of democratic
citizens. In chapter five, “Dissent: Pulling Teachers off the Sidelines and
Back into the Democratic Game,” Sarah Stitzlein claims that political dissent
as an art of democracy is at risk in the current age of accountability
and standardization, as well as in the larger culture of anti-intellectualism
and enforced consensus. Drawing upon the work of famous dissidents and
teacher interviews, Stitzlein describes processes for teaching skills of
dissent as teachers themselves engage in opposition to problematic aspects
of the No Child Left Behind Act. She highlights civics education as one
key location for the cultivation of skills of dissent within students. Stitzlein
concludes her chapter with a call for teachers to both develop and demonstrate dissent within schools as they guide students through learning the
structural and cultural components of democracy.
In Chapter six, “Dissent and Character Education,” Marvin W. Berkowitz
and Bill Puka assert that dissent is a necessity in a self-governing society
and that the inclination and capacity for dissent can be understood as an
aspect of an individual’s character. Berkowitz and Puka maintain that
schools in democracies have long been understood to carry a major part
of the charge for socializing the character of each subsequent generation.
Therefore, character education should be targeted in part toward education
for the character of dissent. In their chapter, Berkowitz and Puka examine
the character of dissent and how it can be promoted, especially in schools.
They offer a taxonomy of eight core aspects of the character of dissent and
how each can be promoted pedagogically. They conclude with an examination of three school-based programs, which while not all claiming to
promote the character of socially-responsible dissent, may nonetheless be
construed as doing so.
Chapter seven by Gloria Holmes is entitled “Power Concedes Nothing
without Demand: Educating Future Teachers about the Value of Dissent in
a Democratic Society.” In her chapter, Holmes shows that multicultural
education simultaneously embodies dissent and the promise of democracy,
while providing one of the most important and controversial challenges to
5
GORDON
American education in the 21st century. Beginning with an historical overview
that begins with the 1630 myth of America as a shining “city on a hill,” she
discusses the origins of America’s dream as a place that values individual
rights and embraces diversity and multiple perspectives. Holmes then moves
to a discussion of the dynamics of dominant privilege, a concept essential to
any discussion of diversity, dissent and multicultural education. The chapter
includes a case study centered on a discussion of race as well as excerpts
from journals of teacher candidates, which reveal the impact of multicultural
education on their belief systems. Holmes concludes her chapter by showing
that becoming a multicultural educator is a transformative and potentially
life-changing process because it requires one to critically examine personal
beliefs and to understand how those beliefs inform classroom practice.
In the final chapter of this book, “Toward A Pedagogy of Dissent,”
Mordechai Gordon takes a close look at a number of examples of several
teachers and one school that have attempted to cultivate students who are
critical thinkers and responsible dissenters. Gordon begins his analysis by
considering some of the difficulties, which those educators in the United
States who are committed to fostering dissent are likely to encounter. He
then presents a number of things that various teachers and one school have
done to foster dissent in their classrooms. Gordon concludes his chapter by
reflecting on the lessons that can be gleaned from these cases for a worthy
education in a democratic society.
The various contributors to this volume share the conviction that the
vitality of a democracy depends on the ability of ordinary citizens to debate
and oppose the decisions of their government. Yet recent history in the
United States suggests that dissent is discouraged and even suppressed in
the political, cultural and educational arenas. Many Americans are not even
aware that democracy is not primarily about voting every four years or
majority rule, but about actively participating in public debates and civic
action. Democracy is about protecting the rights of minorities, respecting
diverse viewpoints, values and lifestyles, and cherishing the fundamental
right to dissent. We need to reclaim a tradition in the United States, like the
one that existed during the Civil Rights Era, in which dissent, opposition,
and conflict were part of the daily fabric of our democracy.
As I write this Introduction, Barack Obama has just been elected the 44th
President of the United States. The grass roots movement that he inspired
and mobilized is a sign that there is hope and hunger in this country for a
new type of politics, one which values the contributions that ordinary
Americans can make in bringing about social change. My hope is that the
mass movement, which helped elect the first African American President in
the United States, will not be content to remain idle, marveling in its victory.
6
INTRODUCTION
Far more important than the unprecedented results of this election, is the
prospect that civic engagement and dissent will once again become part of
the everyday fabric of the United States democracy.
REFERENCES
Gatto, J. T. (2002). Dumbing us down: The hidden curriculum of compulsory schooling. Gabriola
Island, BC: New Society Publishers.
Goodlad, J. I., Mantle-Bromley, C., & Goodlad, S. J. (2004). Education for everyone: Agenda for
education in a democracy. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass.
Gutmann, A. (1987). Democratic education. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
White, P. (1996). Civic virtues and public schooling: Educating citizens for a democratic society.
New York: Teachers College Press.
7
Part I Dissent Under Attack
MORDECHAI GORDON
THE MEANING AND VALUE OF DISSENT
IN A DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY
“Consensus destroys democracy!”
(Dr. Luis Alberto Lacalle, Former President of Uruguay, 1998)
INTRODUCTION
Anyone who has taken the time to watch the State of the Union addresses
in the last eight years may have noticed that there is something terrifyingly
similar between the way in which the senators and representatives responded
to the President’s remarks and how the Chinese parliament members reacted
to Mao’s speeches in the middle part of the twentieth century. Those long
pauses of almost unanimous stand-up applause every couple of minutes are
reminiscent of the footage depicting the great adulation that Mao received
during the heyday of Communist China five decades ago. To be sure, the
State of the Union speech is a carefully scripted spectacle, including audience
members who are hand-picked to create a feeling of pride, strength, and
patriotism. But it seems to me that this event should also give us reason to
pause and reflect on what is happening to the American democracy today.
In particular, we need to take a serious look at the dangers that the lack of
dissent in the United States poses to the strength of our public schools, the
power of our free press, and the integrity of our political institutions.
By dissent, I mean the rejection of the views that the majority of people
hold. To dissent implies to disagree with or withhold consent from a proposal,
law, or an action of a government or a group of people in power. Dissent is
usually associated with difference of opinion, disagreement and nonconformity
with conventional views or sentiments. The list of famous dissidents includes
people such as Gandhi, Martin Luther, Rosa Parks, and Salman Rushdie, to
mention only a few. These dissidents were individuals who were willing to
sacrifice personal comfort and security for the sake of exposing some serious
social problem and establishing a more humane and democratic society.
To illustrate my point about the dangers that the decline of dissent poses
for the American democracy, it is useful to look at the war in Iraq. It is well
known that almost all the Senators and Representatives from both parties
M. Gordon (ed.), Reclaiming Dissent: Civics Education for the 21st Century, 11–26.
© 2009 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.
GORDON
supported the initial invasion of Iraq in March of 2003, despite the lack of
evidence to substantiate the administration’s claims that Saddam Hussein
was amassing weapons of mass destruction and that he intended to use
these weapons against the West. It is also well known that the majority of
people in the United States did not support the preemptive invasion of Iraq
without the U.N. approval, even though the administration went to great
length to create an atmosphere of fear and panic in this country following
the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001.
Less well known is that the mainstream media in the United States sounded
the war drums prior to the invasion of Iraq, downplayed the amount of
dissent that existed for this war among ordinary people and grass root organizations, and gave much more air time to people who supported the war
than to those who opposed it.1 Today, six years after the invasion of Iraq,
when it is clear that the United States has thrust itself into something that it
does not know how to get out of, there is still not enough informed debate
among politicians, the press, and ordinary people about the colossal failure
of this offensive. During the first two years after the invasion, even public
news networks like NPR and PBS rarely questioned whether or not the
United States should even be in Iraq, reserving their criticism to specific
shortcomings of various military, civic, and humanitarian operations in that
country. In short, there seems to be a tacit assumption—shared by politicians,
media leaders and even some prominent college professors—that dissent is
incompatible with patriotism and that support for this country means not
challenging the decisions of the government too much.
In contrast, in this chapter I argue that consensus destroys democracy
and that a democratic society can only flourish to the extent that dissent
becomes an integral part of its underlying structures and processes. I begin
my discussion by exploring the benefits as well as the limitations and dangers
that consent poses for a democratic society. Next, I examine the meaning
and value of dissent by focusing on the lessons we can learn about dissent
from the examples of three famous dissidents: Socrates, Thoreau, and Angela
Davis. In the last part of this chapter, I reflect on a number of limitations of
dissent as well as on the main differences between reasonable and thoughtless dissent.
THE PROBLEM WITH CONSENT
Every society, including a democratic one, cannot exist and thrive without
some beliefs and values that its citizens share. As Alexis de Tocqueville
(2000) noted:
12
THE MEANING AND VALUE OF DISSENT
For without common ideas there is no common action, and without
common action men still exist, but a social body does not. Thus in
order that there be society and, all the more, that this society prosper,
it is necessary that all the minds of all the citizens should be brought
and held together by some principal ideas; and this cannot happen
unless each of them sometimes comes to draw his opinions from one
and the same source and unless each consents to receive a certain
number of ready-made beliefs. (p. 407)
For Tocqueville, who was intrigued by the fledgling democracy in the United
States, the society he traveled through in 1831 could not exist unless its
citizens held in common certain core principals and values like equality and
freedom. Such basic principles and values are normally accepted or taken
for granted by citizens rather than questioned or challenged.
In Tocqueville’s view, the taken-for-granted beliefs and values are
necessary not only for the existence of society but also for the well being of
individuals. “If man were forced to prove to himself all the truths he makes
use of every day,” Tocqueville wrote, “he would never finish. He would
exhaust himself in preliminary demonstrations without advancing” (pp.
407–408). Given both time constraints and the limits of an individual’s
intelligence, each person is forced to take on trust a host of facts and beliefs
that one has neither the time nor the power to verify for oneself. On the
basis of these accepted facts and beliefs, each individual creates for himself
or herself a set of opinions and values, yet the groundwork for these views
is usually never questioned. Tocqueville believed that this condition is not
only necessary but also desirable since otherwise each individual would be
condemned to finding out everything for oneself, making it almost impossible to explore any topic in depth.
Yet, while Tocqueville recognized the benefits for both society and
individuals of having some shared ideas, he was also keenly aware of the
dangers that the taken-for-granted beliefs pose for the citizens of a democracy. He emphasized that the public, by which he meant the majority
opinion, does not try to persuade the minority of the validity of its beliefs.
Rather, “it imposes them and makes them penetrate souls by a sort of
immense pressure of the minds of all on the intellect of each” (p. 409). Thus,
Tocqueville was concerned that the majority viewpoint in the United States
would overshadow minority opinions and that unpopular truths would no
longer be spoken. Moreover, he correctly called our attention to the danger
of allowing the majority to simply supply individuals with ready-made
opinions, thereby relieving them of the obligation to form their own. Not
having lived through the age of mass media and their attempt to mobilize
support for the powerful elite, it is amazing how Tocqueville was able to
13
GORDON
foreshadow how a democratic society such as the United States could
willingly induce its citizens to trust the general will and give up thinking.
