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

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.

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."
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