This sounds like a memorandum circulated within the current administration and shaping its public statements, such as John Ashcroft’s admonition against those who dare to express concerns about loss of liberty in the name of security: “your tactics only aid terrorists for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America’s enemies and pause to America’s friends.”

But such guidance comes from Hermann Goring, who was diagramming for the judges at Nuremberg the simplicities of successful propaganda. And Goring added: “It works the same in any country.”

Alas, it has worked here, too, and that is one of the principal messages of Lewis Lapham’s Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and the Stifling of Democracy.

An unforgiving indictment

If Lapham’s angry, cynical, well documented, unapologetically partisan, sometimes poetically discursive polemic had no other message to offer, then it would not make an original contribution to the literature (although the vigor of the prose would still make it worth reading). The accusation that the Bush Administration has traded in paranoia to stifle dissent has now become a commonplace.

But Lapham has a great deal more to say. And he has more to offer us because his interest extends beyond the question of whether this political strategy has worked since 9/11 (it generally has) to reach the question of why it has proven so effective – particularly given its simplicity and transparency.

Critique of institutional media

Lapham’s answer to that question amounts to an unforgiving indictment of the institutions that have failed us.

He launches some of his harshest criticism against the American media, reciting numerous examples of its embracing of jingoism and abandonment of critical thinking, for instance Dan Rather exclaiming on the CBS Evening News that he will “line up” wherever George Bush tells him or Newsweek discovering in President Bush the character of “a warrior king … comfortable in ermine.”

Of course, Lapham’s attack consists of more than examples of lapses on the part of individual reporters or publications. His indictment reaches the institutional media broadly conceived, pointing out that “[a]s few as nine conglomerates now manufacture and distribute 90 percent of the country’s news and entertainment product” and charging that the national news media has become increasingly “toadying” over the last thirty years as it has been absorbed by “very large, very rich, and very timid corporations.”

Lewis Lapham makes a compelling case, and one that would not suffer from a little more sympathy and optimism. It does not seem terribly surprising, or seriously disquieting, that many reporters and publications got caught up in the post 9/11 fever of national unity, sharing in the sense of rage and helplessness. Also, some of the most outrageous statements Lapham quotes – such as Ann Coulter’s exhortation that “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity” – do not come from the mainstream media. And Lapham does not adequately acknowledge the continuing presence of a “raucous and belligerent press,” which he describes as the best defense against the abuses of power. In fact, the institutional media has done an excellent job of reporting on the infirmities of the PATRIOT Act and played a critical role in derailing the even more constitutionally obnoxious PATRIOT II.

Schools & Civil Liberties

Lapham also bemoans public schools that “serve an economic system rather than a political or philosophical idea,” and therefore “promote, not unreasonably, the habits of mind necessary to the preservation of that system…” “Our schools,” he writes, “teach marketing instead of history, and the prosperity of the last thirty years has encouraged a disdain for politics on the part of people who imagine that liberty is an asset inherited at birth – together with the grandfather clock and the house on the lake – rather than the product of hard and constant labor.”

In common parlance, we have become dumb and lazy, and the dissent that drives a true and vigorous democracy requires intelligence and vigilance. Again, Lapham’s point would lose nothing by acknowledging some grounds for encouragement, like the influence of popular voting initiatives or the revival of a visible protest movement.

Finally, Lapham worries over our country’s historic willingness to compromise civil liberties -- including the right to engage in dissenting speech -- during times of heightened security concerns, real or imagined. He recites a number of familiar examples: Mitchell Palmer’s fueling of public paranoia, J. Edgar Hoover’s dossiers, the antics of the House Un-American Activities Committee, loyalty oaths, the Hollywood blacklists, and so on. [editor’s note: re this matter, see Geoffrey Stone’s Perilous Times]

Conclusion

Lapham notes the occasional emergence of heroes, like Learned Hand and Arthur Miller making brave judgments in defiance of extraordinary pressures. Again, though, Lapham could cede some additional territory without compromising the integrity of his argument. Since 9/11 we have shown some productive skepticism: despite initial resistance, our government conducted a serious and probing inquiry into the failures that made the events of that day possible. And our fear has found some limitations: 9/11 did not result in the mass and groundless imprisonment of Arab Americans, unlike the shameful interring of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor. We certainly continue to make mistakes; but perhaps we also continue to make progress.

A true Jeremiad waves its arms in warning, but also to give some direction. We cannot find any such direction when the surrounding landscape seems to have lost all hope and promise. Lapham has written half a brilliant Jeremiad, and the urgency and potency of his warning should shake us all. But a great work of social criticism would also help us understand what we have done right, where we need to go, how to find our way there, and why we should not surrender to despair along the way.