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Dissent And Disagreement

Decent Essays

Dissent and Disagreement A world where slavery is still widespread, genocide is an everyday occurrence, and the voices of the common citizen is silenced. This would have happened if we only disagreed over such matters and not dissented. In the Decline of Radicalism, by Daniel J. Boorstin, he asserts that “disagreement is the life blood of democracy, dissension is its cancer” and that dissent is negative word. Boorstin also claims that “disagreement produces debate”, which is true, but could have all conflicts been solved with diplomacy? Dissent is the life blood of democracy and it is not negative; it is vital to how our nation came to be. Dissent is, according to Boorstin, is when people “have a quarrel”, and disagreement is when …show more content…

But they do not always listen. Dissent is when you revolt and you fight back against voices that try to drown out yours. History shows that dissent is the true baseline of democracy. In the Civil Rights movement, would talking about racism, segregation, and oppressive laws have changed a thing? No, it took dissent to progress forward. It took protesting in the streets, it took illegal action and subsequently getting arrested for it. Disagreement would have not push America forward, dissent did, does, and will. Discussion is bred from disagreement, according to the author, but does discussion work? Discussion and diplomacy are also foundations of democracy. Debate and nonviolence are cornerstones of how our government works. With it, we avoid a lot of conflict and we can manage to find a compromise in coordination with other parties. Though, you have to ask yourself this question: does discussion always work? If we talked with Great Britain about seceding from their empire, would we even be our own country? We dissented and fought for our independence. Likewise, in the American Civil War, it would be completely unacceptable if we compromised on slavery. We fought so human beings could have basic rights, and there would be no way we could talk the South into abolishing slavery. Diplomacy is beneficial to democracy, but the truth is that without dissenting democracy would not exist at all. Boorstin writes

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