A Sobering, Important Look at the ‘Betrayal of Democracy’

On the screen, a 30-second public-service spot speaks in Mandarin to Chinese-Americans over news footage of people demonstrating for democracy in Tian An Men Square in 1989.

Additional television spots in English, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and Cambodian show different scenes that contrast troubled homelands with all-American images of the Constitution and the Capitol in Washington.

Produced by multilanguage KSCI-TV Channel 18 to encourage Asian-Americans here to participate in this year’s elections, the spots have a compelling central theme: “We the people have the right to express our opinions and the power to change our government. Make your voice heard. Vote.”

It’s a worthy public-service campaign promoting a noble sentiment that the Founding Fathers would applaud.

But how much influence do average Americans actually have on their government? For an answer we watch a different set of images.

They flash across the screen in a “Frontline” special titled “The Betrayal of Democracy,” two hours of gloomy political reality that will not help public television’s cause with congressional conservatives seeking to curb its federal funding and already fragile independence.

Not that this important program (at 9 tonight on KCET Channel 28 and KPBS Channel 15, at 8 on KVCR Channel 24) is politically doctrinaire or partisan. As a diagnostician, veteran reporter William Greider turns out to be an equal-opportunity basher: “The Republican Party’s artful election strategy has been accomplished not by addressing the real economic concerns of the disaffected working class,” he charges, “but by broadcasting messages attuned to their resentments.” And Greider adds: “If the Democratic Party was once the party of working people, it might now be called the party of Washington lawyers.”

“The Betrayal of Democracy” was produced by Sherry Jones and Elizabeth Sams. Yet its message of alienation--depicting citizens as outsiders with their noses pressed against the window of the government candy store--is presented as a somewhat personal statement by Greider, the Rolling Stone national correspondent who has spent two years writing a book about tonight’s topic.

Noting that most Americans have contempt for politics, he adds: “Washington’s dirty little secret is that the contempt is mutual.”

This is not a program specifically about candidates in 1992 or the cross-fire of charges and countercharges that has riddled this election campaign, but one that addresses why so many Americans believe that the entire process of participatory democracy has left the track and crashed.

“What has happened in American politics to produce today’s cynicism and resignation?” asks Greider, echoing election-year dourness that has made “none of the above” a ballot choice for millions of Americans. “Why exactly do so many citizens feel left out and betrayed?”

The replies Greider gets are sobering, from the dispassionate analysis of former and present government insiders to the cynical sound bites of working-class bar patrons in Kentucky: “Politicians are like lovers. They chase you, and then when they get what they want, they forget about you.”

In cutaway shots during interviews, Greider’s own face at times seems to sag wearily, as if the messenger has become a metaphor for the crushing weight of his message. He concludes that the “democratic decay” he repeatedly hears about runs deeper than mere elections: “It is buried in the power relationships surrounding the government itself.”

This theme--one that also threads through Bill Moyers’ current PBS series “Listening to America”--is not new. But tonight’s blunt-speaking program, in which Greider never meets a politician’s euphemism he can’t clobber, turns up the resonance.

Greider says that 2,000 companies now have lobbyists in Washington, compared with fewer than 200 in 1971. And central to the “power relationships” he speaks of are money-pumping special-interest groups that we’re told have supplanted the electorate as the government’s main constituency. In this milieu, political survival becomes the first--often the only--priority. Rep. Jim Leach (R-Iowa), his party’s second ranking member on the House banking committee, tells Greider:

“You (typical elected officials) have a series of commitments . . . to large, powerful groups who by definition have money, instead of the average citizen, who by definition doesn’t. That is very different than anyone ever intended the system to be.”

Once elected, Leach adds, elected officials tend to get swept up by a Washington lifestyle in which they socialize with people who have “special agendas.” The quid pro quo: Promoting special agendas equals campaign dollars.

Thus, we hear about “hollow laws”--whether concerning hazardous waste or some other significant public issue--that appear to be tough but are diluted in the regulatory process. Such laws please voters, but serve corporate contributors. Says Curtis Moore, former GOP counsel to the Senate Environment Committee: “It’s a lot easier to fool the public than it is to fool the corporations. . . .”

And, as it turns out, it’s also rather easy to fool the news media, who Greider seems to believe have been a party to the “betrayal,” if only through their acquiescence. It’s inevitable that the scandalous savings and loan bailout surfaces in such a discussion. In a revealing piece of news footage, President Bush is shown holding a press conference in a lazy beachfront setting. When he gets a soft question about the S&L; debacle--which both Democrats and Republicans strategically avoided mentioning in the 1988 election campaign--he dodges artfully, as if blowing the question harmlessly out to sea.

There’s an even more intriguing exchange here between Greider and famed Watergate muckraker Bob Woodward, whom Greider rather laboriously attempts to characterize as a metaphor for general press malaise vis-a-vis government. Greider suggests to an uncomfortable Woodward, now a Washington Post executive, that he has become “well-aligned with the people in power, whereas 20 years ago you were a skeptic.”

“Betrayal of Democracy” does not depart without visiting a few areas of the nation where reform-minded citizen activists are injecting themselves into the political process instead of observing passively. The purpose is to give the people more alternatives and elect better representatives. Immersed in an environment where political deception is institutionalized, however, won’t even these fresher faces be corrupted by the system?

The KSCI public-service campaign for Asian-Americans makes valid and powerful comparisons between democracy in the United States and totalitarianism abroad. Problems at home always loom largest, however. So it’s the dark humor of a bumper sticker displayed on a pickup truck in tonight’s program that seems even more pertinent to this political season.

It says: “Since I gave up hope, I feel better.”