Book Review

Professor Dev Raj Dahal

Kathmandu, Nepal

William Greider divides the book into four parts – the realities of power, people’s response to power, mediating voices and triumph and loss. He begins with a grim note about the decayed condition of American democracy by the atrophy of civic virtue, self-governance and a systemic breakdown of the shared civic values. The tissues that once linked the citizens to governance, such as political parties, the media and a myriad of mediating institutions fail to respond to popular aspirations. This is why government appears responsive to the narrow webs of power -the financial, bureaucratic and political elite -leaving the public interest largely in oblivion.
Greider argues that elite decision-makers have failed to provide a coherent governing plan for the nation owing to their increasing isolation from the values and experiences of common people. The crisis of political representation has, therefore, paralyzed those sections who do not have the benefit of higher education or social status. The book, therefore, sets out to examine how and why some interests influence the government’s priority while the others are left out in the cold and forcefully suggests the need of a just society based not on human nature but on human essence.

If politics does not sustain human relationships – dialogue, engagement and compromise and reveal the mutuality of interests -the electoral political alone cannot become representative and, consequently, politics operates in a void, devoid of substantive issues, creative work and free inquiry. Similarly, too much emphasis on corporate citizenship is likely to skew power relationship in society thus enervating the self-correcting mechanism of politics. And the result is: citizens increasingly discount the utility of politicians. The more politicians laid bare to brutal human nature the better it unfolds the true nature of the citizens as well. This, Greider calls “mindless mass audience” that “speaks in politics mainly through opinion polls,” and can be easily manipulated by the rhetoric and media. How can genuine political space be created, a space, which builds reliable mediating mechanisms to enable the people to participate in decision-making?

In the post-modern politics, citizen’s ability to satisfy their universal human needs and speak to power lies in transparent communication process whereby they have proper access to the institutional arrangement of politics, the media, and the expert policy dialogue on vital matters affecting their lives. This post-modern conception marks a departure from the notion of passive citizenship -who only marks a ballot paper- to that of a sovereign citizen who makes the governing power accountable. Innumerable voluntary associations provide citizens the needed connections with modern politics. Still, it is the powerful economic interests who set out to seize the realities of power from the legislature to empower the executive branch and practice the mode of excluding ordinary people’s access to debates and public good. The most crucial questions it evoke are: who will tell the people about this?
Who restores the value of representation and induce reforms in the politics of clientism? The obvious answer is: mediating institutions who have the power to reclaim national sovereignty, enforce national laws and beef up social amity and peace.

Greider holds that information driven politics has become a convenient reason in which organized money dominates the action while unorganized voices are inhibited from speaking. To him, the ordinary citizens are being “skillfully manipulated by powerful interests -using facts that are debatable at best -in a context designed to serve narrow corporate lobbying strategies, not free debate.” (p.38) Even political parties use the citizens to agitate, educate and mobilize for their selfish ends rather than involve them in a genuine democratic discourse. One positive aspect in politics today, however, is public rationale for every action of the government. Information has become a vital core of the governing process. Ironically, it made lawyers and economists “supra citizens whose voices are louder because they speak the expert language of debate.” (p.46) If expert language is the only route to governance, then the majority of citizens have no access to power at all and that it cannot be called democracy. Business magnates who prepare the ground against government regulation and weaken the base of public power corrupt scholars in their thinking. Greider asserts that the capital of democracy is situated in the costly city where citizens of average means hardly afford to live and enjoy.

Greider further asserts that “if cost is a permanent barrier to democratic expression, as is obviously is, then democracy becomes a contest merely for the organized economic interests, not for the citizens.” (p.51) The economic version of democracy weakens the politics of equality. In this context, what is needed is collective action of organized citizens which can reduce the cost of political participation and increase the chance of civic political culture. The obscure rules drawn from law, economics and science not only mask human values expressed by people but also fails to satisfy the “publics thirst for justice.”

Scientists, like economists and lawyers basically “ reflect the institutional biases of their employer” (p.55) and exercise biased methods to rationalize anything the actions of those who pay them. Greider, therefore, bluntly labels the economic calculation of citizens a fascist thinking. One can fairly ask: Can anyone imagine good governance without interest groups and lobbyists who are being governed by normal human instincts? If not, then, does democracy mean only taking care of the clients, not the public at large?

Good governance implies a correct disposition of things. Yet, when media defines politics in terms of elections rather than the issue of governance and takes their cues from the people in power, it fails to report much on intricate matters like economic policy which is running into opposite direction –rewarding the few at the cost of many people. One example of economic disparity, Greider cites, is “86 percent of the individual net financial wealth in America is owned by 10 percent of the people.” And the elite debate and decision-making cloaks the real question of tax and recession thus disconnecting the public from their right to information. The elite bipartisan consensus has been promoting the agenda directly “counter to what voters at large wanted.” The ideology of supply-side economics thus sets the social equity subordinate to the economic hegemony of the wealthy, applying the theory of trickle-down which has been long discarded in development discourse.

