The Assault On Reason Analysis

Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore’s The Assault on Reason is a passionate, scathing book that paints a clear picture of where America has gone wrong. Our democracy is far from dead, but as events of recent years have shown, it is ill – perhaps gravely so. The appalling levels of ignorance of basic scientific and political facts among the voting public; our heedless and disastrous rush into war with Iraq; a political class that considers voter consent something to be bought and sold; a shallow, sensationalist for-profit media; an increasingly corrupt, secretive and authoritarian government – all of these are symptoms indicating that something has gone fundamentally wrong with the process of rational deliberation that America’s founders considered
Instead, there is a more fundamental problem: unlike print and the Internet, television is a time- and space-limited medium with high barriers to entry, making it in its essence a medium of the rich and powerful. It is not a place where people can have a two-way conversation; rather, it turns people into passive receivers of information, unable to respond as they see fit. Worse, television is not a meritocracy. One’s ability to participate in the medium is not based on the merit of one’s ideas, but rather on how much money one can afford to spend to purchase airtime for
This movement is summed up by its standard-bearer, George W. Bush, whom history will without a doubt judge as one of America’s worst presidents of all time. In a set of searing chapters, Gore lists the sins of the Bush administration: their obsessively secretive nature that deprives the public of information it needs to make reasoned decisions; their systemic and sustained campaign of deception to drum up support for their agenda; their disregard for evidence and expertise whenever those things clashed with the decisions they had already arrived at; the authorization of torture and deliberate attempts to create legal ambiguity surrounding the treatment of prisoners; and their authoritarian view of unlimited executive power which leads Bush to conclude that he has the right to seize and imprison American citizens indefinitely without trial, to wiretap and search without warrants, to preemptively attack any country he decides may become a threat, or to disregard inconvenient laws via “signing