The New Dissent

In his fine manifesto Letters to a Young Contrarian, Christopher Hitchens tells the story of Nelson Mandela being visited in prison by South African authorities who had been shaken by growing international condemnation. You’re free to go, they told him, out you get. Except Mandela told them, Look, you don’t have the power to release me. He refused to leave until all the regime’s other political prisoners had been released as well. “At that moment,” Hitchens writes, “it was clear who held the keys.”

Nelson Mandela is one of the great heroes in the annals of dissent. After spending 27 years as a political prisoner in South Africa, he was released in 1990. He then negotiated an end to the apartheid system and became his country’s president in 1994. In an absurdly cinematic arc he went from victim to victor, driven by the unquenchable force of his refusal to accept the legitimacy of the racist regime.

From one perspective, Mandela’s...