Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and Stifling of Democracy

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From one of America's most important voices of protest, an urgent new polemic about the stifling of the American public's capacity for meaningful dissent, the lifeblood of our democracy, at the hands of a government and media increasingly beholden only to the country's wealthy few.

Dissent is democracy. Democracy is in trouble. Never before, argues Lewis Lapham, have voices of protest been so locked out of the mainstream political ...
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2004 Hard cover New in new dust jacket. Never read, excellent condition, no remainder marks Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 178 p. Audience: General/trade.

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Overview

From one of America's most important voices of protest, an urgent new polemic about the stifling of the American public's capacity for meaningful dissent, the lifeblood of our democracy, at the hands of a government and media increasingly beholden only to the country's wealthy few.

Dissent is democracy. Democracy is in trouble. Never before, argues Lewis Lapham, have voices of protest been so locked out of the mainstream political conversation: they are criminalized, marginalized, and muted by a government that recklessly disregards civil liberties and by an ever-more concentrated and profit-driven media, in which the safe and the selling sweep all uncomfortable truths from view. As a result, we face a crisis of democracy as serious as any in our history. Never has the public conversation been more in need of dissent, and never has protest been more effectively quarantined into zones where it has so little effect on the political process. Under the noses of a cowed and silenced populace, Lapham posits, the Bush regime is "assembling from the ruins of a democratic republic the corporate splendor of a precision-guided empire....What the Bush administration has in mind is not the defense of the American citizenry against a foreign enemy, but the protection of the American oligarchy from the American democracy."

Dissent has always had a hard time of it, Lapham shows in a bravura short tour of political dissent in American history, and an especially hard one in time of war. The more ill defined the conflict and the more invisible the enemy, the worse it is for civil liberties, particularly the liberty to disagree. And now, just when the electorate is most narcotized and apathetic, spoon-fed its infotainment by a small gang of gigantic media conglomerates, and the government is in the hands of a terrifyingly self-righteous crew, comes a conflict, the "war on terror," that makes the hunt for Communists in the 1950s look like the Normandy landings on D-Day in its clarity of aim and purpose. It's a witch's brew that is pure poison for a living democracy.

Gag Rule is a rousing and necessary call to action in defense of one of our most important liberties-the right to raise our voices against the powers that be and have those voices heard.

Author Biography: Lewis H. Lapham studied at Yale and Cambridge and worked for the San Francisco Examiner and New York Herald Tribune before becoming editor of Harper's magazine in 1971. When his column there won a national magazine award in 1995, it was cited as "an exhilarating point of view in an age of conformity." His books include Money and Class in America, Imperial Masquerade, The Wish for Kings, Hotel America, The Agony of Mammon, and Waiting for the Barbarians. He has hosted two television series for PBS, America's Century and Bookmark, and his writing has appeared in Vanity Fair, The National Review, Fortune, Forbes, The New York Times, the London Observer, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications.

