Citizen Democracy: Political Activists in a Cynical Age (People, Passions, and Power: Social Movements, Interest Organizations, and the P)

Apathy and antipathy toward politics are epidemic. Citizen Democracy provides the antidote. Through a series of nineteen carefully chosen vignettes, Stephen Frantzich portrays citizens from every walk of life—rich and poor, old and young, black and white, male and female, left and right, famous and obscure—as they choose to become involved in politics at a level to which readers can relate. Some of the stories contain unexpected twists. Candy Lightner, the founder of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, now works as a liquor industry lobbyist and argues that MADD has gone too far. College freshman Gregory Watson reacted to receiving a OCO on a political science paper by quitting school and becoming the driving force behind passage of a constitutional amendment that had been the subject of his paper. Two young women independently wrote letters of application to the U.S. Naval Academy and in the process moved military education in the direction of gender neutrality. Citizen Democracy shows ordinary people engaged in extraordinary civic activity. Their causes run the gamut from civil rights to flag burning, from the Internet to the international fronts of landmines and the UN - but their common cause is the fact that they creatively entered the arena of national public policy making and made a difference.