Journalists From The United States

"The term "radical middle" debuted on the national stage in 1995 in a Newsweek cover story by Joe Klein. ... Almost a decade later, the electorate is more polarized than ever. ... Not so, according to New Age activist-cum-sensible centrist, Mark Satin, whose new book Radical Middle announces the arrival of a kinder, gentler radical middle, Think of it as a "compassionate conservatism" for the center-left. ... Satin wants his book to be the movement's manifesto. Like the political newsletter he's been issuing since 1999, .. Satin's rhetoric employs New Age emotionalism in the service of mostly hard-nosed, rational solutions to a broad spectrum of social and political problems. True to claim, the policy proposals cataloged here don't fit neatly into the standard left / right model. ... The most provocative ideas combine a leftist concern for the commonwealth with a conservative instinct for individual responsibility and self-reliance."

"Distinctions between the two parties are of little interest to Satin. Having spent his entire political life outside conventional politics, Satin firmly believes that the current system can't lead to the moderate majority he wants. The most "radical" thing about Mark Satin's Radical Middle is the extraordinary depth of the author's belief that identifying solutions to America's problems depends on spurning conventional party politics."

"Even though Satin continually inveighs against the "impractical idealism" that (by his own admission) much of his own career exemplifies, his book ultimately places him in the sturdy tradition of "idealistic" American reformers who think smart and principled people unencumbered by political constraints can change everything. For all the stylistic differences, Radical Middle echoes the message of Ross Perot's 1992 and 1996 presidential campaigns, which placed unlimited cash at the disposal of the proposition that a (nominally) uncorrupted and nonpartisan candidate could simply "open up the hood" of American government and fix things."

"Mark Satin, in his Washington newsletter Radical Middle, describes the domination of the public debate about the [biotechnology] issue by two different groups. ... Satin's report carries the encouraging news of an emerging group with a different voice, one that is "nuanced, hopeful, adult" and that he calls the "voice of cautious optimism." It is essentially a willingness to listen to both sides of the argument."

"Christa Slaton ... worked with and studied the Greens in the United States. She was concerned that Greens carried "mistrust into most of their political interactions with each other ... name calling and insults are routinely exchanged." As political commentator Mark Satin noted, the irony was that the Greens made a point of saying how important it was to treat people well, yet he found that they sometimes treated each other worse than people in traditional political parties."

"New Options suggests that the New Age / New Left has to continue to evolve into the "New Center" – or fail, for real this time, to change the world."

"Mark Satin's irritating Radical Middle is a timely clue to what gave liberalism a bad name. It opens breathlessly. ... Satin ... perceive[s] obvious solutions to almost everything. The greater part of the book consists of short chapters that state daunting problems and then summarily solve them. ... Why do so many liberal preachments grate like glass shards on a blackboard? Well, maybe it's the haut à bas tone, the disdain of politics, the smug armchair analyses, the insufferable smart-aleckness."

"New Options is spearheading a movement that is still nameless. He [Satin] no longer uses the "New Age" moniker, as it now conjures up Shirley MacLaine and Windham Hill. Though he's active in the U.S. Green movement, ... he's reluctant to identify his newsletter as a Green publication. "The U.S. Green movement so far is characterized by an ineptness of organizing strategy and a substantial degree of cultural alienation from the American mainstream," he says. ... But Satin isn't reaching for the brick pile. He says he's content with New Options pragmatic stance. "I think it's a third path which alienated people can move to once they become bored with their own alienation.""

"The New World Alliance ... was a short-lived precursor of the North American Greens. It was founded by Mark Satin (author of New Age Politics) after a nationwide Delphi-type survey among 500 academics, policy experts, and political activists interested in this emerging political paradigm. These new colleagues ... were also exploring the relationship between personal and political transformation."

"The Greens in the United States ... began as an initiative of individuals formed by the co-author of a "new age" interpretation of the West German movement, Charlene Spretnak, along with David Haenke from the North American Bioregional Congress, Mark Satin, editor of New Options and author of New Age Politics, and Harry Boyte."

