How has dissent shaped American history?
Author Ralp Young talks about his new book
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Scott LaMar
Aired; January 16th, 2024.
Author Ralph Young writes that “the history of America is a history of dissent.”
From the protest of the British Parliament’s taxation policies that led to the American Revolution to the fight for women’s right-to-vote to the Civil Rights Movement, anti-war demonstrations and protests and the Black Lives Matter uprisings, dissent has fueled change in the U.S.
Young’s newly published book is called American Patriots — A Short History of Dissent. The book is an update of Young’s 2015 book Dissent: The History of an American Value.
On The Spark Tuesday, Young said he decided to update his earlier book because there have so many examples of dissent since it was published nine years ago. But he added there was one act of dissent that motivated him to update the book,:”What prompted me to kind of rethink everything about my book and the way I looked at dissent was January 6th. When these people invaded the Capitol and then you had afterwards people, politicians who had been hiding in the cellar of the Capitol as the Senate floor was being invaded and the House of Representatives later was saying, well, they were just protesting, exercising their right to protest. And they got me to thinking, well, why do we have the right to protest? Why was it put into the Constitution? And it struck me that the framers of the Constitution, they were very aware that they were creating an experiment, an experiment in the idea that can people run a government as we the people, we’re the ones who have the sovereignty. And, because this was an experiment, and if people could rule as they wanted, of course, to have people join on to this and decide that they wanted to be a part of this new government. And, of course, with the Bill of rights and all these enumerated rights that we have, they put the right to dissent so that people would understand that if the government was not living up to its part of the bargain, they had a right to protest for these rights if they felt that any of these rights were not being respected or protected. The way so many people have looked and so many dissenters over the course of American history, the way they’ve looked at our founding documents, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, this is like a contract and that the government has promised to protect our rights, and therefore we will obey the government. We will go along with this. But if you felt that your rights were not being respected, then you had the right to protest. You have the right to protest for right? What you did not have is the right to protest to do away with somebody else’s rights.”
Young writes in the book that January 6 was not productive political dissent,”They were protesting a lie. They were protesting based on conspiracy theories. And I think that many of the people that invaded the Capitol believe those theories. Many of the people who did knew that these were wrong, but this is what they wanted to have happen. They didn’t like the result of the election. What they were doing basically was, in a sense, going against the Constitution. They were trying to excorcize the rights of what was the 81 million people that voted for Biden.”
Young writes that even though dissent has led to progress, there always has been push back against that progress,”The women’s movement, of course, the civil rights movement. And of course, we just celebrated Martin Luther King yesterday and these have had a significant amount of success. But again, if you look at our society today, do women have complete equal rights? Do African-Americans have complete equal rights? I mean, things are certainly better today than they were pre-civil rights movement or pre-women’s movement. It’s kind of a work in progress. That’s another thing about dissent is that dissenters push for progress. But almost always there’s a reaction to it. You know when it when a dissent group, like when the women’s movement was getting real traction and moving towards the right to vote, you had the anti suffrage movement come into being, when slavery was ended at the end of the Civil War, you had the birth of the Ku Klux Klan trying to roll back these advances, these progressions.”
Ralph Young is a Professor of Instruction of History at Temple University and author or editor of several other books focusing on history.
