In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The Durability Of Dissent
  • Andrew J. Huebner (bio)
David Mayers. Dissenting Voices in America’s Rise to Power. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xi + 446 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $85.00 (cloth); $24.99 (paper).

On January 14, 2004 Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) stood before the Center for American Progress, a liberal advocacy group in Washington. The elder statesman of Senate progressives had been among the handful of lawmakers who voted against congressional authorization for the Iraq War in 2002. On this day, buttressed by recent allegations by former Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill in Ron Suskind's book The Price of Loyalty, Kennedy was even more irascible than usual. O'Neill had corroborated what Kennedy already suspected: that President George W. Bush and his inner circle had been plotting Saddam Hussein's downfall since before September 11, 2001. Thus assertions that Iraq harbored weapons of mass destruction were a "distortion of the truth" that had led the United States to a "perilous place." Administration officials were "vindictive and mean-spirited," "breathtakingly arrogant," and guilty of "scare tactics," "gross abuse of intelligence," and "dubious boasts of success." Kennedy charged that Bush's war, moreover, sullied principles of the American republic established by the founders more than two centuries earlier. Those men had developed a government based in liberty and justice and accountability before the American people; now, Bush was trampling on those "fundamental values" in the name of unbridled power and a "war of choice." "I do not make these statements lightly," Kennedy went on. "I make them as an American deeply concerned about the future of the Republic if the extremist policies of this Administration continue."1

Ted Kennedy's opposition to the Iraq War upheld a long tradition of dissent against American foreign policy. David Mayers carefully examines that tradition in his erudite book Dissenting Voices in America's Rise to Power, which covers the period from the Louisiana Purchase (1803) to the Korean War (1950–1953). Mayers organizes historical opposition to American diplomacy into four "strands": the republican, prophetic, nationalist, and cosmopolitan. Kennedy's opposition to the Iraq War embodied the republican strand, which has viewed bellicose foreign adventures as violations of the country's original [End Page 68] distaste for gross power and empire. According to this thinking, "the United States should not substitute the sham of imperium for estimable virtues," including "moderation and restraint"—Mayers's words which could also be Kennedy's (pp. 6, 329). Voices for the prophetic strand have opposed American policy believed to hurt the United States in the eyes of God. Nationalist dissenters, or adherents of realpolitik, have eschewed restraint in favor of an aggressive approach to overseas affairs. (Mayers points out that because the nationalist view often has dominated American policy, its proponents have only occasionally occupied positions of dissent.) Cosmopolitan dissent, or what might be termed the humanitarian strand, has appeared when critics of administrations believe the United States should denounce or contest human rights abuses abroad. At bottom, these strands represented disagreements over how and when America should exercise the power it accumulated during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. What are the overseas duties of a strong nation? When should a strong nation exhibit restraint? These questions continue to define debates over America's role in international affairs.

Mayers tracks his four strands of dissent across the decades from Jefferson to Eisenhower, weaving them through stories of policy and opposition in three sections: "Expansion" (1803 through the 1830s), "Conquests" (1840s through the early twentieth century), and "Hazards" (World War I through the 1950s). His chief aim, carried out tenaciously and convincingly, is to complicate the notion that America grew to superpower status smoothly and inevitably. By examining dissent within what he calls the "responsible class"—members of Congress, the military brass, diplomats, and cabinet officers—Mayers successfully argues that the United States rose to globalism (in Stephen Ambrose's phrase) not in a climate of unanimity but amid "colliding ideas and uneasy conscience" (p. 8).2 Dissent has benefited the United States, Mayers contends, even as it has irritated administrations: "Policy has been improved, thought quickened" (p. 9). Notwithstanding a few minor limitations, Dissenting...

pdf

Share