The last few years have seen a volley of books criticising the Bush Administration, ranging from investigative journalism to left-liberal harangues to whistle-blowing memoirs. Now comes The Assault on Reason by Al Gore, ?the man who was to be the next President of the United States?. It is possibly the deepest and most lucidly argued critique of George W Bush and his policies, because it approaches its topic, not by listing facts and faux pas, but from a philosophical, ideological and historical perspective. Gore?s core argument is that Bush has violated the very idea of the United States of America that the nation?s founding fathers had formulated and enshrined in the Constitution.
What strikes one immediately as one follows Gore?s arguments is the man?s erudition. The people he quotes to make his points range from Aristotle and Thomas Jefferson to computer scientist Danny Hillis, neuroscientist VS Ramachandran, and cult writer Thomas Pynchon. Citing recent discoveries in clinical psychology, neurosciences, information theory and media theory, and mapping them onto his expert knowledge of history and political science, Gore presents the case that Bush and his cohorts have masterfully stoked the American people?s fear and Christian faith to suppress the faculty of reason. The result has been a systematic subversion of the US Constitution and all democratic processes and institutions.
Gore uses the analogy of the children?s game of rock, paper, scissors to illustrate the relation between fear, faith and reason. Just as rock breaks scissors, scissors cut paper, and paper covers rock, ?fear displaces reason, reason challenges faith, faith overcomes fear?. He quotes extensively from Jefferson, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton to show that the founding fathers placed reason at the heart of democracy. And goes on to explain the basis of the Bush Administration?s strategy thus: ?Fear?can disrupt the easy balance between faith and reason ? especially irrational fear of a kind less readily dispelled by reason. When fear crowds out reason, many people feel a greater need for the comforting certainty of absolute faith.? According to Gore, by constantly keeping the mass panic button pressed on terrorist threats, and supporting that all the time with Christian fundamentalist doctrine, Bush managed to crowd reason out and ram through policies that are turning the US into a fundamentalist police state, where the legislature is cowed down, the judiciary intimidated, and the people never even get to know the details of what the executive is doing and what the implications could be.
Gore believes that Bush has pushed the US as a nation into a seemingly permanent state of post-traumatic disorder. ?Leadership,? he writes, ?means inspiring us to manage through our fears. Demaguogery means exploiting our fears for political gain. There is a crucial difference.? He notes that the fear campaign aimed at selling the Iraq war was timed precisely for the kick-off of the 2002 mid-term election. The president?s chief of staff, Andrew Card, explained the timing as a marketing decision. It was timed, he said, for the post-Labour Day advertising period because that?s when campaigns for ?new products?, as he referred to it, are normally launched. ?For everything,? writes Gore, ?there is a season, particularly for the politics of fear.?
One of the book?s other central theses is that television, being a passive one-way medium, has numbed the democratic process of multi-way debate that the print medium fostered. After all, there?s no point writing a letter on some political issue to the editor of a television channel. The medium is also perfect for producing ?vicarious traumatisation?. As usual Gore backs every assertion up by quoting research, in this case medical: ?The physical effects of watching trauma on television ? the rise in blood pressure and heart rate ? are the same as if an individual has actually experienced the traumatic event directly. Moreover, it has been documented that television can create false memories that are just as powerful as normal memories. When recalled, television-created memories have the same control over the emotional system as do real memories.?
In a particularly well-written passage, he muses: ?It may well be that the disuse of democracy?s calisthenics ? the sharp decline in reading and writing ? and the bombardment of every new fear with television commercials and simplistic nostrums disguised as solutions for the indicated fear has given American democracy an immune system disorder that prevents the citizenry from responding precisely, appropriately and effectively to serious threats to the health of our democracy. So all of a sudden we overreact to illusory threats and underreact to real threats.?
Of course, Gore does not end on a note of total despair. He feels that the spread of the internet could again build a ?well-connected citizenry?, essential for democracy to flourish (He himself has co-promoted Current TV, a television network aimed at young people based on viewer-created content and citizen journalism). And he does not fail to mention popular right-wing networking sites that spend much of their time criticising the opinions of men like Gore, as vital to the democratic process. At the end of the book, the reader may or may not agree with Al Gore, but will certainly be impressed by his research, his knowledge, the lucidity of his argument, and the passion that simmers just beneath his well-crafted, and often eloquent prose. This man is much more than a Democrat; he is a true democrat.
