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A Practical Radical Politics

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Robert Jensen
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A Message From the Future With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez What if we actually pulled off a Green New Deal? What would the future look like? The Intercept presents a film narrated by ...
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We need to be practical when it comes to politics, to work for policies that we can enact today, inadequate though they may be to answer calls for social justice and ecological sustainability.

We also need to maintain a relentlessly radical analysis, to highlight the failures of systems and structures of power, aware that policies we might enact today won't resolve existing crises or stave off collapse.

Both things are true, and both things are relevant to the choices we make.

Politics is the art of the possible, and politics also is the pursuit of goals that are impossible. We can pursue reforms today, knowing them to be inadequate, with revolutionary aims for tomorrow, knowing that the transformation needed will likely come too late.

These two obligations pull us in different directions, often generating anger and anxiety. But it is easieror, at least, should be easierto handle that tension as we get older. Aging provides more experience with frustration, along with greater capacity for equanimity.

Frustration is inevitable given our collective failure, our inability as a species to confront problems in ways that lead to meaningful progress toward real solutions.

Equanimity allows us to live with that failure and remember our moral obligation to continue struggling.

Frustration reminds us that we care about the ideals that make life meaningful. Equanimity makes living possible as we fall short of those ideals.

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Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. His latest book, All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice, was published in 2009 (more...)
 
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