New Options for America

New Options for America is a collection of 25 of the best and most talked-about articles from Mark Satin's Washington, D.C.-based international political newsletter, New Options. During its nine-year existence, 1984-1992, Newv Options was the go-to publication for those who were seeking creative, imaginative, and idealistic alternatives to traditional liberal and socialist policies. It was often called "post-liberal" or, among those with a spiritual bent, "transformational."

Satin, who wrote most of the copy, built it from scratch into the second-largest independent political newsleteer in the U.S. (Wahington's great direct-mail maestro, Roger Craver, played a key role here - as an unpaid coach.) In its heydey you could find New Options mentioned everyhere, from the militant Earth First! Journal (May 1, 1987) to the front page of the Outlook section of the Washington Post (April 1, 1990). The advisory board, which reflected the capaciousness of the post-liberal universe c. 1990, included Atlantic Monthly editor James Fallows, feminist Robin Morgan, ecologist Lester Brown, futurist John Naisbitt, Aquarian Conspiracy author Marilyn Ferguson, Reagan White House advisor John McClaughry, and all-purpose gadflies Hazel Henderson and Jane Jacobs.

New Options for America brings order to the post-liberal cacophony. Satin's articles are arranged in five parts (with brief introductions by him to each), corresponding roughly to overviews, economics, domestic issues, foreign policy, and great activist inititives, respectively. Among them are several examples of Satin's intensely personal, participant-observer journalism, including two pieces on the early U.S. Green Party movement that capture the hopes, frustrations, and lost opportunities of that group, and a study of street prostitutes near the White House called "Some of Our Daughters, Some of Our Lovers." After that appeared, advisory board member Fallows sent Satin a brief, handwritten note: "It is an astonishing piece of reportage and humanity."

The result of New Options for America's five-part arrangement is a coherent, some might say "holistic," overview of the most cutting-edge thoughts of post-liberal, post-socialist activists as they began gearing up for the new century. Some might find the beginnings of a new "ideology" here. Others might find the seeds of two movements that have since diverged, one anti-globalist, the other radical-centrist. Satin's earlier book, New Age Politics: Healing Self and Society (1976), was uncompromisingly decentralist and anti-corporate; his later book, Radical Middle (2004), helped articulate the more reformist radical-centrist philosophy. In New Options for America, Satin is clearly pulled both ways. As were many of us in the 1990s. As are many of us today.