Indeed, when one reads Democracy in America, one is struck by the fact
that many of Tocqueville’s observations still hold true today. For instance,
he remarked in his discussions on the tyranny of the majority that “I do not
know any country where, in general, less independence of mind and
genuine freedom of discussion reign than in America” (p. 244). Tocqueville
explained that freedom of thought and expression are not limited in the
United States as long as one remains within the boundaries that the majority
has erected. However, if one dares to cross these boundaries one is likely to
face a host of penalties and persecutions:
A political career is closed to him: he has offended the only power
that has the capacity to open it up. Everything is refused to him, even
glory. Before publishing his opinions, he believed he had partisans; it
seems to him that he no longer has any now that he has uncovered
himself to all; for those who blame him express themselves openly,
and those who think like him, without having his courage, keep silent
and move away. He yields, he finally bends under the effort of each
day and returns to silence as if he felt remorse for having spoken the
truth. (p. 244)
For Tocqueville, the most pressing problem with the democratic government
he witnessed in the United States is the omnipotence of the majority party
in relation to the minority. What he feared most, which he calls the
“tyranny of the majority,” is that the majority in the United States, because
it is so powerful, would easily deny both individuals and groups who are in
the minority their basic rights of expression and determination. As he puts it:
What I most reproach in democratic government, as it has been organized in the United States, is not, as many people in Europe claim, its
weakness, but on the contrary, its irresistible force. And what is most
repugnant to me in America is not the extreme freedom that reigns
there, it is the lack of a guarantee against tyranny. (p. 241)
Perhaps Tocqueville is exaggerating the power of the majority in the United
States to control public opinion, open discussion, and individual expression.
But it seems to me that it is difficult to disregard his argument that the
governing party in the United States together with the mass media go to
great length to squelch dissenting opinions and limit the discussion to those
parameters that they deem legitimate to talk about. Indeed, Edward Herman
and Noam Chomsky refer to the practice of shaping public opinion and
squelching dissent as “manufacturing consent.” Unlike the common view
14
THE MEANING AND VALUE OF DISSENT
that the media in the United States are independent and committed to
discovering and reporting the truth, Herman and Chomsky (1988) assert
that it is more accurate to say that the mainstream media tend to reflect the
world as powerful groups wish it to be perceived:
Leaders of the media claim that their news choices rest on unbiased
professional and objective criteria, and they have support for this
contention in the intellectual community. If, however, the powerful
are able to fix the premises of discourse, to decide what the general
populace is allowed to see, hear, and think about, and to “manage”
public opinion by regular propaganda campaigns, the standard view of
how the system works is at serious odds with reality (p. xi).
Much like Tocqueville, Herman and Chomsky are deeply concerned about
the way in which the powerful groups in this country use their influence to
control information, dominate public discussions, and suppress dissenting
viewpoints.
To illustrate this point, consider the case of the war in Iraq mentioned
above. In a speech given on October 7th 2003, Chomsky argues that
starting in September of 2002, there was an active propaganda campaign
initiated by the Bush Administration to scare the American public and
shape the conversation in such a way that made resistance to invading Iraq
unpopular and anti-American. To begin with, Chomsky (2003) reminds us
that in early September, National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice,
warned us that “the next evidence we were likely to have about Saddam
Hussein will be a mushroom cloud, presumably over New York.”2 Then on
February 5, 2003, Secretary of State, Colin Powell, delivered the famous
multimedia presentation at the U.N., using satellite images and intercepted
phone calls, to try to convince the world that Hussein was hiding weapons
of mass destruction and cultivating links with Al Qaeda. Finally, it has been
demonstrated by FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting), the media
watch group, that in the months and weeks leading up to the invasion of
Iraq, ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS, conducted about 400 interviews with
experts about the war. In its study, FAIR concluded that Network newscasts
were dominated by current and former U.S. officials and largely excluded
Americans who were skeptical of or opposed to an invasion of Iraq. “Of all
393 sources,” the study found, “only three (less than 1 percent) were identified
with organized protests or anti-war groups.”3
Following this propaganda campaign, should it come as any surprise that
by the end of September of 2002, 60% of the American people regarded
Iraq as a serious threat to the security of the United States? Equally troubling, is that in the weeks leading up to the war, about 50% of the population
15
GORDON
believed that Iraq was involved in the September 11th attacks on the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon. For Chomsky, the irony is that at this same
time none of Iraq’s neighbors were afraid of Saddam, neither Kuwait, which
Hussein invaded, nor Iran, which experienced an eight-year devastating war
with Iraq. “They’re not afraid of him because they know exactly what the
U.S. intelligence and everyone else knows – Iraq was the weakest country
in the region” (2003). Its economy and population had been devastated by
the U.N. sanctions; the country was virtually disarmed and had been under
total surveillance for years.
What is at stake here is the ability of powerful groups in the United States,
including the administration and the mass media, to shape public opinion,
manufacture consent, and even induce individuals to give up thinking on
their own. Uncritical consent is very dangerous, as Tocqueville warned us,
since it undermines some of the core principles of a democratic society
such as individual expression, diversity of opinions, and open discussion.
In light of Chomsky’s critique, it is evident that uncritical consent among
members of congress, the mainstream press, and the American public made
it possible for the Bush administration to invade Iraq in 2003, despite
making a weak case for this war. In hindsight, one of the most important
lessons that we can learn from this war is about the critical role that dissent
can play in preventing unwarranted military confrontations.
DISSENT FROM SOCRATES TO ANGELA DAVIS
Based on the discussion above, it is clear that I think that dissent is
indispensable for the life of a democracy and that recent attempts to limit
dissent in the United States pose a serious threat to some of our core values.
Safeguarding dissent is essential for the welfare of a democracy because it
ensures that different and even opposing opinions will be considered before
taking action. Moreover, protecting dissent is vital since it guarantees that
unpopular viewpoints will be heard rather than silenced. According to this
view, arguments and disagreements are important because they force
people to think, search for evidence, and come up with convincing reasons
for their positions. In what follows, I would like to expand on the meaning
and value of dissent by looking at the lessons we can learn from the
examples of three famous dissidents: Socrates, Thoreau, and Angela Davis.
The story of Socrates as it appears in the dialogues of Plato indicates that
he loved to engage in dialogues with his fellow citizens from Athens.
Socrates was relentless in his search for the truth. He was an expert at
examining the opinions of his dialogue partners and evaluating them
from multiple perspectives to see if they hold up to the test of reason and
experience. Perhaps this is one of the reasons that the dialogues that
16
THE MEANING AND VALUE OF DISSENT
Socrates takes part in so often seem to go around in circles, analyzing the
same problem from different points of view, but never really reaching a
definitive answer. Yet while it is true that Socrates does not provide us with
conclusive definitions of virtue, justice, or love, he does help us gain a
better understanding of these very complex and rich concepts. As such,
Socrates embodies what it means to be a critical thinker: a person who
takes nothing for granted and continuously engages in the process of
questioning, doubting, analyzing, and revising his ideas.
One of the instances in which Socrates presents his views on dissent is in
the dialogue Gorgias. In this dialogue, Socrates engages in a discussion
with Gorgias, Polus and Callicles, all famous orators, on the differences
between the life of the orator and the life of the philosopher in the context
of debating the nature of the moral life. In one of the pivotal moments in
the dialogue, Socrates tells Callicles:
And yet for my part, my good man, I think that it’s better to have my
lyre or a chorus that I might lead out of tune and dissonant, and have
the vast majority of men disagree with me and contradict me, than to
be out of harmony with myself, to contradict myself, though I’m only
one person. (Plato, 1987, p. 52)
On the surface, the point that Socrates is making is that we should be
careful not to contradict ourselves, that is, that we need to be consistent and
logical in our arguments. More importantly, however, is the idea that it is
better to be true to oneself and uphold one’s values than to constantly change
one’s views so that one would remain popular and not offend others, even
though the majority of people might disagree with you.
In light of Socrates’ experience, we can see that dissent is frequently
related to critical thinking and the search for truth. This is not to say that
every dissident is a person who is committed to thinking and finding the
truth. Yet historically speaking, dissidents were more often than not people
who questioned popular beliefs and refused to take things for granted (e.g.
Galileo, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela). Moreover, for Socrates,
dissent implies a willingness to stand tough against popular beliefs and an
eagerness to defend the truth at all cost. In this view, dissent and disagreement are preferable to consent and conformity because the former are likely
to lead to a deeper understanding of complex issues like the nature of the
good life and whether or not the United States should have attacked Iraq.
Consent and conformity, on the other hand, have historically led people to
support misguided practices, unethical policies, and even criminal acts (the
Holocaust is a case in point)4.
17
GORDON
Another instance in which Socrates discusses dissent is when he is forced
to defend himself at his trial (Apology). One of the important arguments
that Socrates makes at his trial is that dissidents are valuable because they
often expose knowledge from which others can greatly benefit: “I think that
god put me on the state something like that, to wake you up and persuade
you and reproach you every one, as I keep settling on you everywhere all
day long” (Rouse, 1965, 436). Conformists, on the other hand, can deprive
the public of invaluable information and even tacitly support criminal acts.
Cass Sunstein (2003) summarizes this point well:
Conformists are often thought to be protective of social interests,
keeping quiet for the sake of the group. By contrast, dissenters tend to
be seen as selfish individualists, embarking on projects of their own.
But in an important sense, the opposite is closer to the truth. Much of
the time, dissenters benefit others, while conformists benefit themselves.
If people threaten to blow the whistle on wrongdoing or disclose facts
that contradict an emerging group consensus, they might well be
punished. Perhaps they will lose their jobs, face ostracism, or at least
have some difficult months. (p. 6)
Dissenters are important for democratic societies not only because they expose
various dangerous truths but also because they often speak out and struggle
against unjust laws and practices. Here, I think, the example of Henry
David Thoreau is instructive. In an introduction to a collection of Thoreau’s
writings, Joseph Wood Krutch notes that the slavery question drove Thoreau,
who in the earlier part of his life would have been inclined to withdraw
from society and immerse himself in nature, to fight against this grave
injustice: “To Thoreau, who cherished individual freedom as the most
precious of human rights, slavery could not but be the blackest of evils,
and so, in time, he was to find himself somewhat incongruously enrolled
among the defenders of the active abolitionists” (Thoreau, 1962, p. 13).