"Spretnak and Satin played a significant role in facilitating the articulation of Green political thought, and the philosophies they represented have left their influence on the Greens' ideological foundation. ... Although Spretnak's and Satin's books developed their sources in different ways, both authors drew upon radical and cultural feminist critiques of women's oppression. ... The sixty-two founding Greens may have chosen the term community-based economics over anticapitalism because cultural feminism and New Age thought are both antileftist. Both Spretnak and Satin rejected leftist critiques, preferring instead the West German Greens slogan that had graced the cover of Spretnak and Capra's book Green Politics: "We are neither Left nor Right, we are in front.""

"The purpose of the Alliance was to "articulate new decentralist / planetary politics, launch practical and realisable projects and to serve as one of the organisational vehicles for transformation." ... Its political vision included healing, rediscovery, human growth, ecology, participation, appropriate scale, globalism, technological creativity and spirituality. ... Mark Satin ... eventually settled down to producing an interesting monthly newsletter called New Options, which in March 1988 reported a circulation of over 10,000."

"In his new book, Radical Middle ..., which provided the initial inspiration for this article, Satin fleshes out pragmatic new policy ideas. ... Satin draws inspiration from nonpolitical realms of society where people are blending what works from various orthodoxies. He points to developments like integrative medicine, ... socially responsible business, ... and judges' increasing use of psychology, economics, and even literature in crafting legal opinions. "Politics," he says ruefully, "is the last area of society where this kind of creative thinking is taking hold.""

"The New World Alliance (NWA) is a conscious attempt to create a national political movement based on values that have traditionally stood outside politics. NWA is the brainchild of Mark Satin. ... When Satin returned to the United States under Carter's Vietnam amnesty program, he decided to take a cross-country bus trip to assess the mood of "new age" activists, to learn from them what was needed to start a new national political organization. "I went systematically to 24 cities and regions from coast to coast, ..." he wrote to us in a letter. "I stopped when I found 500 people who said they'd answer a questionnaire ... on what a New Age-oriented political organization should be like – what its politics should be, what its projects should be, and how its first directors should be chosen." ... In December 1979, the NWA held its first governing council meeting in New York."

"The thirty-nine members of the NWA Governing Council included teachers, futurists, environmentalists, feminists, think-tank members, an others from a variety of professional backgrounds. ... The NWA sponsored a number of conferences and facilitated local and national networking. In 1981 the group put forward a "Transformational Platform," which was the first attempt to take ecological, decentralist, globalist, and human-growth ideas and translate them into a detailed, practical political platform with about 300 specific proposals. ... Yet something was missing. Satin observed: ... "We are engaged in theoretical-verbal overkill in exactly the same way the military people are engaged in stockpiling weapons and for the same kind of reasons. ... We don't know what to do.""

"West German Green Wilhelm Knabe and a few U.S. Greens ... were becoming impatient with the movement's slow pace of growth. Mark Satin, one of the "New Age" and more conservative participants, suggested that Greens needed to leave behind some classic characteristics of the sixties counterculture: namely, their fear of money, hierarchy, authority, and leadership. Satin felt the Greens would need both fundraising skills and a more coherent structure in order to get their message out to a broad base of the population."

"The most ambitious effort to fashion a new-age manifesto was Mark Satin's comprehensive but quite readable New Age Politics. ... More historically grounded than the bulk of new-age literature, Satin's book found transformative significance in the feminist and ecology struggles of the period, which, however, he tried mightily to fit into the new paradigmatic shift; these movements were important [to Satin] precisely insofar as they transcended "politics" and could be integrated into a spiritual outlook. Satin conceded that efforts by movements and parties to win reforms might be useful here and there, but they could never be the heart of the matter. ... Satin was convinced that, in the end, the desired aim of a new harmonious world comprised of people fully in touch with nature and their inner selves would have to be realized outside of and against a hopelessly corrupt and dehumanizing institutional system."

"After Satin accepted amnesty in 1978, he was invited to speak at a gathering in the States. He had just returned, and he was awake all night before the talk with excitement and fear. ... The speech got a standing ovation, and Satin wept. His vision of what was possible, of what in fact was already moving through the culture, had evidently struck a nerve. ... Two decades later, we know that Satin's hopes for a new political platform did not materialize. But over those long years in Toronto and Montreal and Vancouver Island, he caught sight of and began to plan for the general movement for change that is taking form now."

