In December 2005, a Newsweek cover depicted George W. Bush floating above the clouds in a bubble. The image perfectly captured what so many have come to suspect: the US leader has been living in his own world, isolated from reality and fundamentally beyond the reach of those seeking to present contrary facts or arguments. This much has been true of Bush’s treatment of science, typified by his administration’s refusal to heed what its own scientists are saying about climate change. But the consequences of a reality-challenged president extend much further than science, from Medicare policy to the litany of untruths used to peddle the war with Iraq.
One gets the sense that had Al Gore been president, he would never have displayed such flagrant disregard for facts (though he may well have made other mistakes). Bush isn’t “stupid” – a mistaken judgement too often made about him – but Gore is deliberative to a fault: an intellectual, a wonk. It’s fitting, then, that his latest book develops the “Bush in a bubble” meme into a comprehensive indictment of the president who defeated him courtesy of “hanging chads”. And he has done it all in the name of reason.
By “reason”, Gore doesn’t simply mean argumentation based on logic and evidence. He means the entire Enlightenment project of forging constitutional democracies based on checks and balances, the rule of law and a free-thinking citizenry able to debate the issues and vote knowledgeably. And so Gore’s critique includes the Bush administration’s assaults on privacy, individual liberties and the balance of power. One might object that Gore is using an over-expansive definition of “reason” to do his intellectual dirty work. Such quibbles, however, seem beside the point as Gore bloodies the administration with a polemic of intense and sustained passion. A typical passage: “It is the president’s reactionary ideology, not his religious faith, that is the source of his troubling inflexibility… He is, in fact, out of touch with reality, and his recklessness risks the safety and security of the American people.”
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Such talk tends to be judged as beyond the bounds of polite (read conservative) Washington DC discourse, but Gore applies it to issues ranging from the disgusting abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq to the Bush administration’s apparent endorsement of the militarisation of space. Gore may be vulnerable on some of the details of his many anecdotes but he paints a thoroughly damning big picture. And thus arises his central question: If Bush and his administration failed so many times, misled us and lied to us so frequently, how did they get away with it?
Gore’s answer is that, as a society, we’ve forgotten how to blow the whistle. We’ve grown less deliberative, less engaged and less reasoned, at a fundamental level. This has occurred, he argues, as we’ve gone from a critical-thinking print culture to a spoon-fed TV culture; as PR and advertising gurus have developed increasingly sophisticated ways of manipulating us; as media conglomerates focus on vacuous Paris Hilton stories, rather than report serious public policy; and as special-interest groups have hijacked the US democracy and made it less and less responsive to the concerns of the citizenry. In sum, the proverbial “marketplace of ideas” has been trashed beyond recognition, leaving citizens less and less inclined to apply their critical powers to the issues of the day.
In Gore’s account, Bush is precisely the kind of disastrous president you get when public policy ceases to be about substance and instead centres on the marketing of agendas. Bush’s administration claimed his tax cuts would favour the middle class, that Iraq was cooperating with Al-Qaida, and uttered myriad other untruths that millions of Americans never learned to recognise as lies. To rescue Americans from this state of atrophied reason, Gore’s book, almost like a song, has a refrain: we need a “well-informed citizenry”. Gore understands the tendency to romanticise the past and recognises that this ideal – descended from Thomas Jefferson – was never a reality even in the founding days of the republic. Nevertheless, Gore thinks we can do far better in becoming informed, especially as the internet matures and surpasses TV as the dominant medium, promising engaged, two-way conversation.
The very idea of a well-informed citizenry, though, is problematic – something Gore does not sufficiently acknowledge. This becomes a key weakness of his book. Perhaps the most inconvenient truth of all is that reason itself – and particularly social science research – shows that most citizens will not have a deep understanding of most issues most of the time. They have neither the time nor the inclination to become fully informed about everything – and who can blame them? It’s actually quite “reasonable” to remain uninformed, given the complexity of public policy. It should come as no surprise that even as the US stem cell debate raged in 2001, polling data from Matthew Nisbet of American University in Washington DC showed that the vast majority of Americans didn’t know that “NIH” stands for National Institutes of ҹ1000.
“It’s actually quite ‘reasonable’ to remain uninformed”
“Reason” also teaches us that purely cerebral appeals and intellectual arguments aren’t always the best way to motivate people. In 2000, Gore was by far the more knowledgeable candidate; unlike Bush, he knew what the “Dingell-Norwood bill” was. A lot of good it did him. This is something the Bush administration has grasped far better than its Democratic rivals. Their 2004 campaign strategy – casting John Kerry as out of touch with the average American – showed a clever understanding that one doesn’t win elections by having more reasonable policies. As James Carville and Paul Begala put it, Americans want a president they’d like to have a beer with.
If we’ve opened a Pandora’s box of sophisticated PR tactics and voter manipulation, the realist in me doubts whether it can ever be closed again. Perhaps instead of bemoaning how the game is played, those of us who care about reason should instead focus on using these techniques more honestly and more effectively than our opponents. Gore himself has done this: using film, mass market books and especially the communications superpower that is Hollywood (as powerful as the administration at times), Gore broke out of a stultifying media discourse that failed to treat climate change with the seriousness it demands. While The Assault on Reason reads as a lament, Gore’s transformation into America’s leading public intellectual tells a far more hopeful tale.
Gore’s hope is that the internet can save us, but there are reasons to question this. The internet is much like television in that it overwhelms audiences with choices and leads to an inevitable kind of self-selection. Many web surfers opt out of serious information entirely, or choose groups of like-minded individuals who rarely encounter contrary perspectives. This concern – voiced in Cass Sunstein’s book – is never grappled with by Gore. The blogosphere, for all its virtues, too often mirrors Sunstein’s image of large groups of people engaging in mutual intellectual back-scratching, rather than challenging their own convictions. “Reason”, if it means anything, must include sustained engagement with opposing viewpoints. Rather than trusting in technology, the best solution to the problems Gore describes is probably the election of a president who will use the incredibly powerful communications platform that the office confers to elevate public discourse again – to inform and to educate, rather than mislead.
Gore’s hope for a “well-informed citizenry” will probably never be realised, and the internet may not be our saviour. Still, Gore the author, rather than Gore the politician, has produced a passionate, frustrating, but above all intensely powerful book. The Assault on Reason isn’t the kind of volume that ought to be judged by standard norms of literary criticism; it’s far too historic for that. Reading it, your mind is very much elsewhere: on the catastrophic failed presidency of George W. Bush, and – if only Gore had taken office instead – what might have been.
The Assault on Reason
Penguin