Indeed, in January of 1848, Thoreau delivered a lecture at the Concord
lyceum in which he preached complete, yet nonviolent resistance to any
authority which is unjust. Presumably, this lecture became the basis for his
famous essay “Civil Disobedience,” which was published the following
year. In this essay, Thoreau (1962) declared that respect for the law is evil
if it conflicts with respect for fundamental human rights such as freedom:
Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we
endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or
shall we transgress them at once? Men generally, under such a
government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have
persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should
18
THE MEANING AND VALUE OF DISSENT
resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. It makes it worse.
Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does
it not cherish its wise minority? Why does it cry and resist before it is
hurt? Why does it not encourage its citizens to be on the alert to point
out its faults, and do better than it would have them? (p. 92)
Here Thoreau clearly suggests that consent to the law of the land is not
always a good thing and that there are instances in which it is better to
transgress rather than follow unjust decrees. For Thoreau, the government
and the majority that support it are not inclined to correct the wrongs since
it would mean relinquishing some of their power and changing the status
quo. Therefore, it is up to the minority and ordinary citizens to call attention
to and struggle against those laws and practices, like slavery, that are
blatantly opposed to the basic principals of democracy. As Sunstein writes,
Diversity, openness, and dissent reveal actual and incipient problems.
They improve society’s pool of information and make it more likely
that serious issues will be addressed. I do not deny that great suffering
can be found in democracies as elsewhere. There is no guarantee,
from civil liberties alone, that such suffering will be minimized… But
at least it can be said that a society which permits dissent and does not
impose conformity is in a far better position to be aware of, and to
correct, serious social problems. (p. 149)
One dissident who dedicated her life to the struggle against the oppression
of African Americans in the United States is Angela Davis. Davis, a black
activist and member of the communist party, became famous during the
Civil Rights Era and the Vietnam War, as a vocal advocate of equality for
blacks and anti American imperialism. She continuously charged that African
Americans and other minorities were systematically discriminated against
and oppressed by institutions such as the judicial system in the United
States. Davis was arrested several times in large part because of her
involvement in the communist party as well as her vocal stance against the
United States’ treatment of blacks and its aggression in Southeast Asia.
Writing from jail in 1971 about the efforts of people such as Anthony Burns
and Marcus Garvey to emancipate Blacks, Davis (1971) notes that:
All these historical instances involving the overt violation of the laws
of the land converge around an unmistakable common denominator.
At stake has been the collective welfare and survival of a People.
There is a distinct and qualitative difference between breaking a law
for one’s own individual self-interest and violating it in the interests of
a class or a People whose oppression is expressed and particularized
19
GORDON
through that law. The former might be called criminal (though in many
instances he is a victim), but the latter, as a reformist or revolutionary,
is interested in universal social change. Captured, he or she is a
political prisoner. (p. 29)
Here Davis calls our attention to the difference between dissidents and
revolutionaries who break the law on behalf of a group of people who are
oppressed and unlawful acts committed by individuals to serve their own
self interest, such as robbers and murderers. The former are justified, she
implies, since political dissidents typically act for the sake of correcting
various institutional injustices and bringing about necessary social change.
The latter, on the other hand, may rightly be called criminals because they
are motivated simply by their own benefit and a desire to harm others.
Thus, the distinction between dissidents and criminals hinges on the different
goals that drive their respective decisions to break the law. Unlike regular
criminals, dissidents, according to Davis, are generally people who act in
order to resolve some grave injustice and bring about a better, more humane
and democratic society.
How would Socrates, Thoreau, and Davis respond to the U.S. invasion of
Iraq, mentioned at the beginning of this chapter? Socrates would probably
insist that this invasion was guided by erroneous information, a distortion
of the facts, and faulty reasoning. Based on his notion that dissidents should
be committed to searching for and speaking the truth, Socrates would urge
us to explore the real reasons that motivated the United States to attack
Iraq. Such an analysis would lead us to reject all of the justifications that
the Bush administration gave for its invasion like the notion that Saddam
was collecting weapons of mass destruction, that he intended to use these
weapons against the U.S. and its allies, and that he was cultivating links
with Al Qaeda. In short, a Socratic dissident would most likely come to the
conclusion that the invasion of Iraq should be strongly condemned since all
of the reasons that the United States’ government gave to justify its actions
were shown to be incorrect.
In addition to Socrates’ argument, Thoreau would probably say that even
if the United States had reliable and accurate intelligence prior to initiating
this war, the invasion was still unjustified since the United States was never
attacked by Iraq. Given that Thoreau believed that violence is only justified
as a last resort, like self defense, he would certainly never approve a preemptive, unprovoked invasion such as this one. For Thoreau, the United States’
invasion of Iraq was unjust not only because it was an unwarranted act of
violence, but also because the U.S. failed to follow the legal protocol that
exists in the U.N. regarding sanctions and the use of force. Inspired by
Thoreau, a dissident of the U.S. invasion would argue that the actions of the
20
THE MEANING AND VALUE OF DISSENT
United States were undemocratic because they infringed on the rights of the
Iraqi people and a sovereign country.
Angela Davis would agree with Socrates and Thoreau’s critique of the
actions of the Untied States against Iraq. She would probably add that the
U.S. invasion of Iraq was plainly not an act that was prompted by a noble goal
aimed at bringing about democracy to that country or establishing a more
humane society. On the contrary, Davis would most likely call the invasion a
criminal act motivated by self-interest, a lust for oil, and a desire for domination in the region. As a dissident who was deeply concerned about the
oppression of minorities in the United States, Davis would challenge the U.S.
invasion and occupation of Iraq because of the great suffering and destruction
it has brought about for the Iraqi people. She would point out that it is the
ordinary Iraqis, not Saddam or his family, who have paid the heaviest price
for this war in terms of lives lost and the loss of economic opportunities,
not to mention the psychological damage that this war has inflicted.
REASONABLE VERSUS THOUGHTLESS DISSENT
Although I have argued that dissent is generally a very valuable and even
indispensable practice in a democratic society, as a critique or defiance of
popular views, dissent should not be celebrated as such. As Sunstein argues,
in reality, dissent is not always helpful:
Sometimes dissenters lead people in bad directions. And when conformists are doing the right thing, there is far less need for dissent. If
scientists have reached the correct conclusions about global warming,
pseudo-scientists do us no favors in pushing nutty theories of their
own. (p. 7)
Global warming is a good example of an issue about which there is a fairly
broad consensus among scientists in the field. The majority of scientists
believe that global warming is serious, that it is getting worse, and that
something significant has to be done about it now in order to avert catastrophe
in the future. Still, there are a few scientists, business executives and some
prominent politicians in the United States who argue that global warming is
not really that serious and that we do not have enough evidence to support
the claims of the majority opinion. In this case, the dissent of the latter is
more like a refusal to face up to the devastating consequences of the warming
of the earth caused by the actions of human beings than an alternative
understanding of this problem that is worthy of our attention. It is an attempt
to put the short term financial gains of a relatively few individuals over the
long term welfare of the human race and the earth.
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GORDON
The case of the war in Iraq discussed in this chapter is another example
in which the minority dissenters in the United States seem to be leading the
country toward a very dangerous outcome. Even though the majority of
Americans believed a couple of years ago that the United States should pull
its troops out of Iraq and end its occupation of this country as soon as
possible, the Bush administration decided in 2007 to send more American
soldiers into Iraq. Remember also that the decision of the Bush administration to support a surge of troops contradicts the recommendations of the
Iraq Study Group, which it appointed. Although the surge of American
troops in Iraq has had a substantial effect on reducing the amount of sectarian
violence, it has had little impact on making this country and the region in
general more secure. Much like the case of global warming, the insistence
of the Bush administration to maintain the U.S. troops in Iraq illustrates the
point that the opinions and actions of the minority dissenters do not always
lead to good results.
Moreover, there are many cases in which consent and consensus enable
people to live in peace and security in a democratic society. For instance,
Gary Shiffman (2002) notes that
There is a broad consensus that murder is a crime and should be
punished by the state. I believe that it risks little to add that in this
domain—the criminal code regarding acts of violence—consensus is
not only a fact but also a norm. That is, we consider it good and justified
that we agree; we believe, I think, that consensus on such matters is at
least an overlapping consensus, more likely the mark of civilization or
humanity. (p. 182)
For Shiffman, the consensus that exists in the United States and other
democracies that murder, theft, and other acts of violence are crimes that
should be punished is one of the virtues that distinguishes a civilized society
from other societies. Those who dissent and commit such crimes are not
simply breaking the law but are explicitly hurting other people and undermining the moral backbone of society.
Even though many dissenters throughout history have been people who
were motivated by just causes such as freedom and equality (e.g. Nelson
Mandela and Martin Luther King), there are also quite a few who can be
considered villains and monsters (e.g. Osama bin Laden and Hitler among
others). So what distinguishes the former dissidents from the latter? What is
the difference between Martin Luther King and Osama bin Laden, for
instance? To begin with, is the fact that the former was motivated by a very
noble cause, namely, ending the racism and discrimination of African
Americans in the United States and restoring the humanity of this oppressed
22
THE MEANING AND VALUE OF DISSENT
group of people. The latter, on the other hand, seems to be inspired more by
a lust for power and a desire for vengeance against the United States than
by some worthy causes such as justice or peace.
Second, is the point that the “good dissidents” mentioned above realized
that in order to bring about the ends they desired, they had to choose means
of struggle that were consistent with those ends. Both Nelson Mandela and
Martin Luther King elected to use nonviolent methods of resistance rather
than violence to combat the institutional racism and discrimination that
were rampant in their societies. Both Mandela and King realized that in
democracies the means of bringing about social change cannot really be
separated from the ends. They understood, in other words, the point that
Dewey (1966, pp. 81–99) made in Democracy and Education: that in
democratic societies the methods of initiating change have to be consistent
with and support the goals that one is seeking. In this view, using tyrannical
means to achieve democratic objectives is not only contradictory but also
counterproductive. In contrast, the “bad dissidents,” like bin Laden or Hitler,
advocated the use of violence, destruction and killing in order to bring about
their visions of a better world. Hence good dissidents typically diverge
from bad ones in both the ends they strive for and the means they select to
achieve these ends. The former embrace democratic values as guiding
principle for their actions, whereas the latter prefer despotic tactics to help
them achieve their plans and exploits.
What we need, then, is a form of dissent that is thoughtful and self-critical
rather than dissent for its own sake. In Sunstein’s words, “what we want to
encourage is not dissent as such but reasonable dissent, or dissent of the right
kind” (p. 91). Sunstein’s point is that a democratic society should encourage
open dissent for the sake of exposing problems or unjust laws, considering
multiple options, and carefully weighing all the evidence for each option
before taking action. In other words, dissent in democracies is valuable to
the extent that it can support the democratic process of freedom of speech,
exchange of ideas, deliberation and unbiased inquiry. It should not serve
as an uncritical defiance of an existing policy for the purpose of simply
rejecting it.
