Jamie Court's new book shows how you can reclaim direct democracy as citizen activist.

In Jamie Court's new book, "The Progressive's Guide to Raising Hell," Court recounts ways in which citizens have reclaimed direct democracy as citizen activist. This guide takes the fight from closed doors and halls of power in Washington and brings it home to states and communities. "Don't Hope--Get mad and do something!

Change is no simple matter in American politics-a fact that Americans have recently learned well. Elections rarely produce the change they promise. After the vote, power vacuums fill with familiar values, if not faces. Promises give way to fiscal realities, hope succumbs to pragmatism, and ambition concedes to inertia. The old tricks of interest groups - confuse, diffuse, scare - prevail over the better angels of American nature.