"A lot has changed in the forty years since I stood before Mark's table at the World Symposium on Humanity and purchased his ugly but powerful little book. Mark and I have changed. Undoubtedly, if he were to write this book now, it would be different. But it stands as the first comprehensive articulation of a transformational political ideology. It shows, in great and systemic detail, how we can depthfully understand our world of crisis and get to a world of collaboration and wholeness. And, by the way, it restores the true meaning of "New Age" – from a prophetic image all too often used to justify narcissism, to an image of the innate potential in all of us to make things new for the benefit of all."

"As represented by Mark Satin's (1978) movement-encompassing treatise, New Age Politics, the New Age movement is plural in its expressions of antagonism towards relations of subordination in the United States. It calls for a new revolutionary strategy appropriate for our time, and focuses its efforts on the discursive plane, at the level of consciousness. Its goal is a radical plural democracy, although it lacks specific criteria for the ideal world or ideal political work. And it rejects, explicitly, the working class as the primary agent of change, emphasizing instead plural struggles from diverse standpoints. This chapter argues that the New Age does not represent an adequate political response to the conditions of late capitalism. ... Satin is calling for therapeutic, self-oriented work within the democratic imaginary, a reworking of individual consciousness in place of public struggle. ... Satin does not call his enemy capitalism."

"The themes of New Age politics were first articulated in the late 1970s by Mark Satin, who had fled the Vietnam War draft for Canada. There it dawned on him that "the ideas and energies from the various 'fringe' movements – feminist, ecological, spiritual, human potential and the like – were beginning to come together in a new way." Drawing on decentralist and feminist theories of the early 1970s, Satin's New Age Politics called for an escape from the "six-sided prison": patriarchism , egocentricity, scientism, bureaucracy, nationalism and urbanism. In its place Satin advocated a "third force" which would transcend the traditional divisions between Marxism and capitalism, liberalism and conservatism, Democrats and Republicans. Still seeking that synthesis, Satin publishes the Washington-based newsletter "New Options," which has criticized both the Sandinistas and Reagan's policy in Central America while searching for a "different" ground from pro-life and pro-choice forces on the abortion issue."

"Both Mark Satin and Jerry Rubin speak of legitimate mystical experiences where good and evil dissipate into the One. [Marilyn] Ferguson claims that good and evil are transcended by an awareness that "unites opposites." ... But what is left of ethics? The New Age is morally unfit to lead us politically. It lacks any absolute standards that would tell us that the outcome of the great transformation would be more good than evil."

"From the United States there seemed to be not one but many different kinds of movements developing ... as well as a number of ideologies that already then seemed to be in competition with one another: the social ecology of Murray Bookchin, the new-age politics of Mark Satin, the appropriate technology of Amory Lovins, the ecofeminism of Carolyn Merchant, to name some of those that I became acquainted with."

"The most important departure from politics-as-usual that Satin ascribes to the radical middle is a commitment to finding a higher common ground that integrates best insights from both the left and the right. ... There is no way to do justice here to Satin's outpouring of specific policy proposals. No one will agree with all of them. But there is a good deal of fresh thinking here, and some of the policy ideas Satin presents may turn out to be very important. The most troubling aspect of Radical Middle is Satin's tendency to exaggerate how far along this approach to politics really is. ... Satin's tendency to set out his own favorite policy ideas as if they are the official position of the radical middle, for which he is serving as spokesman, is problematic. It risks turning the radical middle into a new ideology with a detailed political platform."

"In New Age Politics Mark Satin articulates some of the ethics and values that would likely form the platform of a new society in harmony with diverse spiritual beliefs. He sites four "New Age ethics" as (1) the self-development ethic ...; (2) the ecology ethic ...; (3) the self-reliance / cooperation ethic ...; and (4) the nonviolence ethic."

"The young men who came to Canada rather than take part in the Vietnam war always impressed me with their singleness of purpose. ... Probably a more honest statement about the complexity of the feelings that caused them to reject their homeland in the turbulent days of the sixties is expressed in Mark Satin's Confessions of a Young Exile. ... Satin's emigration wasn't dictated totally by his idealism. More often than not, he talked himself into radical positions and situations as a result of trying to impress his peers or his girl friend, or rebelling against middle-class parental authority."

