No one ever accused Harper's editor Lewis Lapham of terseness. His new book, subtitled On the Suppression of Dissent and Stifling of Democracy, buckles under the burden of its author's hyperelaboration syndrome. Like his monthly Harper's column, Notebook--once a reliable source of erudite social critique, now a repository of increasingly artless crankiness--Gag Rule suffers from Lapham's refusal to say simply what he is simply saying. To wit: The Bush administration's War on Terror is, in fact, a war against the core precepts of the American experiment, and the president's men are winning.

It's an important point to make, and few public intellectuals seem better equipped to make it than Lapham, who excels (or used to) at framing abstract arguments in literal terms. When he is direct (and fact-based), the book shines. But his passionate animosity for the Bush machine leads him down the rhetorical blind alley of smug overstatement. Sentences like "Tyranny never has much trouble drumming up the smiles of prompt agreement" are fine by way of introduction, but page after page of "national political awakenings" being "smothered under the pillows of cant," the press corps as "the assembled scribes and Pharisees," and the ironic depiction of moderate Republican truisms as the "four pillars of imperishable wisdom," taints Lapham's screed with the insufferable arrogance of the Latin scholar. It's not that you don't agree with the ideas; it's that you cringe to agree with the speaker. Surely, this is the mark of a poor polemic.

It's all very well to lament the absence of Thomas Paine's voice in contemporary discourse, as Lapham does here, at length; but Lapham's own voice, which once seemed likely to carry on the tradition, is no substitute. His writing has become monochromatic and dull--more bludgeon than curmudgeon. The result is a book that fails to meet its own basic requirement: You can't start a conversation if you won't stop talking.