At a recent dinner, a friend posed a question that has haunted many of us: “What can be done?” That end of the table fell quiet for a moment. We had been bemoaning the state of national politics—its toxicity, its tribalism, the eerie sense that integrity and independence are liabilities rather than virtues in today’s political climate.
The question lingered in the air, unanswered, tormenting me. But later, I found myself thinking back to a different time, when our country was locked in another era of overreach, division, and political fear. And I remembered a voice that dared to answer that same question with moral clarity and intellectual courage: former Arkansas US Senator J. William Fulbright.
In 1966, Fulbright published The Arrogance of Power, a searing critique of American foreign policy and the culture of political obedience that enabled the Vietnam War. But his deeper warning was broader and more enduring: that unchecked power—especially when it demands loyalty and punishes dissent—threatens not only policy, but the very foundation of democracy.
Today, nearly sixty years later, Fulbright’s message is not only relevant—it is urgent. The danger he described has resurfaced, not on foreign battlefields, but within one political party and many of our governmental institutions.
In today’s Republican Party, dissent is no longer seen as a sign of strength, but as betrayal. Those who question the party line—on the 2020 election, January 6th, on the rule of law, on America’s role in the world—are not debated, they are exiled. Loyal public servants are stripped of committee assignments or targeted in primaries for the crime of independent judgment. We have watched as party platforms were rewritten to reflect the preferences of one man. Judges, journalists, and even fellow Republicans who deviate from the orthodoxy are branded as enemies.
This is not strength. This is the arrogance of power in its modern form.
Fulbright warned us of exactly this: a political environment where questioning authority is equated with disloyalty, and where conformity replaces conviction. “The greatest danger arising from the arrogance of power,” he wrote, “is that a nation may overreach itself, overreact to imagined threats, and respond with excessive force and intimidation.”
He might just as well have been describing our own moment.
We are not the first generation to face this test. During the Vietnam era, Fulbright—himself a Democrat—publicly challenged the foreign policy of a Democratic president. He paid a political price, but preserved his integrity and others joined his dissent. History remembers him not for disloyalty, but for courage.
And that is one answer to my friend’s question.
What can be done? We can rediscover the virtue of dissent. We can reward intellectual independence, not punish it. We can reassert the idea that loyalty to country and Constitution comes before loyalty to party or personality.
That work must begin within the Republican Party. Leaders must stop mistaking obedience for unity. They should foster real debate—not just behind closed doors, but in public, where voters can see the courage of honest disagreement. Legislators must reassert their constitutional role as a check on executive power, especially on matters of war, justice, and civil liberties. And citizens, institutions, and the press must elevate the voices of those who dare to speak hard truths.
Our democracy was built to thrive on friction. Dissent is not a flaw of our system—it is an engine that keeps it honest.
The arrogance of power has returned, but so has the opportunity to confront it. We can meet this moment, just as Fulbright once did, not with submission but with clarity, conscience, and the courage to say: enough.
