Democracy in Deep Decay

For 17 years, through his work on the pages of Rolling Stone -- from the era of Blondie to Brittany, from Boy George to George W's "Kenny Boy" Lay -- I suspect one writer slipped more political information and consciousness into the minds of young people than anyone else. Before Michael Moore and the Web there was William Greider. Now national affairs correspondent for The Nation, Greider is the author of the national bestsellers "Who Will Tell the People?," "Secrets of the Temple" and "One World, Ready or Not."

McNally: It seemed to me, in "Who Will Tell the People?" which came out in 1992, you tried to go deeper into what was wrong with the democratic process than simply money or the political parties. Ten years later, talk a little bit about what you found then, and how things might have changed.

Greider: I think that things have not improved, to put it mildly. If one starts from the original, optimistic idea of people being able to participate in deciding things that affect their own lives -- that's my idea of democracy -- then it is in deep decay. And the reasons for that are far more complex than big money. Big money has always, at one level or another, asserted itself in American politics. Wealth and power go together, to be sure, but our problems are deeper still. The usual self-correcting mechanisms of politics -- that allow it to get back on track, that make it responsive and eventually accountable to the public -- are broken.

That's a pretty broad indictment, but it includes everything from the press -- the media, now -- which is not representative of the people in ways, it was 30, 40, 50 or 100 years ago. It doesn't fulfill the same functions it did then, which is educating and agitating and so forth. The political parties are now quite hollow as representative organizations. And finally to the process of law-making itself, in which only certain parties are close to the table and participate intimately in the language of law.

Then the public, partly because it doesn't have much connecting tissue with the process, wakes up in the morning and discovers, "They did this to us."

And worse, wakes up and says, "They did this to us two or three years ago."

Yeah, right. Meanwhile there's the process -- familiar in Washington, but much more opaque to people at large -- that makes passing a law only one stage of the fight. Lawyers and lobbyists then follow the implementation of the law at every stage, fighting -- maybe in court, maybe just in the corridors -- over what that law means, working to strip it of its intended meaning. Environmental law offers the best, most vivid example of this.

The picture I'm describing is more universal than simply guys with bags of money -- although they're there, too.

You're trying to get below the level of the easy targets, talking about how lawmaking has become a process of continual deal making and negotiation. Can you give an example?

The first Clean Air Act was passed in 1970. But in order to get that law through the Congress, a compromise was made. And there were no illusions about it. "We will exempt the older utilities, mostly coal-burning, because if we don't give them a grandfather exemption, it'll just be shutting them down. And we can't take that either politically or economically." So they said, "All right, as long as you don't expand the production of electricity at those plants, we'll let you continue. But when you begin to expand, then you've got to begin to meet the same Clean Air Standards as everybody else."

The industry, of course, not only didn't comply, but expanded. Essentially broke the law. The government has been spending 20 or 30 years trying to close that loophole. Now there are hundreds of these plants, many in the South and Midwest... and they account for the majority of our electrical production.