HOW TO BE A DISSIDENT, by Gal Beckerman
In the spring of 1963, in Birmingham, Ala., teenagers and children as young as six faced fire hoses, dogs and angry police officers to protest segregation. The campaign, called “Project C” — the “C” stood for “confrontation” — involved rolling marches and sit-ins. On a single day, hundreds of young people were locked up.
“Don’t worry about your children,” the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. assured anxious parents. “Don’t hold them back if they want to go to jail, for they are doing a job for not only themselves but for all of America and for all mankind.” Less than a week later, the jailed kids were released and the city agreed to desegregate its lunch counters.
The so-called Children’s Crusade of 1963 is one of the many stories recounted in “How to Be a Dissident,” an inspiring series of profiles of activists and rabble rousers from Gal Beckerman, a former editor at The New York Times Book Review who is now a staff writer at The Atlantic, and whose previous works include a history of radical ideas and a history of Soviet Jews. Beckerman features the Birmingham tale prominently in a chapter titled “Be Reckless,” which also lingers on the example of the Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny, who refused to remain in exile after an almost-lethal poisoning in 2020 and died in a Russian prison four years later.
To his credit, Beckerman offers no hard and fast formula for determining when heroic risk-taking veers into irresponsible adventurism or outright self-destruction. Recklessness is both “necessary” and “completely fraught,” he writes.
Superficially, “How to Be a Dissident” takes the form of a guide, with each of the 10 chapters focused on a trait central to the dissident temperament: In addition to being reckless one should “Be Alone,” “Be Pessimistic,” “Be Watchful,” “Be Human” and so on. But the book can also be understood as one man’s reckoning with the existential questions posed by the rising tide of authoritarianism.
There are, of course, classic dissident stories, set against the backdrop of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, which sadly don’t feel as distant or foreign as they might have only a few years ago. We also meet the novelist and philosopher Albert Camus, the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, Jesus Christ and many other luminaries. The subtext is that any one of us might be next: called to rebel when ICE agents snatch our neighbors, when lawmakers hijack our rights or when A.I. companies try to steal our livelihood.
The book’s stories are compellingly rendered, imparting clear and moving lessons or posing interesting moral challenges and ambiguities, especially when coupled with Beckerman’s insightful commentary. Yet some characters and accounts are more prickly or ambiguous than others. In the chapter “Be Funny” I flinched during an aside that compared the comedian Louis C.K.’s public masturbation to the Greek cynic Diogenes, who famously and irreverently lived in a large urn on the streets of ancient Athens and masturbated in the city’s marketplace, without mentioning that C.K.’s actions were abhorrent because he pressured women into watching or listening to him.
It was a reminder that one person’s dissident is another person’s douche bag or demagogue. As Beckerman acknowledges, dissidents are often “exasperating, self-righteous or rude” — or worse. Even Hitler, he says, could have qualified as a dissident before he rose to power. “Dissidence,” he writes, “is not inherently virtuous.”
It would have been interesting to hear Beckerman dig more deeply into this dilemma and its related complexities. Today, the most powerful people in Washington and their influencer supporters present themselves as dissidents perpetually besieged by oppressive forces. They blast the woke mob, rail against the “Jewish oligarchy” allegedly pulling the strings of American foreign policy, smear students who argue that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza as terrorist sympathizers and rage against the Deep State, conflating hate speech with fearless speech and lies with suppressed truths and revelations. How can we reliably distinguish real dissidence from its profitable simulation?
As I finished Beckerman’s rousing manual, I couldn’t shake another thought: We need dissidents, yes, but we also desperately need discipline and vision. The book offers some tantalizing accounts of collective rebellion, including the fight for abolition in the United States and the struggle against communism in 1980s Poland that started among trade unionists. But more could have fruitfully been said about the push and pull between dissidents and social movements, or between the commands of private conscience and the outreach and compromises required to make lasting change. Beckerman shows how to sound the moral alarm, which is an important first step. What comes next — the steps required to forge durable coalitions and win specific democratic reforms — is harder and on this front Beckerman is more conflicted.
Which brings us back to King. When he raised his prophetic voice, it was in service of organizing toward clearly defined goals: civil rights, labor rights and an end to racism, poverty and militarism. Over decades, King and countless others built a movement wide and deep enough that it could coerce the powerful into making concessions.
When those courageous young people stood up to the Alabama authorities, their dissent was grounded in solidarity and guided by well-honed strategy. As readers of “How to Be a Dissident” think about the kind of dissidents they might want to be, they would be wise to remember that potent combination.
HOW TO BE A DISSIDENT | By Gal Beckerman | Crown | 199 pp. | $19, paperback
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