Paulo Freire (1994) echoes this point when he argues against a kind
of unreflective activism or “action for action’s sake” (p. 69). For Freire,
reflection and action as instruments of change in a democracy are mutually
dependent; action should always be informed by reflection and reflection
should always lead to action. In the same way, dissent, as a form of political
action intended to bring about change, ought to be thoughtful and intentional.
When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus in 1955, she wasn’t
merely tired or being stubborn. She was deliberately trying to resist a racist
23
GORDON
law of segregation, which required blacks to sit in the back of the bus and
give up their seats if there were white passengers standing. Park’s example
teaches us that thoughtful dissent is usually aimed at transforming some
significant social problem and trying to create a better and more humane
society.
Aside from the distinction between reasonable and unreasonable dissent,
we also need to consider how much dissent is optimal in a democratic
society. In other words, what is the best mix between consent and dissent?
Unfortunately, this question does not have an easy answer that can be applied
to all situations. Legally, it is probably best to permit free dissent, but
practically speaking, as I have shown, there are forms of dissent like murder
or hate speech that cannot be tolerated in a democracy. There are also
examples of dissent in the United States—like the refusal to face global
warming—that are not based on genuine reflection and a careful evaluation
of the evidence. At the same time, there are numerous cases of dissent, both
historical and current, that were not only reasonable, but that helped
transform this country for the better. Thus, each case of dissent needs to be
considered on its own merit.
Still, it is probably safe to say that this society suffers from too little
dissent rather than too much. How do I know that this is the case? For one
thing, the two party system of government in the United States makes it
very difficult for independent candidates with fresh perspectives to get
equal air time, not to mention get elected to office. Moreover, critics of
the American political system like Ralph Nader charge that, practically
speaking, there is very little difference between the Republican and Democratic parties since both of them are closely tied to the big corporations and
receive large donations from them. Historically speaking, the leaders of the
two major parties have rarely taken action that seriously challenged the
agendas of the large corporations, like fight for a national healthcare plan
or try to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Analyzing the monopoly of
political elites in the United States in the context of public opinion and poll
taking, Justin Lewis (2001) concluded that
While the more centrist or conservative connotations of poll responses
inform public debate, many of the left-leaning, social democratic
inclinations suggested by opinion surveys—whether support for
universal healthcare, for increases in most forms of social spending, or
for limiting the power of large corporations—are generally ignored.
(p. 200)
Furthermore, the majority of the mainstream media in the United States
present the news in a very superficial, one-sided, and mundane way. There
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THE MEANING AND VALUE OF DISSENT
are very few in-depth news programs in the big television networks and
even fewer debates among intellectuals about social, political or cultural
issues of interest. An atrocity in Africa or Asia gets much less attention
than the transgressions of celebrities in this country. Think of the amount of
coverage that the Anna Nicole Smith saga received in comparison to the
crisis in Darfur. The former is a story about an abused Playboy star that has
absolutely no political or social significance, whereas the latter deals with a
humanitarian disaster. It would seem that the mainstream media are much
more interested in getting the viewers to empathize with the misfortunes of
celebrities than to think deeply about important social issues or criticize the
policies of the administration.
Finally, public schools for the most part do not educate students to be
critical thinkers, respectful skeptics and reasonable dissidents. Rather, these
institutions teach students to accept the information that is given them
without questions, to look for simplistic solutions to complex problems, and
to adjust to the status quo. Kathleen Vail (2002) confirms this sentiment
when she writes that “some civics and social studies educators worry that
by emphasizing the easy side of patriotism, schools are neglecting to show
their students the complex and difficult sides of democracy, including of
government in their lives” (pp. 14–15). Vail goes on to suggest that there
seems to be a vacuum of education about democracy in our schools. The
four chapters in the second part of this book attempt to respond to this void
by examining the role of dissent in the education of democratic citizens and
exploring ways of helping students become critical citizens and thoughtful
dissidents.
CONCLUSION
Despite the various dangers of uncritical dissent discussed above, I strongly
agree with the statement of the former president of Uruguay, Lacalle, that
“consensus destroys democracy,” cited at the opening of this chapter.
Consensus destroys democracy by greatly curtailing the possibility that
diverse viewpoints, rigorous discussion and critique—all essential to maintain
the democratic process—will play a major role in shaping the direction of
the country. And consensus destroys democracy by privileging the majority
opinion, ignoring the needs and interests of minorities, and marginalizing
the voices of dissent. Ultimately, a society that punishes dissenters for
speaking out against a wide range of institutional forms of discrimination,
inequalities, and racism cannot be considered democratic.
Gary Shiffman echoes this point when he writes that “regimes that purport
to represent the people on the basis of perennial and perpetual consensus
are generally, and I believe rightly, viewed as undemocratic, or as fake
25
GORDON
democracies. Democracy without institutionalized, normative disagreement is
simply not democracy” (p. 182). Open dissent is thus one of the essential
characteristics that distinguish a democratic society from other societies
that are despotic in nature. Indeed, freedom as one of the foundational pillars
of a democracy is an empty phrase unless it includes the ability to dissent
and disagree with the opinions of others. Without the ability to dissent a
society cannot really be considered free. Neither is such a society truly
diverse, in the sense of being open to multiple perspectives and beliefs.
NOTES
1
2
3
4
See for instance an article in The Washington Post from August 12, 2004 in which the writer
admitted that from August 2002 until March 19, 2003 the Post ran more than 140 front page stories
that focused heavily on administration rhetoric against Iraq and downplayed critics of the Iraq war.
See also the September 8, 2002 article in The New York Times by Michael Gordon and Judith Miller
entitled “U.S. Says Hussein Intensified Quest for A-Bomb Parts” in which the authors suggest that
Saddam Hussein is renewing his efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction and downplay the
evidence that cast considerable doubts on this claim.
Taken from a speech that Chomsky gave at Illinois State University on October 7th, 2003 entitled
“Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance.” Retrieved 12/6/06 from http://www.
democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/10/22/1450216&mode=thread&tid=25.
See the Action Alert by FAIR entitled “In Iraq Crisis, Networks Are Megaphones for Official
Views.” Retrieved 12/6/06 from http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1628
For a good discussion of the dangers of conformity in the context of the Holocaust see Hannah
Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, (New York: Penguin Books,
1977); see also Geoffrey Short’s essay “Antiracist Education and Moral Behaviour: Lessons from
the Holocaust,” Journal of Moral Education, 28, 1999, 49–62.
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Arendt, A. (1977). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. New York: Penguin Books.
Davis, A. (1971). If they come in the morning: Voices of resistance. London: Orbach and Chambers.
Dewey, J. (1966). Democracy and education. New York: The Free Press.
Freire, P. (1994). Pedagogy of the oppressed (Myra Bergman Ramos, Trans.). New York: Continuum.
Herman, E. S., & Chomsky, N. (1988). Manufacturing consent: The political economy of the mass
media. New York: Pantheon Books.
Lewis, J. (2001). Constructing public opinion: How political elites do what they like and why we seem
to go along with it. New York: Columbia University Press.
Plato. (1987). Gorgias (D. J. Zeyl, Trans.). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing company.
Rouse, W. H. D. (1956). Great dialogues of Plato. New York: New American Library.
Shiffman, G. (2002). Construing disagreement: Consensus and invective in ‘Constitutional’ debate.
Political Theory, 30(2), 175–203.
Short, G. (1999). Antiracist education and moral behaviour: Lessons from the Holocaust. Journal of
Moral Education, 28, 49–62.
Sunstein, C. R. (2003). Why societies need dissent. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Thoreau, H. D. (1962). Thoreau: Walden and other writings (Joseph Wood Krutch, Ed. & Intro.).
New York: Bantam Books.
Tocqueville, Alexis De. (2000). Democracy in America (H. C. Mansfield & D. Winthrop, Trans. &
Ed.). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Vail, K. (2002). Lessons in democracy. American School Board Journal, 189(1), 14–19.
26
SEAN P. DUFFY
HISTORICAL, POLITICAL, AND LEGAL EFFORTS
TO SQUASH DISSENT IN THE UNITED STATES
“Political repression [is] not episodic and cyclical… but rather at the
center of the national experience.”
William Preston, Jr. (Preston, 1994, p. 279)
William Preston first published his seminal work linking the suppression of
dissent with fundamental strains of anti-radicalism and xenophobia in 1963,
immediately in the wake of what was at the time the nation’s latest bout of
extreme political and legal efforts to squash dissent. In profiling the antiradicalism of an earlier time (1880–1920), Preston established what he
believed to be a constant factor in American political history: the impulse
to suppress the extremes of civic discourse in the name of protecting
democracy. Following Preston, I will be using the notion of “anti-radicalism”
throughout this chapter to refer to the efforts to control and censor individuals or groups that attempted to speak out and dissent against the actions
of the government. Preston’s lessons are no less important to us nearly fifty
years later, as the patterns he described are clearly visible in American
national life 100 years after the period he studied. This chapter will outline
the fundamental factors in American civic culture that Preston identified,
then detail several historical “high points” of the emergence of these factors
into civic life, and conclude with an examination of the different tools
government – at the local, state, and federal levels – has historically used to
suppress dissent.
ANTI-RADICALISM IN AMERICAN CIVIC CULTURE
From the earliest days of the American Republic, dissent has been associated
with radicalism, which in turn has been seen as a threat to the republic. The
suppression of dissent has ebbed and flowed with anti-radicalism and
nativist—anti-foreigner or anti-immigrant—sentiments. These factors have
often been augmented by domestic economic difficulty or the involvement
of the United States in foreign conflict. Jules Boykoff (2007), in his work
detailing the complicity of government, the media and popular culture in
the suppression of dissent, places this suppression in the context of the
M. Gordon (ed.), Reclaiming Dissent: Civics Education for the 21st Century, 27–48.
© 2009 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.
DUFFY
classic tradeoff between freedom and security: “The state, in concert with
the mass media, delimits what are considered ‘appropriate’ words and
deeds during ‘exceptional’ moments when state action is ostensibly needed
to install order” (p. 17). The association of disorder with radicalism of a
foreign origin often results in local, and ultimately federal, anti-immigrant
efforts including the denial of legal rights (such as the habeas corpus right,
the right to legal representation, and the right to appeal) and the use of
deportation. This focus on the immigrant is partly cultural and partly legal.
On the one hand, American culture is characterized by a xenophobia that so
easily associates radicalism with ‘un-Americanism’ and the foreigner. On the
other hand, the constitutional rights of non citizens are ambiguous, and
therefore the easiest to target through legislation and executive action.
Consequently, throughout history, periods of anti-radicalism in American
culture have been closely associated with anti-immigrant efforts by all
levels of government.
