Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham is full of dissent these days, and seems energized by it. “It’s in our character to want to be nice. We get uneasy with sharp disagreement. We have nothing like the prime minister’s question period” in the British Parliament. Add nationalist fervor to fundamental niceness, he says, and you get something close to the view that America can do no wrong. ‘People want to feel that their presidents know what they’re doing, that our artists are capable of masterpieces, that our weapons are invincible. That we’re No. 1 in everything.’ To think otherwise, in this context, is to be perceived as somehow un-American.”