Exposing Al Gore's corrupt populism

Before the Democratic National Convention, I didn't think Al Gore was all that bad. I found him intelligent and likable, albeit rather misguided on several issues. When compared to the likes of Bill Bradley and Jesse Jackson, Gore was definitely not the worst alternative—or so I thought. When I heard his acceptance speech for the Democratic nomination, I received a rude awakening, and it hasn't gotten any better since. Somewhere along the line, Gore went terribly wrong.

HYURA CHOI/YH

If one line from Gore's stump speech could serve as a case in point, it would be his repeated declaration that Republicans are "for the powerful; I'm for the people." Yet on closer investigation, who are "the powerful" that allegedly back the Texas governor? Most have risen through their own efforts; those who inherited wealth received it because someone chose to give it to them. Certainly the majority of Yale students reading this column will eventually join their ranks. As for those who have actually used illegal means, Bush is by all accounts tougher on crime than Gore.

So what does it mean when Gore says "the people" rather than "the powerful" should rule? Precisely because we have the ability to think for ourselves and profit from our decisions, Gore says, we do not deserve to govern ourselves using this ability and its rewards. Precisely because we are capable of choosing, he claims, we are unworthy to live by our own choices. Like a snake eating its own tail, Gore's argument swallows itself whole, just like the Marxist theory from which it is adapted. If ideas are a product of class background rather than individual deliberation, populist and proletarian views are just as vacuous as those uncorked by the rich.

It only adds to the absurdity of Gore's new agenda that the vice president is and has always been one of "the powerful" whose ouster he demands. The former senator is himself the son of a career senator. The man went to St. Alban's Episcopal School and Harvard—though you won't find the former anywhere on his website, and his time at the latter gets exactly one sentence. If Gore wanted to be "one of the people," he could have at least gone to Brown.

As if the letter of Gore's rhetoric weren't revolting enough, its spirit is downright scary. Even as he plays on populist sentiments against the educated and deliberative, he seeks to impose his vision on individuals like a colonial paternalist of old. He appeals to a lack of erudition and then claims that this lowest common denominator in fact knows best.

I'm sure our Cantab friend has at some time read Democracy in America, but from his arguments one would think he's never touched on even the brief excerpts assigned to Yale's DSers. Time and again Tocqueville warns against a "tyranny of the majority"—but this is exactly where Gore is taking us, especially because, if elected, he'll get the chance to pick three Supreme Court justices. With his continued emphasis on social spending and the taxation necessary to back it up, Gore seeks to subvert the individual's right to self-determination in the most direct way possible: by depriving him of the fruits of his labor and diverting them toward some goal he does not choose. Gore's expansion of Medicare and his refusal to reform or phase out Social Security will mean that the citizen has no choice but to subsidize these self-destructing pyramid schemes when he could have invested his money as he saw fit and reaped the consequences for good or ill.

One can still hope that Gore is just playing it up for the cameras. One can hope that on the inside he's the same decent person who spoke for reasonable environmental protection, the same person who served in the Vietnam War but took upon himself the public disclosure of its vagaries. Yet it wasn't until he turned up the demagoguery that his popularity began to rise, and if the polls speak the truth, the swing voters are eating it up like candy.

I fear that, if elected, Gore will interpret his victory as a message from all voters rather than just those individuals who cast their ballots for him. Even thus far, Gore has been corrupted not by power but by the mere drive for it, and if he is elected, I doubt that his corruption will end at anything less than absolute.

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