Newsletter 474 - July 23, 2026

This is the third and last installment of David Eisner's three-part series on fault lines that are hampering effectiveness of civic renewal and pro-democracy work.

The first installment argued that practitioners often hold positions informed by genuinely different — and often unspoken — beliefs about citizens: whether to see them as recipients of democracy or its co-creators, and whether to read troubling behavior as malice, as incapacity, or as legitimately different priorities. In the second installmant, David explored the practical implications of these differences. Now, in this last installment, he explores how we can effectively pursue our shared purpose without defeating ourselves by continuing to argue over these fault lines.

For those who do not know David, he has been a leader in government, business, and non-profit organizations, having served as the CEO of the Corporation for National and Community Service, the National Constitution Center, and Convergence Center for Policy Resolution, among other roles. Currently, he is volunteering with Braver Angels as Special Advisor to the CEO.

As we said in our introduction to the first installment, we have found this essay to be extremely thought provoking, and believe it should be “required reading” for all of us doing “pro-democracy” and “civic renewal” work.

If you are interested in commenting on, or responding to this series (as we are), please get in touch! -- Heidi Burgess

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Citizenship Under Friendly Fire - Part : Three: Taking Common Aim

A three-part series on the civic fault lines that divide — and distract — those who would repair democracy.

by David Eisner

This final installment turns from mapping the fault lines to living with them: how a field divided by contrasting worldviews which it cannot see can still pursue its shared purpose without defeating itself. The first two installments traced those fault lines beneath our collisions – and left us at exactly this question.

Virtually everyone working in civic renewal agrees on the destination: a democracy that is inclusive, fair, functional, and peaceful – sustained by thriving, engaged citizens, unafraid to speak their minds and able to work across difference, and by institutions worthy of their participation.

That shared commitment is real. It survives every fault line this essay has mapped – even though we would argue endlessly about what “inclusive” or “fair” or “thriving” really means, and even though our strategies for getting there collide. The destination holds.

What doesn’t hold is the assumption that we can reach it without reckoning with the fault lines — because for most of this field, they have never been visible at all. That is what makes them dangerous. The disagreements this series has traced are genuine, and they have bite: they cause practitioners to see each other’s approaches not as alternatives, but as threats – to safety, to legitimacy, to democracy itself. But the collisions arrive without explanation – felt as betrayal, or seen as bad faith – because the beliefs producing them run underground, beneath the level of strategy, where none of us thinks to look. There is a purpose to this long act of excavation: what stays buried keeps causing collisions no one can explain. Nothing in what follows asks anyone to un-see what it surfaces. But it does call on us to confront the underlying issues at least as directly as we manage their consequences.

Something else has bite too, and more of it. Every tension inside this field is dwarfed by the pressures outside it: democratic norms disintegrating; political processes failing the people they exist to serve; institutions and citizens locked in spirals of distrust and dysfunction. Whole groups are being victimized and dehumanized and gridlock is throttling the country’s capacity to meet its greatest challenges. All of this compounds collapsing trust and spiraling contempt, and the window for renewal narrows daily.

No one in this field looks at that inventory and shrugs. Each views the emergency through their own lens, and every lens brings a different element into focus, for the crisis is not one consistent thing. It is a tangle of failures, some of them pulling in opposite directions: facts dismissed and facts weaponized, spaces that exclude too much and spaces that admit too much, malice unseen where it works and malice alleged where it doesn’t. In such a threat-rich environment, finding appropriate focus requires its own discipline – and the discipline is proportion: the fights within the field are real, and they are smaller – categorically smaller – than the fight the field exists to wage.

The civic renewal ecosystem is practiced at helping polarized citizens navigate mistrust and moralized conflict. Bridge-builders, facilitators, and dialogue practitioners have developed robust approaches for de-escalation, for finding shared concerns beneath surface disagreement, for creating conditions under which collaboration becomes possible.

Yet when similarly deep disagreements arise among the organizations, practitioners, funders, and advocates trying to help citizens, those same capacities are rarely applied inward. Internal conflicts are treated as evidence of moral failure, rather than as navigation challenges in their own right. It is a strange gap – a field fluent in the very conflict-management strategies it cannot – and often doesn’t even try to – apply to its own conflicts. The rest of this installment discusses how we can close that gap.

Most importantly, the fault lines themselves provide the diagnostic that makes managing the collisions that they create possible. When friction arises, practitioners can locate it: which fault line is active? What differences in values and perspectives underlie the dispute – the role and needs of citizens, the reason for their perceived “bad actions,” the role of institutions, the trustworthiness of “facts,” or the priorities for change? Simply knowing where the collision comes from – that it has a source on the map, rather than a source in the other party’s character – reduces unnecessary escalation before any further question is asked.

