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“The starting point of the book is that American democracy is in decline and rather than blaming Bush’s administration exclusively, Al Gore asks why is it that the elaborate checks and balances in the system (free press, congress, judiciary …etc and ultimately the voters) are unable to address the decline? This suggests a deeper problem than just a misguided administration. According to Gore,
“The underlying premise of representative democracy is that the voters would be able to communicate freely within the public forum with the candidates vying to be their representatives in Congress and assumed further that they could rely on the free flow of information about that representative’s subsequent performance in Congress in order to hold him accountable.”
Hence his thesis that ‘reason’ is under assault as decisions are no longer made based on reasons communicated freely by the citizens of America. Gore refers to this process as the ‘dialogue of democracy’.
Although Gore tries to distance himself from pointing his finger at the current administration, that is always inevitable given Bush’s horrendous war time policies and Gore’s partisan political background. He begins identifying factors that are assaulting reason with a through analysis of the “politics of fear”. Gore skillfully weaved neuroscience lingo such as “heuristics”, “vicarious traumatization” and “probability neglect” together to show how the Bush’s administration has applied the politics of fear to undermine the role of reason in the dialogue of democracy.
Heuristics is the shortcut pathway that connects our visual centre in the form of disturbing images to the rest of the brain without being mediated by language or reasoned analysis. Further, when confronted with a great threat, we often ignore the probability of the threat materializing (probability neglect).
Gore also asserts that in times of fear and uncertainty, the masses blindly cling on to religion dogmatically as religion is constant and provides comfort in trying times. Bush’s Iraq policy utilized such conditions and was summarized as below,
“He waged the politics of blind faith. He uses a combination of misdirected vengeance and misguided dogma to dominate the national discussion, bypass reason, silence dissent and intimidate those who questioned his logic.”
In doing this, Bush was ably aided by his coalition of ‘economic royalists’, ‘foreign policy hawks’ and ‘extreme religious conservatives’ who vitally provided religious camouflage to cloak the right wing faction’s political agenda.
The next factor analyzed by Gore is the incestuous relationship between capitalism and democracy. They are siblings but they must be separated as democracy begins with the premise that all are created equal whereas capitalism begins with the promise that competition (which is encouraged) will inevitably produce inequality. In America’s history, the tension between democracy and capitalism has always existed, slavery being the most obvious example but time and time again, democracy has always prevailed thanks to an accessible and open public forum aided by the free press. It has to be said though that why an open public forum necessarily favours democracy over capitalism is unclear. According to Gore, the advent of radio and later on television disrupted this balance. Some of the unfortunate features of the television are:
1) One way medium
2) Individuals receive but do not send
3) They listen but do not speak
4) They do not comment in ways that others can hear
5) Their ability to use the tool of reason as participants in the democratic dialogue is suspended.
This problem becomes more acute when access to the public forum (to contribute ideas) requires capital as in the case of television. According to Gore,
“If the forum is not fully open, then those who control access become gatekeepers. If they charge money in return for access, then those with more money have a greater ability to participate. Good ideas of men and women who cannot afford the price of admission to the public forum are then no longer available for consideration.”
In this scenario, lobby groups (those with money) are typically motivated to fund candidates who promise post election policies that will serve their interest and voters check and balance are ineffective as both candidates and contributors can shape voters’ opinions by mass advertising campaigns on TV. Consent of the governed becomes “manufactured consent”.
Gore tried to compare and contrast the features of TV with the printing press which according to him brought about the Enlightenment but he fails to show how the printing press provides the avenue for a two way discourse in the democratic dialogue. Nevertheless his concerns on the nature of TV are still valid.
At this juncture, unfortunately Gore digresses into discussing specific policies of the Bush administration in curtailing individual liberty without linking it back to his central thesis. Nevertheless, it is useful to understand how the current assault on individual liberty is different from previous administrations’ in the way below:
1) In each of the previous cases, when the conflict and turmoil subsided, the country recovered its equilibrium and often felt ashamed and tried to make up for the abuses with monetary compensation, apologies, new laws and new protections. Now the war on terror is predicted by the administration to last for the rest of our lives.
2) New technologies have been harnessed by the administration to sweep up and analyze enormous quantity of information which adds significant vulnerability to the privacy and freedom of enormous number of innocent people.
3) This administration has come into power based on the legal theory that excessive concentration of presidential authority is what the constitution intended.
According to Gore, the cumulative affect of the above factors leads to national insecurity as he aptly puts it,
“We should have known then what we know now not only about the invasion of Iraq but also about the climate crisis and what would happen if the levees failed to protect New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. We should have known because the information was readily available. The larger explanation for this crisis in American decision making is that reason itself is playing a diminished, less respected role in our national conversation.”
