Grassroots/Hank Kalet

Greider Told the People

It is rare that a single book can shift the perspective of a journalist and change the way he approaches his work. But that is what happened in the early 1990s when I read William Greider’s “Who Will Tell the People.”

As the book’s subtitle says, the it was a reported treatise on “The Betrayal of American Democracy,” a list of particulars in an indictment of the elites that controlled the nation and the ways in which “the self-correcting mechanisms of politics” have ceased to function properly and instead have been deployed (where they still exist) to hide the problems or shift blame.

In a passage early in the book, which was published in 1992 when Greider was the national affairs editor for Rolling Stone, he explains (unknowingly) how the rot that had settled into the system might ultimately lead to something far worse than what we were seeing at the time — almost predicting the rise of a charlatan demagogue like the current president.

“The consequences of democratic failure are enormous for the country,” he wrote, “not simply because important public matters are neglected, but because American won’t work as a society if the civic faith is lost.”

“Unlike most other nations, the United States has always overcome the vast differences among its people, the social and economic enmities and the storms of political disagreement, through the overarching bond of its democratic understandings. If these connections between the governed and the government are destroyed, if citizens can no longer believe in the mutuality of the American experience, the country may descend into a new kind of social chaos and political unraveling, unlike anything we have experienced before.” (15-16)

The book describes what Greider would call the “early symptoms of such deterioration,” focusing on the ways in which money and existing power entrench themselves — from the manipulation of expert opinion to the elevation of celebrity and spectacle in politics, from the erosion of civic connections and organizations to a hyper-materialism that functions as a bread-and-circus distraction.

This is the landscape that gave us Donald Trump — but also the failed presidencies of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, failed because they served not as bulwarks against the forces pushing to disempower citizens, but ultimately as co-dependents if not as outright facilitators of this disconnection.

Greider died on Christmas Day, almost three years into a presidential administration that now seems the natural apotheosis of his 1992 thesis — something he as much as admitted in his most recent writings. In September 2017 (https://www.thenation.com/article/why-american-democracy-has-descended-into-collective-hysteria/), he described the current incarnation of the American governing system as “a kind of collective hysteria, an emotional breakdown that reflects problems far broader than our having a crackpot president.”

Both major parties are stuck in the past and afraid of the future. Fear and confusion have overwhelmed the establishment. They have no plan for our future—not one that speaks candidly to the troubled conditions that have emerged over the last generation.

Trump, of course, has sucked all the oxygen out of the room. He is the immediate emergency and, as such, all efforts are targeted at his removal from office. But replacing Trump with Joe Biden — or Pete Buttigieg, or Amy Klobuchar, or even my top choices, Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren — will do little to address the rot that gave us Trump if all we do is vote and return to our bunkers for the next four years.

Unless we understand Trump for what he is — not an aberration, but the outgrowth of a broken system — we will get another Trump in short order. And the next Trump just may be competent, and all the more dangerous.

Greider’s argument — in 1992 and in 2017 — was essentially the same:

“There’s a familiar pattern in American history: When the two-party system was stalemated and radical reforms were needed (abolishing slavery or voting rights for women, for example), people organized powerful third-party challenges to advance their cause. The country is now ripe for another rump insurgency.”

A third-party run, at the current moment, would be national suicide. It would do little more than siphon votes away from the Democrat and ensure four more years for the current White House occupant. But it doesn’t mean that an effective third party could not be developed from the ground up, built out of a real need to give people a voice.

The focus of this kind of party, however, should not be electoral, at least not yet. The first-past-the-post system we have makes third-party runs somewhat quixotic and counterproductive, especially at the national level.

But third-party organizing that works parallel to the current two-party system can create philosophical and ideological shifts that realign our politics. The Tea Party on the right and #BlackLivesMatter and Occupy Wall Street on the left might seem passing fads to the political classes, but these movements ultimately dragged the two parties along and altered their platforms. Over the last decade, we went from being unable to criticize Obamacare on the left to openly debating Medicare for All, and we’re having a serious discussion about student debt that includes free college. And mass incarceration is now viewed popularly as the damaging, racist policy it always has been. That didn’t happen because of party elegies. It was the work of activists, and activism is what we need now, more than ever.

Hank Kalet is a poet and a journalist in New Jersey. Email hankkalet@gmail.com; Twitter @newspoet41 and @kaletjournalism; Instagram @kaletwrites; Facebook.com/hank.kalet; Patreon.com/Newspoet41.

From The Progressive Populist, February 1, 2020

Populist.com