The period encompassing the late 19th and early 20th centuries provides
ample illustration for the general pattern. It is this period that forms the
basis of Preston’s work on the anti-radicalism associated with late-19th
century anarchism and the rise of socialist-inspired workplace actions
associated with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or Wobblies)
in the first two decades of the 20th century. The period began with the
massive immigration of populations new to the United States in the 1880s
and 90s, and contained two fairly substantial economic shocks. At the same
time, anarchists were responsible for several high-profile assassinations of
world leaders, culminating with the assassination of President McKinley
in 1901. In addition, changes in the workplace associated with rapid Industrialization created social pressures that resulted both in the Progressive
Movement and the rise of workplace activism and efforts to organize labor.
Finally, the period ended with American involvement in World War I, and
a reaction to the rise of Bolshevism in Europe and the Russian Revolution. The
coincidence of all these factors—the threat of anarchism/Bolshevism,
workplace agitation and the economic threat posed by socialist ideology,
the social disruption posed by the influx of ‘unassimilated’ immigrants, and
the nation’s involvement in a foreign war—led to wide scale local and
federal efforts to suppress perceived threats. These efforts targeted
immigrants and organized labor, particularly the IWW, and culminated in
the “Palmer Raids” associated with the Red Scare of 1919–1920, following
World War I.
As the 20th century progressed, however, additional factors contributed
to the manifestation of this pattern of anti-radicalism and the social and
political responses to it. First, the Cold War allowed for a more
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EFFORTS TO SQUASH DISSENT
comprehensive development of the Manichean impulse to divide the world
into spheres of good and evil, with the United States as a standard bearer
for good, opposing the evil world outside its borders. Always implicit in
American culture,1 this fundamental feeling of exceptionalism morphed
during the Cold War into a distinction between two spheres: the “free
world” (of which the U.S. was the leader) and “godless communism.” The
echo of this division was quite clear in George W. Bush’s September 20,
2001, address to the American people:
Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you
are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any
nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded
by the United States as a hostile regime (Bush G.W., 2001).
This division of the world into good and evil amplifies the tendency so
present in American culture to vilify the alien or the foreigner: that which is
external to, or different from, the consensus. This impulse all too easily
leads to the conflation of an alien threat with domestic dissent.
The Cold War struggle also had the effect of altering the Constitutional
balance between the executive, legislative and judiciary branches. It has
long been a truism that when the country is under attack or in crisis, the
nation “rallies around the flag.” This generally means rallying around the
leadership of the President in his role as commander-in-chief of the U.S.
military; it also often means the willingness of the two other branches of
government to allow the Executive to lead with policy to address the crisis.
This alters the constitutional balance between the three branches: Congress
cedes responsibility for foreign policy to the Executive, and the Judiciary –
always a reactive branch—can find itself months, or years behind in its
ability to address a quickly-changing public policy realm. The U.S.
constitutional arrangement—what constitutional scholar Edwin Corwin
characterized as “an invitation to struggle”—can become decidedly
Executive-led; in times of crisis, Congress often merely amplifies, with
hastily-drafted and minimally-opposed legislation, the national climate that
calls for suppression and executive action.
By emphasizing an external threat, the long period of the Cold War
helped to establish and ensconce an “Imperial Presidency,” strengthening
the tools available to the executive branch in its quest to preserve domestic
order and protect the homeland from external threat. The threat associated
with that which is foreign or disloyal to mainstream American culture and
politics is all too often conflated with “radical” dissent in the domestic
realm. As Boykoff (2007) noted, “The First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments
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to the Constitution are often retracted, if temporarily, in the name of
national security” (p. 25). He continues:
While the U.S. Constitution affirms the freedom of speech, assembly,
and the petitioning of grievances, in reality the state has regularly
trampled these rights when it comes to dissenters. This has especially
been the case during times of war. In these moments, which include
declared wars and metaphorical wars such as the ‘War on Terrorism,’
dissent is cast by the state as disloyalty, and in some cases disloyalty
that crosses the line into illegality… the First Amendment (freedom of
speech, assembly, and the right to petition grievances), the Fourth
Amendment (protection against unreasonable searches and seizures)
and the due process guarantee of the Fifth Amendment would all seem
to be legal weapons of defense for activists during these fear-laden,
intensity-drenched historical moments; however, these are usually the
constitutional rights that dissidents have been forced to forfeit.
(Boykoff, pp. 21–22)
All these elements of a civic realm inhospitable to dissent were in place at
the time of the attacks of September 11, 2001: an innate nativism, the
tendency to conflate dissent with radicalism and external agitation, a crisis
mentality regarding a hostile external world compounded by an immigration
crisis, and a strong executive branch insufficiently restrained by constitutional, legislative balancing. An examination of five prior periods throughout
U.S. history helps to clarify the patterns and precedents that came into play
in the early years of the 21st century.
THE SUPPRESSION OF RADICALISM IN U.S. HISTORY
1798: The Alien and Sedition Acts
A period of crisis in its relations with France in 1798 provided the
Federalist Party, the party that had held power in government since the
ratification of the Constitution, with the context and conditions for using
a rising swell of nationalist fervor in its battles against its emerging
opposition—the Democratic Republican Party led by Thomas Jefferson.2
The French Revolution, a decade earlier, had already raised the anxieties of
the American Republic about the dangers of radical social, political and
economic upheaval. The conservative instincts that became ascendant in
the Federalist Party and American civic culture more generally saw their
expression in an anti-foreign, anti-radicalism that culminated in four bills
passed into law under the signature of President John Adams, collectively
known as the Alien and Sedition Acts. “Based on the mistaken conservative
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EFFORTS TO SQUASH DISSENT
theory that foreigners were more dangerously extreme than native-born
Americans,” Preston states, “the Alien Act of 1798 gave the President
power to deport those foreign agitators he deemed a threat to the welfare
and security of the country” (Preston, pp. 21–22).
This Alien Act, or An Act Concerning Aliens, was one of three acts
passed that year that expired or were repealed by 1802; the fourth is still in
effect. The Naturalization Act, or An Act to Establish a Uniform Rule of
Naturalization, extended the residency requirement for citizenship to 14
years; it was repealed in 1802. The Sedition Act, or An Act for the Punishment of Certain Crimes against the United States, made it a crime to
publish words or ideas that could be deemed treasonous or antithetical to
the interests of the country. This was enacted with an expiration date of
March, 1801. The Alien Enemies Act, or An Act Respecting Alien Enemies,
gave the president the power to apprehend and deport noncitizens whose
countries of citizenship are at war with the United States. This is the act
that remains in force today. According to Miller, “In the Alien and Sedition
Acts, American freedom…survived one of the severest attacks destined to
be leveled against it in the name of ‘real Americanism.’” They pitted for
the first time, in the context of a foreign crisis, the countervailing tensions
between defending the interests of the country and permitting the freedoms
of speech, expression and criticism protected by the First Amendment
(Miller, 1952, pp. 22–23).
With the diffusion of the crisis, the expiration of three of the four Acts,
and the rise of the Democratic Republican party under President Jefferson,
these aspects of American civic culture, and the alien-radical stereotype
they forged, soon lapsed. Yet Preston contends that they were merely dormant:
the influx of German immigrants in the wake of the revolutions of 1848
briefly “shook the self confidence” of the nation stimulating its fear of
radical revolution, to be more fully provoked following the social and
economic changes of the late 1870s and 1880s, which “revived the latent
fear of radicalism, stimulated a new wave of nativism, and furthered the
faulty assumptions of 1798” (Preston, pp. 22–23).
1880s and ‘90s: Depression and Anarchism
Workplace insecurity and economic depression from 1873–1877 and again
in the 1880s culminated in massive strikes and riots in 1877, 1886, and
1894. Groups such as the Molly Maguires in coal country, and the rise of
socialist-inspired labor unions increasingly challenged the economic authority
of the ruling classes. In both 1877 and 1894, the Federal government sent
troops to quell workplace actions and associated disturbances, classifying
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them as ‘domestic insurrections’ (Preston, p. 5). The Haymarket Riots and
bombing in Chicago followed a protest meeting called by anarchists in
1886. These events resulted in a public hysteria about anarchism that lasted
for decades after the effective suppression of the movement by the resulting
trials and executions (Preston, p. 26).
In addition to his focus on this increase in federal actions to suppress
threats to the economic and social status-quo, Preston builds on John
Higham (1955, 2007) as he establishes the 1880s and ‘90s as the period
when the nativist tendency to link the alien and the radical became fully
established in American civic culture. The association of the Irish with the
Molly Maguires, and the presence of many foreign-born labor organizers,
increased the association of foreigners with radicalism, socialism, and
anarchism (Preston, pp. 24–25). A contemporary increase in anarchist
agitation worldwide culminated in the high-profile assassination of President
McKinley by the anarchist Leon Czolgosz (American born, but with a
“foreign-sounding” name). All this finally provoked legislative action in
1903 (Preston, p. 4). The Immigration Act of that year called for more
formalized rules governing entry and inspection of those crossing U.S.
borders.
Anti-alien and anti-radical sympathies during this period were legitimated
by the 1893 Supreme Court decision in Fong Yue Ting v. United States,
which helped fortify a reliance on deportation as one tool in a crackdown
on radicalism. In its decision, the Supreme Court upheld the right of the
government to exclude or expel aliens, and found that Congress may provide
a system for the registration and identification of any class of alien, and it
may vest the enforcement of its regulations exclusively in the executive
branch. (Justicia) According to Preston, the Fong Yue Ting ruling “determined the future pattern of expulsion in one simple interpretation: Deportation
was not a punishment for crime but merely an administrative process for
the return of unwelcome and undesirable alien residents to their own
countries.” This ruling established the legal interpretation that deportation
was justified on the grounds that the presence of targeted aliens was
“deemed inconsistent with the public welfare” (Preston, p. 11). As Preston
later states, once deportation was established as an administrative, not
criminal procedure, “all else followed.” Procedural guarantees granted by
the Bill of Rights were deemed not to pertain to this type of administrative
procedure. Thus, “expulsion often involved…long detention, excessively
high bail, unreasonable searches and seizures, the denial of counsel, selfincrimination, and trial without jury” (Preston, p. 12). By removing this
procedure from the judicial realm (in favor of executive process), the
decision also laid the groundwork for the establishment of four executive
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EFFORTS TO SQUASH DISSENT
techniques used in cases where deportation is used as a means of suppressing
radical dissent committed by aliens: arrest without warrant, “telegraphic
application” for an arrest warrant, the use of a preliminary hearing, and the
denial of counsel until a very late stage (Preston, p. 13).
