"Strongly challenging the notion that democracy is just an arrangement for selecting a governing elite, Schneirov and Fernandez look for democratic ideas and practices in corporations and families, in social movements and cultural productions, in education and childrearing. Their democratic America is a place of continual controversy over everything from corporate power to disco; their cast of characters ranges from the marginalized to the spectacularly successful, from those in power to the social movements that challenged them. As they turn their gaze to the early twenty-first century, they write of the inequalities of the Second Gilded Age and the movements for democratic renewal that confront them."– John Markoff, author of Waves of Democracy: Social Movements and Political Change