So writes Lapham in Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and the Stifling of Democracy (Penguin Books, 2005. xiii + 178 pp., footnotes, index.). The reception of news and campaign speeches as entertainment evokes the warning issued four decades ago by Marshall McLuhan in evaluating the focus of H.A. Innis on "the bias of communications" (itself an outgrowth of Innis’ apprenticeship with Thorstein Veblen). McLuhan does get two pages in Gag Rule, but Lapham has not dwelt here on the disturbing anthropological implications of communications technology. He has chosen rather to express his contempt for the press barons who control information as they suck up to political power and encourage the prostitution of the reporters and commentators in their employ. And, to bemoan the failure of America to educate its youth in the importance of critical thinking about public policies for their own and the collective welfare. (A surprise: Woodrow Wilson, as President of Princeton University, opposed liberal education for all but a minority, preferring to discourage the habits of skepticism or dissent.)

If Tom Paine Were Alive Today

Lapham’s prime exemplar of what can happen when people are free to think out loud is Thomas Paine, whose 1776 pamphlet Common Sense galvanized Americans to revolution. (Currently available, with Agrarian Justice of 1796, from Penguin Books in a Great Ideas series, 2004) Paine urged his countrymen to not merely grumble about unfair treatment in the hope of getting a tax break from the king, but to revolt against government from afar. The British system of government, including a king and hereditary peers, is nonsense, he insisted. "As in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries, the law ought to be King." Published in January (150,000 copies), it evoked sufficient response that Thomas Jefferson borrowed Paine’s reasoning six months later in writing the Declaration of Independence.

But Paine’s trenchant approach to fundamental political order disturbed the propertied class and his next book, The Rights of Man, "prompted the British government to charge the author with treason and to declare him an outlaw." It became the best-selling book of the entire 18th century, says Lapham, and Paine was welcomed as a hero by revolutionaries in France. While there he continued his pursuit of the democratic ideal with The Age of Reason in which he ridiculed the role of established churches. That gave the Karl Roves of his time the opportunity to denounce him as a blasphemer. The Federalist Party had come to power in America during the decade of the 1790s, and on his return from France in 1802, "a Federalist crowd met Paine at the dock in Baltimore with jeers and catcalls, damning him as a "drunkard" and a "brutal infidel." When he died in 1809, his body was denied burial in hallowed ground, and throughout the whole of the nineteenth century, American preachers brandished the name of "Old Tom" as a synonym for the "devil." The appeal to religious prejudices seems to be a ready tool for cynical political manipulation of the unthinking and undemanding under-classes in every era.

The key element in Lapham’s analysis for the subject matter of particular interest to us is a 1979 book by Walter Karp, The Politics of War. Karp, he says, took his cue from Paine in making a clear distinction between the American Republic and the American nation, which Karp described as "deadly rivals for the love and loyalty of the American people." The nation, said Karp, is "a poor, dim thing, assembled as a corporate entity, sustained by an ‘artificial patriotism,’ and given the semblance of meaning only when puffed up with the excitements of a foreign war." Hermann Goering explained the principle to his judges at Nuremberg: "All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." The parallels in the United States over the past four years are unmistakable, but Lapham’s compilation brings them freshly to the fore.

It is the interlinkage of money power to warfare and appeals to patriotic nationalism that get in the way of democracy, social justice and public institutions. The seeds of this pattern were already apparent in the Federalist government of 1798 which passed a Sedition Act prohibiting "any false, scandalous and malicious writing...against the government [or President] of the United States...with intent to defame...or bring them into contempt or disrepute...." Furthermore, President John Adams proclaimed the need for an American monarchy and the need for a large militia to guard against the threat of Jeffersonian principles. Nevertheless, it was only "the expanding sense of national purpose associated with the waging of...the Mexican and Civil Wars [that] muffled...expressions of dissent in the more popular assumption that America was destined to become ‘the ark of safety [and] the anointed civilizer.’"

