Book Review--The Age of American Unreason

I am always interested in books purporting to tell me why and how we have lost our way, because I happen to agree with that sentiment. Since Ronald Reagan took office, we have been led down a path of ignorance and foolishness, with monumentally negative ramifications that we are seeing come home to roost in our crashing economy and plummeting international standing. The causes for our willingness to continue traveling this self-destructive path are seemingly long established and deep-rooted in many aspects of our culture and society, and many observers have attempted to detail them in order to raise an alarm. Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind was singularly curmudgeonly in its preeminence, although most of the writers covering American cultural/social decline show a similar disdain for modernity. In fact, almost all of the "genre" contain a virtually identical conservative theme: Things Were Better Back Then. All of the works I've read include many passages mooning over how when the author were young, s/he was exposed to classical writings or music by a hallowed teacher or professor--and bemoaning that the kids today are lacking that exposure.
Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason is no different, although I bet she would argue that she is not a conservative. Her own stance, though, becomes obvious whenever she stops arguing with the specter of Bloom's book and addresses popular culture or technology on her terms. For Jacoby, all modern conveniences (e-mail, the Internet, blogging, even television and rock music, but especially video games) are contributing to our intellectual vacuity, because Things Were Better before their inventions. She details all the ways we are becoming more unreasonable (by which she means we are becoming creatures less driven by intellect over time) wonderfully well, but her assertions of causation lack even a modicum of proof. Even when faced with opposing research, she merely asserts its obvious lack of sense instead of offering up evidence to the contrary. For example, she makes great hay of Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good For You, calling it "self-referential codswallop" (pg. 16). Much like Bloom before her, however, Jacoby dismisses Johnson (and her other potential detractors) with many strokes of her pen but no substantive refutations of his thesis or research.
More fundamentally damaging to her attacks on modern media, though, and the one that betrays her center-right ideology, is that at no point does she even acknowledge the profound structural changes our media have undergone in the past several decades. In her haste to claim her centrist "pox on both your (left/right) houses" position, she fails to note that the right owns almost all the levers of power in the media, and they may have a very good reason (pun intended) to keep/make us illiterate and without the capacity to reason.
All of which is unfortunate, because I think she actually has many valid points and worthy targets otherwise. She shows a great grasp of how poisonous fundamentalist religion has been to our country's political landscape, and ties that in to our increasing science illiteracy as well. She writes wittily and well, and as a thought piece The Age of American Unreason is provocative. If this is meant to be an extended essay (which by definition would have required no research but rather sets out possible avenues for research), it holds together quite nicely, but if that is the case, her specific attacks on Johnson's and others' work are out of place.