The Assault on Reason: Our Information Ecosystem, from the Age of Print to the Age of Trump

311 Pages·2017·2.25 MB·English

by  Al Gore

Praise for the First Edition of Al Gore’s The Assault on Reason ‘The Assault on
Reason . . . is as powerful in making its points about the implications of this
administration’s policies as the author’s 2006 book, An Inconvenient Truth, was in
making its points about the fallout of global warming. . . . [A] blistering assessment
of the Bush administration and the state of public discourse in America at this
“fateful juncture” in history’
New York Times
‘Powerful . . . His writing represents a decency and an intelligence in American
political thought that has been missing in recent years’
Sunday Times
‘Historians who need a catalog of what went wrong after, oh, December 12, 2000,
the day of a certain U.S. Supreme Court decision, will find it all in this book’
Washington Post
‘What [Al Gore] is telling us today – with the moral authority of a man who many
believe was wrongly barred from the presidency – is that American democracy and
indeed American society are in danger from authoritarians of the right. . . . He
provides in this book one of the most comprehensive indictments of the Bush
administration that has ever appeared in print’
Los Angeles Times
‘The book is part polemic, part impeachment in hard covers’
Boston Globe
‘The book – devastating precisely because Gore has been so close to the pinnacle of
American politics – is a carefully considered elucidation of the Bush
administration’s crimes’
Bloomberg.com
The Assault
on Reason
To my father,
Senator Albert Gore Sr.,
1907–1998

Contents
Preface to the 2017 Edition
INTRODUCTION
ONE The Politics of Fear
TWO Blinding the Faithful
THREE The Politics of Wealth
FOUR Convenient Untruths
FIVE The Assault on the Individual
SIX National Insecurity
SEVEN The Carbon Crisis
EIGHT Democracy in the Balance
NINE A Well-Connected Citizenry
CONCLUSION The Rebirth of Democracy
CONCLUSION TO THE 2017 EDITION: Post-Truth: On Donald Trump and the
2016 Election
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Preface to the 2017 Edition
Ten years ago, when I wrote the first edition of The Assault on Reason, I began with
the observation that “a large and growing number of Americans are asking out loud:
‘What has happened to our country?’ More and more people are trying to figure out
what has gone wrong in our democracy, and how we can fix it.”
Ten years later, especially in the wake of the 2016 presidential campaign, this
feeling of unease about our democracy has deepened considerably. The assault on
reason has not only continued but intensified. At the end of 2016, Oxford
Dictionaries declared post-truth as its international word of the year. Not to be
outdone, another dictionary, Merriam-Webster, declared surreal as its word of the
year.
Back in 2006–2007, I was extremely concerned that “reason” was playing a
sharply diminished role in the deliberations of representative democracy, and that
the time-honored method by which Americans tried to identify the “best available
evidence”—and then struggled together to agree on what was more likely than not
to be true—was having an increasingly hard time of it out in the world.
Information that was importantly true, like the scientific consensus on the global
emergency of the climate crisis, was simply not finding its way into people’s hearts
and minds—in part because of large, expensive, and successful disinformation
campaigns. Meanwhile, information that was importantly untrue, such as the
allegation that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking the United States on
9/11, was actually believed by most Americans, and continued to be believed by
nearly half of all Americans five years later, in 2006.
I wrote The Assault on Reason, not to excoriate the bad actors behind the
poisoning of our ecosystem of information, but to explore how that ecosystem has
changed in ways that make it so much more vulnerable to such poisoning. Bad
actors have always been with us, and always will be, and in any case, my bad actor
might be your inspired patriot.
For this edition, I have added a substantial new conclusion, which largely uses
the 2016 election and the success of Donald Trump’s sui generis campaign to try to
explain what has happened over the ten years since this book was first written, and
to examine where we can go from here.
I admit it doesn’t look good. His counselor, Kellyanne Conway, has introduced a
new Orwellian label for falsehoods: “alternative facts.” And even before taking the
oath of office, Trump used Twitter to begin a continuing claim that “millions” of
votes in the election were cast fraudulently, despite overwhelming evidence that this
isn’t so, and absolutely no credible evidence that it is so. His apparent reason is to
counter a fear that the “mandate” he wants attached to his victory in the electoral
college might be undermined if too much importance was assigned to the fact that
his opponent won the popular vote by a significant margin.
But just as I felt ten years ago that it was too simple, and wrong, to focus on
George W. Bush as the cause of this crisis in American democracy, I feel the same
way now about Donald J. Trump. Indeed, during his campaign, Trump was a harsh
critic of Bush—particularly his decision to ignore the CIA’s clear warning in August
2001 that Osama bin Laden was planning to imminently attack the United States,
and his misleading claim a year later that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of
mass destruction (WMD). Ironically, Russian propaganda designed to undermine
confidence in the ability of the United States to make good decisions regularly
includes the question, “What about the claim that Iraq had WMD?”
I wrote about the Bush administration’s relationship to the forces of unreason at
a moment when the stakes were still high; the grave consequences of that history are
of course still with us—particularly the destabilization of the Middle East and the
Eastern Mediterranean that predictably followed the tragic invasion of Iraq on false
pretenses.
Now that some of those passions have cooled, I have been tempted to go back to
those sections of the book and recalibrate them. I have resisted that temptation: I
think the essential argument of these sections has held up well, and they serve as
case studies of abiding use. And in terms of the underlying issues, the stakes are still
just as high.
This is, truly, a deepening systemic crisis for American self-government and for
democracy itself. After all, Trump’s victory must be seen in the context of a
worldwide rise in support for right-wing populism and authoritarianism. And in
every country that has voted in anger to overturn the established order, reason itself
has been under assault.
Just a few weeks after the election, here in the United States, an armed gunman
discharged his weapon in a Washington, D.C., pizzeria because of baseless and
vicious online conspiracy theories advanced by Internet trolls supporting Trump (or
that simply hated Hillary Clinton) that the restaurant was the site of a child
pornography ring run by Clinton campaign head John Podesta. And the same
group has already started circulating claims that this gunman was himself a “false
flag”—that is, a plant—sent by the child pornographers themselves to discredit the
conspiracy theories. This is, of course, a level of detachment from reality that is
truly disturbing.
Almost every day now, there are similar examples of “fake news,” ludicrous
conspiracy theories and determined efforts to discredit the established truth of
information that in previous eras would have been challenged among the literate
and sane. But perhaps more important than the proliferation of fake news are the
decline of real news about actual and important choices confronting our self-
government and the phenomenon the late Neil Postman called disinformation,
which in his view “does not mean false information. It means misleading
information—misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information—
information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads
one away from knowing.” Postman believed that when everything is presented as
entertainment, the role of news for self-government is damaged, because “we are
losing our sense of what it means to be well informed.”
So where are we, and how did we get here? In The Assault on Reason, I argue that
our ecosystem of information has been shaped by three successive reigning
paradigms: First came the age of print, from Gutenberg through to the middle
decades of the twentieth century. Then came the age of radio and television, from
the early to mid-twentieth century to our own time. And now—ten years later—we
are in the still-early stages of the age of the Internet.
The argument of the first edition of The Assault on Reason and the historical line
it follows still prevails; it is just, at present, incomplete. Democracy, which depends
on a well-informed citizenry, came to maturity in the age of print culture for good
reason. It wasn’t nirvana, or utopia—there was fake news then too, and at times an
unhealthy concentration of power in the hands of press barons as well, but there
was freedom of the press in a meaningful sense, and the Jeremiahs and the
muckrakers, from Thomas Paine to Ida Tarbell, got their messages out.
Broadcasting, particularly on television, changed all that—for many reasons I set