Why Is Civil Disobedience Important To The Government

Throughout the history of the United States, there has been a continuous debate about which threat is the most severe for the American people: foreign invaders and terrorists, or a national government with too much power and without the best interests of its people in mind. It is apparent through the creation of the Bill of Rights, as well as the general purpose of limiting the powers of the national government within the Constitution, that the framers believed that an overly powerful national government was the greatest threat to the American people. In order for the people of a nation to debate an issue such as this, it is essential for them to support the exercise of civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is more than just a positive
If government is made up of people, and if a government believes that it is essential to have access to certain pieces of information in order to protect its people, than it inherently believes that having information about potential threats is critical for people to protect themselves. Therefore, to keep information from its people is to keep them from having access to a means for protecting themselves, which goes against the initial purpose of the argument. For a government to keep information from its people while also preventing them from exercising civil disobedience in order to protest the keeping of that information must mean that it looks to serve some separate interest, which breaks the agreement between the people that makes up government in the first place. To sum things briefly, the exercise of civil disobedience is not only a positive impact on a free society; it is the very ideology that a free society is founded upon. Without support for disobedience, a government breaks the agreement that it represents. By this reasoning, without the right to peacefully oppose a law while also accepting the consequences, a society cannot truly identify as