"The radical centrists of the 21st century were better dressed and superficially better behaved than the Greens. But they had their own impediments to humanity and effectiveness. I got my first taste of this after my book Radical Middle was published in 2004 and I attended my first radical centrist … conference in Washington DC. I dearly wanted to meet some of the other writers whose books and articles were turning radical centrism into an emerging American political perspective. But when I introduced myself to the ones I most wanted to meet, the best known gave me stony stares and little face time. … I supposed it was just the old male competitiveness, rearing its silly head among the reconcilers, until I reread Ed Kilgore's weirdly ambivalent review of my book in the radical centrists' then-favorite magazine, the Washington Monthly. Kilgore characterized me as a person who'd "moved to Canada to avoid the draft" and "rubbed elbows there with the Weathermen," and later became a "New Age guru." There it was in a nutshell, I realized: my peers in the radical centrist community, ... many of them hoping for jobs in future political administrations, did not want a notorious New Age draft dodger exotic gumming up their ranks. I'd been in the Big World long enough to understand their concern. But it still hurt. And I knew this aversion to getting one's hands dirty would keep us from ever being able to take our movement beyond the world of think tanks and Big Ideas."