His favorite quote in [his new book] Our Choice is from the philosopher Theodor Adorno (1903–1969): "The conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power … has attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false."
Adorno, and his colleagues in what is called the "Frankfurt School," are Marxists. Al Gore and his liberal admirers in the press (see this Seattle Times dispatch) aspire to make it through Adorno's impenetrable prose. British journalist Alastair McKay brightly reported that in Scotland in 2006, Gore lauded the entire school of Marxists:
"After World War Two there were a group of very thoughtful, humane, decent philosophers – Germans – who were so horrified, humiliated, shamed by what had happened in Germany that they became what is known as the Frankfurt School – Jurgen Habermas is probably the best known.
They devoted themselves over decades to exploring the question: what in the hell happened? And one of them, a philosopher named Theodore Adorno – conducted a philosophical autopsy of the Weimar and the emergence of the Third Reich. And he identified the first significant symptom of their descent into hell. He said this: ‘All questions of fact became questions of power’.
Gore's entire construction of the global-warming debate is between reason (that's the we're-almost-roasted-marshmallows doom) and unreason, superstition, and capitalist propaganda (that's conservatives). We face a "democracy crisis" because people have failed so far to bow to his genius. After a windy account of how the Enlightenment and the printing press allowed a new "rule of reason," Gore launched into an attack on television for ruining democracy:
"The information ecology defined by the printing press was displaced 40 ears ago in my country by the television, and it’s now so dominant that the average American watches television for four hours and 39 minutes a day. It has a quasi-hypnotic effect, and the internet’s a great source of hope and it replicates that meritocracy of ideas but it does not have that hypnotic effect that television has.
"I see the internet as a source of hope. To use the Star Wars analogy, the rebellion is alive and well on the internet on some far galaxy, connected to ours, and it is growing, and I do believe that it is changing the operation of our political dialogue, democratising it, opening it up, so that questions of fact become questions of truth instead of power, so that there’s not censorship of global warming studies."
Notice how Gore is always making conservatives into the unspeakable evil in his analogies: the Nazis, in the Frankfurt School analogy, and Darth Vader's forces in the Star Wars analogy. Press him, and he denies the analogy is exact; but that's how he wants his liberal allies to feel about themselves, that they are the anti-Nazi Skywalkers in this perilous ecological era, fighting "the Assault on Reason."
But it's more amazing that Gore seems to place the blame for our "democracy crisis" on television news -- as if all the liberal networks haven't swallowed Gore's theories whole and lauded him as a global genius, like Newsweek does.