The next part of Gore’s analysis is a critical examination of the checks and balances within the American system specifically Congress and the courts. Reason will only play a central role when the different branches of government are forced to deliberate amongst themselves and negotiate with the other branches. Here Gore pointed to the elaborate system of checks and balance such as the different tenure for the House (elected every two years) and the Senators (elected every six years). This ensured that those elected into the House would be more responsive to the citizens’ needs and wants whereas the Senators could take a more long term view on issues. Another interesting mechanism is known as the filibuster which is a political device used in the US senate to prevent Senators from closing debate on pending questions and moving on to actual vote. A bare minimum 41 senators out of 100 can obstruct the ability of the majority to proceed to take vote including when confirming the President’s nomination for the judiciary (which is the purview of the Senate).
However in the name of security, the Bush’s administration has relegated the Congress and the courts to the sidelines and replaces US’s democratic system of checks and balances with an unaccountable executive. For example President Bush has issued more than 1000 “signing statement” traditionally used for the president to raise concern on Congress approved legislation but which has been used by President Bush to indicate which part of the law does not apply to him when he is acting in the capacity of commander in chief. In comparison, President Clinton issued signing statements covering 140 laws over 8 years.
As for the judiciary, Gore opined that the Republicans in the Congress have created an atmosphere that discouraged judicial independence and have even intimidated them by withdrawing budget from courts whose decisions they disagree with. Further, appointments like Alito and CJ Roberts who subscribes to the ‘unitary executive’ philosophy achieves the same objective to deny check and balance. Ultimately to Gore though, it is the American voters who must play the vital role of ensuring that reason takes its rightful place in the democratic dialogue and that is the subject of his analysis in the last chapter.
In this last chapter, Gore returns to his analysis on the relationship between voters and the media specifically the television. According to him,
“Voters are now viewed as targets for easy manipulation by those seeking their ‘consent’ to exercise power. What passes for a national ‘conversation’ is usually a television monologue consisting of highly sophisticated propagandistic messages.”
To underline how important TV advertisements have been, Gore reveals that in the 2006 elections, candidates of both political parties verified that more than 2/3rd of their election budget was spent on thirty second TV advert.
Gore then explained that this monologue has resulted in voters loosing interest in elections and democracy generally. He drew a parallel between infants and the disinterested American voters using the ‘Attachment theory’. Just as infants who receive no emotional response from their caregivers are at a high risk of learning a deep existential rage that makes them prone to violence and antisocial behavior, voters who express their opinions over an extended period of time without evoking a meaningful response, also begin to feel angry. If the flow of communication provides little opportunity for citizens to express themselves meaningfully, they begin to feel frustration and powerlessness. This is especially so in the case of television where the information and opinions made available in the marketplace of ideas come only from those with enough money to pay the price of admission. Democracy depends on the regular sending and receiving of signals – not only between the people and those who become elected representatives but also amongst the people themselves. Only then will reason return to its primacy.
Gore then proceeds to distinguish a ‘well educated citizenry’ from a ‘well informed citizenry’ in which he opined that education alone is not sufficient to address this malaise. He quoted the example of the Nazi party where most members were well educated yet their education only served to make them more effective members of the party. What America really needs is the reestablishment of genuine democratic discourse in which individuals can participate in a meaningful way – a conversation of democracy in which meritorious ideas and opinions from individuals do evoke a meaningful response. In essence America needs ‘a well connected citizenry’ to produce a ‘well informed citizenry’ and the solution Gore believes lies in the power of the internet. Some of the structural features of the internet that empower citizens are:
1) Heavy reliance on text. Anyone who learns to read text also learns to write text. For most publishing a text message on the internet is even easier today than publishing a printed pamphlet was in the late 18th century. Moreover in contrast to radio and TV broadcasting, there is no inherent limitation on the number of entryways to the public forum as it exists on the internet.
2) Ideal medium for individuals with common perspectives to find one another and form communities around their shared interests.
3) Blogs allow for public discourse without the public ever needing to gather in a single public place.
4) Rapid explosion of wikis that compile public information. The idea behind wikis is that in general people as a group know more than nay one individual. Anyone is allowed to contribute information to a wiki
All the above makes Gore believe that the internet is not just another platform for disseminating the truth but also a platform for pursuing the truth and the decentralized creation and distribution of ideas.
Gore then belatedly analyzes the obstacle faced by the internet namely the attempt by network operators to impose additional charges on web companies who put high volumes of content on the network which will effectively create two tiers of content providers. This will mean that:
1) Web companies that refused to pay money to the network operators might find that their sites stopped running quickly for Internet users
2) Smaller content providers who can now capitalize on the two way nature of the internet for democratic discourse might be unable to secure quality online services.
It goes without saying that Gore believes the global citizens and particularly Americans must fight these attempts vigorously as what is at stake is not just free speech but given the role that he believes internet has to play, the whole democratic framework of America.
Due to the fact that the ‘solution’ was only introduced in the last chapter of the book (albeit there were brief hints in other chapters), analysis of the obstacles faced by the internet is not exhaustive and insufficient particularly on issues such as censorship and the masses’ access to the internet in poor and developing countries. We won’t get a ‘well connected citizenry’ if the citizens don’t have access to the chain that connects them in the first place. However given that the theme of “Assault on Reason” is on American democracy, issues such as censorship and access to the internet may not be as important and hence their omission is understandable.
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sunny78 wrote this review Monday, October 15 2007.
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