Gore's "The Assault on Reason"

Discussion Questions

• Has power corrupted our democracy and twisted it to serve the rich instead of the people? If so, can we restore a government by, of, and for the people? How?
• Have we damaged our reputation in the world? If so, what can we do to repair it?
• Looking forward twenty years, what small actions can we take now that will have the largest positive impact to increase America's and the world's security?

Main points by chapter

1. The Politics of Fear

• p. 23: Edmund Burke wrote ... before the American Revolution, 'No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.'
• p. 25: President Eisenhower belatedly said, 'Any who act as if freedom's defenses are to be found in suppression and suspicion and fear confess a doctrine that is alien to America.'
• p. 25: It is simply an insult to those who came before us and sacrificed so much on our behalf to imply that we have more to be fearful of than they did. In spite of the dangers they confronted, they faithfully protected our freedoms. It is up to us to do the same.
• p. 25: The single most surprising new element in America's national conversation is the prominence and intensity of constant fear. Moreover, there is an uncharacteristic and persistent confusion about the sources of that fear; we seem to be having unusual difficulty in distinguishing between illusory threats and legitimate ones.
• p. 33: In almost every conflict zone in the world, you will find an element of amygdala politics based on vicarious traumatization, feeding off memories of past tragedies. In each case, there is a political process that attempts to solve these conflicts through reasoned discourse. But such a response is insufficient to dissipate the continuing power of the reawakened and revivified traumatic memories.
• p. 34: Research shows that television can produce "vicarious traumatization" for millions. ... television can create false memories that are just as powerful as real ones. ... People who watch television news routinely have the impression that the cities where they live are far more dangerous than they really are. ... even when statistics measuring specific crimes actually show steady decreases, the measured fear of these same crimes goes up as television portrayal of those crimes goes up. And the portrayal of crime often increases because ... viewership increases when violent crime leads newscasts.
• p. 38: Terrorism relies on the stimulation of fear for political ends. Indeed, its specific goal is to distort the political reality of a nation by creating fear ... that is hugely disproportionate to the actual danger that the terrorists are capable of posing. Ironically, President Bush's response to the terrorist attack of September 11 was, in effect, to further distort America's political reality by creating a new fear of Iraq that was hugely disproportionate to the actual danger Iraq was capable of posing.
• p. 40: The fear campaign aimed at selling the Iraq war was timed precisely for the kickoff of the 2002 midterm election. The president's chief of staff explained the timing as a marketing decision. It was timed, Andrew Card said, for the post-Labor Day advertising period because that's when advertising campaigns for "new products", as he referred to it, are normally launched.
• p. 43: Ed Muskie [said]: "There are only two kinds of politics... the politics of fear and the politics of trust. One says you are encircled by monstrous dangers. Give us power over your freedom so we may protect you. The other says the world is a baffling and hazardous place, but it can be shaped to the will of men."

