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Newly-elected President Joshua Land’s top goal is a world where every country is a Democracy. But the ghosts who haunt the White House have a different agenda. Pair an idealistic president who is haunted by his past and unwavering ghosts who intend on haunting the president’s future if he doesn’t comply with their demands, and the Oval Office becomes similar to the Roman Coliseum as the battle between the political gladiator and the spectral gladiators rages on. On the evening of January 20, 2033, Inauguration night, President Land is warned in a letter from the outgoing president, Daniel Manning, that the White House is haunted and the president is the only one it haunts. At first, President Land thinks the letter is a joke. He eventually realizes that it was a genuine warning, and the White House is haunted by ghosts who think Democracy has run its course and needs to be eliminated because, as a system of government, it can no longer effectively fix the world’s problems. President Land’s agenda is simple: “Less government at home, and more Democracy abroad.” The ghosts demand that Joshua reverse his agenda and warn him that if he does not, the haunting will intensify. “The Founding Fathers gave all future generations a warning about what causes Democracy to die,” Dustin Lawson said. “I fear those warnings are being lost to history and need to be revitalized. One of the reasons why I wrote this novel is to help the Founders warn us from the grave.”
During Lawson’s last semester of grad school, he lived in Washington D.C. During that time, he took his first tour of the White House. Standing in Cross Hall before the Secret Service pushed him out the front door, Dustin envisioned all the history that had walked that hall, all the ghosts. That is when the idea for The Ghost of Democracy was born.
“In 1949, George Orwell gave us a warning in his novel 1984,” Dustin Lawson said. “That warning was that totalitarian governments, Big Brother, threatened to destroy Democracy if left unchecked. In The Ghost of Democracy, I have tried to give the 21st century a slightly different warning. Yes, Big Brother is a threat to Democracy. But, as big a threat to the future of Democracy is Little Brother, the people, specifically the flaws within human nature that causes voters to gradually kill Democracies. Personally, I believe that the combination of the gradual centralization of government and the ignorance and apathy of voters will not only kill Democracy by the end of the 21st Century, but will kill it so subtly that most people won’t even realize it.” Dustin Lawson is the author of six books, four novels and two non-fiction. After college, he spent a year traveling all over North America, Europe, and parts of the Middle East as the personal assistant to the author and speaker, Josh McDowell.
Read the first chapter and a more in-depth book synopsis, watch Dustin’s web series “The Ghost of Democracy: Why Democracy will not Survive the 21st Century”, or find his other books at http://www.dustinlawsonauthor.com.
(Caged Lions Publishing, Inc., 2015, $16.95, available at http://www.dustinlawsonauthor.com, ISBN: 978-1518623851)
Release ID: 95626