Who Will Tell the People: The Betrayal of American Democracy.

• Author: Gitlin, Todd

This book is for the believers," writes William Greider toward the end of this long, valuable, alternately dispiriting (because true) and inspiring (because passionate) book.* By believers he does not mean believers that--readers who came to his chronicle of everyday corruption already persuaded that corporate power, two-party collusion, campaign finance payoffs, the pas de deux of Congress and lobbyists, tax hustles, runaway factones, media complacency, and the all-around reign of the Smooth Deal have overwhelmed a feeble democracy. Greider musters plenty of evidence that powerful institutions (chiefly top corporations) have manifold means of accumulating and protecting their power, including the bolstering of federal power to override local regulations, the bending of laws by regulators and their corporate sponsors, and the collusion of Congress in the process, so that, for exampie, the S&L calamity could be kept out of sight until after the 1988 elections.

This book contains pathology reports by the score, but it is more than an anatomy of the wounds in the body politic-economic. Greider has a keen eye--particularly in his curtain-raiser about mass mobilization by corporate lobbies and his chapter on the polyform nature of General Electric's political interests and talems. But his sector-by-sector analyses of abuse, important as they are, are not his principal contribution. Rather, it is the controlled anger that animates this book---a sign of his wish to speak to, and for, "believers in"---in the popular participation that interest-group politics has eroded.

Thus his criticism is not only broad but deep. No technical fixes will do, no 12-step program to a happier democracy--although Greider is not averse to unfashionable reform specifics, like raising the minimum wage to fight poverty. His framework is his greatest originality: He harnesses a shrewd analysis of how policy goes wrong to a radical, principled invocation of the democratic renewal it would take to right things. If this occasionally gives his book a sentimental ring--as in the poor title, which has the feel of one of those folk songs that very few folk sing--at least he is clear about what he is doing: proposing "a new parable... a story of national purpose that faces the present realities maturely but does not sacrifice the country's youthful idealism and inventiveness and self-confidence."

Greider has no bogeyman theory. Even the corporate lobbyists have their reasons for...