For Al Gore, winning the Nobel Peace Prize marked another milestone in the remarkable reinvention of his life since he lost the presidency to George W. Bush. The Al Gore who has emerged from the wreckage of that defeat is a hip figure with enormous cultural impact. What other politician has produced an Oscar-winning movie? Joked about pop stars at MTV Music Awards? Spawned a cult-like following of young adults who beg him to run for President in 2008?

Gore’s newfound credibility, combined with his decades of experience in politics, bridge traditional democratic values and the concerns of the modern world. In his newest book, The Assault on Reason, Gore laments the absence of intelligent and substantive discussion in American politics: He draws a straight line from civic disengagement to the misdeeds of the current administration. If his harsh indictments of government are sometimes narrow—Bush is blamed for nearly every blunder—Gore is nonetheless compelling in his insistence that citizens themselves must reclaim the future.

Blinding the Faithful
Gore does not mince words: Our government, he says, has acted with dishonesty. The proximate cause is, of course, the administration itself, but Gore believes that a “systematic decay of the public forum,” engendered by the rise of television as the predominant source of information, created the conditions for dishonest government to flourish. While Americans once read newspapers to stay well-informed, they now rely on staged thirty-second campaign clips that cater to their impulses rather than to their capacity for reason.

He recalls his own frightening glimpse into the power of commercials when, in his first run for the United States Senate two decades ago, an advertisement that he aired a set number of times garnered the exact 8.5 percent increase in tracking polls that his media adviser had predicted. The consent of the governed has become, Gore believes, a “commodity to be purchased by the highest bidder.” He repudiates the current White House for manipulating the level of fear in America to launch an unnecessary war and assert an unconstitutional expansion of executive power. The Bush administration has performed its task with such precision, Gore argues, that many Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein was connected to the 9/11 attacks.

A Wireless Savior?
Gore views the Internet as the future of mass communication, acknowledging the irony it has in relation to his own career: A medium that he was once mocked for supporting now threatens to dethrone television from its position of dominance. In 2005, as a sign of his faith in the potential of the web, Gore co-founded Current TV, an Emmy award-winning cable network that broadcasts videos submitted online by users. For Gore, this combination of citizen input and mass broadcast can re-establish the “marketplace of ideas.”

Gore wisely tempers his hope for the Internet with concern that service providers may monopolize information, just as wealthy politicians monopolize television. Indeed, if the political trend of media bias is so heavily entrenched in America, Gore’s assertion that neutrality rules for the Internet “could be easily crafted to protect…free speech” may prove naïve. What good are rights and rules if Bush and his successors can bypass them so easily?

Flawed but Necessary Foresight
Gore optimistically envisions a world in which reason is inborn—in which citizens, if given the chance, will gravitate toward checking the power of government. But his characterization of the everyday American as unusually receptive to media propaganda leads the reader to wonder whether Gore’s grand vision is possible. Indeed, to make a persuasive case regarding the dangers of irrational fright, Gore himself resorts to the language of panic, issuing warnings on subjects ranging from the “incestuous coupling” of wealth and power to the “carbon crisis.”

Whatever the limits to Gore’s proposals, however, there is an underlying cogency to the contrasting visions of political discourse that he sketches: the enlightenment of the printed word versus the passive misinformation of television; the “politics of trust” versus the “politics of fear”; and the democratic ideal versus unprecedented power in the executive. While The Assault on Reason may lack for objectivity, the force of its arguments illuminates the gap between what America is and what it could be, a gap that is beyond the power even of a prospective Gore administration to bridge. Whether Americans can close that gap will, in the best tradition of democratic government, be up to the citizens themselves.¨ ]]>