"Some surprisingly ordered thinking has been going on in the counter-culture. The evidence at hand is a book called New Age Politics. ... In 60,000 words Satin has made a comprehensive critique of North American society and outlined a Utopian society to replace it. There's no comfort in Satin's analysis for anyone who believes that our present way of life is worth preserving. ... Society would be transformed by a bloodless – but thorough – evolution. For instance, the nuclear family (mom, pop and the kids) would have to go. ... Bigness in government, in business and in all human organizations would have to go too.... Utopian defence policy is what one might expect from a pacifist draft dodger. … It's a question of how one views man's nature. Are we born naturally good but corrupted by civilization? Or are we born with a devil as well as an angel inside us?"

"Mark Satin is one of the few profound political thinkers of our day who has grasped the significance of both spiritual practice and psycho-spiritual growth. ... The author's active political background, and more recent involvement in self-growth, make him uniquely qualified to draw together ideas which up until now have remained isolated from one another. ... Satin sees North Americans to be in a unique and unprecedented situation. Rather than relying upon ready-made economic or political systems (Marxism, socialism, capitalism, etc.), we could evolve an entirely new way of perceiving and thinking about political reality. New Age Politics is an attempt to delineate this emerging perceptual and conceptual framework. While reading Satin's book, I was reminded of Yaqui Indian Don Juan's teaching that one must learn (or re-learn) to "see.""

"His [Satin's] most important contribution to draft resistance was editing the TADP Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada which he compiled from his own well-researched knowledge of Canadian immigration and from material submitted by a number of Canadian and American contributors. The ninety-page book contained every conceivable piece of information that a young American could possibly need to know about moving to Canada, including the demolition of a number of myths. All of it was presented in a strikingly thorough and concise format. It is excellently written. .... If a resister had any doubts about going to Canada before he read the book, he seldom had any after finishing it. ... By mid-1968 the TADP manual had become the first entirely Canadian-published best seller in the United States."

"The do-it-yourself spirit also moved Mark Satin – a young American draft resister living in Canada – to write, design, and even typeset his own book, New Age Politics: The Emerging New Alternative to Marxism and Liberalism. The book sold 10,000 copies, which Satin mailed from his basement before he sold reprint rights to a mainstream publisher – to secure, he explained apologetically, more money and wider distribution for his work."

"In a major bid to encourage Americans to evade military conscription, the Toronto Anti-Draft Programme plans to put into the mail next week about 5,000 copies of a "Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada." The 132-page soft-cover book contains detailed advice about how to qualify as a Canadian immigrant, and information about Canadian jobs and school opportunities, housing, politics, culture and climate. The book is one of the manifestations of the growing organizational apparatus and financial strength of the Anti-Draft Programme, which deliberately uses the British spelling of "program." Other such signs, as reported by Mark I. Satin, the 21-year-old director of the "Programme," are: ... A list of 200 Torontonians who have offered to shelter and feed draft dodgers. ... Establishment of an employment service to help the youths find jobs. ... Mr. Satin's office gives cash grants to draft resisters who are without funds."

"New political parties such as the Citizens Party have formed in the United States. ... The more visionary, global movement coalescing around the prodigious communications efforts of Mark Satin, author of New Age Politics (Delta, 1979), has now incorporated as the New World Alliance."

"What happened to all [those] groups and initiatives [that sprang up between 1970 and 2000] and the visionary, beyond-left-and-right perspective they sought to advance? Why did the [New World] Alliance and New Options disappear, and the U.S. Greens turn into just another left-wing protest party, and terms like "transformational" get taken over by Sixties-style socialists? In this tough-love [book], you will be able to discern many, many, many answers. One of my volunteer reader-critics, a nice guy from Minnesota, was astonished by all the awful behavior I describe in and around the organizations covered here. Suffice it to say that, if you are ever going to create a healing new politics, you are going to have to dwell on what went wrong with us … and then act differently from us. It may be harder than you think."