2. Blinding the Faithful

• p. 47: With a few exceptions, our Founders were not irreligious. They knew then -- as most of us feel now -- that despite the many clashes between reason and faith, these cohabit much more easily in the mind than reason and fear. ... When fear crowds out reason, many people feel a greater need for the comforting certainty of absolute faith. And they become more vulnerable to the appeals of secular leaders who profess absolute certainty in simplistic explanations portraying all problems as manifestations of the struggle between good and evil. ... [The fear of others-who-are-different] is especially useful to demagogues who learn how to fan it and exploit it to gain and consolidate power.
• p. 48: One of the most important contributions of America to the world was the precision of our Founders in separating the relationship between Good and government... they were also keenly aware of the thin and permeable boundary between religious fervor and power-seeking political agendas. "A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction", wrote James Madison, but the ... nation would nevertheless be protected against the ungovernable combination of religious fervor and political power as long as the Constitution prohibited the federal government from establishing any particular creed as preeminent. ... John Adams signed a treaty [saying] "The United States is not a Christian nation any more than it is a Jewish or Mohammedian nation".
• p. 51: Our facility with rational analysis is not what it used to be... reading and writing don't play as important a role in how we interact with the world as they used to. ... self-government has always depended... on a widespread familiarity and competence with printed words. ... It may well be that the ... decline in reading and writing -- and the bombardment of every new fear with television commercials and simplistic nostrums disguised as solutions for the indicated fear has given American democracy an immune system disorder... we overreact to illusory threats and underreact to real ones.
• p. 54: By portraying the invasion of Iraq as the central front in an epic struggle between good and evil, President Bush sought to cloak his policy of unprovoked war in the garb of religious faith. ... He offered Americans a way to cut through the complexities of foreign policy by sorting every nation in the world into two simple categories: "You're either with us or against us." ... Bush proclaimed that his "responsibility to history" was to "rid the world of evil".
• p. 56: After invoking the language and symbols of religion to bypass reason and convince the country to go to war, Bush found it increasingly neccessary to disdain and dispute inconvenient facts that began to surface in public discussion... those who questioned the faulty assumptions on which the war was based were attacked as unpatriotic. ... Those inside the administration who sounded alarms about the increasingly troubling signs that our nation was marching with blind faith into a strategic quagmire were intimidated, threatened and censored. For example, the administration undercut the four-star general who was chief of staff of the U.S. Army, General Eric Sinseki, by naming his successor fourteen months before his retirement. And Major General John Batiste testified last year that anyone in the Pentagon who asked about postwar planning was threatened with being fired.
• p. 62: President Bush has stolen the symbolism and body language of religion and used it to disguise the most radical effort in American history to take what belongs to the American people and give as much of it sa possible to the already wealthy and privileged.
• p. 63: In case after case, the president has pursued policies chosen in advance of the facts -- policies designed to benefit friends and supporters.
• p. 63: The first important group in this coalition is what I would call the economic royalists, who are primarily interested in eliminating as much of their own taxation as possible... Their ideology -- which they and Bush believe in with almost religious fervor -- is based on several key elements:
  1. There is no such thing as "the public interest"; that phrase represents a dangerous fiction created as an excuse to impose unfair burdens on the wealthy and powerful.
  2. Laws and regulations are also bad -- except when they can be used on behalf of this group, which turns out to be often.
• p. 64: The second branch of this coalition is made up of the foreign policy hawks whose policy preferences range from unprovoked invasions to economic imperialism. Their overarching goal is to maximize U.S. influence throughout the world. Treaties and agreements are considered antithetical... because they can interfere with the exercise of power the same way domestic laws can. The Geneva Conventions and the U.S. law prohibiting torture were both described by President Bush's former White House counsel as "quaint" and then effectively discarded... so that Bush and ... Rumsfeld could institute policies that resulted in the widespread torture of detainees ...
• p. 66: The progressive abandonment of concern for reason or evidence has required the administration to develop a highly effective propaganda machine with which it attempts to embed in the public mind mythologies that grow out of one central doctrine upon which all the special interests agree: Government is very bad and should be done away with as much as possible-- except the parts of it that redirect money through big contracts to industries that have won their way into the inner circle.
• p. 66: This coalition gains access to the public through a cabal of pundits, commentators, and "reporters"... [who] relentlessly force-feed the American people right-wing talking points and ultraconservative dogman disguised as news and infotainment...
• p. 71: What makes [the right-wing's sect]'s zeal so dangerous for our country is their willingness to do serious damage to our American democracy in order to satisfy their lust for a one-party domination of all three branches of government and the enactment of dogma as policy. They seek nothing less than absolute power. ... They endeavor to break down the separation of powers... they seek to establish a system in which power is unified in the service of a narrow ideology serving a narrow set of interests.
• p. 71: It is truly power that is key to understanding the cynical manipulation of faith and the assault on reason. ... if either major political party is ever so beguiled by a lust for power that it abandons [respect for the rule of law], then the fabric of our democracy will tear.

