Americans are celebrating their Independence Day today and in a most excellent essay, Yale law professor Stephen L. Carter sets out the case that democracies — American’s but also Canada’s — must have dissenters to thrive …
…the one symbol of patriotism that has yet to fade is our love of dissent — loud, raucous, passionate, sometimes impolite — and it is dissent that we should be celebrating on Independence Day.
It’s hard sometimes. If you’re like me, at least twice a week you encounter some opinion that makes your blood boil. Maybe it comes from a friend or colleague, maybe from a politician or pundit; whatever the source, a part of you surely wonders how any seemingly intelligent person can possibly believe that drivel, much less express it. The Fourth of July is exactly the right occasion to pause and give thanks for those disagreeable views — and for a country that was founded on our right to express them.
Dissent is central to democracy, and although I believe dissent should be civil, its centrality doesn’t fade when it isn’t. As sociologist Charles P. Flynn pointed out in his 1977 book “Insult and Society,” insults aimed at government officials “provide a check to those in power who may be tempted to think of themselves in grandiose terms, above the rest of humanity and hence not subject to insults.”
