Toward a New Radical Politics of Dialogue and Healing (by Mark Satin)
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OUR NATION 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.
Instead, many 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. It’s only a fetus until the day it pops out of the womb. People with white skin who profess certain beliefs (e.g., in color blindness, individualism, meritocracy) are racist. People with black or brown skin can’t be racist. Rioting and looting are legitimate forms of protest. On and on.
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.
Some of us are moving in this direction already. We call ourselves “post-socialist” radicals now (or “radical centrists,” or “transpartisans”). 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).
Dirty little secret: it’s fun doing politics the way it’s done now: The Good Guys vs. the Bad Guys, forever. Another observation: this way of doing politics poisons life in a society, big time.
The politics of dialogue and healing is not fun: it requires endless amounts of listening, learning, and mediating … not to mention activist modesty. But unlike the current far-left strategy (and all other us-against-them type strategies), it holds out hope of coming up with policies that meet everyone’s core interests. Even of inspiring a kinder world.
Mark Satin is the author of Up From Socialism: My 60-Year Search for a Healing New Radical Politics(Bombardier Books, 2023).
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