Dismantling democracy

Al Gore touches on the fundamentals of a free society in his book.

THE five Republican politicians on the United States Supreme Court Bench who abused the judicial office in 2000 dishonestly to deny, for manifestly political considerations, electoral victory in the presidential election to Al Gore over George W. Bush inflicted a lasting wrong on their country. Al Gore is by far the most cerebral American politician of the front rank since Adlai Stevenson and the only one with respect for scholarship since Woodrow Wilson. The subtitle of this book sums up his thesis: How the Politics of Fear, Secrecy and Blind Faith Subvert Wise Decision-Making, Degrade Democracy and Imperil America and the World. This thesis is relevant to every democracy; particularly ours. We have had our own phases of politics of fear and secrecy Operation Parakram, to cite one example. The politics of blind faith was behind the crime of the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Al Gore touches the fundamentals of a free society and does so with copious references to works of history, law, politics and psychology.

We all know what our Parliament has been reduced to by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ever since it lost the general elections in 2004; it is not the only sinner though. The quality of public discourse generally has declined.

Hence, the relevance of Al Gores criticism. Not long before our nation launched the invasion of Iraq, our longest-serving Senator, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, stood on the Senate floor and said: This chamber is, for the most part, silent ominously dreadfully silent. There is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this particular war. There is nothing. We stand passively mute in the United States Senate. Why was the Senate silent? In describing the empty chamber the way he did, Byrd invited a specific version of the same general question millions of us have been asking: Why do reason, logic, and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions? The persistent and sustained reliance on falsehood as the basis of policy, even in the face of massive and well-understood evidence to the contrary, seems to many Americans to have reached levels that were previously unimaginable.

He holds that it was not always this way. Why has Americas public discourse become less focussed and clear, less reasoned? Faith in the power of reason the belief that free citizens can govern themselves wisely and fairly by resorting to logical debate on the basis of the best evidence available, instead of the raw power was and remains the central premise of American democracy. This premise is now under assault.

The U.S. has had similar phases in the past. A fact that Al Gore mentions explains why there was so little public censure of the decision to invade Iraq. Three quarters of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on September 11, 2001. Democrats who sensed this mood merrily went along with President Bush for fear of losing their seats.

He and his party would have otherwise denounced them as traitors. The press went along, too. Much of the criticism one has heard lately was inspired by the failure of the mission. The aspect of crime seems to elude the author as well. He also regards 9/11 as an attack on the U.S. It was a crime and, as Zbigniew Brzezinski pointed out, it should have been addressed as such. It was not an act of aggression which justified the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. This mission, too, has failed. The U.S. spurned for long the Talibans overtures for accord. The U.S. invasion of Iraq was very much a crime.

The electronic media pander to this mood, become an agent of disinformation and foster chauvinism. Newspapers are haemorrhaging readers. Reading itself is in decline, not only in our country but in most of the world. The Republic of Letters has been invaded and occupied by the empire of television.

Radio, the Internet, movies, cell phones, iPods, computers, instant messaging, video games, and personal digital assistants all now vie for our attention but it is television that still dominates the flow of information in modern America. The Internet is a formidable new medium of communication and a source of great hope for the future vitality of democracy. Eventually may be sooner rather than later television as we now know it may be looked back on as a transition between the age of print and the age of the Internet.

I have sought to hasten the arrival of truly interactive television with a new kind of network which I cofounded with my partners, Joel Hyatt Current TV, which bridges television and the Internet. But today, television still reaches far more people than does the Internet.

It has become a vicious circle. Galbraith deplored the impact of advertising on the classic relationship between supply and demand. The market place is no longer a free forum. Advertising campaigns create high levels of demand for products that consumers never knew they wanted, much less needed.

Image-based advertising shapes voters perceptions and increases the role of money in politics and the political influence of those who contribute the money. Debates on issues become irrelevant. Ideas will play a diminished role. Political dialogue is through purchasing expensive television advertising.

Public Relations has become a science and art to be used in politics as well as commerce Media Machiavellis are in demand. They enable in Walter Lippmanns famous words the manufacture of consent.

Thomas Jefferson said: I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. The free market place of ideas, lauded in judicial pronouncements, is no longer free. Al Gore defines clearly its three important characteristics: 1. It was open to every individual, with no barriers to entry save the necessity of literacy. This access, it is crucial to add, applied not only to the receipt of information but also to the ability to contribute information directly into the flow of ideas that was available to all. 2. The fate of ideas contributed by individuals depended, for the most part, on an emergent meritocracy of ideas. Those judged by the market to be good rose to the top, regardless of the wealth or class of the individual responsible for them. 3. The accepted rules of discourse presumed that the participants were all governed by an unspoken duty to search for general agreement. That is what a conversation of democracy? is all about.

There is, however, a fundamental difference between the print and the electronic media. TV anchors in India who invite the viewers verdict only deceive them. TV is a one-sided affair. The press allowed the public to participate actively in the discussion through letters and articles. Ronald Reagan had the Fairness Doctrine in TV discarded. Out of the window went the equal time rule. The consequences of the rise of TV have been profound. First, The high capital investment required for the ownership and operation of a television station and the centralised nature of broadcast, cable, and satellite television networks have led to the increasing concentration of ownership by an ever smaller number of larger corporations that now effectively control the majority of television programming in the U.S.

These conglomerates are apparently sometimes tempted to bend their news-programming choices to support the achievement of commercial objectives. The news divisions which used to be seen as serving a public interest and were subsidised by the rest of the network are now seen as profit centres designed to generate revenue and, sometimes, to advance the larger agenda of the corporation that owns them. They have fewer reporters, fewer stories, smaller budgets, less travel, fewer bureaus, less-independent judgment, more vulnerability to influence by management, and more dependence on government sources and canned public relations handouts. In Dan Rathers words, TV news has been dumbed down and tarted up.