"Something that may surprise if not unhinge you about this [book] is that I tell you as much about relationships as about politics narrowly defined. Using myself as a more or less representative lens, I pay special attention to … activists' often difficult relationships with parents, our often contentious relationships with [movement] colleagues, and our often shaky relationships with lovers. Marx and Madison didn't write about that stuff. But you can hardly understand the perils of visionary, unconventional politics without paying compassionate attention to those aspects of our lives."

"Most of all, I was angry all the time. Angry for righteous political reasons, but also because I'd rejected so much of what makes a long life beautiful and bearable. Usually my anger expressed itself subtly and indirectly (re-read Parts One and Two of this book), but you've also seen it on full display, from my hysterical shrieking about [the theft of] my clothes at Freedom House in Mississippi in 1965, to my tossing Sandra's suitcase out my door in 2005. And not to cast stones, but I was often surrounded in this book by equally "dedicated," equally "selfless," equally obsessed, and equally angry activists. There is no way around it. No matter how dire the political situation may seem to us, we must take the time to become decent and whole human beings if we want to truly change things for the better. … Only by making a conscious effort to heal ourselves—be it through church services and groups, spiritual practice, individual or group therapy, community volunteer work, deep apolitical friendships, or some lovely combination of these—can we supposedly visionary and healing activists ever gain the capacity to take this nation beyond poisonous Us-against-Them type politics. Only by becoming kind people can we create a kind world."

"Many of us like to call ourselves "post-socialist" radicals now. (We also use terms like "radical centrist," "creative centrist," and "transpartisan.") It's not that we're unhappy with socialists being out there. It's just that, when formulating policies, we draw from diverse other perspectives as well. To us, everyone has a piece of the truth, right populists and left populists, libertarians and Greens, Biblical Christians and Islamists, Turning Point USA and Black Lives Matter … everyone. And the more "radical" you are, the more willing you are to listen to, respect, and accommodate everyone's most vital interests (as distinct from their emotionally expressed public positions on issues)."

"These 100 books do not agree on everything – and that's OK too. You don't need total agreement when you're an open-hearted, decentralist, experimentalist New Ager. After the Prison and its institutions lose their hold over us, you won't even want such agreement. Within the parameters of certain life-affirming values, you'll want a hundred flowers to bloom. Synergy is all; cooperation and coordination is all."

"Our country is struggling. The left and the right are tearing each other apart. Meanwhile, none of our major domestic and global issues are being properly addressed. We desperately need a new political perspective for the 21st century, one that can unite and heal this nation. And we need a political movement backing it up."

"Mark Satin ... looks and sounds just like a boy many a citizen of Wichita Falls, Tex., would love to give a good spanking to. He has long hair. ... He has a yellow button announcing DISSENT in the lapel of his rumpled jacket. Dissent is certainly what he is about, and he has had a great chance to exercise it since he joined SUPA last month as a $25-a-week counselor for draft emigrants from the United States. "That godawful sick, foul country; could anything be worse?" he asks, his frayed sleeve bumping against a loaf of sliced bread on the desk. ("My breakfast and lunch," he explains apologetically.)"

"[M]any of us are buying into an agenda that would neither unite nor heal us. It's all around us now. Forget balanced budgets. Condone illegal immigration. Defund the police. Don't go hard after street crime. Don't institutionalize the mentally ill. Dismantle the nuclear family. … None of this stuff is original to the 2020s. All of it goes back to the latter half of the 1960s, when the Vietnam War was tearing us apart. It's been dredged up again by a variety of socialists, often deeply caring people whose passion keeps them from seeing that other sorts of people hold to equally valid truths (and half-truths). It rarely occurs to them, just as it rarely occurs to other passionate activists across the political spectrum, that what the social change movement in America needs today isn't an us-against-them strategy—"we're right, they're evil"—but a strategy for healing and uniting. That's an even more radical strategy, in its way. It would have us listen empathically to everyone's deepest needs and fears … and then find ways to address everyone's core interests."

