This is a weekly discussion forum about the ideas in and thoughts inspired by Al Gore’s: The Assault on Reason. It is not a "Run, Al, Run" diary and participants are asked to forego partisanship as well as "hot" language. If you have something to contribute, do so in a comment. You may challenge comments but do not challenge those who write them, please. Let’s all practice reason.
In this week’s diary, you will find a poll about money. You will also find an overview of Chapter Three: "The Politics of Wealth." I’ve done my best to stay true to the book; if you find an error or glaring omission please write a comment. Then I follow with my own commentary. At the end you will find links to dailykos diaries from this past week or so that I bookmarked into a folder titled, "Assault on Reason." They made me think about the book; I invite you to make your own connection. If you think I missed one, write a comment.
Overview
Chapter Three: "The Politics of Wealth"
Gore begins the chapter by discussing the relationship between capitalism and democracy. In the early years of this country, "Capitalism and democracy shared the same internal logic: Free markets and representative democracy were both assumed to operate best when individuals make rational decisions..." (72) The founders were concerned about overly concentrated wealth just as they were about concentrated religious dogma seeking political power (Chapter Two). Alexander Hamilton, a founder of conservative politics, warned that "As riches increase and accumulate in few hands...virtue will be in greater degree considered as only a graceful appendage of wealth (and will) depart from the republican standard." (74; algebrateacher note: "virtue" once meant the ability to make rational, usually political, decisions and the word "graceful" should be considered from its religious connotation: given by God)
From there Gore moves to how money can interfere with the public forum, corrupt the process of reason and thereby damage democracy. When uncorrupted, "...the operations of government are open to full examination by its citizens...then the corrupt misuse of political power for private gain becomes more difficult to conceal...Moreover, when ideas rise or fall according to merit, reason tends to drive us toward decisions that reflect the best available wisdom of the group as a whole." (75) Then where does the corruption come from? First Gore points out the problem of having people who control access to the public forum, "If they charge money in return for access, then those with more money have a greater ability to participate." (75) Those without the money have their opinions blocked and those with the money become more influential. Gore uses the comparative example of the political "importance" of the inheritance tax as opposed to health care for those who don’t have it.
Wealth also distorts political campaigns. Large sums of money can pay for public relations campaigns to shape public opinion, a one-way communication as opposed to the give and take of a participating, informed public. Large sums of money pay for television advertising, again a one-way communication that treats voters as consumers. Reform of this system is made limp simply because the public is not involved in scrutinizing the process, "It is the public’s lack of participation that empowers its abusers. It is the public’s enforced muteness that prevents people from...wield(ing) reason to mediate between wealth and power." (77)
Gore says, "In its contemporary form, corruption almost always involves the incestuous coupling of power and money and describes the exchange of money for the misuse of public power." (78) Gore gives examples of this, including Ken Lay of Enron, his involvement in the picking of members of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the criminal bilking of California energy users. Gore also mentions the Environment Protection Agency and its being populated with representatives of the worst polluting industries. This is the fault of a presidency that operates in secret and is morally timid in the face of large contributors. This "incompetence, cronyism and corruption" has played a significant role in undermining United States policy in Iraq (81).
Gore is definitely not anti-wealth and does take a number of pages to show how the founders did not find fault with wealth in and of its own self. In fact, the early property requirements to vote were considered positive because a property owner would not be beholden to anyone when it came time to vote; someone with independent means could then vote independently. Property owners would also have an incentive to band together to preserve their property and thus preserve the republic. (algebrateacher note: I can almost hear some of you saying but, but, but...because of exclusionary suffrage of the early United States. History sometimes has to be studied from the viewpoint of the principals. I would add that one theme in American history is the extension of suffrage rights to more and more people.)