Secondly, unlike the newspaper, TV does not prod thinking. I believe that the vividness experienced in the reading of words is automatically modulated by the constant activation of the reasoning centres of the brain that are used in the process of co-creating the representation of reality the author has intended. By contrast, the visceral vividness portrayed on television has the capacity to trigger instinctual responses similar to those triggered by reality itself and without being modulated by logic, reason, and reflective though Books also convey compelling and vivid representations of reality, of course. But the reader actively participates in the conjuring of the reality of the books author is attempting to depict. Moreover, the parts of the human brain that are central to the reasoning process are continually activated by the very act of reading printed words: words are composed of abstract symbols letters that have not intrinsic meaning themselves until they are strung together into recognisable sequences. The passivity associated with watching television is at the expense of activity in parts of the brain associated with abstract thought, logic, and the reasoning process When millions of people experience these same changes simultaneously in the course of a few decades, their interactions with one another begin to take new forms. An individual who spends four and a half hours a day watching television is likely to have a very different pattern of brain activity from an individual who spends four and a half hours a day reading. Different parts of the brain are stimulated repetitively (emphasis added, throughout).

TV does not calm emotions. It arouses them; particularly the emotions of fear and hate. Justice Louis D. Brandeis aptly recalled: Men feared witches and burnt women. Al Gore admits, My own experience tells me that extended television watching can be mind numbing I believe it is extremely important to pay considerably more attention to the quality and integrity of television programming made by citizens.

He repeatedly draws on history to fortify his argument. Over two centuries ago James Madisson warned that a religious sect may degenerate into a political faction. Bush uses religion in aid of his sordid politics. He is heading the political extreme Right disguised as a religious sect.

The truth about this particular brand of faith-based politics is that 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 as possible to the already wealthy and privileged. It is the Presidents reactionary ideology, not his religious faith, that is the source of his troubling inflexibility... The hallmark of the current administration is a systematic effort to manipulate facts in service to a totalistic ideology that is felt to be more important than the mandates of basic honesty.

More than three hundred years ago, John Locke, wrote, Every sect, as far as reason will help them, make use of it gladly; and where it fails them, they cry out, it is a matter of faith, and above reason. This is precisely the stand which the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) and the BJP took on Babri Masjid. Never mind the facts of history. Their own faith will legitimise the demolition of a centuries-old mosque at Ayodhya. There are important elements in India who have hitched their wagon to its star.

The following passage applies to the Indian scene no less. The surprising recent dominance of American politics by right-wing politicians whose core beliefs are usually wildly at odds with the opinions of the majority of Americans is one that resulted from the careful building of a coalition of the interest groups that have little in common with one another besides a desire for power that can be devoted to the achievement of a narrow agenda. This coalition of supporters includes both right-wing religious extremists and exceptionally greedy economic special interests, both groups seeking more and more power for their own separate purposes. All have agreed to support one anothers agendas even when it is ideologically inconsistent to do so. The only consistent loser in these exchanges is the American citizen.

Allied to this coalition are the foreign policy hawks whose foreign policy preferences range from unprovoked invasions to economic imperialism. This is the party of the rich and privileged. Once wealth is given to acquire power, the concentration of either can double the corrupting influence of both.

Al Gore describes in careful detail how Bush has dismantled the entire system of checks and balances the courts, the Congress, the media, the army and the State Departments professionals. No President in recent history amassed so much power or abused power with such impunity. Civil liberties were freely violated. Torture was authorised, not merely condoned. CNNs Christiane Amanpour put it neatly: I think the press self-muzzled. Im sorry to say, but certainly television and perhaps, to a certain extent, my station was intimidated (sic.) by the administration.

To her testimony Al Gore adds his own, based on authentic information. The present executive branch has made it a practice to try to control and intimidate news organisations, from PBS to CBS to Newsweek. They paid actors to make phony video press releases and paid cash to some reporters and columnists who were willing to take it 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 website owned by a Republican Party delegate from Texas. He cites a specific instance in which this man bailed out Bush at a press conference when he was asked an inconvenient question. How perfect that the presidents exchange with a journalist was in service of an effort to misdirect attention from efforts to investigate the growing corruption of the interaction of a free press and public officials. It serves as a live-action version of the counterfeit scenes in political commercials when actors pretend to be objective citizens expressing support for a candidate whose backers have paid for an ad.

The author records how the Supreme Court was captured by a group of law professors and students at Yale and Chicago who called themselves the Federalist Society.

Perverting democracy at home, Bush launched on a vicious campaign abroad. The Bush White House announced in 2002 that, for the first time, the United States was making it a part of our deterrence strategy to consider using nuclear weapons in a first-strike attack against non-nuclear states. This radical and reckless doctrine of nuclear pre-emption actually creates an incentive for other nations to develop nuclear weapons as quickly as possible so that they can respond if America does launch a first strike, an active possibility according to the Bush team. This policy, was laid down in the classified Nuclear Posture Review.

Al Gore pins his hopes on democratisation of the media through the Internet. The democratisation of knowledge by the print medium brought the Enlightenment. Now, broadband interconnection is supporting decentralised processes that reinvigorate democracy. The key requirement for redeeming the integrity of representative democracy in the age of electronic media is to ensure that citizens are well and fully connected to an open and robust public forum one that is easily accessible to individuals and that operates according to a meritocracy of ideas.

Indian non-governmental organisations should encourage this in our country as well.