During the decades following Fong Yue Ting, government extended
these practices against a steadily expanding circle of ‘undesirables.’ Preston
lists
prostitutes, procurers, lunatics, idiots, paupers, persons likely to become
a public charge, professional beggars, individuals suffering from a
loathsome or dangerous contagious disease, polygamists, epileptics,
persons convicted of felony, crime, or misdemeanor involving moral
turpitude, and Chinese and Japanese (p. 19).
Increasingly, the targets of these techniques during this period were
anarchists and other “radical” agitators who threatened the status quo and
national peace of mind. “Beginning in the late nineteenth century,” Preston
states, “the tide of repression seemed to surge more forcefully and ebb less
completely at each succeeding phase of reaction” (p. 21).
The after-effect of the Haymarket riots, and a return of economic crisis
in the 1890s created the climate for the first legislative responses to this
“idea that foreign influence was subverting the promise of American life”
(Preston, p. 23). Legislation restricting immigration by category and political
belief was first debated during this period. In 1891 and 1893, immigration
legislation contained provisions to deny entry to “anarchists” and “members
of anarchist societies” (Preston, p. 28). In 1894, similar legislation received
consideration and support from both Houses of Congress and the administration: it passed in the Senate but ran out of time for full consideration in
the House. Ultimately, these early attempts to restrict entry to the United
States, barring those with undesirable political beliefs or affiliations, failed
due to reluctance to pass legislation that gave such discretion to the
administration without defining the conceptual basis – “anarchism” – on
which persons were to be excluded.
1905–1920: The IWW and Communism
The assassination of President McKinley in 1901 changed all this. Preston
reports that “Local police apprehended anarchists, mobs assaulted radicals,
and several states passed criminal-anarchy laws” (p. 30). Restrictive language
that had failed to be enacted into immigration law was finally included in
the 1903 Immigration Act. In addition, this period saw a number of other
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efforts to suppress the threat posed by radical anarchism, some targeted
solely at immigrants, others affecting U.S. citizens as well:
Federal proposals to curb anarchism fell into two major categories:
those seeking to safeguard the President and other high officials from
any attack by drastically increasing the penalties for such action,
whether successful or not; and those attempting to make such attacks
impossible through immigration restrictions. The first assumed that
there were citizens as well as aliens whom the law would deter. In this
group were also bills to suppress anarchism, punish anarchism, amend
the Constitution to suppress anarchism, punish anarchistic killing, and
amend the Constitution to declare anarchism treason. The other line of
legislation presumed that the menace was entirely alien and favored
the exclusion, deportation, and nonnaturalization of all immigrant
anarchists. (Preston, p. 30)
In his message to Congress in December, 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt
called for a “war” against anarchism and anarchist sympathizers. The
president suggested not just excluding “known believers of anarchist
principles,” but also creating economic and literacy tests for immigrants,
to more effectively exclude the “types” of immigrants who were deemed
more likely to embrace radical or anarchist principles (Preston, p. 31). The
resulting 1903 Immigration Act excluded – for the first time – immigrants
because of their beliefs and associations. Section 2 made anarchists, or those
who advocated the overthrow by force of the U.S. government, ineligible for
immigration. Section 38 barred those who opposed organized government
more generally, or those who were members of organizations that advanced
such principles. Any alien inside the country who was found to espouse
anarchist beliefs was deportable if arrested within 3 years of entry. All this
legislation, however, came after the end of the panic: it was largely unused,
yet it set the bar for future anti-radical panics, and it signified the continued
deep distrust of foreigners as well as their association with radicalism.
The rise in activity of the Industrial Workers of the World (the IWW, or
“Wobblies”) during this period shifted the focus of anti-radical efforts to
the rise of labor activism from 1905 to 1920. By 1912, Preston recounts, a
rise in the intensity of nativism in the U.S. corresponded with the
increasing notoriety of the disruptive effects of labor activism. At this time,
he says, “Americans were… becoming much less willing to tolerate any
challenge to social homogeneity and national unity… Wobbly agitators and
strikers were making radicalism an effective threat to both” (p. 45).
The reaction began in California, where IWW agitation had been
particularly aggressive, and Asian immigration had created a racist backlash
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EFFORTS TO SQUASH DISSENT
against a perceived dilution of American culture and society. Local and
state-level authorities, led in particular by the California Republican Party,
put increasing pressure on the federal government to “crack down” on both
immigration and disruptive social activity. The start of World War I, and
American involvement a few years later, created the conditions for a revival
in Federal Government action: “With nativism propelling a powerful
restriction movement, World War I stimulating nationalism, and global
revolutionary disorder creating anew the horror of social unrest, the forces
speaking for tolerance and civil liberties were silenced or shattered”
(Preston, p. 55).
Ultimately, local and national authorities chose to use the restriction and
deportation provisions of immigration law to crack down on labor activism;
1917 saw debate over legislation to amend immigration law with a new
literacy test and additional antiradical provisions, including a strict deportation
policy. On February 5, 1917, the new policies became law over President
Wilson’s veto. As Preston states,
Officials had seized upon deportation as the quickest and most
effective method of suppressing the propagation of dangerous ideas
because of its very antithesis to due process. Congressmen did not
want to determine the rights of anarchists and other radicals ‘by the
long slow process of courts.’… If repression was the aim, then a
noncriminal, administrative procedure was far more efficient and gave
immigration officials great latitude in defining guilt.” The fact that
what constituted such “guilt” went largely undefined in the legislation,
however, meant that “immigrant inspectors were apparently ready to
become America’s first thought police. (Preston, pp. 84–85)
The period from 1917–1921, largely defined by the U.S. involvement in
World War I and the nationalist hysteria that provoked, was subsequently
characterized by the use (and abuse) of provisions in immigration law to
detain activists, disrupt the actions of the IWW and other labor organizations,
and to police the beliefs and associations of those entering the country.
Preston notes that the war:
Affected the course of repression in several ways… A strike could
now be described not only as a legitimate labor struggle but also as
seditious interference in war production… The Wobblies’ militant and
dramatic surge in the lumber, mining and agricultural centers of the
West [] established the organization as a menace to numerous communities producing essential war materials… Finally, an atmosphere of
war hysteria colored all decisions from the local to the national level.
One hundred per cent Americanism, with its demand for conformity
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and distaste for dissent, savagely resented any threat to national unity,
especially of a class and radical nature. (Preston, pp. 97–98)
Federal troops were deployed in July and August of 1917 to quell labor
actions in the West. Preston notes that such actions were usually taken on
the initiative of local authorities, and effectively established a form of
martial law, where labor union activists were simply locked up to eliminate
the threat to good order. State courts, largely convinced by the extraordinary
requirements of a nation at war, allowed such actions to go unchallenged
and denied habeas corpus when the detainees protested their confinement
(Preston, pp. 105–106). “Surveillance, occupation, and suppression marked
the wartime participation of the federal troops in the drive against subversive
labor elements,” Preston reports. “By September 1920, the army had put
down twenty-nine domestic disorders without resort to constitutional
procedures” (p. 116).
The use of military force was complemented by an unabashed legal
strategy. A series of raids, culminating in the infamous “Palmer Raids”
(named after the U.S. Attorney General at the time) conducted by the
Justice and Immigration departments in 1919 and 1920, targeted the IWW
and other radical and leftist organizations, and used the full force of
immigration law and emerging judicial practice to effect the complete
suppression of radical expression in the U.S. The Justice department largely
relied on laws pertaining to seditious or criminal conspiracy, and characterized IWW action and materials as evidence that the organization was
pursuing criminal objectives in a time of war.
Another strategy involved Post Office investigators, using a 1911
amendment to the criminal code that expanded the definition of “indecent”
(and thus un-mailable) to matter that incited arson, murder or assassination.
The 1917 Espionage Act and the 1918 Sedition Act expanded the grounds
for surveillance and criminal prosecution of radical organizations that used
the mail for distribution of literature. The Espionage Act barred the mailing
of materials that interfered with the operations of the armed forces, and
the Sedition Act broadened the list of offensive materials to include
“disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language, or language intended to
cause contempt, scorn… or disrepute as regards the form of government
of the United States” (Preston, p. 145). Legal action could then proceed
against organizations such as the IWW using their own literature to incriminate them.
These strategies were largely effective at shutting down the IWW and
stifling dissent during this period. As Preston states, “The IWW prosecutions
largely depended on business influence, community hysteria, and the eagerness or common-sense restraint of local federal attorneys… Juries turned
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EFFORTS TO SQUASH DISSENT
out to be frightened, jingoistic, and vindictive; all in all they were thoroughly
sympathetic to the government’s aims” (p. 122). Where deportation or an
immediate trial was difficult, the government simply resorted to indefinite
detention, without access to counsel: “district attorneys used indictments
against radicals as a preventive weapon, often with little thought of ever
bringing them to trial” (Preston, p. 139).
This period ended with the passage of the Immigration Law of 1920. This
“dying gasp of legislative antiradicalism” made it possible to punish aliens
for “simply possessing literature, for advising rather than advocating and
teaching, for holding membership in groups and societies as well as organizations and for showing sympathy and support (apart from membership) by
financial contributions” (Preston, pp. 228–229). The law was never used by
the Justice Department against the IWW, and the Red Scare that prompted
the Palmer Raids was on the wane, leading to the subsidence of antiradicalism in Federal Government policy through the 1920s and 1930s.
World War II, and the advent of a Cold War with the Soviet Union after
1947, provided the occasion for the next escalation of anti-radical efforts on
behalf of the Federal government.
The 1950s: The Cold War
The rise of Joseph McCarthy and The Congress’ House Un-American
Activities Committee (HUAC), the practice of blacklisting in Academia
and the entertainment industries, and the widespread use of propaganda
to cultivate an extreme social paranoia about the Soviet Union and the
threatened spread of global communism are well documented tools of antiradical suppression that originated in the highest political and governmenttal levels during this period. Other activities by Congress, however, helped
to support the return of some of the features of earlier periods of antiradicalism: an association of radicalism with non-natives, and the use of restriction, detention, and deportation as tools against radical dissent.
The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) of 1952 (also known as the
McCarran Walter Act, after its sponsors in the Senate and House of Representatives) consolidated the various statutes that governed immigration law
into one comprehensive text, and is well known for abolishing the racial
restrictions in immigration policy in favor of a quota system. The act also,
however, maintained and consolidated the anti-radical provisions of earlier
periods by barring from the U.S. “subversives” or immigrants engaged in
subversive activity. The INA remains the basis for immigration law today,
and has been amended many times over the past 50 years – most recently to
strengthen anti-terrorist restrictions. The anti-subversive restrictions have at
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times been constructed to bar those with connections to autocratic government,
communism and communist political parties, and most recently any of the
many organizations that have been labeled terrorist organizations or those
that support terrorism.
