New Books Network

What is right about democracy?
In Daring Democracy: Igniting Power, Meaning, and Connection for the America We Want (Beacon Press, 2017), Frances Moore Lappe and Adam Eichen seek out an answer. Lappe, author of the multimillion-selling Diet for a Small Planet and seventeen other books, is a recipient of the Right Livelihood Award, the “Alternative Nobel.” Eichen is a Democracy Fellow at the Small Planet Institute. Drawing on several previous New Books in Political Science podcast alums, including Lee Drutman and Zachary Roth, as well as numerous other political science scholars, Lappe and Eichen offer a series of critiques of our current state of democratic affairs. But they do not dwell long in the past, they instead focus on noble solutions. They back a Democracy Movement and call upon citizens to daringly take up the cause of democracy through becoming a citizen lobbyist, creating new public spaces for community talks, and celebrating democracy.