WHO WILL TELL THE PEOPLE by William Greider

Author:William Greider
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SIMON & SCHUSTER PAPERBACKS
Published: 2003-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

MEDIATING VOICES

11 WHO OWNS

THE DEMOCRATS?

The empty space at the center of American democracy is defined ultimately by its failed political institutions. At the highest level of politics, there is no one who now speaks reliably for the people, no one who listens patiently to their concerns or teaches them the hard facts involved in governing decisions. There is no major institution committed to mobilizing the power of citizens around their own interests and aspirations.

The principal mediating institutions of politics do still function in a formal sense, of course, but in different ways each has lost the capacity to serve as authentic connective tissue between government and citizens. In different ways, the major political parties and the news media have instead gravitated toward another source of power—the elite interests that dominate government.

This section directly confronts the failure of those political institutions and explores why each, in its own way, falls short in its responsibility to democracy. The analysis begins with the hollow reality of the Democratic party and how economic interests that are most hostile to the party's main constituencies manage to influence the party's direction from the top down. Chapter Twelve, “Rancid Populism,” examines the Republican party and how its mastery of modem communications enables it to hold power with an illusory program based on alienation and resentment. The press fails its responsibility too and Chapter Thirteen, “Angle of Vision,” explains the deep economic and social transformations that led the “news” away from the people it once spoke for and into alignment with the governing elites. The political impact of the mass-media culture, explored in Chapter Fourteen, “The Lost Generation,” is more paradoxical and, in some ways, more hopeful. While television trivializes complex political action, its imagery is also relentlessly populist in its directness—and brutally accurate in its own unsettling manner.

The empty space left by the failure of these mediating voices has been partially filled, however. It is held by the powerful political organizations called corporations. The final chapter of this section, Chapter Fifteen, “Citizen GE,” illustrates the institutional reality of corporate power by examining the awesome reach and capabilities of one corporate political organization, the General Electric Company.

The distorted power relationships that dominate government and have cut out citizens are embedded in all these political institutions. At its core, the democratic problem is a problem of institutional default on a massive scale.

The Democratic party traces its origin, with excessive precision, to the twenty-third day of May in 1792 when Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to George Washington. His letter described political alignments that were already visible in the young Republic—the yeomanry versus the Tory financiers. Jefferson urged President Washington to rally the people in a party that would defend democracy against the corrupt ambitions of monied interests. His text is uncannily appropriate to the politics of the late twentieth century. 1

While historians recognize the letter as a milestone, it was Andrew Jackson, thirty years later, who mobilized the constituencies of farmers, workers and merchants into a vigorous, effective political party known forever after as the Democrats.

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