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The Assault on Reason
Al Gore
New York: The Penguin Press, 2007
308 pp., $25.95, hardcover
ISBN: 978-1-59420-122-6

Former Vice President Al Gore’s The Assault on Reason is a well-researched exploration of the diminishing existence of debate in America in the age of television. He outlines how debate exists at the core of democratic theory and structure, and wonders whether or not democracy can survive its extinction.

Is America retreating to a pre-Civil Rights era, or to a McCarthy-like bunker mentality in response to a new "Cold War," or to an overreaching one, as during World War I, when the Sedition Act enabled U.S. law enforcement to round up pro-union workers and activists in the name of protecting war-serving industries? It seems so. This book compiles copious research alongside psychological and media theory to outline the decline of debate in America in cool, reasoned prose.

Policy advocates, lawmakers and concerned world citizens everywhere of all political persuasions should read this book. It is not always right, but its ideas are profound and provocative. It requires set-aside quiet reading time, for Gore’s book is an extended rational argument, combining academic and conversational prose.

It also is an extensively documented indictment of the Bush administration’s disregard for the U.S. Constitution and the checks-and-balance system of government. While Gore’s focus here may seem partisan to some, Gore cites facts already well-reported in news outlets about federal wiretapping, U.S. torture, and the conservative “unitary executive theory” behind it all that should alarm conservatives and libertarians alike. This theory states that the President’s constitutional war powers can trump congressional law, ignoring that the U.S. Constitution specifically gives the President a veto power over laws, not a free pass to ignore law.

These two issues—the government’s security-minded assault on U.S. Constitution and the diminishment of public debate are intertwined—argues Gore, because the checks-and-balances core of the U.S. Constitution is precisely designed to require debate and compromise in government. Institutionalized public debate is what distinguishes America from past monarchies and present dictatorships. Governmental debate is safeguarded by the institutions of checks and balances and constitutionally-protected “free press.”

From this perspective, diminished public debate represents a social crisis. The long-term cause of declining debate in America, says Gore, is that for the last 50 years, electronic culture has eclipsed print culture.

U.S. Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia noted on the floor of the Senate—on the eve of the 2003 U.S. war against Iraq—that the chamber “is, for the most part silent, ominously dreadfully silent.”

As a former Senator himself, Gore notes from experience that lawmakers are too busy raising money for pricey television advertising to participate in, or even listen to, legislative debates. This was not the case in the 19th century, when legislators like Henry Clay made their reputations through congressional oratory.

The second-half of the 19th century also is known as a gilded age of congressional graft, and so one cannot simply blame today’s loss of debate on political corruption. Television advertising today is so expensive, argues Gore, that policy is driven by the agenda of political donors who can fund 30-second TV sound-bites. These sound-bites themselves diminish debates, as also does the social science of advertising used for political campaigns.

What Gore calls “Democracy The Movie” is broadcast to hide this fundamental expensive and corrupt marketing structure. How to defeat wealthy interests and reform this system remains a question before and after this book is digested.

Its central thesis however is that the creation of the printing press in Europe and the subsequent rise of print culture itself created the culture of debate and therefore U.S. democracy. The exchange of ideas through print and pamphlets led to the founding of the U.S. and shaping of the U.S. system, which institutionalized on debate through the structure of checks-and-balances.

The eclipse of mass print culture and the rise of television and movies in the 20th century have empowered an oligarchy of media owners, says Gore, who now shape public debate through exclusive broadcasting and expensive gate-keeping for political ads. As a result, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, if broadcast today, would only appear on C-Span’s Book TV. Few watch that.

Of course rational arguments in print did not always equal rational and just societies, as the U.S. Civil War testifies. Nevertheless, print as technology is much cheaper and more democratic, argues Gore. Print promotes an exchange of ideas even between the pamphleteer and established publications.

TV has replaced two-way print culture with one-way electronic broadcasting. It also has intertwined advertising and content. This electronic culture thirdly has created a more instantaneous, responsive, and therefore less-contemplative population. Watching TV is passive, while also absorbing and immediate, as the phrase “couch potato” suggests.

The confluence of TV culture and TV information, says Gore, is why debate has died. This is why according to numerous polls, 50 percent of Americans still believe Iraq’s former leader Saddam Hussein was involved in the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. This often-cited poll data remains disturbing. It lends credence to Gore’s argument that reasoned debate has fled the body politic today, if nothing else, possibly because of television.

The book’s final chapter praises the Internet for enabling interactive, two-way public communication again. Gore sees the Internet becoming the next major new media. Are today’s blogs like yesterdays town crier? Beyond this, Gore offers no solutions.

Yet his book is a call to take arms against the sea of troubles. There must be local- and state-based ways to make political campaigns less expensive. There must be methods to make media more open to diverse viewpoints and ownership.

How can norms of debate begun in print culture be transferred to post-print mediums? This is a good question for everyone to ask. “Be the Media,” the independent media movement that began with the Internet says. Not a bad idea.

In addition, how can we all promote reading, writing, and thinking? For without public debate as the norm, non-public interests will debate and determine how governments address the social, environmental, and political challenges of the 21st century.

If all this was not enough, Gore uses the middle section of this book to bring together a number of well-reported facts about Bush administration’s assault on deliberative debate within the U.S. system of checks-and-balances. Constitutional checks-and-balances enable each arm of government to exercise oversight over another. Unfortunately this administration has been expanding their executive power under what conservative lawyers call, “the unitary executive authority” of the president’s constitutional war power. Their theory, for instance advanced by Berkeley law Prof. John Yao, asserts that the president can ignore U.S. law while exercising war powers. This theory is behind their actions on torture, enemy imprisonment, wiretapping, and so on. The theory makes a mockery of the system of Congress passing laws and the president signing or vetoing them. In fact, it very well could lead to an uncheckable executive much like what has existed in world governments for numerous centuries. But never mind that, some say, because we are the best and the brightest and know what is right for America.

— Gregg Mosson
Gregg Mosson is the author of the book of poems
Season of Flowers and Dust (Goose River Press).

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