Mark Satin

Mark Ivor Satin (born November 16, 1946) is an American political theorist, author, and newsletter publisher.

He is best known for contributing to the development and dissemination of three political perspectives – neopacifism in the 1960s, New Age politics in the 1970s and 1980s, and radical centrism in the 1990s and 2000s.

Satin's work is sometimes seen as building toward a new political ideology, and then it is often labeled "transformational", "post-liberal", or "post-Marxist".

One historian calls Satin's writing "post-hip".

After emigrating to Canada at the age of 20 to avoid serving in the Vietnam War, Satin co-founded the Toronto Anti-Draft Programme, which helped bring American war resisters to Canada.

Many mid-1960s American radicals came from small cities in the Midwest and Southwest, as did Satin: he grew up in Moorhead, Minnesota, and Wichita Falls, Texas.

His father, who saw combat in World War II, was a college professor and author of a Cold War-era textbook on Western civilization.

His mother was a homemaker.

As a youth, Satin was restless and rebellious, and his behavior did not change after leaving for university.

In early 1965, at age 18, he dropped out of the University of Illinois to work with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Holly Springs, Mississippi.

Later that year, he was told to leave Midwestern State University, in Texas, for refusing to sign a loyalty oath to the United States Constitution.

In 1966 he became president of a Students for a Democratic Society chapter at the State University of New York at Binghamton, and helped recruit nearly 20% of the student body to join.

One term later he dropped out, then emigrated to Canada to avoid serving in the Vietnam War.

Just before Satin left for Canada, his father told him he was trying to destroy himself.

His mother told the Ladies' Home Journal she could not condone her son's actions.

Satin says he arrived in Canada feeling bewildered and unsupported.

According to press accounts, many Vietnam War resisters arrived feeling much the same way.

As 1967 began, many American pacifists and radicals did not look favorably on emigration to Canada as a means of resisting the Vietnam War.

For some this reflected a core conviction that effective war resistance requires self-sacrifice.

For others it was a matter of strategy – emigration was said to be less useful than going to jail

or deserting the military, or was said to abet the war by siphoning off the opposition.

At first, Students for a Democratic Society and many Quaker draft counselors opposed promoting the Canadian alternative, and Canada's largest counseling group, the Anti-Draft Programme of the Student Union for Peace Action (SUPA) – whose board consisted largely of Quakers and radicals – was sympathetic to such calls for prudence.

In January 1967 its spokesman warned an American audience that immigration was difficult and that the Programme was not willing to act as "baby sitters" for Americans after they arrived.

He added that he was tired of talking to the press.

When Mark Satin was hired as director of the Programme in April 1967, he attempted to change its culture.

He also tried to change the attitude of the war resistance movement toward emigration.

His efforts continued after SUPA collapsed and he co-founded the Toronto Anti-Draft Programme, with largely the same board of directors, in October 1967.

Instead of praising self-sacrifice, he emphasized the importance of self-preservation and self-development to social change.

Rather than sympathizing with pacifists' and radicals' strategic concerns, he rebutted them, telling The New York Times that massive emigration of draft-age Americans could help end the war, and telling another reporter that going to jail was bad public relations.

He also wrote the Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada (1968), which sold nearly 100,000 copies.

After a period that author Marilyn Ferguson describes as Satin's "anti-ambition experiment", Satin wrote New Age Politics (1978), which identifies an emergent "third force" in North America pursuing such goals as simple living, decentralism, and global responsibility.

Satin spread his ideas by co-founding an American political organization, the New World Alliance, and by publishing an international political newsletter, New Options.

He also co-drafted the foundational statement of the U.S. Green Party, "Ten Key Values".

Following a period of political disillusion, spent mainly in law school and practicing business law, Satin launched a new political newsletter and wrote a book, Radical Middle (2004).

Both projects criticized political partisanship and sought to promote mutual learning and innovative policy syntheses across social and cultural divides.

In an interview, Satin contrasts the old radical slogan "Dare to struggle, dare to win" with his radical-middle version, "Dare to synthesize, dare to take it all in".

Satin has been described as "colorful" and "intense", and all his initiatives have been controversial.

Bringing war resisters to Canada was opposed by many in the anti-Vietnam War movement.

New Age Politics was not welcomed by many on the traditional left or right, and Radical Middle dismayed an even broader segment of the American political community.

Even Satin's personal life has generated controversy.