Daring Democracy ─ Igniting Power, Meaning, and Connection for the America We Want

An optimistic book for Americans who are asking, in the wake of Trump’s victory, What do we do now? The answer: We need to organize and fight to protect and expand our democracy.

With our democracy in crisis, many Americans are frightened and uncertain. So, the legendary activist and author of Diet for a Small Planet, Frances Moore Lappé, and organizer-scholar Adam Eichen teamed up to tell the underreported story of a “movement of movements” arising to tackle the roots of the crisis. The authors view the Trump presidency as a symptom of a shocking anti-democracy movement and expose the events that drove us to this crisis. But their focus is on solutions: how people from all backgrounds, committed to an array of social-justice causes, are creating a canopy of hope, what Lappé and Eichen call the “democracy movement.” To save the democracy we thought we had, argue the authors, we must take our civic life to a place it’s never been. The arising democracy movement’s innovative and inspiring strategies are enabling millions of Americans to feel part of something big, historic, and positive. Democracy is not only possible but essential to meet the most basic human needs for power, meaning, and connection; joining the democracy movement is thus a daring and noble undertaking calling each of us.

Frances Moore Lappé is the author or coauthor of eighteen books about the environment, world hunger, and democracy, including Diet for a Small Planet, which has sold three million copies. Articles featuring or written by Lappé have also appeared in O: The Oprah Magazine, Harper’s, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Nation, People, and elsewhere. A recipient of the Right Livelihood Award (often called the “Alternative Nobel”) and eighteen honorary doctorates, Lappé is the cofounder of the organizations Food First and the Small Planet Institute.

“A small number of people in every generation are forerunners, in thought, action, spirit, who swerve past the barriers of greed and power to hold a torch high for the rest of us. Lappé is one of those.”—Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States

Adam Eichen is a writer, researcher, and political organizer working to build a democracy that represents and empowers all voices in society. He serves as a Democracy Fellow at Small Planet Institute and as a member of the Democracy Matters board of directors. In 2016, he was appointed deputy communications director for Democracy Spring, a historic national mobilization comprising more than a hundred organizations working for campaign-finance and voting rights reform.