This left behind many unorganized people from the economic and political process. The justification for this is that American economy has suffered because of the lack of capital formation, declining investment, and too many entitlements. Political parties could not offer justification on behalf of the people. This means, according to Greider, the American economy cannot be considered healthy when most of its citizens, workers and consumers are not. To him, in the distorted power relationship, “the present system provides no reliable mechanism to represent the people on the most important governing questions-no institution that is committed to listening to them and to speaking for them, no organization that mobilizes the potential strength of people and uses it to confront the rival power of organized money.” (pp.103- )

Greider explains that Washington seems to be a grand bazaar where the noise of buying and selling silences “patriotic music.” The liberal nightmare is that it does not implement the law properly, rather it intends to liberate the economy from the government to give it to private sector. Yet, the privatization of government functions not only weakens the governmental authority and accountability but also favors the rich against the poor. In this sense, both the political parties of the United States have created the webs of “client-representative ties” with their followers and concocted “hallow laws” that only expresses the gesture of good intent rather than the capacity for deliverance whether it pertains to basic needs, environmental management, or civil rights. This approach has fostered a sense of “public deception” and “deepening pessimism” among the citizens.

The reason is neither bureaucratic leniency, nor scientific skepticism, but a form of political standoff, as well as class and geographical biases. In the case of environment, political community has unveiled two strategies to respond -appealing to the people’s environmental concern but without disturbing the corporate power. Endlessly negotiating on this issue easily breaks down a representative process in the same way as does the dysfunction of the legislative process. It evokes the questions like these: How to break the new concentration of power? By power diffusion or creating countervailing institutions?

According to Greider, “White House accumulated an imbalance of power over the legislative branch because it was always seen as the great protector of the national interest and of the weak and defenseless. Now, the protection is regularly employed on behalf of the powerful.” (p.143) This heralds a power shift from the Congress and the Court to the Executive branch and, therefore, American democracy loses what Greider calls “the pluralist sense of justice.”
The periodic elections, once a check on the government, have been “invalidated by modern campaigning, the high-tech and high-cost campaigns that merely manipulate voters.” (p.177) Greider, therefore, suggests that in case government makes tradeoffs between business profit and human life, it has to initiate public debate about it. Otherwise, interest-based politics would produce a pressing crisis in public authority. Can new federalism be a solution? It cannot, unless people fight back the centralizing tendencies of corporate-political-bureaucratic nexus and force power to listen to the voices of “political orphans,” the poor and the working class of people.

As citizens are reduced to incapacity, governing elite creates a class of their own and saps the mediating institutions, such as consumer's association, trade union, neighborhood organizations, civil rights groups, social and ecological groups, etc. Especially, workers and unorganized people are bound by the prevailing “law and politics” unable to express collectively although they constitute America’s half of the work force. What they require, therefore, are the renewal of democratic virtues from the bottom-up and a reanimation of democratic promise by political leaders. Greider finds a ray of hope in many alternative institutions built by citizens themselves who are acting for the people like Greenpeace and Amnesty International as they are educating citizens for politics as do the political parties. When political power springs from either organized money or organized people, elections will have little meaning for making the government accountable and nursing public aspirations.

Greider worries over the capture of political space by economic interests where “election exists like a vacuum jar at the center of the political disorder: the most interesting and important action flows outside and around them.” (p.238) The trouble is: how to reconcile the trust of voters with election so that a general faith is developed between the government and the governed? The answer is by developing their two-way accountability and coping with the problems of pungent populism, alienation and resentment of people and making the public institutions, the media, and corporate power responsive to the public.

The integrity of political parties both the Democratic and the Republican lies less on winning elections than on taking responsibility to party followers and initiating continuous dialogue and communication with the public and building affiliations with several mediating institutions of society. Yet, as Greider observes, the settings for effective citizen control of government are what is “missing from both political parties and from American democracy.” Can the press and television serve as principal gatekeepers for political dialogues and overcome their pre-set angle of vision to become reflective of broader public interest? Perhaps not. In several cases, they inclined themselves to power politics, and protected the governing circle from disfavor rather than reflecting the diversity of facts and opinions and serving as a mediating voice. Public accountability eloquently calls for a diversity of voices and a rough sense of equilibrium among opposing interests that are given control of the access. (p.329)

In the next communication revolutions educated journalists, therefore, should focus on new rules of equity which has the liberating potential and which will be based on both truth as well as facts. To Greider, corporations should establish a new social context whereby they should carry the social obligations to the workers and the communities rather than risk on creating a national-security state drifting often into vulnerability and dependence. To cope this, America has to break the frightening dilemma produced by the dynamics of global economy: combining domestic political order with a new vision of internationalism.

Economic globalization is bringing devastating impacts on society, economy and democracy itself. The only way out of this economic trap, according to Greider, is a grand political strategy for growth that focuses on workers and wages world wide and makes reversal of the prevailing economic doctrine for the promotion of democratic virtue. This, however, requires the self-realization of citizens and their rebellion against poverty and powerlessness through democracy means. Though mainly based on American experience, this book raises fundamental issues faced by many democracies of the world and set off a lively discourse on the factors responsible for the betrayal of democracy.

# ( Review of A book by William Greider, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993, pp. 464, Price $ 13.00). #Published with the straight permission from Professor Dahal: Ed. Upadhyaya. N. P.

# Our contact email address: editor.telegraphnepal@gmail.com