Great Radical Centrist Blogs and Weblogs

Hundreds of blogs and article collections are “radical middle” in orientation now -- it may be the fastest-growing category of Internet political commentary! (By "radical middle" I mean you listen to & genuinely learn from all political perspectives, and USE your learnings to address our fundamental socio-economic problems in creative new ways.) The sites we've linked to below strike me as not only radical middle but as unusually

- original,
- thoughtful,
- guileless,
- information-rich, and / or
- smart.

II. THE LIVE TWENTY-FIVE

Althouse – from Ann Althouse, law professor at the University of Wisconsin

Another Opinion – from Paul Hosse, long-time Louisville KY community & political activist

A View from the Radical Middle – from Per Kurowski, former Executive Director of the World Bank for Mexico, Nicaragua, and Venezuela

Breakthrough – from The Breakthrough Institute, California’s leading radical-centrist think tank

Centrist Project blog – from Charles Wheelan, author of The Centrist Manifesto

Demos blog – from Demos, Britain's "leading cross-party think tank"

Gruntled Center – from William (Beau) Weston, self-described "sociology professor . . . AND married father of three"

James Fallows blog – from James Fallows, great radical-centrist journalist and founding chair of the New America Foundation

Joe Klein articles – from the author of “Stalking the Radical Middle,” the 1995 Newsweek article that propelled the concept of radical centrism into the U.S. political dialogue

John Avlon articles – from John Avlon, author of Independent Nation: How the Vital Center Is Changing American Politics (see his earliest columns HERE)

John McWhorter articles – from the author of Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America (see our review HERE)

Joseph E. Stiglitz articles and op-eds – from the author of Making Globalization Work and co-author of Creating a Learning Society

Life on the Edge – from John Graham, former U.S. foreign service officer and co-founder of The Giraffe Project, which celebrates people for “sticking their necks out”

Mark Gerzon blog – from Mark Gerzon, “transpartisan” leader (see our review of his book on leadership HERE) and author of The Reunited States of America

Matt Miller: The Archives – from Matthew Miller, author of The Two Percent Solution: Fixing America’s Problems in Ways Liberals and Conservatives Can Love (see our review HERE)

Michael Lind articles – from Michael Lind, co-author of The Radical Center: The Future of American Politics (see our review HERE)

Moderate Voice – from Joe Gandelman, former San Diego Union staff writer

Moderate Voters – from Gary Butts, a Southern California voter

New America articles – articles from staff and fellows at the New America Foundation, Washington DC’s premier radical centrist think tank (see our article HERE)

New America policy papers – policy papers from staff and fellows at the great New America Foundation

Passport – from staff writers at Foreign Policy magazine

Political Animal – from staff writers at The Washington Monthly, whose founder and long-time editor, Charlie Peters, was an early radical centrist

Radical Centrism – from Ernest Prabhakar, open source products manager at Apple Inc. and an early champion of radical centrism as a political philosophy

Radical Middle Newsletter – from Mark Satin, author of Radical Middle: The Politics We Need Now (see its preface HERE)

Republic 3.0 – “next generation policy ideas” from The Washington Monthly

Ta-Nehisi Coates blog – from Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of Between the World and Me

Village Square – a forum for centrist dialogue

III. ANCIENT HISTORY DEPARTMENT: A CAUTIONARY NOTE

Radical centrist observations, analyses, and policy formulations may be flourishing today, but there is nothing inevitable about their triumph. They’ve been around since the early Reagan era.

See the New World Alliance’s A Transformation Platform: The Dialogue Begins (1981), which some people think was the first programmatic statement of radical-centrist politics. Authors included former speechwriters for Robert F. Kennedy (Len Duhl) and Ronald Reagan (John McClaughry). It was introduced at the National Press Club by decentralist spokesman Kirkpatrick Sale (author of Human Scale, 1980), Robert Olson of the Office of Technology Assessment of the U.S. Congress, and me. It gained little traction.

See Charles Peters’s article “A Neoliberal’s Manifesto” (1983), which some feel was the first grand and nationally influential statement of radical centrist politics (n.b.: “neoliberal” did not mean for Peters what it’s come to mean today!). It originally appeared in The Washington Monthly, which Peters ran for many decades. You’ll have to scroll down the first page of this PDF before discovering any text.

See a web sampling of my New Options Newsletter (1984 – 1992, r.i.p.), at one time the second largest independent political newsletter in the U.S., and correctly described by culture critic Annie Gottlieb (in Do You Believe in Magic?, Simon & Schuster, 1988) as attempting to pull New Left and New Age activists into a “New Center.” My advisory board included radical centrists James Fallows (who was an editor under Peters), Marilyn Ferguson (who used the term as early as 1980), and John Naisbitt (who used it in 1982).

For radical centrist ideas to prevail, we must develop organizations capable of spreading them and fighting for them. See our list of Great Radical Centrist Political Organizations elsewhere on this site … and ask yourself whether even these are sufficient.

ABOUT THE RADICAL MIDDLE CONCEPT

WHY "Radical Middle"?

WIKIPEDIA Weighs In

50 Thinkers and Activists DESCRIBE the Radical Middle

50 Best Radical Middle BOOKS of the '00s

GREAT RADICAL MIDDLE GROUPS AND BLOGS:

100 Great Radical Centrist GROUPS and Organizations

25 Great Radical Centrist BLOGS

SOME PRIOR RADICAL MIDDLE INITIATIVES:

Generational Equity and Communitarian platforms 1990s

First U.S. Green Party gatherings, 1987 - 1990

Green Party's "Ten Key Values" statement, 1984