Dissent from left to write

Politics, it’s often said, is a cyclical phenomenon; what goes around comes around. Just five years ago, pundits liked to claim that we lived in a post-ideological society; now, ideology has reemerged as fundamental to daily life. With Michael Moore and the Fox News Network, Aaron McGruder and Rush Limbaugh, it is an essential aspect of our cultural infrastructure, as elemental as the air we breathe.

Even in bookstores, it can’t be ignored. “There has been double-digit growth in political titles every year since the 2000 election,” says Charlotte Abbott, Book News editor of Publishers Weekly. “We haven’t seen this kind of environment in the publishing industry since Watergate.”

In many ways, this renaissance of political writing only makes sense; it’s been a tumultuous four years, after all. More interesting, though, is how the orientation of these books has slowly shifted, moving from right to left and from the confrontational bluster of, say, Al Franken to more nuanced arguments.

Certainly, you can still find conservative titles. L. Brent Bozell has written “Weapons of Mass Distortion: The Coming Meltdown of the Liberal Media,” while the new anthology “Thank You, President Bush: Reflections on the War on Terror, Defense of the Family and Revival of the Economy” will be distributed later this month to delegates at the Republican National Convention in New York.

Yet in stark contrast with the first year or so after Sept. 11 -- when conservative ideologues such as Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity effectively owned the bestseller lists -- the majority of new books are critical of the Bush administration and its policies, and seek to engender public debate.

“What we’re seeing,” says Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper’s magazine and the author of “Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and the Stifling of Democracy,” “is a reawakening of political consciousness, an understanding that freedom is made by politics. To some extent, this has to do with the debacle in Iraq and the squandering of American goodwill, but even more, I think, there’s a growing realization of just exactly what kind of people and ideas we have in power.”

Lapham is no newcomer to politics; his Harper’s column has been a model of intelligent engagement for years. With “Gag Rule,” however, he means to up the ante by addressing, in four direct and impassioned essays, the importance of protest in the marketplace of ideas. He’s not the only one: This summer, James Carroll has collected 88 of his columns for the Boston Globe into “Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War,” a withering moral indictment of the president’s Mideast policy, while John Powers offers up “Sore Winners: (And the Rest of Us) in George Bush’s America,” a kaleidoscopic take on the peculiar dynamics of what the author dubs “Bush World.”

The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg presents “Politics: Observations & Arguments, 1966-2004,” which gathers nearly 40 years of commentary, including his trenchant and insightful writings on Sept. 11 and its aftermath. Then there’s Thomas Frank, whose “What’s the Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America” has become a surprise bestseller after having been touted by Barbara Ehrenreich on the opinion page of the New York Times.

“The Frank book,” says Abbott, “is the most astonishing, because here you have someone who is not a household name writing about electoral strategy, which is a whole new thing.”

The question all this raises is how, in a culture that seemed almost entirely silent barely a year ago, dissenting voices have now risen to the fore. According to Carroll, it’s all part of a developing awareness that things may not be as they appear.

“In the last six months,” he says, “people have finally begun to face hard facts that have been evident for the last three years, that the great organs of government and the press looked aside while horrors were unfolding. Since Sept. 11, we’ve seen a failure of the political system. There has been no significant opposition to the radical policies of the Bush administration, so you’re seeing writers grappling with that instead.”

Carroll’s book is almost a moment-by-moment account of what he sees as our collective slide down the rabbit hole; the earliest piece dates from Sept. 15, 2001, and the most recent from March 16, 2004, around the first anniversary of the Iraq war. His central argument is that the president made a fundamental error in framing terrorism as a military, rather than a law enforcement, issue.

“I’m often misunderstood,” he says, “as a traditional pacifist, but law enforcement is not pacifism. The difference is that with law enforcement there are limits, while with war, as we’ve seen, there are not.”

As to why this matters, Carroll refers to his book’s title, a word the president invoked shortly after Sept. 11. “One reason the word ‘crusade’ is a useful emblem is that during a crusade, dissent goes out the window. It strikes me as important that there be a record of what happened from the beginning. Americans need to know that there was no reason to buy it -- then or now.”

For Frank, the issue is somewhat different; “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” is less a policy critique than an inquiry into conditions that have made our current moment possible, beginning with the right’s use of populist rhetoric to get its agenda across.

“My interest here is cultural,” he notes. “I’m fascinated by the way that places like Kansas, despite deep economic trouble, grow more conservative every year.”

Like Carroll, Frank has been charting such developments for a while now; his last book, “One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism and the End of Economic Democracy” appeared just before the 2000 election, and he edits “The Baffler,” a Chicago-based journal of social criticism that he cofounded in 1988.

“The Republicans do an incredible job of speaking to people on their own terms. They talk about values, which is what people want to hear,” he says. In that sense, Frank thinks the Bush administration may be less important on its own terms than as the expression of a decades-long process of moving the center to the right.

“People claim that Bush is such an outrageously bad president, that his policies are in such flagrant disregard of common sense and decency, that we need to speak up,” Frank says. “I don’t think that’s the case. He’s just a cipher, the product of a 30-year shift in the political landscape.”

This is an approach that Lapham, to a point, echoes. “Everything has a cycle,” he says. “Liberal ideas were in the ascendancy from 1930 to 1980, roughly, but beginning with the rise of Ronald Reagan, the dominant opinion has been on the conservative side.”

What remains to be seen is whether this emergence of oppositional voices can make a difference. Can a bunch of writers change the world?

“I don’t think one book can have a real effect, although perhaps their weight together can,” says Nancy Snow, assistant professor of political communications at Cal State Fullerton and the author of “Information War: American Propaganda, Free Speech and Opinion Control since 9-11.” “But I don’t think we’ve hit the tipping point. We’re still skimming the surface of dissent.”

Even the success of a book like Frank’s may not suggest anything fundamental, since, as Publishers Weekly’s Abbott warns, “Book consumers tend to be educated, middle-class people at a certain salary level, which makes drawing conclusions from them about the mood of the nation specious at best.”

Still, Abbott admits, there may be something happening, if only at the cellular level of the culture.

“This is a dramatic time,” she says. “We have a tight-lipped administration, a country at war, an uncertain enemy, an election year and the proliferation of media. Books are the last place where someone can deliver an idea at length, without worrying about handlers. When many people feel like they’re not getting the whole story, books offer a deeper look and direct access to a variety of points of view.”

Carroll is even more explicit. “Hope is the will of the people,” he says. “The Cold War didn’t end because of Ronald Reagan; it ended because of populist movements like Solidarity, or Czechoslovakia’s Charter 77. I have that kind of faith in the power of a popular movement.”

Still, he remains a little wary: “Until we have the debate, we can’t get the change.”

Of course, when it comes to change, Lapham argues, we’re looking at a process, and every process starts with an idea. More than once in “Gag Rule,” he cites Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet, “Common Sense,” was in a very real way the match that lighted the fuse of the American Revolution. Published in January 1776, it sold 150,000 copies in a nation of 4 million people, an influence impossible to imagine today.

Although Lapham acknowledges that a single voice can no longer make this kind of difference, he believes in the power of engagement to swing the political pendulum back.

“I think it can be done, but it has to be done in pieces. It’s not just about this administration, this election. We have to become political in the long-term sense of the word.

“During the 2000 campaign, Ralph Nader said that if a million people gave a hundred dollars and a hundred hours, we could change the country. But it’s the hours that are the hard part. That’s the willingness to serve.”