The Act derived its support from two groups in Congress: those who
favored liberalizing immigration law (by ending the racial exclusions) to
project a better image abroad, and those who wanted to continue to use
immigration law as a national security bulwark against communist infiltration
and undesirable immigrants who could “threaten the foundations of American
life” (U.S. Department of State). In 1954, the Supreme Court upheld in a
seven to two decision the constitutionality of the ISA when applied after
the fact to aliens who had been Communists at any time, even long before
the passage of the Act (Preston, p. 273).
The INA rested, in turn on the new definitions advanced by the Internal
Security Act of 1950, also advanced by Senator McCarran and built on an
earlier set of proposals supported by Richard Nixon, which would require
the fingerprinting and registration of all “subversives.” (Barson, 1992). This
Act required members of the Communist Party to register with the government, and created the Subversive Activities Control Board to investigate
individuals suspected of engaging in subversive activities. It permitted the
exclusion of immigrants, the deportation of aliens in the U.S., and the
denaturalization of citizens. The Internal Security Act passed over the veto
of President Truman, but many of its provisions were revoked in 1968 after
being found unconstitutional in a series of Supreme Court decisions. Both
of these Acts rested on the Smith Act, or Alien Registration Act of 1940,
which required the registration of all non-citizen aliens in the U.S., and
made it a criminal offense to in any way teach, advocate, or engage in
activities with an intention of overthrowing the government of the U.S., or
to be a member of any organization that so advocated or engaged. This act
motivated a series of trials through the 1940s that conflated sedition with
membership or involvement in leftist organizations of all kinds.
At the same time, the expansion of the Federal government following the
New Deal and the involvement in World War II included the “creation of
new and more sophisticated agencies of covert control… the Central
Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco
and Firearms, Drug Enforcement Agency, and special White House units of
surveillance and disruption” (Preston, p. 288). In addition, the period was
characterized by a contagion theory of subversion that nonetheless left the
definition of subversion unspecified. Preston reports of this period that there
were “300 federal, state, and local laws against subversion; 100 personal
characteristics that made one a security risk; 700 reasons the McCarran38
EFFORTS TO SQUASH DISSENT
Walter Act gave for denying visas or entry papers to foreigners; 197
organizations registered with the Subversive Activities Control Board; and
3 large indexes of suspects (Security, Communist, and Reserve)” (p. 291).
Summarizing this period, Preston notes that
Present legislation penalizes conspiracy to advocate, past membership
(no matter how far back), and membership, association, or affiliation
with any organization required to register under the Subversive
Activities Control Act of 1950… In the early 1900’s the nation accepted
its responsibility for domestically induced radicalism. Today it has
made the radical or ex-radical everlastingly liable for what he once
was or thought. It has reserved the right to create new classes of
radicalism and to enlarge the index of dangerous ideas and associations
for which an individual may find himself deportable in the future…
In the security-conscious 1960’s the rights of a large portion of the
population – aliens, naturalized citizens, and native born radicals – have
been sacrificed to the safety of the state… There has been a steady
progression toward a federal policy based on fear rather than on faith
in people. (Preston, pp. 274–275)
The 1990s and 2000s: Immigrants, Homosexuals and Terrorists
The characteristics present in the current anti-radical and security-minded
climate can be traced to a resurgence of nativist and nationalistic sympathies
in the 1990s. During the 1990s, as today, the most fully-stigmatized
immigrants in U.S. society are Latinos, those coming from Latin American
countries. The current wave of nativist sympathy and the resulting movements to restrict immigration target this group. Emblematic of these efforts
are a series of ballot initiatives proposed – and passed – in California in the
1990s.
Proposition 187 appeared on the California ballot in November of 1994.
Backed by several organizations within the state, the proposition was passed
by nearly sixty percent of California voters, and restricted the provision of
public services – including education, health care and social services – to
undocumented immigrants and their children. It also required law enforcement agents and public servants (including school teachers and health care
providers) to investigate the legal status of any individual they suspected of
being undocumented. While the law was immediately challenged in the
courts as an imposition by the state into the Federal realm of immigration,
the episode was emblematic of efforts taken to restrict “illegal” immigration.
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Lisa Garcia Bedolla relates this episode to a “long tradition” in California
history, and chronicles the political factors that led up to the introduction of
Proposition 187 (Bedolla, 2005). Between 1990 and 1993, California lost
830,000 jobs, and in 1992 per capita income declined for the first time in a
century. Unemployment doubled between 1990 to 1994, and the state ran
consistent budget deficits, leading to the brink of fiscal crisis (Bedolla,
p. 27). In addition, during this period the foreign-born proportion of the
California population rose from 9 percent to 22 percent: one in four legal
immigrants to the U.S. settled in California, most of them from Asia and
Latin America – with a plurality coming from Mexico (Bedolla, p. 28).
These social and demographic shifts corresponded to a rise in the
proportion of Californians concerned about immigration. Bedolla reports a
1992 Roper poll that found 63 percent of Californians endorsing the
opinion that immigration law let in too many immigrants; 78 percent of
Californians found immigrants to be a financial burden on the state. Other
polls found citizens concerned that immigrants were negatively affecting
the social, cultural and racial makeup of their neighborhoods, towns, and
larger society (Bedolla, p. 28). These social trends were quite effectively
tapped by conservative social groups and political movements such as the
American Immigration Control Foundation, the Federation for American
Immigration Reform (FAIR), the Citizen’s Committee on Immigration
Policy and the loose coalition of organizations that sponsored Proposition
187, Save Our State (Bedolla, p. 31).
The climate surrounding Proposition 187 in California also drove two
subsequent political and legal efforts: those characterized by Propositions
209 and 227. Proposition 209 was introduced in 1996, and changed the
California constitution to bar any public institution from using race, sex or
ethnicity as a consideration in administering their programs. Proposition
227, an English-only proposition, required all education to be provided in
the English language. Both propositions passed by large margins. Bedolla
specifically links this period of anti-immigrant backlash in California to the
other periods examined in this chapter:
The political environment for Latinos in California during the 1990s
echoed previous periods of nativist backlash in the state… For
example, in the 1880s, California was the source of the anti-Chinese
sentiment that led to the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. In 1913,
targeting Japanese immigrants, California passed the Alien Land Law,
which prohibited noncitizens from owning land… The 1930s and 1950s
in California saw mass deportations of Mexicans, some immigrants,
some native born. (p. 34)
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EFFORTS TO SQUASH DISSENT
Bedolla studied the political reaction to this climate in the Latino community;
one of her research questions concerns the silence and resignation of some
in the community in the face of this increasingly hostile climate. Her thesis,
concerning how the powerless and marginalized are politically silenced in
American society, is one that bears thought as we consider the link between
nativism, anti-immigrant sentiment, and the suppression of dissent in
American history and society. Needless to say, the anti-immigrant
sentiment characteristic of this period in California have by now become
nation-wide phenomena, with anti-immigrant groups organized across the
continent, and the federal government building a wall along the U.S. border
with Mexico. Security and immigration are again linked, following
September 11th, 2001. The reorganization of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) into the Immigration and Customs Enforcement
(ICE) agency of the Department of Homeland Security institutionalize this
link, explicitly making immigration restriction and control one prong in
U.S. counterterrorism policy.
Resurgent nativism is but one of the factors that made the 1990s a lot
like the 1950s and 1910s. Another factor is the revival of hyper nationalism.
Following the speedy conclusion of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, political
authorities were celebrating the end of the “Vietnam Syndrome,” the term
used by conservatives to refer to the loss of American self-confidence and
assertiveness on the world stage following the Vietnam war. The “syndrome”
was evident particularly in American willingness to involve itself militarily,
but also in its foreign affairs more generally. President George H.W. Bush
celebrated the eclipse of these tendencies in his March 2, 1991, radio
address to the Armed Forces in the Persian Gulf. After accolades over the
victories on the field of battle and geopolitics, he said:
Americans today are confident of our country, confident of our future,
and most of all, confident about you. We promised you’d be given the
means to fight. We promised not to look over your shoulder. We
promised this would not be another Vietnam. And we kept that
promise. The specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert
sands of the Arabian Peninsula. (Bush G.H.W., 1991, emphasis
added).
At the same time, other less wholesome cultural developments were manifesting themselves as hyper nationalism. The “patriot movement” – a loose
coalition of anti-government movements, mostly in the western states – is
interesting to study on two levels. First, it represents the resurgence of a
fundamentalist brand of thinking that sees society in Manichean terms:
good versus evil, righteous versus corrupt. On another level, the patriot
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movement also elicited notorious examples of government repression
against individuals and groups in the movement. One such example is the
government siege of David Koresh and his apocalyptic Branch Davidian
movement at their compound in Waco, TX in April of 1993. Led by the
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) and the Federal Bureau
of Investigation (FBI), the siege resulted in the deaths of 76 movement
members, including women and children. The FBI and ATF siege of Randy
Weaver, his family and friends in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992 is another
such example. Both examples demonstrate the level to which fundamentalist thinking had risen as well as the degree to which the machinery
of government repression was capable of mobilizing to repress such
movements. These developments in American culture and society reached
their pinnacle with the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building
in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. Timothy McVeigh, the individual
found guilty of masterminding the bombing, had roots in the patriot
movement – and was said to have been inspired to act by the government
action in Waco in 1993.
The conservative crusade to defeat the “Vietnam Syndrome,” the rise of
fundamentalist nationalism, and the reaction against the cultural threat of
immigrants all fed into what became known as the “culture wars.” This
term generally refers to the conflict between two opposed movements –
liberal/progressive versus traditional/conservative – and came to define the
condition of ultimate, zero-sum politics around core American values. As
part of this conflict, movement conservatives were able to benefit electorally
by politicizing issues related to “God, gays, and guns,” or religion in public
life, the relative toleration of homosexuality and homosexuals, and Second
Amendment battles around the individual’s right to possess and wield
instruments of deadly force. Exemplary of this position, conservative
commentator Pat Buchanan, after challenging President George H.W. Bush
for his party’s nomination for President, gave what became known as the
“culture wars speech” at the Republican National Convention in August,
1992. In characterizing Bush’s Democratic opponent, Bill Clinton and his
wife, he established what would become the battle lines for the anti-Clinton
movement for the rest of the decade:
The agenda Clinton & Clinton would impose on America – abortion
on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights,
discrimination against religious schools, women in combat – that’s
change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America wants. It is
not the kind of change America needs. And it is not the kind of change
we can tolerate in a nation that we still call God’s country…
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EFFORTS TO SQUASH DISSENT
My friends, this election is about much more than who gets what. It is
about who we are. It is about what we believe. It is about what we
stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in our
country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the
kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself. And in
that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton & Clinton are on the
other side, and George Bush is on our side. And so, we have to come
home, and stand beside him. (Buchanan, 1992)
What is significant about the invocation of such “culture wars” is the
characteristic fundamentalism of the ascendant conservative position: there
is one right view on each of these issues, and toleration of any ambiguity or
alternative perspective is foreclosed. Even more, however, we see evidence
of the trend established early in American history with the Alien and
Sedition Acts of 1798: an association of dissent with anti-Americanism,
and the political use of anti-radical demagoguery to create an advantage in
electoral politics.
