BOOK REVIEW / ESSAYS : One Take on the ‘States of Confusion’ That Are America : HOTEL AMERICA: Scenes in the Lobby of the Fin-de-Siecle by Lewis Lapham; Verso; $24.95, 371 pages

For a man of strong opinions, Lewis Lapham is in an enviable position. The longtime editor of Harper’s magazine can vent those opinions in Notebook columns in every issue--being subject, presumably, to nobody’s blue pencil but his own.

No wonder that the anger and gloom with which Lapham views the United States in this collection of 52 columns from 1989-’95 is mixed with such a sense that he is having a terrific time.

Lap whose previous books include “Money and Class in America” and “The Wish for Kings,” here groups his columns under three headings: Government, Society and Culture. He prefaces each group with an essay that with a certain grim glee--like the methane gas that bubbles like champagne from the garbage in a landfill--sums up one of the “several states of confusion” that have beset America’s “ruling and explaining classes” since “the abrupt disappearance of the Cold War.”

The apparent triumph of democracy in the world, Lapham says, has disguised the erosion of democracy in the United States. Big money, always a powerful force in government, has corrupted it completely. “Congress offered itself for sale to the highest bidder, and the political action committees bought so many politicians of both denominations that it was no longer possible to tell the difference between a Republican and a Democrat.” A class war has been fought in the last 15 years and the rich have won it, with hardly a peep of protest from the losers.

The “liberal” media that might have kept people informed about this have instead knuckled under to power, celebrity, the opinion polls, the victorious military of the Persian Gulf War and, of course, their own bottom lines. “The manufacture and sale of the nation’s news is the work of very large, very rich and very timid corporations,” Lapham says. The news is tailored to the buying public; and what sells in these fear-ridden, intolerant days--besides scandal and bad taste--is conservatism.

We are fear-ridden and intolerant, he says, because growing economic inequality has made Americans angry and because, without the Soviets to kick around anymore, that anger has to be deflected from its appropriate targets, the rich, onto other groups deemed “less American.”

Hence the “culture wars,” which have so far succeeded brilliantly in “substituting the questions of moral conduct and deportment for the more intractable ones about the division of the national spoils.”

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Regarding the Los Angeles riots, Lapham notes: “The spirit of the age is feudal, and the fear of the cities allies itself not only with the fear of crime and disease and black people but also with the fear of freedom.” We let cities decay and burn because the suburban well-to-do--the voters--have come to value safety and orthodoxy more than the free life of the mind that cities, in their messy diversity, make possible.

“As conditions in the slums deteriorate, which they inevitably must as a consequence of their designation as enemy countries, the slums come to look just the way they are supposed to look in the suburban imagination,” Lapham says. “The bleak prospect confirms the Republican faith in prisons and serves as an excuse for imposing de facto martial law on a citizenry construed as a dangerous rabble.”

Lapham’s own opinion of the citizenry isn’t much higher. Indifferently educated, easily confused, they are “so frightened of the future that they prefer the comforts of the authoritative lie.” He muses: “I think it is possible that the American experiment with democracy may have run its course.”

How serious is he? Here we may have a clue about why Lapham, who makes so much more sense than Rush Limbaugh or Howard Stern, has less influence than either. His is a patrician voice. He refuses to talk down to his audience, much less cozy up to its ignorance and prejudices--which is admirable, of course. Nor will he surrender a jot of his wit and erudition and style.

But this is an age when Limbaugh and Stern can make lack of style sound like honesty and make prejudice thump like the heartbeat of the common man. Lapham, in contrast, sounds like somebody with Gore Vidal disease--somebody who speaks for the poor not because he knows much about them but because he despises the Puritanism of the middle class and knows the sins of the rich all too well; somebody who, no matter how sincere his convictions, never lets them keep him, as a writer, from having a very good time indeed.