The Pattern Beneath the Collisions

Readers may have noticed a pattern running through the fault lines. Positions cluster. Practitioners who see citizenship as bounded and episodic tend to emphasize what citizens receive, tend toward protection and institutional authority, and tend to prioritize structural reform. Those who see citizenship as expansive and relational tend to emphasize what citizens create, tend toward inclusion and earned legitimacy, and tend to prioritize cultural repair. (The malice frame stands apart – it sits off this axis entirely, answering a prior question about whether people can be trusted at all.)

That clustering is less mechanical than it may appear – practitioners hold complex combinations of perspectives, some in tension with others, and almost always more nuanced and individual than any generalization can capture. Still, the pattern illuminates why disagreements can feel so deep and existential. Practitioners aren’t just debating tactics. They’re operating from different beliefs about what citizenship is and what it requires.

And the pattern reveals something else – something the heat of the collisions often obscures. Every one of these fault-line beliefs sits on a continuum; the binaries are rare. Our inclination is to treat them as either/or: inclusion or protection, institutional authority or earned legitimacy, structure first or culture first. But almost no one lives at a pole. The fiercest advocate of positions based on inclusion virtually always accepts some modification of an every-person-included-every-time approach. The fiercest protector includes far more people than she excludes. The staunchest institutionalist knows expertise sometimes fails and sharp institutional skeptics, nevertheless, board airplanes and take antibiotics. The structural reformer concedes meaningful power of change to citizens, while the culture-repairer understands that institutional shortcomings can poison relationships. Press any practitioner honestly and you will find them somewhere in the interior – holding an imperfect position between the poles, arriving there through experience, constituency, and judgment about which risk matters more.

The binaries, in other words, are artifacts of argument, not accurate descriptions of anyone’s stance. When we fight, we describe our opponents as occupying the pole – and ourselves as defending sanity against it. But the pole is nearly always vacant. What exists instead – what practitioners actually occupy – is a distribution spread along each continuum, each optimizing differently, each carrying a different read of the terrain. That is not a field at war over irreconcilable absolutes. It is a field disagreeing – genuinely, consequentially – about where along a shared line to stand.

This reframe matters because it changes the nature of our disagreements. A fight between poles is zero-sum: one side must be wrong. A distribution along a gradient is something else – a set of judgment calls under uncertainty, where different positions cover different risks. The disagreements remain real. Nothing here suggests every position is equally sound, and the essay has argued throughout that some collisions carry real stakes. But a gradient admits something a binary cannot: the possibility that the field needs its distribution – that the approaches arrayed at different points along each continuum cover terrain the others cannot see from where they stand.

Naming this pattern enables something harder than diagnosing others: locating ourselves. These positions are hard to see from the inside. A view held long enough stops feeling like a view at all – it feels like how things are: obvious, neutral, the ground itself, rather than a place to stand on it. Nothing in the daily press of the work announces that one’s own orientation is one location among several; the fault lines run underground, and our own location on that fault line runs beneath our feet, but too often out of view. What the pattern offers is a map. It allows practitioners to find themselves on it – to recognize assumptions as assumptions and a position as a position – and to see that those standing elsewhere along the line may be neither naive nor dangerous, but stationed differently.

Two Shifts That Change Everything

The fault lines won’t disappear. They’re part of the terrain. But once visible, they become navigable. We can choose different routes. We can slow down at the danger points. We can stop treating certain collisions as evidence that others in our field are enemies, rather than as a signal that we’ve hit a fault line that was opaque or invisible to us.

Two shifts – in how we read each other, and what we do about it – can reduce the damage of our collisions enough that parallel efforts accumulate and build upon, rather than undermine, each other. These shifts require no coordination infrastructure, no shared measurement, no common agenda – but they do require seeing colleagues and what they are doing differently.

A note on who these shifts are for. The fault lines generally run between approaches – bridging, structural reforms, leverage of “facts,” who is invited to join. But approaches don’t act; organizations and the people in them do. It is organizations that fund, publish, convene, and criticize; organizations through which the conviction that one approach is right becomes conduct. So, while the collisions are between ideas, the fire is always delivered by actors —which is why the shifts are addressed to them. The ask is not a nonaggression pact between institutions. It is that organizational and individual actors stop discharging arguments between approaches as if they represent sides of a war.