3. The Politics of Wealth

• p. 72: If political and economic freedoms have been siblings in the history of liberty, it is the incestuous coupling of wealth and power that poses the deadliest threat to democracy. ... [Throughout human history] wealth and power have become concentrated in the hands of a few... The establishment of the United States represented the most hopeful departure from that pattern.
• p. 79: The private foxes have been placed in charge of the public henhouses... But there is precious little outrage because there is so little two-way conversation left in our democracy.
• p. 82: The essential cruelty of Bush's game is that he takes an astonishingly selfish and greedy collection of economic and political proposals and then cloaks them with a phony moral authority, thus misleading many Americans who have a deep and genuine desire to do good in the world. And in the process he convinces these Americans to lend unquestioning support for proposals that actually hurt their families and their communities.
• p. 87: Thomas Jefferson [sounded the alarm in 1821]: "Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation of power first, then corruption, its neccessary consequence."
• p. 91: [When radio was introduced] in the United States, the defenders of democracy insisted that constraints be placed on the new medium. The "equal time rule" ensured that political parties ... received equal amounts of airtime; the Fairness Doctrine ensured that differing points of view were included in programming; and the "public interest standard" required all of those in the small group granted licenses to keep the public interest always in mind... [in other countries without these safeguards, radio became a quick road to power for totalitarian regimes].
• p. 97: These contraints were removed during the Reagan administration, in the name of "free speech", and the results have been horrendous... Now that the conglomorates can ... selectively choose the ideas that are amplified so loudly as to drown out others that, whatever their validity, do not have wealthy patrons, the result is a de facto coup d'etat overthrowing the rule of reason.

4. Convenient Untruths

• p. 100: [Free market economies are superior to] centralized economies and [democracies are superior to] forms of government that concentrate power in the hands of a few. In both cases, the root of the superiority lies in the open flow of information.
• p. 103: All recent occupants of the White House... have been tempted to try to manage the impressions formed in the minds of Americans. Unfortunately, during the present administration, this temptation has led to a sharp increase in the use of secrecy, a determinted assault on the integrity of scientific research findings that might undercut the administration's effort to intimidate and silence the bearers of any information that might be used to challenge the decisions this White House has made. Worse still, the current White House has engaged in an unprecedented and sustained campaign of mass deception -- especially where its policies in Iraq are concerned. ... it is important to understand how such a horrible set of mistakes could have been made in a great democracy.
• p. 104: We were told by the president that war was his last choice. But it is now clear that it was always his first preference. (Note: this is one of the items disputed by David Horowitz; see my companion page for some fact-checking.)
• p. 104: The first rationale presented for the war was to destroy Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. (Note: this is one of the items disputed by David Horowitz; see my companion page for some fact-checking.)
• p. 105: Bush told the American people that he had documentary proof that Saddam Hussein was seeking yellowcake Uranium in ... Niger... then he asked the country to imagine how horrible it would be if one of the bombs made from this yellowcake exploded in a mushroom cloud and destroyed an American city. But two weeks later, the head of the UN agency monitoring nuclear weapons proliferation... [stated that the document Bush based this on was forged]. (Note: this is one of the items disputed by David Horowitz; see my companion page for some fact-checking.)
• p. 108: When he was preparing to invade Iraq, President Bush repeatedly gave the clear impression that Iraq was an ally and partner to the terrorist group that attacked us, al-Qaeda. In fact, not long after the attacks of 9/11, President Bush made a decision to start mentioning Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein in the same breath, in a cynical mantra designed to fuse them together as one in the public's mind. He repeatedly used this device in a highly disciplined manner ... President Bush said, "See, in my line of work, you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda." ... he continued to give no evidence whatsoever. [And eventually it worked]; polls showed that fully 70 percent of the people had gotten the message that Bush wanted them to get; they were convinced that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
• p. 116: Since his ideology teaches him contempt for the very notion of "the public interest", he actually prefers to rely on biased information prepared by sources ... who have a private interest in a particular policy outcome. The President has, in effect, outsourced the truth.
• p. 126: "if you were thinking of saying anything negative about the president... you had to expect right-wing pundits and publications to do all they could to ruin your reputation." ... The present executive branch has made it a practice to try to control and intin=midate news organizations. They paid actors to make phoney video press releases and paid cash to some reporters and columnists ... in return for positive coverage. When they needed a hand at crucial moments, they routinely called on pseudo-reporter, Jeff Gannon, who had been given press credentials by the White House even though he worked for a Web site owned by a Republican Party delegate from Texas... [who used time during presidential press conferences to support the President].
• p. 127: These tactics are all aimed at making it easier to deceive the public.
• p. 128: For this administration, all too often, the truth hurts; it hurts, that is, when it is available to the American people. Consequently, they have often sought relief by depriving the American people of access to information to which they have a right.