All these factors were present in the lead-up to the Al Qaeda attacks on
the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. These
attacks made manifest a final component in the climate of anti-radicalism: a
demonstrable threat to the security of American territory and society. The
predominant legislative reaction to these attacks reaffirmed approaches
used over and over throughout U.S. history. The USA PATRIOT Act
reorganized and restated many provisions already present in U.S. jurisprudence, but extended them both in terms of depth and scope of
application. USA PATRIOT is itself an acronym3 contrived to associate the
measures advanced with patriotic struggle: opposition to the act, thus, has
been easy to portray as un-patriotic. The Act was approved overwhelmingly
by Congress and signed into law a scant six weeks after the attacks of
September 11, 2001. While many of the provisions were set to expire in
2005, the Act was renewed after somewhat more debate in March of 2006.
USA PATRIOT Act provisions largely cluster around four areas: the
legalization and application of electronic surveillance techniques, the
facilitation of information sharing among federal agencies, updating existing
laws to reflect new technologies and threats, and increasing penalties for
terrorism-related crimes. (U.S. Department of Justice) The most controversial
provisions regarding extended surveillance involve the use of “roving
wiretaps” (attaching permission to monitor electronic communications to
an individual instead of a phone), delayed-notice search warrants, and the
ability for law enforcement agencies to obtain business records pertaining
to an individual’s purchases or library borrowing activity.
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Ostensibly regulated by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts
established under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978,
the expanded use of indefinite detentions, National Security Letters (which
allow the FBI to monitor electronic communications without a court order)
and the delayed-notice search warrants have all drawn criticism from civil
libertarians. Under the objective of monitoring communications between
those in the U.S. and “foreign” contacts, the National Security Administration
(NSA) has been allowed to establish “warrantless wiretaps,” evading the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts altogether. The surveillance set in
place – with the collaboration of most of the communications companies –
has monitored huge volumes of electronic communication regardless of
origin or destination. Many of these provisions continue under different
guises the objectives of the Office of Information Awareness established by
the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) by Admiral
John Poindexter in January of 2002. One of the major projects of this office
was the Total Information Awareness program, which would use available
technology to collect, analyze, and monitor all manner of communications
data in the effort to mine information for counterterrorism purposes.
Also in reaction to the events of September 11th, 2001, the uses of
detention and restriction have been expanded. Detention of non-citizens
found on the “field of battle” in places like Iraq and Afghanistan as “enemy
combatants” has tested both domestic and international conceptions of
procedural justice; the arrest of Jose Pedilla in May of 2002 extended the
use of this appellation and technique to U.S. citizens arrested and detained
in the United States. A long series of court challenges – and several highprofile Supreme Court setbacks for the Administration – have gradually reestablished habeas corpus and court access rights for those detained under
enemy combatant status.
At the same time, there has been an expanded use of practices of
restriction around acts of dissent such as the establishment of ‘Free Speech
Zones’ around high-profile events. Intended to protect those participating in
the events, critics attest that the designation of confined areas – sometimes
far removed from the event and media attention – are an infringement on
the exercise of free speech and assembly supported by the First Amendment
to the Constitution. While the practice of confining protest to designated
areas has been around for a while, it has been much more widely used since
2001. Free Speech Zones were established at the political party nominating
conventions in 1988, 1992, and 1996, and at the World Trade Organization
meetings in 1999. Since the election of George W. Bush in 2000, however,
they are commonly established at any event – even a motorcade – at which
Bush himself appears. The 2004 Republican National Convention in New
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EFFORTS TO SQUASH DISSENT
York City was notorious for the complementary practice of preventive
detention, whereby members of protest groups (which had been monitored
weeks, even months before the event) were rounded up upon reaching the
city and detained for the duration of the Convention.
In addition to concern over the suspension of civil liberties, critics of the
USA PATRIOT Act and other programs set in place following September
11th focus on the degree to which they alter the balance between executive,
legislative and judicial branches of government. Bypassing even the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Courts, denying detainees access to the judicial
system, and entrusting the executive branch and security agencies at all
levels of government with such unprecedented tools for monitoring perceived
threats, all undermine the accountability of government and create the
conditions for an abusive use of power against dissent in the public realm.
What is clear in this most recent period is that the legal and political
suppression of dissent is still built on, and draws its support from, other
important factors in American civic culture more broadly: a nativist reaction
to immigration, a rise in hyper nationalism and patriotism, concern with the
national economy or an external threat to national security, and the
resurgence of fundamentalist thinking that divides the world into good and
evil. Threat is all too easily conflated with the foreign; what is foreign is all
too easily generalized to include dissent. Despite an apparently cyclical
nature to the suppression of dissent, the factors that underlie it are constant
and persistent aspects of American culture. As Preston noted in his 1994
epilogue, “such individual antiradicals as A. Mitchell Palmer, J. Edgar
Hoover, and Senator Joseph McCarthy… need to be understood as
representative of American attitudes, policies, and procedures in the
nation’s quest for absolute security. The guilt is collective, not personal”
(Preston, p. 279).
CONCLSUION: THE TOOLS OF SUPPRESSION
The periods under review and the cultural characteristics highlighted
ascribe to both the people and government of the United States qualities
that convert fear, insecurity and a desire for conformity into xenophobia,
anti-radicalism, and the suppression of dissent. The legal and political
tools of this suppression have included detention, deportation and denaturalization of non-citizen residents, increasing levels of sophistication in the
surveillance of communication, and the relatively heavy-handed use of U.S.
troops or other law enforcement agencies to suppress political activity by
groups designated or associated with a national threat. Jules Boykoff, in his
2007 work Beyond Bullets, focuses on both hard and soft tactics used by
government, often in association with the mass media, to “demobilize” or
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suppress dissent and social movement generally. Boykoff distinguishes
between violent repression of dissent and more subtle modes of silencing
or preventing dissent. Liberal regimes like the U.S., he claims, tend to rely
more on the latter (Boykoff, pp. 10–11). Boykoff defines such suppression
as “a process through which the preconditions for dissident action, mobilezation, and collective organization are inhibited by either raising their costs
or minimizing their benefits.” Actions taken to effect such suppression, he
claims, affect not just the intended targets, but the general public and “other
potential social movement allies” as well (p. 12). Thus, requiring protesters
to confine their activities to a specified location blocks from the target
event not only raise the costs of such protest (in terms of organization and
the securing of permissions), but they also minimize their benefits (in terms
of reduced publicity and exposure). More importantly, this policy sends a
wider signal that protest is neither desirable nor tolerated; at the worst, it
can make it seem criminal.
Boykoff defines dissidents as citizens and groups that “(1) publicly
challenge prevailing structures of power and/or the underlying logic of
public policy, (2) engage in some extra-institutional, oppositional tactics…
and (3) on at least some issues… have marginal stances that are not
consistently entering the dominant political discourse” (p. 20). The state
can use any combination of suppression, appeasement, co-optation and
disregard to marginalize or diffuse such stances. In these efforts, the media
are a natural ally to the government as they present social movements and
actions through a process of negative framing:
The mass media… tend to look more favorably on people who operate
within the system and to disparage those whose oppositional activities
move beyond sanctioned forms of action. While activists are sometimes able to frame issues and grievances in a manner satisfactory to
them, they are more often frustrated by what they deem inadequate –
and sometimes even derisive – mass-media coverage. (p. 27)
Boykoff analyzes twentieth and twenty-first century U.S. history to isolate
the most prevalent techniques used by the state and mass media to suppress
dissent. “In the short run these modes of suppression slow down – or in some
cases paralyze – the practice of dissent,” he says. “In the long run they
demobilize dissent by discouraging future action” (p. 35). He enumerates
twelve modes of suppression that encompass many of those that have been
detailed earlier in this chapter:
direct violence; public prosecutions and hearings; employment deprivation; surveillance and break-ins (including ‘black bag jobs’);
infiltration, badjacketing and agent provocateurs; black propaganda;
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EFFORTS TO SQUASH DISSENT
harassment and harassment arrests; extraordinary rules and laws; mass
media manipulation; bi-level demonization; mass media deprecation;
[and] mass media underestimation, false balance, and disregard. (p. 36)
Most often several of these tools are used in conjunction to undermine
reputation, tar dissent in the public eye, and discourage dissenters from
taking further action.
Keeping this in mind, it becomes even more evident why the suppression
of dissent seems to ride in conjunction with nativism and anti-immigrant
fervor. Because they are weaker in terms of social and legal status,
immigrants are often easy targets both for public disdain and state action.
They thus make it easier both to frame dissent as un-American, and to
undermine the legitimacy of that dissent. Likewise, the American penchant
to see the world in terms of good and evil makes the use of black
propaganda—the use of fabricated documents or material to negatively
frame a group or movement—an effective tool for dividing a movement
and undermining its potential base for support in the mass public. Media
demonization and deprecation are also effective tools for tapping into the
national penchant to see opposition as an “enemy” to the state and
illustrative of evil. Boykoff states: “The logic of bi-level demonization
proceeds simultaneously on two levels: While an external foe from the
international arena is demonized, and therefore depicted as deserving of
punishment, a domestic dissident or group is linked to the external demon,
and therefore also made vulnerable to state suppression” (p. 191).
The five periods detailed here are simply five in which the full force of
most of these tools were used in conjunction, resulting in periods of strong
national conformity and weak dissent. As is evident from a closer reading
of American history, these techniques of suppression are in almost constant
use: against civil rights and anti-war organizations in the 1960s and 70s,
and environmental and civil liberties movements in the 1980s, for example.
The continuous use of the tools of suppression against different kinds of
dissidents effectively closes the gap between two of our periods. What
seem apparent in this review, however, are the easy associations between
conformity and complacency, fundamentalist thinking, nativism, and
extreme nationalism, and partisan politics and demonization. All it takes is
a national emergency of one sort or another to bring on the strongest
reaction. The increasing strength of government and the mass media as
agents of social and political control have made the Twentieth and early
Twenty-first centuries particularly prone to political repression in the
American experience.
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NOTES
1
2
3
See, for example, John Winthrop’s City upon a Hill sermon, from 1630, in which he established the
idea that the New England colonies existed as a special province for God – a shining example for all
peoples.
Miller (1952) details the period in much detail. The political angle is one he particularly emphasizes.
Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and
Obstruct Terrorism.
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