Public Citizens
The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4155802 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Lily Geismer (Claremont McKenna College , Claremont, California, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 109 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 704-705 |
| Publication date | 2022-12-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of American History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/jahist/jaac433 |
| OpenAlex | W4311808162 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 7 |
Ralph Nader's role in the 2000 election sealed his place as a scourge of the Democratic party and modern liberalism. In Public Citizens Paul Sabin illuminates Nader's longer and more complex role in undermining liberalism. Sabin challenges the traditional narrative of political realignment that treats Ronald Reagan's 1980 election as the conservative nail in the coffin of the New Deal order. Sabin contends this interpretation has failed to account for the ways Nader and the public interest movement helped weaken faith in the state. Public Citizens is not a biography of Nader. Instead, this concise and accessibly written work illustrates the ways Nader served as both the spark and public face of a larger movement of nonprofit organizations that emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s focusing largely on consumer and environmental protection. These organizations relied on extensive research and other tactics to point out key problems with the legacy of the New Deal state and how it concentrated excessive power in agencies. This caused the agencies to become overly bureaucratic, unresponsive, and easily susceptible to capture from the industries they aimed to regulate. The movement did not just seek to curb misuses of “big government” but also advocated for a “tripartite model of government” in which citizens would be the “third pillar” (p. 167
Bureaucracy · Democracy · Government (linguistics · Liberalism · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Sociology · State (computer science · Law · Political and Economic history of UK and US · Public Administration
| Unique citing works | 7 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 2,33 |
| Citation span | 2023 - 2025 (3) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 6 |