The First Shift: the Loyal Opposition

Start with the encounter as it actually feels. Somewhere in this field is an approach we believe is doing damage – not merely inefficient, not merely misguided, but harmful to the very destination we serve. The structural reformer watches bridge-builders convene dialogue while democratic architecture burns, and sees cover being provided – legitimacy lent to people and movements that would end the democratic experiment. The bridge-builder watches many “pro-democracy” advocates brand half the country as the enemy, and sees the next generation of contempt being manufactured under a banner of virtue. The protector sees spaces that admit everyone and calls them unsafe by design; the includer sees boundaries drawn for safety and calls them the quiet death of pluralism. None of this registers as difference of opinion. It registers as threat – often existential threat.

The shift begins in exactly that moment, and it is an interpretive discipline built on two questions:

1. What threat is this approach trying to prevent? And

2. Does this disagreement reflect genuine bad faith or incompetence – or a position at a different point on the continua bridging the fault lines this series has mapped?

The approach that alarms us is not stationed at the pole our alarm assigns it. The people behind it are weighting a risk we also perceive – protection, inclusion, authority, legitimacy, structure, culture – just not identically, and not in the order we would. We already hold some version of their concern inside our own position; and they already hold some version of ours. What divides us is emphasis under conditions of uncertainty, not membership in different moral universes. This reading will not always survive scrutiny – bad faith exists. But the bar for finding it should be high, precisely because the finding matters so much. But as the default, differently-positioned-not-perverse is both more accurate and more useful than the alternative, because it keeps the disagreement inside the shared project, where it can still teach.

And the shared project genuinely needs each of these different perspectives. The destination – a renewed civic and political culture – is too complex, too multidimensional, too varied across contexts for any single approach to deliver. This goal needs portfolio logic, not politeness. A serious investor holds assets she is individually skeptical of, because the portfolio needs coverage against futures she cannot predict. Two serious investors will weight the same portfolio differently without either calling the other’s allocation treason. Our approach is one of many. Essential, perhaps; superior for certain terrain, perhaps. Alone, insufficient. The disposition here isn’t modesty about our importance. It’s clarity about being part of, not the entire solution.

Democracies long ago developed a name for the perspectives that don’t “win” the political contest, and for how we understand those seeking change in conflict with the perspectives we seek to protect: the loyal opposition – the recognition that those who oppose what we advocate are not enemies of the project, but participants in it, whose opposition is itself a form of service. The concept was never meant for mild disagreement. It was built for conviction – for oppositions each side believes, in earnest, to be leading the country astray. That is what makes the concept of loyal opposition load-bearing, rather than decorative. It extends the presumption of loyalty precisely where loyalty is the hardest to presume. It is part of what separates a democracy from an autocracy: the standing acknowledgment that the other side is devoted to the same constitutional order, that their resistance is not sabotage but contribution, and that the union is made more perfect by the contest between us – not by our victory in it. It does not require us to stop believing the opposition is wrong; opposition means each side believes exactly that. The shift is not from “wrong” to “different” – we may remain fully convinced that they are wrong.

What changes is the conclusion we draw. Within a Massively Parallel Effort, wrong cannot mean enemy to destroy; it means wrong and still ours to travel with. The model runs on approaches that doubt each other – approaches we would never fund, whose theories of change we may believe are dangerous. They are our loyal opposition – not obstacles the work must overcome or prevent, but constituents of it, covering ground we may not be able to see from where we stand. We need only stop mistaking the loyal opposition for the disloyal kind.

The Second Shift: Saving Our Fire For the Real Enemy.

The first shift governs how we read each other. The second governs what we do when the reading is done – when we’ve extended the generous interpretation, held our assumptions to the light, and still conclude that another approach is not just different but genuinely counterproductive. Conviction of that kind feels like a license. It isn’t.

Not because our judgment must be wrong – it may be exactly right. But the cost of acting on it through attack exceeds any benefit the attack could win. When one organization publicly campaigns against an approach adopted by other organizations, the single critique is never the whole price. Every attack licenses the next. Retaliation follows; alliances are conscripted; funders take sides; and a field that runs on trust begins to run on grievance. The cost isn’t the argument – arguments are healthy. The cost is the conflict culture, and conflict cultures, once normalized, consume fields for years.

And there is arithmetic beneath the culture. Competing civic-renewal approaches seek to address the same ills: the disintegration of norms, the failure of processes, the spirals of individual and institutional distrust, the dehumanization of whole groups, the gridlock, the collapsing trust, escalating contempt, and attendant increases in violence. The need to address these challenges dwarfs the need to win any quarrel among us. Fire spent on each other is fire that injures all of our work. Every hour consumed in intramural combat, every relationship burned, every coalition fractured over a fault-line difference is capacity lost to addressing the actual crisis. Saving our fire is not declining to fight. It is choosing our battles, and refusing optional fights against wrong-headed allies, so that we can be most effective fighting where we must.

