Bill Moyers, Doubleday

 Our democracy has prospered most when it was firmly anchored
in the idea that "We the People" -- not just a favored few -- would
identify and remedy common distempers and dilemmas and win the gamble our
forebears undertook when they espoused the radical idea that people could
govern themselves wisely. Whatever and whoever tries to supplant that with
notions of a wholly privatized society of competitive consumers undermines a
country that, as Gordon S. Wood puts it in his landmark book The Radicalism
of the American Revolution, discovered its greatness "by creating a
prosperous free society belonging to obscure people with their workaday
concerns and their pecuniary pursuits of happiness" -- a democracy that
changed the lives of "hitherto neglected and despised masses of common
laboring people."