Gore points out how "neither logic nor morality was sufficient to dispel the corrupt understanding of ‘property’ that was at the heart of slavery." (86) The American Civil War, caused at its heart by slavery, was also a fight "between those who sought to perfect the logic of democracy and those who insisted on a perversion of capitalism...the right to own other human beings." (86-87) The America that fought its Civil War was still mostly agrarian; it was Lincoln who had to rely on corporations in order to win the war. His doing so freed the corporations from many constraints to the point where Lincoln perceived a danger, "...I see a crisis approaching...As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow...I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war..." (88; algebrateacher note: The whole quotation was the source of embarrassment for one reviewer of Gore’s book because he took Gore to task for not footnoting- thus implying that Gore made up the quotation- only to be "caught" by the fact that Gore has his notes at the end of the book, implying that the reviewer did not really read the book. The quotation is from a letter to Colonel William F. Eakins, November 21, 1964, as it quoted from The Lincoln Encyclopedia, ed. Archer H. Shaw, New York, Macmillan, 1950, p. 40)
The growth of power of the corporations continued through the rest of the nineteenth century and it was the 1886 Supreme Court decision Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad that essentially conferred upon corporations the legal status as "persons." The abuses of power and the hardships caused by corporations spawned reform movements, in particular the Progressive movement. Gore says, "In the tradition of Thomas Paine, reformers laid out with clear logic a description of the abuses they saw, the suffering that resulted, and the need for governmental action to impose remedies that were not forthcoming in the market of its own accord." (90, algebrateacher note: this is an easily memorized definition of what a Progressive is for those who feel challenged for their progressive politics.) It was the reading public that took these descriptions to heart and forced political change.
The beginning of one-way mass medium communication came with the radio. Gore explains the distinction between what the public had known, information through reading, with what was distinctive about the radio: it allowed communication over thousands of miles and it made the idea of a "mass audience" possible. Anyone who could afford to broadcast could bypass intermediaries and communicate directly to the listener. In the United States, constraints were placed on radio including the "equal time rule" and the Fairness Doctrine that ensured that different points of view would be broadcast. This was not true in the rest of the world where the radio was used for propaganda purposes. The massive listening public had to be convinced to follow and obey the leaders. Gore notes the effectiveness of propaganda in the rise and control of power of the Nazis, fascists and Stalinists. The radio allowed mass persuasion, a fact that was adapted by Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew. Bernays discovered the effectiveness of research in persuasion with two notable successes: convincing women it was all right to smoke cigarettes and it was all right to use packaged cake mix. It was Bernays’ business partner, Paul Mazur, who extended this further: "We must shift America from a needs to desires culture. People must be trained to desire, to want things, even before the old have been entirely consumed." (94) And thus the radio became a resource for creating demand where none had been. Competition over products became limited to companies that had the money to mass-market their products on the radio.
The effectiveness of economic marketing, centered on persuading a listener to buy a product, was used also in the political realm, where listeners were persuaded to buy in to a politician or political movement. In the United States, Walter Lippman proposed "the manufacture of consent" in which a governing class would reach decisions and sell them to the public. An example of this is Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s use of the radio to communicate with the people directly. Lippman thought this would be a positive thing for democracy; his philosophical opponents, such as Noam Chomsky, later used this phrase against the concept. The problem came when "consent" became its own commodity. The removal of constraints, such as the Fairness Doctrine, by the Reagan administration in the name of free speech has unleashed political sales and salesmanship, particularly in the current pervasive medium: television. Television is vulnerable to corruption, however, due to the costs of broadcasting, the possibility of monopoly over the methods of distribution (cable, satellite and the Internet) and the consolidation of media ownership.
A couple of significant quotations:
"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." (82)
"Now that the conglomerates can dominate the expressions of opinion that flood the minds of the citizenry and 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. Greed and wealth now allocate power in our society, and that power is used in turn to further increase and concentrate wealth and power in the hands of the few." (99)
Commentary from algebrateacher (call this: "Three Women"):
In acts of great bravery, as far as I am concerned, I recently broke my anonymity here at dailykos and sent links to my diaries to two people who know me: my mother and a friend from high school. My mother is a retired public school English teacher who, in her eighties, is still sharp enough to teach creative writing classes, write articles for her local newspaper and ask devastating on-point questions. My friend from high school is and has always been a cut-to-the-chase type person. I have condensed what they had to say to two questions to which I’ll respond; they I’ll get to the third woman.
Do I realize that I am preaching to the choir?
I know that a majority of the people who read this are drawn by the name "Al Gore." I choose to believe, on the other hand, that each week there will be one reader who is a strong partisan for the current group of presidential candidates. I choose to believe there will be one reader who is too young to have had the chance to vote for or against Al Gore. I choose to believe there is one Republican lurker who is curious about what really is in Al Gore’s book. If I am preaching to the choir, let it be so. But I am writing for those others. I am obliged to represent the book as honestly as I can which is why I always will invite corrections.
Do I realize that I am reading the book for people who can’t, or won’t, read it for themselves?