Gag Rules Before Bush

"Not surprisingly, the Civil War fostered the suppression of disagreeable opinion in every arena of American politics...but it was the applications of the gag rule by the McKinley and Wilson administrations around the turn of the twentieth century that established the precedents for those currently being put to use by the Bush administration." By 1890 the Industrial Revolution had made America rich, but people had also begun to notice that the railroad and banking monopolies held loaded dice and that the tax burden was shifting from capital to labor. The populist reform movement in the Mid-West threatened political control by "the nervous oligarchies of the monied East." The solution provided by McKinley’s administration included war in Cuba, the conquest of the Philippines, the annexation of Puerto Rico, and a foreign policy worthy of the strength and dignity of a great nation. "How better to muzzle the republican spirit and replace the love of liberty with the love of the flag than with the trappings of imperial grandeur...." McKinley had posed as an enemy of the eastern monied interests (a compassionate conservative, no doubt) and never once mentioned the word Cuba during the election campaign of 1896. By 1901, populist unrest had subsided in the surge of nationalist pride, "and for the next five years the agents and apostles of the American nation gloried in a triumph of wealth and cynicism presumed sufficient to silence any loose-mouthed talk about ordinary citizens deserving a say in a government nominally democratic.... Not unlike the bandmasters of the Bush administration, the tribunes of the people at the zenith of the country’s Gilded Age embraced the view of Senator Nelson Aldrich of Rhode Island, who regarded any kind of politics save the politics of corrupt privilege as ‘sentimental rot.’"

Populist discontent continued to rumble, and ripened into the Progressive Movement with the assistance of muckraking journalists and awakened intellectuals. This time angry farmers were joined by the urban middle classes in the clamor for a change of system. Against this more sophisticated enemy, the monied upper class found its salvation in "the hypocrisy of Woodrow Wilson, who engineered America’s entry into World War I in order to damp down the fevers of domestic discontent. Just as Operation Iraqi Freedom was not about the rescue of the Iraqi people, so also the Spanish-American War was not about ‘the sacred cause of Cuban independence,’ and our entry into World War I not about keeping the world ‘safe for democracy.’ Presidents McKinley and Wilson sought to punish foreign crimes against humanity...in order to make America safe for the domestic crimes against humanity committed by the top-hatted gentlemen in Cleveland, Chicago, and New York."

Although Wilson, like McKinley, had campaigned for the White House on the promise of social reform, he betrayed his presumed principles at the earliest opportunity (an invasion of Mexico). A year later, drumming up enthusiasm for America’s engagement in World War I, Wilson called upon the nation to rebuke the voices of disagreement, drown out dissent with the "deep unison of the common, unhesitatingly national feeling...." Not one American in ten thousand wished to intervene in a quarrel between the British and German monarchies; even the most feeble of presidents could have kept America out of the war, but only "a president of uncommon ability, boldness and flaunting ambition [these phrases are Karp’s] could possibly have gotten us into it." "The emergence of the United States as a world power between the years 1890 and 1920 followed from the domestic political crisis threatening to remove control of the country’s wealth and well-being from the custody of its newly ascendant ruling class--the passions of war meant to overrule the motion for economic justice...."

To continue this trajectory, one could consult Michael Hudson’s 1972 Super Imperialism: The Strategy of American Empire to see how the levers of government were pulled during and after WW I to emasculate Britain’s trading empire and make the world "safe" for American capitalism. Before the completion of that process, however (essentially the establishment of World Bank and IMF as tools of American capitalism), the Great Deflation intervened. This event has been widely interpreted as a consequence of "‘the money power’ and its hired politicians [having] consigned the arrangement of the country’s financial affairs to a consortium of swindling bankers and bribed legislatures" because it was "incapable of managing an economy that it could only prey upon." (Said of the McKinley-Roosevelt era, by Karp) Their abject failure then forced the money powers to retreat before a democratically energized government, but our generation has witnessed the reassertion of control by a narrow class of oligarchs who brazenly flaunt their ownership of government and wield its power against the interests of the great majority.

– from Economic Reform, February 2006