Les AuCoin Blog

Al Gore told me about his soon-to-be-published third book, The Assault On Reason (Penguin Press, 273 words), during a reunion at Portland’s Rose Garden in October.

In the green room, my mind went back thirty years to a different basketball venue we shared—the U.S. House Members’ Gym—and pick-up games in which Gore was a deadeye from the outside.

His political touch was never as deft. His consultant-inspired sighs and patronizing name-dropping in the 2000 debates helped George Bush more than George Bush helped himself, an odd feat.

The man I met at the Rose Garden, however, has blown off consultants, taken precise aim at causes larger than himself and seems liberated because of it. When they write the history of climate change, Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth may prove as seminal as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was to abolition.

Now comes The Assault On Reason, which warns against a threat not to the natural environment but to the American political environment and democracy itself.

The book advances four major arguments. First, the invention of moveable type in the 15th Century democratized civic knowledge previously monopolized by elites—and ultimately spawned the Enlightenment and an attendant belief in the power of reason, the bedrock of American democracy.

Gore contends that modern media conglomerates are reversing the process, his second point. By blurring news and entertainment—especially on television “news” where most Americans get their information—they sate the public with journalistic air balls such as Britney Spear’s shaved head and Anna Nicole Smith’s baby, disproportionately reserving too much consequential information to political elites.

With the public thus distracted from a reasoned debate about our national life, the book asserts, the Bush Administration capitalized on 9/11 and preyed on the fear of terrorism—abandoning the rule of reason for hubris and an appetite for raw power. “In almost every policy area,” Gore writes, “the administration’s consistent goal has been to eliminate any constraints—whether by law, regulations, alliance, or treaty—on their exercise of power.”
This is Gore’s third theme, that Bush and Cheney have “taken us further down the road toward an intrusive ‘Big Brother’-style of government—toward the dangers prophesized by George Orwell in his book 1984—than anyone ever thought would be possible.”

He chides both men for justifying the Iraq invasion by repeatedly linking Saddam Hussein to 9/11—a groundless assertion that 50 percent of the public still believes.

“[That] lie was also the key to justifying a constitutional power grab by the president,” he writes, citing warrantless wiretaps of phones and computers, unannounced entry into private homes even when owners are absent, the “un-American” jailing of citizens deemed to be “enemy combatants” without charges or access to lawyers, the use of torture, and the abuse of presidential “signing statements” attached to laws passed by Congress, in which the president asserts the right to ignore their requirements when he feels so inclined.

Duplicity and misfeasance of such magnitude would seem impeachable but Gore does not go there in the book and specifically rejected the idea in a recent interview on PBS’s News Hour. Yet he writes, “If [Bush and Cheney] actually believed [in a pre-war Saddam-al Qaeda linkage] in spite of all the evidence to the contrary…that would by itself, in the light of the available evidence, make them genuinely unfit to lead our nation.”

He quotes James Madison: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many…may be justly pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” In that spirit, Gore is convinced Founders “would feel that we … are facing a clear and present danger with the potential to threaten the future of the American experiment.”

But if such a threat and collapse of reason cannot be stopped by impeachment or even, as Gore suggests, by an election, what is his solution?

The Internet.

In this final point, he claims the World Wide Web’s easy access allows almost anyone to set up a site and become a modern day version of the pamphleteers, newspaper founders, and broadside authors who flourished during the birth of the republic. Gore believes when the Internet reaches its potential it may well eclipse the mainstream media and their “one-way” communication of “infotainment” with a spirited, interactive exercise of grassroots reason and analysis.

Gore’s prescription suffers in contrast to his erudite diagnosis of the problem. He ignores, for instance, the habit of serious blog readers to frequent sites that support their biases and ignore sites that don’t, behavior that falls short of thesis, antithesis and synthesis—in short, the kind of analysis that guards against any assault on reason.

But if only for its urgent, authoritative description of how presidential power has been aggrandized, this book is important reading.
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