5. The Assault on the Individual

• p. 131: Bush has declared that he has a heretofore unrecognized inherent power to size and imprison any American citizen whom he alone determines to be a threat to our nation -- without an arrest warrant, without notifying them of what charges have been filed against them, and without even informing their families that they have been imprisoned. ... Now, if the president makes a mistake..., and he locks up the wrong person, then it's almost impossible for that prisoner to prove his or her innocence -- because he or she can't talk to a lawyer or family or anyone else. The prisoner doesn't even have the right to know what specific crime he or she is accused of committing. So a constitutional right to liberty and the persuit of happiness that we used to think of in an old fashioned way as "inalienable" can now be instantly stripped from any American by the president with no meaningful review by any other branch of government. ... In his famous book The Trial, Franz Kafka wrote about fictional prisoner "K.", who was put in a predicament eerily similar to the circumstances of some held in custody by the Bush-Cheney administration:

  But K. should not forget that the trial would not be public, if the court deems it necessary it can be made public but there is no law that says it has to be. As a result, the accused and his defence don't have access even to the court records, and especially not to the indictment, and that means we generally don't know - or at least not precisely—what the first documents need to be about, which means that if they do contain anything of relevance to the case it's only by a lucky coincidence. ...

  As Winston Churchill once put it, "The power of the executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious, and the foundation of all totalitarian governments whether Nazi or Communist.
• p. 160: The top-heavy focus on dominance as a goal for the U.S. role in the world is exactly paralleled by this administration's aspiration for the role of the president to completely dominate our constitutional system. The goal of dominance necessitates a focus on power, even absolute power. ... This same pattern characterizes virtually all of the Bush administration's policies. It resents any constraint as an insult to its will to dominate and to exercise power, and its appetite for power is astonishing.

6. National Insecurity

• p. 161: The pursuit of "dominance" in foreign policy led the Bush administration to ignore the United Nations, to do serious damange to our most important alliances, to violate international law, and to cultivate the hatred and contempt of many in the rest of the world.
• p. 164: It is vital that we see clearly who -- and what -- our enemies are and how we intend to deal with them. It is also important, however, that in the process we preserve not only the physical safety of our people, but also our dedication to the rule of law. As a nation, our greatest export has always been the hope that through the rule of law, people can be free to pursue their dreams. We have hoped that democracy can supplant repression and that justice, not power, can be society's guiding force.

  With the blatant failure by the present U.S. government to respect the rule of law, we now face a great challenge in restoring America's moral authority in the world and demonstrating our commitment to bringing a better life to our global neighbors.

• p. 166: The disdain that this administration demonstrates in its approach to all international agreements and treaties is similar to its contempt for rational debate based on reason and evidence in our national policies and public discourse. Rather than trusting that the international public forum can produce agreements that benefit all participants, the Bush-Cheney administration has an avowed foreign policy goal of unilateralism: Power is more important than compromise, and dominance is more important than international law.
• p. 178: Acting FBI director Thomas J. Pickard [repeatedly asked the chief law enforcement officer appointed by President Bush to be in charge of counterterrorism, John Ashcroft, to pay attention to the many warning signs that were being picked up by the FBI during the summer of 2001. Pickard testified under oath that Ashcroft angrily told him he did not want to hear this information anymore and that Ashcroft shut down the discussion.
• p. 181: There was then, there is now, and there would always have been, regardless of what President Bush did, a threat of terroris that we would have to deal with. But instead of making it better, he has made it worse. We are less safe because of his policy. He has created more anger and righteous indignation against us than any leader of our country in all the years of our existence as a nation.
• p. 189: When I and others asked the Bush administration what they planned to do in the aftermath of a speedy victory in the initial invasion of Iraq, Secretary Rumsfeld said that he wasn't certain we would have any responsibility at all. "That's for the Iraqis to come together and decide," Rumsfeld said. At that very moment, as we now know, he was attempting to shut down the program at the U.S. Army War College that was focused on postinvasion stabilization. he was also excluding from postwar planning the State Department team that was focused on nation building. ... The absence of any enlightened nation building after World War I led directly to the conditions that made Germany vulnerable to fascism and the rise of Adolf Hitler... By contrast, after World War II, there was an enlightened vision embodied in the Marshall Plan... that led in turn directly to the conditions that fostered prosperity and American leadership throughout the world. It is no longer reasonable to expect any similar enlightened vision from the current administration, but it is not to late for subsequent administrations to return America to the long-standing mainstream of its position in relation to the rest of the world. The damage to be undone is vast, but the cost of continuing to perpetuate that damage is literally incalcuable.

7. The Carbon Crisis

8. Democracy in the Balance

9. A Well-Connected Citizenry

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