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Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly
Lapham, editor of Harper's, plays the role of a modern-day Tom Paine, propelling stinging criticisms and scathing indictments at the Bush administration and its supporters for what he claims are their bald-faced deceptions about the justifications for the war in Iraq and for establishing policies-especially the USA Patriot Act-he sees as aimed at silencing dissent about its policies and the war in Iraq. Lapham argues that the muting of dissenting voices has contributed to the erosion of democracy, because policy disagreements form the heart of a democratic republic. Most disturbing, says Lapham, is the complicity of the media in its support of the steady erosion of individual civil liberties in the name of national security. Lapham also levels forceful criticism at our educational system: "An inept and insolent bureaucracy armed with badly written textbooks instills in the class the attitudes of passivity, compliance, and boredom." This, charges Lapham (30 Satires; Theater of War; etc.), results in schools producing citizens who blindly accept the pronouncements of their leaders. The United States, he points out in a strong historical sketch, has a deep history of quashing dissent when politicians have raised alarms over perceived threats to the well-being of the country, most notably with the Sedition Act of 1798, the Espionage Act of 1917 and, he asserts, the Patriot Act. Lapham's compelling book reminds us that "democracy is an uproar, and if we mean to engage the argument about the course of the American future let us hope that it proves to be loud, disorderly, bitter and fierce." Agent, Andrew Wylie. (June 21) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Every presidency is a boon to a few of its critics. To Vidal, who has long seen the United States as an imperial power obsessed with security, the administration of George W. Bush has been a gift outright. In a single year, 2002, Vidal brought out two essay collections, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace and Dreaming War. Now his publisher is announcing "the long-awaited conclusion to his best-selling trilogy." Trilogy? Unlike the two earlier collections, most of the essays here are not about contemporary events, and readers anticipating another helping of Vidal's take on Bush-Cheney might be surprised to find his wit instead trained upon Ronald Reagan, Jerry Falwell, or Earl Butz. Only the introduction, the postscript, and one essay in which Vidal suggests a nationwide conspiracy to rig voting machines deal with current events. Some essays are not even newly collected, since several, very lightly reworked here, can also be found in Vidal's widely held United States (1993). Only for libraries wanting a complete run of this master novelist and essayist. Lapham, the longtime editor of Harper's, is another eloquent and caustic critic of American imperial ambition, commercial crassness, and media timidity. His magazine work is regularly collected and republished in book form. Gag Rule consists of four long essays on the state of our polity, in large part quilted together from shorter Harper's pieces. Like Vidal's, some of this material has appeared already; certain passages in Lapham's 2002 collection, Theater of War, are identical to passages here. Consequently, this is an optional purchase for libraries, which can gauge the degree of redundancy they want in their own collections.-Bob Nardini, Chichester, NH Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
The noted contrarian takes on a presidency that seems devoted to taking the path of least resistance. On December 6, 2001, Attorney General John Ashcroft had this to say to Harper's magazine editor Lapham's fellow antinomian types: "To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: your tactics only aid terrorists for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve." Sure of the salutary power of dissent, Lapham (Lapham's Rules of Influence, 1999, etc.) works those phantoms hard, cataloguing all the ways in which Bush and company, having donned the purple robes of empire, are busily taking new and novel views of the Constitution at the expense of our liberties. Lacking the president's certainty that the deity endorses the government's program, Lapham urges his readers to understand that "dissent consists of nothing else except the right to say no . . . the freedom to conceive of the future as an empty canvas or a blank page." That empty canvas or blank page may not always deliver good news, may not always shield us from the risks that the Patriot and Homeland Security Acts are ostensibly meant to ward off; such bits of legislation, Lapham asserts, merely "aspire to a new and improved system of bureaucratic control that joins the paranoid systems of thought engendered by the Cold War with the surveillance techniques made possible by the miracles of our digitally enhanced telecommunications technology." Not that there aren't risks out there, Lapham acknowledges; it is simply that democracy inevitably suffers when no one steps up to defend it. But Lapham is hopeful: though self-rule is hard and autocracy the very definition of the path of leastresistance, the electorate "is by no means as dumb or as disinterested as dreamed of in the philosophy of Karl Rove." Which, of course, remains to be seen. Literate, sophisticated, and plenty ticked-off: vintage Lapham, and a ringing endorsement of First Amendment freedoms.
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781594200175
  • Publisher: Viking Penguin
  • Publication date: 6/17/2004
  • Pages: 192
  • Product dimensions: 5.32 (w) x 7.86 (h) x 0.83 (d)

Table of Contents

1 An Audible Silence 1
2 Gag Rule 41
3 Mute Button 90
4 Democracy in Irons 130
Index 172
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Sort by: Showing all of 2 Customer Reviews

  • Anonymous

    Posted June 8, 2006

    Lapham 'Rocks'. Tells it like it is in brutal detail.

    This book tells (in brutal detail) how this [pick your adjective] (as it's hardly an administration so much as a regime) uses, or better to say, misuses, the 'Patriot Act' and 'Homeland Security' to stifle, with the help of the people, and the media (especially), dissent in America. With emphasis on Bush and his people, Lapham tells it like it is. Hopefully, people will read this book and take notice, and create a 'debate' in this nation, on the war, the economy, and other importance issues to replace the 'monologue' comming from the right wing of the country. People share some responsibility in letting these people (Bush and others) suppress the free expression we are supposed to have, using 9/11 as an excuse. When someone like Ann Coulter can trash the widows and others who lost people on 9/11, but there isn't allowed a rebuttal, something is wrong. This is the kind of one sided and dictatorial view that's pervading the nation right now, and Bush and his people are attempting to suppress it. Lapham Rocks! A must read for most people (of course, right wingers, like Coulter, would vehemently disagree. She ought to be glad she's in a country, so far, that allows her right to be wrong, too bad she doesn't support it.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted February 27, 2005

    Understanding the Dangers of Complicity

    An important book for those who believe that the soveriegnty of this country lies with the people not with the President. This book does not simply criticize current policy but compares the already accepted examples of governmental incusrion into the individual liberties, particularly the freedom to question the government, with the post-9/11 governmental policy. The alien and Sedition Act of 1798, The sedition Act of 1917 along with the Red Scare, and the well known abuses of the government in the McCarthy era offer alarming analogies to current policy and attitudes toward anyone who dares harbor the 'unamerican' ideas that our government may not always be right. This book demonstrates the dangers of complacently allowing the government to quash and punish those who interfere with their pursuits to generate an unquestioned acceptance of policies regarding free choice, speech, foriegn policy, and attitudes toward pursuing wars.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.
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