Why we need "radicalism"

Comment published in New York Times online, reply to: “What’s wrong with radicalism?” by David Brooks, December 11, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/11/opinion/radicalism-trump-moore.html?comments:

Brooks is half-right. There is a tendency of thought and mood in political life that philosophers have called "nihilism." This is an attitude that says that there is a crisis which is so deep and totalizing that it calls for an opposition that also is. This mood can get ahead of efforts at change, lead to opposing things that should not be, or to getting stuck in opposition when there is also a need for vision, novelty, and creation. As the political sociologist John Foran has argued, along with numerous philosophers, politics worth its salt is both oppositional and inventive. 

But now look at the signs that fundamental change is needed:

-American has become a police state whose government is effectively at war against many of its people.

-Corporations and the wealthy control most politics though campaign donations and lobbying.

-Moralistic attitudes feed our bloated system of punishments, while the medical industry has effectively declared everyone crazy, and people can be locked up for illness against their will and without a sufficient reason.

-Our educational system is one of the worst in the industrialized world; race-stratified, too poor to not cede universities to foreigners, and without good jobs for most PhDs who would do research.

-Enormous labor productivity gains have flowed exclusively to capital, there is a large and growing precariat, and economic trends disfavor the 99%. 

Radicals need to be inventive, but it is indeed time for radical change.