When people talk about democracy in America, we often focus on elections… on candidates… on the latest headlines coming out of Washington.
But the deeper question—the one that shapes everything—is this: Who actually holds power in our society?
Is it the people? Is it our communities? Or is it wealth… concentrated power… and institutions that were never designed to answer to ordinary citizens? Today’s episode is all about movement building. Not the kind of movement-building calling for protests or boycotts. Not the kind of movement building that fades when yet another crisis emerges …But the kind of movement building that reshapes the legal and political foundations of our society.
The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, or CELDF, has been at the forefront of a remarkable experiment in democracy. An experiment that asks a simple but radical question: What if communities had the legal authority to defend their own environment… their own health… and their own future?
Ben Price serves as the National Education Director at CELDF, where he has spent more than two decades helping communities organize, learn, and take action. He has mentored local leaders across the country as they developed ordinances asserting community rights and the legal rights of ecosystems.
His book, How Wealth Rules the World: Saving Our Communities and Freedoms from the Dictatorship of Property, examines how modern law has evolved to prioritize property and wealth over democracy and community self-government. The book earned the Independent Publishing Award’s Silver Medal in Finance, Investment, and Economics, and it has sparked important conversations about the relationship between law, economics, and democratic power.
What makes Ben’s work especially important for our conversation today is that he doesn’t just analyze problems. He works directly with communities trying to solve them. Communities asking: How do we organize? How do we build durable movements? How do ordinary people reclaim authority over decisions that affect their land, water, and future?
And perhaps most importantly, how do we build movements that are strong enough to challenge systems that have been in place for generations? These are exactly the kinds of questions we need to explore if we are serious about creating a more democratic constitutional order in America.
Constitutions don’t change simply because people write some ideas down on a piece of paper. They change when movements emerge that are powerful enough to demand something better for everyone. Ben Price has spent years helping communities wrestle with the practical realities of movement building—what works, what doesn’t, and what it really takes to transform political power from the ground up.
Today, we’re going to talk about organizing… democracy… and the long road toward structural change. Ben, welcome to the Peaceful Political Revolution in America podcast.
LINKS:
https://celdf.org/
https://celdf.org/resources/multimedia/
https://celdf.org/resources/blog/
https://celdf.substack.com/
