Ironic Processing.

• Author: Postrel, Virginia
• Position: Social attitudes of presidential candidate Al Gore

How Al Gore's pursuit of "central organizing principles" winds up slicing us into ever-narrowing interest groups.

When I give a speech about the big-picture political and cultural ideas in my book The Future and Its Enemies, the question and answer period almost always starts with a down-to-earth query: "What do you think of George W. Bush and Al Gore?"

"Well," I say, "Bush is a mixed bag. But I think Al Gore is the devil."

This line always gets a laugh, but it's not really a joke. Don't get me wrong: Unlike some Clinton haters, who have the same opinion of his boss, I don't mean Gore is literally the Prince of Darkness. I simply mean that he operates according to core principles that work to erode the freedoms of individuals and the progress of the open society.

This is true whether you examine the "real Gore"--the intellectual wannabe who seems like he'd rather have my job than Bill Clinton's--or the political Gore, who speaks in poll-tested phrases. Both versions share the patronizing world view perfectly expressed in the vice president's tendency to address his audiences as though they were dim second-graders. Both want to tell everyone else how to live, to subordinate our diverse, individualized purposes to their own goals.

Back before his populist peroration at the Democratic National Convention, the intellectual Gore gave a remarkable interview to Nicholas Lemann of The New Yorker. Lemann was smart enough not to ask routine, soundbite-inducing questions. Instead, he asked Gore about his favorite ideas, and he ran long quotations from their conversations.

Gore's responses elicited scorn, derision, and dismay in Washington's political-intellectual circles. He was way, way, way too interested in obscure notions about complexity and fractals. He drew strange diagrams. He talked a lot about metaphor. He dropped names of philosophers and physicists. Gore sounded like a New Age version of Newt Gingrich.

The pundits were so flabbergasted by his strangeness that they paid little attention to the content of what he said. But Lemann's article revealed more than Gore's interest in odd ideas; it gave readers a peek at his political philosophy. And the substance of Gore's world view is troubling.

Gore believes society needs to take ideas from science and apply them to politics and economics, and he's frustrated that scientific ideas are too unfamiliar to the general public--and his political colleagues--to be used that way. He wants to replace the...