In American colonial times, one of the reasons for attending church was to receive news from outside the community. This was particularly true in small, frontier towns and villages. Newspapers received by members of the community were shared openly as were letters and transcribed sermons, often meticulously copied from originals in order to speed distribution, written by trusted and well-respected distant observers. These letters and sermons were most-often read aloud by a member of the community; this job often went to the pastor but not always. The reader was obliged to present the letters and sermons honestly and, in turn, was allowed to comment first about the contents.
If I fit the role of "reader," so be it.
The third woman is the blogger Digby, who recently presented a defense of blogging that should be seen by anyone using the Internet:
http://flprogressive.blogspot.com/...
Al Gore identifies the Internet as a public forum, a forum that is still in development. In the face of conglomerate-controlled messages, bloggers serve as an oversight. Political information that might otherwise be hidden from each of us is presented and, most often, we are invited to share what we think about it. Therefore for the price of a computer (or downtime at work), we are connected to truly current news. In pre-American Revolutionary times, the role of today’s blogger was filled by the Committees of Correspondence. In a time when "normal" news might take weeks or months to spread from one end of the colonies to the other, the Committees of Correspondence fine-tuned the spread of information to a matter of days. They controlled the message by getting it around official filters. That is the purpose for blogging and, here at dailykos, writing diaries. Diarist SusanG, in her review of The Assault on Reason (link: http://www.dailykos.com/... found support from Gore for the exchange of ideas we have here. Blogs do not have to be just for the organization of action; they also serve as a place to find information and try out persuasive arguments. And only in communities such as this one can a minor writer, like me, contribute. That is why I support the "community" diaries that are posted each day at kos. They break down barriers for what is a community of strangers. The community diaries make dailykos human. If someone is more inclined to read what I have to say because I told a good story at kossacks under 35 or I said something on-point at feminisms or I wrote a supportive interpretation of scripture at brothers and sisters, that’s human. Let it be so.
I am not a rich man. I am a member of the middle class and my economic position is under assault. If I were to run for Congress next year, it would be so I could have a pay raise to help pay for my daughters’ going to college. Any Member of Congress who whines about the cost of college and any member of the government who leaves his or her position in order to get more pay in the private sector to pay for college deserve all the derision I can heap on them. They are members of a class of people who see me as only a consumer, assuming they can see me at all. I can’t contribute much in terms of money to give them a good reality slap; all I have are my words and a will to use them.
Some links to thought-provoking diaries and more:
Al Gore "a horrible mistake"
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Not just a lie, a Big Lie
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Gore talks about The Assault on Reason at NPR
http://www.npr.org/...
Bush to Americans: Better you not know
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Baltimore Sun review of the book
http://www.baltimoresun.com/...
Like Gore, Greenwald compares Bush to the Manichaens
http://www.salon.com/...
Yearly kos: Education for Democracy
http://www.dailykos.com/...
A major crisis in confidence in American institutions
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Next week: Chapter Four: "Convenient Untruths"
Regarding the poll:
The bottom-line question here is about the bottom-line source of your money. Who really pays you and what do you do for that pay? What kind of worker are you? As with any poll, there’s wiggle room here. I’ve given some examples to clarify (I hope) what I’m thinking and I’ve tried not to insult anyone. I apologize right now, ok? Please choose the best answer available. If you don’t find yourself here, click the "other" and please write a comment.
I require...
1. An hourly wage from government money (public school teacher’s assistant, departmental administrative assistants, public university office personnel)
2. A salary from government money (public school teacher, police officer, firefighter, district attorney, public university instructors and administrators)
3. An hourly wage from a private company that competes with a public entity (office personnel in a private school, private security company worker)
4. A salary from a private company that competes with a public entity (private school teacher, private university instructor or administrator, private security company administrator)
5. An hourly wage from my private-sector company, no government money (insurance company office worker, warehouse personnel, factory worker)
6. A salary, share or commission from my private-sector company, no government money (insurance company Human Resources Director, private sector attorney, manufacturing administrators)
7. An hourly wage from my private-sector company that has government contracts (munitions factory worker)
8. A salary from my private-sector company that has government contracts (Raytheon, Halliburton, Boeing...)
9. Someone to pay me for the product I produce or the service I provide; generally I’m on my own (Cabinetmaker, dance instructor, professional writers)
10. Someone to pay me for the product I distribute or produce; generally requires employing others on site (I own a retail store or restaurant)
11. Someone to pay me for distributing or producing a product on site (retail store or restaurant worker)
12. Funds from another source (students, Social Security recipients, disability payment recipients, unemployment benefits payments)
13. I am an elected or appointed member of the government and my pay comes from that source.
14. Other. Please write a comment.