Your Editor Says Goodbye

As those of you know who’ve been supporting this newsletter (193 individuals who contribute a set amount each year), 2008 was to be my last year writing Radical Middle . . . and this is my last issue.

Ten years is the natural life of any original editorial impulse; after that, most editors are well advised to find greener pastures. Irving Kristol said it, and it’s made sense in my life twice now, first with Renewal and New Options newsletters (100 issues, 1981-92) and again with Radical Middle (120 issues, 1999-2009).

I. Fullness of heart

I go out with joy in my heart.

When I wrote my first political book, in the 1970s (New Age Politics: Healing Self and Society, Canada 1976, U.S. 1979), few of us felt politics had anything to do with healing, or consciousness, or being visionary and pragmatic at the same time, or being locally and globally oriented at the same time, or borrowing happily from every political point of view.

But in that book one very tempest-tossed 29-year-old (then living in Canada as a Vietnam-war resister – already branded for life as founder of the Toronto Anti-Draft Programme and author of its controversial Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada – somehow less than beloved by his World War II hero father and America-worshipping mother, and as much in need of comfort & healing as any of us), plucked up his courage and called for

. . . a radical politics, not so much in the sense of radical versus liberal as in the sense of going to the roots of things . . . a radicalism that is neither of the left nor right – a radicalism that is modest enough to borrow what it needs from each of the old political “isms” but bold enough to transcend them . . . a radicalism that is less interested in blaming groups and governments for our problems than in attempting to work out new and viable solutions to our problems . . . a radicalism that is more interested in healing society than in championing the exclusive claims to rightness of any one faction or segment of society. . . .

Renewal newsletter (published through the New World Alliance) and New Options newsletter (which eventually become the second largest independent political newsletter in the U.S., with over 12,000 paying subscribers) tried taking that message to my beloved activists and outsiders and dreamers. Both newsletters were written from the heart.

Radical Middle newsletter, begun after a five-year sojourn through law school and the legal profession, was more button-down. It tried to take that same message to policy analysts and professionals, as well as to practical activists. And some were listening – over the last four years, we’ve averaged nearly half a million article views per year (see very bottom of HERE).

Who would have thought, 33 years ago, that the worldview I struggled to express as a young man on the run from the Selective Service System would turn out to be the common currency of millions of policy professionals and activists, and would even find its way into the thinking of a U.S. President? But that is exactly what’s happened, which is why my heart is full.

Of course, I was never alone in my enthusiasms. Even in the 1970s, people were expressing bits and pieces of the radical centrist / transformationalist worldview (see Paul Ray and Sherry Anderson’s book The Cultural Creatives, pp. 206-07, for a fun description of a couple of us). But I know for a fact – I know at first- and second-hand – that many, many, many people (including some of our top politicians, policy analysts, political authors, and journalists) have learned and even borrowed from my writing over the years.

Most of them may never credit me in public, and that’s OK. I know many want to avoid being tarred by my in-your-face draft dodging, or by my refusal to lead a more “reputable” life (see, e.g., HERE about one-third of the way down, or see Marilyn Ferguson’s piece about me HERE). And I understand that. I know the world often requires us to play separate parts. And my heart is still full and my conscience is clear.

II. A certain kinship

I did promise myself I’d have some fun in this article going back over all the things I was right about from 1981-2009. I suspect I could put myself up against any political columnist in the U.S. over the last three decades and come out looking pretty good.

But ultimately I decided that that isn’t me, and that I’d be a lot happier looking forward rather than back. So let me try telling you about 10 compelling visions that have been published over the last year by the current generation of post-partisan (aka transpartisan, aka radical centrist, aka post-socialist, aka transformational, nee New Age?) thinkers and activists.

They are not necessarily the 10 most significant radical-middle visions of the year – any short list would have to include those from such well-received books as Gus Speth’s The Bridge at the Edge of the World (proposing substantial modifications in capitalism as a way to achieve environmental sustainability) and Van Jones’s The Green Collar Economy (proposing “green jobs” as a way to achieve environmental sustainability and full employment).

But they are 10 of our most original and provocative and necessary visions. Among them they can suggest the richness that’s out there now at the radical middle, waiting to be given practical political shape.

Some come from dyed-in-the-wool members of the Establishment, some from passionate grassroots activists, and some from those who couldn’t be pigeonholed if you tried! What all their visions have in common, though – whether they’d care to admit it or not – is some visceral kinship with the hopes & dreams of that 29-year-old draft dodger in Canada, a third of a century ago.

In dreams begin responsibilities, the poet Delmore Schwartz once said. (Even or perhaps especially when the dreamers are flawed, he wisely implied.) Here, then, are some dreams that carry heavy responsibilities, as well as extraordinary opportunities, for those of us who share them. . . .

III. State of our vision 2009

[Ed. note: In the original version of this article, I went on to describe the 10 visions here. But that made for an 8,400-word article -- way too long for a Web-based piece of writing (as several of you were kind enough to tell me!). So I have now put the visions into five separate articles d. January-May 2009, and you can link to them here:

Mastering the Skills of Social Change: Richard Revesz's Numbers-Crunching Meets Marilyn Hamilton's Meta-Frameworking

Thinking About Power: David Rothkopf's Institutional Power Meets Clay Shirky's Internet Power

Moving Politics Forward: AmericaSpeaks's Wise Democracy Meets Chickering & Turner's "Transpartisan" Democracy

Moving Business Forward: Art Kleiner's Good Corporate Guys Meet David Yamada's Good Corporate Laws

Moving Global Affairs Forward: Fareed Zakaria's Humanistic Pragmatism Meets Alanna Hartzok's Visionary Idealism

The rest of my "goodbye" article follows.]

IV. State of my vision 2009

I won’t abandon the Radical Middle website. Over the next year, I’ll get this space professionally redesigned (in large part because of your prodding!), and I’ll arrange my articles so they can be maximally useful to anyone trying to make sense of the radical middle philosophy.

I’ll also post the 50 best articles from my old New Options newsletter, and work them into the mix. Many of New Options’s articles feel as fresh today as when they were written . . . a sad commentary, I suppose, on the course of American politics since 1981.

Most of the time, though, I’ll be working on two books. I’ll be trying to finish an excruciatingly honest memoir – a “teaching memoir,” I like to call it, about the wine-dark experiment that’s been my life – and I’ll be trying to craft my political ideas from the last 33 years into some sort of coherent whole, laced with first-hand experience and a voice of bemusement and love.

Why do I think I can do that now? First and foremost, I am happy to report that last summer I finally moved out of my Oakland poverty warehouse (see one-third of the way down HERE) the better to receive the woman I love.

And always I’ll be rooting for the people and groups I’ve been writing about – all my wonderful Advisors, of course, as well as Washington DC-focused policy groups like the wildly successful New America Foundation (you went where my New World Alliance could not go!), visionary policy groups like Alanna Hartzok’s Earth Rights Institute, radical middle professional groups like David Wexler’s International Network for Therapeutic Jurisprudence, and radical middle activist groups like Lawry Chickering and Jim Turner’s Transpartisan Alliance.

One of the nice things about, um, growing old, is that you find it easier and easier to glimpse parts of yourself and your dreams in other people. I feel blessed to be able to see so much of myself at work in the world through other people. And I feel doubly blessed to see that many of them are at least as vital and at least as original as I ever was at 29; and a lot more savvy, too.

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