"Dissent is democracy. Democracy is in trouble. Never before, Lewis Lapham argues, have voices of protest been so locked out of the mainstream conversation, so 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 salable sweep all uncomfortable truths from view." "In the midst of the "war on terror"--Which makes the hunt for Communists in the 1950s look, in its clarity of aim and purpose, like the Normandy landings on D-Day - we face a crisis a democracy as serious as any in our history. The Bush administration makes no secret of its contempt for a cowed and largely silenced electorate, and without bothering to conceal its purpose the government coordinates "not the defense of the American citizenry against a foreign enemy but the protection of the American plutocracy from the American democracy."" "Gag Rule is a call to action in defense of one of our most important liberties, the right to raise our voices in dissent and have those voices heard."--Jacket.