The Disconsent of the Governed

President Trump’s administration and Congress have not paid much attention to what legislators call “the normal order” in matters related to codifying laws and implementing programs and policies that are supposed to help mind the public’s business or satisfy petitioners looking for attention and relief. This has been partly by design and partly not.

A serious consequence of our leaders not following “normal order” has been to encourage many of us who aren’t in government to use more polarizing rhetoric and to act out more than usual. While there may be little we would consider “normal” about how our national government has been working recently or how people have risen to support or challenge it, we would be mistaken and doing ourselves a great disservice if we were to dismiss or condemn the agitated steps everyday Americans are taking as unhinged or “the work of domestic terrorists.” Their words and actions may be on the other side of normal, but there’s nothing crazy about them.

It’s what being on that other side of normal means in a democracy and how it has changed that concerns us here.

On any given day, there is bound to be someplace in a country as large and diverse as the United States where people aren’t happy with the condition of their lives, each other, or how they are being governed. In the last dozen years, however, we have been treated to more moments when some of us have made our upset with our leaders clearer than we have since the 1960s and 1970s.

Public fights and momentary disruptions of “normal” public order, I have argued elsewhere, are best understood as acts of “disconsent.” People make loud, disruptive displays of their dissatisfaction with the way they are being governed. Distressing and frightening as such acts may be, the show and the mess they make do no lasting damage to how our government works or to how we manage to get along in most other ways.

Our cage-rattling today isn’t identical to the public troublemaking Americans were making three hundred years ago. But then, too, neither are we. What hasn’t changed is the success this kind of behavior has had over the lifetime of our republic to serve as a combination safety valve, warning shot, and heads-up for our leaders and each other. Its contribution to our collective wellbeing comes through the dialogue we are effectively condemned to have about the state of our nation and our accountability to each other.

If occasional shows of popular unrest are best understood as a stabilizing force in how we conduct our public business rather than a mindless display of pique or pent-up rage, it’s important to remind ourselves of five historical facts.

First, the principled good we accomplish through intermittent displays of public disorder applies to the trouble made by people we disagree with every bit as much as it does the trouble made by people we think are right.

We shouldn’t need to be reminded that in a democracy, no one has a monopoly on the right and obligation to make their opinions on important matters known. But big, rowdy, and disruptive demonstrations of disconsent drive that point home better than anything else we’ve managed to come up with in the last 250 years.

Second, discontent may be endemic in a country as diverse and historically rambunctious as the United States. Acts of disconsent, especially violent ones, are not. Such demonstrations may have become more frequent in the last couple of decades, but they also have become less destructive and deadly than they were not too long ago.

Third, there has been an unprecedented convergence in the timing and use of both more reactionary and progressive displays of disconsent in the United States.

Others might disagree, but I’m inclined to think this is a good thing, if only because no one can claim “the other side” is monopolizing the public’s right to show how upset they are.

Fourth, the people who use unrest today to make more progressive-sounding noises and demands were inspired to learn how to act out in public from people who first used unrest in more reactionary ways, that is, to keep the world as they knew it rather than to change it.

Fifth, and perhaps most importantly, public acts of disconsent are perfect inversions of the conventional ways that legislators and the courts use the rules they make to keep the rest of us in line.

Geoffrey Miller pointed out two decades ago that the law can be used to renew our commitment to how we conduct our affairs, try to restore practices we once held dear, or reform our current practices so we can catch up with social and cultural changes that are happening all around us.

Those are the very ways that acts of political disconsent serve the common good, alerting us to the unfinished business we have and that we need to pay more and better attention to the consequences of our public behavior.

Political disconsent, even in its more violent and destructive moments, turns out to be a great deal better for how we mind the public’s business than we knew or ever dared to imagine.

Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.