"I'd do some things differently if I were writing this book from scratch today. I would be more nuanced in the history sections. I'd be less inclined to see everyone at "Self-development Stages Six and Seven" as the cat's meow. Above all, perhaps, I would emphasize that some of what I call "monolithic institutions" are evolving (i.e., are being shoved by us) in a positive direction today – so I'd bend over backward to encourage immersion as well as resistance. We need transformers everywhere, inside "The System" as well as outside it. But even with such "flaws" (mainly the flaws of youth), I think New Age Politics is still the best single expression of the new politics as a coherent, systemic, integral whole."

"Lorian Press could have simply reprinted the first edition of New Age Politics, from 1976. I liked its length (only 50,000 words), it covered almost all the ground I do here, and I wanted to prove to you that the perspective I synthesized – the perspective of many people in the social change movements of today – goes back to the Nixon-Ford era, when the traditional left and right both lost their way. It was not spontaneously generated by any single social movement of the last 40 years. Rather, all our movements have been re-inventing, adding to, and deepening a perspective that already in the 1970s stood as our only real alternative to More Of The Same."

"What Keys, Laszlo, Falk, and many other New Agers are proposing … could be called a "planetary guidance system." ... A planetary guidance system would regulate the world, not run it. ... Does this chapter strike you as impossibly idealistic? In 2011, Parag Khanna of the New America Foundation argued that a decentralized planetary guidance system is currently arising outside the confines of the United Nations. To Khanna, it consists of an ever-changing (depending on the issue) array of representatives of governments, non-governmental organizations (nonprofits), corporations, super-wealthy individuals, and universities. Although Khanna, a buttoned-down radical centrist, doesn't use terms like "synergic power" and "win-win approach," it is obvious from his text that that's exactly how (some of) these entities are beginning to operate in the global context."

"This new edition of New Age Politics – stripped-down and updated for the 21st century – has been launched to reassert, in thunder, that the movements of our time have generated a perspective or ideology of their own. It's as coherent an ideology as liberalism or Marxism – and far more relevant to our needs as life-loving human beings on a finite planet. In other words, New Age Politics gives us a common ground on which to stand."

"Mark Satin has thrown himself, as much as any man can, into helping his draft-evading contemporaries. For the first time in his twenty years, he has found a cause he can believe in. Seven days a week, from nine in the morning until, often, very late at night, he runs the SUPA Anti-Draft programme. ... On my first visit, there were ten to fifteen young Americans drifting in and out of the SUPA office. Some were settled for the evening in the elderly but comfortable furniture (all donated). They were reading, napping, gassing; some writing letters, one strumming a guitar. There was a mail basket and someone to take and pass on messages; a hot plate, an assortment of instant foods. There's always someone's baggage lying around. ... All the young Americans seem to respond to Mark Satin. His enthusiasm for the job and general air of unflappability seem catching."

"We need mandatory national service so we will all take part in performing the collective tasks we know are ours. We need mandatory national service because duty and honor are as necessary to us as oxygen and water. That's what I was trying to tell the Army in my application to the JAG corps at the age of 52. And that's what the radical middle needs to tell the American people."

"For most of the 20th century, small radical groups were seen as social change incubators. The various socialist and communist parties, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and a thousand local or regional variants were where it was at. ... But we live in a knowledge society now – a world that depends increasingly on professional expertise and special skills. If we want to change that world, we'll need to be even more expert and skilled than those who'd defend the status quo. That's why professional schools, not radical groups, are our social change incubators now. And radical middle social change agents know it. Many of the most idealistic and dedicated of them have been pouring into our graduate schools, including our great medical, business, and law schools."

"Few political authors employ the term New Age anymore; however, ... many use equivalents or near-equivalents such as communitarian, evolutionary, green, holistic, integral, post-socialist, radical centrist, spiritual, transformational, and transpartisan, and that's OK. Perhaps the new generation, not being ego-attached to any of these, will finally come up with a term we can all say "Aha!" to."

"The radical middle movement is phenomenally diverse. But if you look at what everyone who might be called radical middle is saying and doing, you'll discover we share four goals. I like to call them our Four Key Values:"

"Put these values together and you can see how the radical middle draws holistically on our entire political tradition. Each value is a sort of updated version of an aspect of our 18th-century political heritage – liberty, equality, happiness, and fraternity, respectively."