This is why mutual non-interference isn’t a favor among allies. It’s an obligation among those bound for the same destination. We don’t have to do each other’s work. We don’t have to praise it, fund it, or partner with it. We just have to stop making each other’s work harder.

What These Shifts Do Not Require

It is worth being explicit about what these shifts are not asking – because each has a softer cousin it will be mistaken for, mostly in the vein of performative civility and politeness.

The shifts described here don’t require anyone to stop advocating. We will continue to argue for our approach; make its case to funders, partners, the public – even against the alternatives. The line the shifts draw is between making our case and unmaking theirs: between claiming our approach reaches ground others miss, and campaigning to discredit the others as dangerous, illegitimate, or corrupt. Advocacy is the field working. Delegitimization is the field consuming itself.

Maintaining our belief in loyal opposition and in holding fire doesn’t require collaboration. Non-interference is not partnership. Any of us can decline to work with an organization whose approach we doubt; we just don’t impugn their motives or competence, or treat its existence as an obstacle.

We may remain convinced – after the generous reading – that an approach is counterproductive, even that some actors aren’t acting in good faith or with competence. The discipline isn’t pretending otherwise. It’s declining, even then, to launch the attacks that normalize conflict across the ecosystem.

We don’t sacrifice urgent work for comity. No one slows down. The shifts ask only that civic renewal be treated as a common imperative – not less important, or even co-equal, with attacking others in our space, however misguided.

And they don’t require coordination, shared metrics, or a common agenda. This is the critical departure of this framework from those based on holistic strategies like Collective Impact or Systems Design. These shifts are internal to each actor – no meetings, no agreements, no shared measures unless we see opportunities for positive change. Each of us adjusts how we interpret difference; nothing else moves.

What Changes If We Make These Shifts

If practitioners, organizations, and funders internalized these two shifts, the collision problem would diminish – not because anyone coordinated, but because:

• Energy returns to the work. The hours and dollars now consumed by intramural conflict – the rebuttals, the whisper campaigns, the coalition triage – flow back toward citizens and impact.

• Impactful coalitions built to last. Partners who read their disagreements as fault-line differences rather than betrayals can hold together through strategic tension; a coalition that can metabolize disagreement is both stronger and more sustainable than one that never faced it.

• More learning. Practitioners out of defensive posture can absorb insight from approaches they don’t share; a different threat model becomes a source of learning, rather than a target.

• Collaboration becomes possible – where it’s chosen. Nothing here requires working together; that’s Collective Impact’s ask, not ours. But actors who have stopped attacking each other discover what hostility forecloses: coalitions that span fault lines, initiatives built smarter for having been built by approaches that once only collided.

• The field’s doorways multiply. Citizens, funders and other stakeholders differ the way practitioners do. A field engaged in internal attacks forces them to pick a side before they can pick up the work; a field of many legitimate approaches lets each stakeholder across the continuum find the door that fits – and every constituency becomes, indirectly, everyone’s.

• Natural role differentiation. If every actor accepts being one holding in the larger portfolio, the field’s diversity begins to shape complementary roles – organizations find their niche by mission, rather than by fighting over whose approach should dominate.

• And preserved pluralism: The ecosystem keeps the full range of approaches that Massively Parallel Effort requires. No single orientation captures the field and drives out the alternatives – which, given real uncertainty about what will work, is not a courtesy to the losers. It is how the field hedges its one chance.

• None of this requires resolving the underlying fault lines. The disagreements remain. What changes is how we hold them.

The Craft We Already Own

The path available to step around or over the civic fault lines identified in this paper will be nothing new to civic renewal practitioners – and it has been hiding in plain sight since this series began.

We’ve identified the importance of extending the presumption of loyalty to those we believe are wrong; holding our fire even when conviction says the other side is doing harm; assuming difference of position before defect of character; and maintaining focus on the proportion between the quarrel in front of us and the crisis around us. None of this is new. It is certainly not invented in this paper – these are the answers we share with citizens to equip them to work together.

Every day central civic renewal approaches ask and equip citizens to engage across differences they experience as profound – to work alongside neighbors whose politics they believe are damaging the country, to disagree without dehumanizing, to build the trust that self-governance requires, even where agreement is out of reach. Although the bridging community delivers these asks of citizens with the greatest force within the civic renewal ecosystem, few, if any, other parts of the ecosystem reject the imperative of citizens finding ways to work together. The most protection-minded practitioner still works to build trust across difference; the most inclusion-minded practitioner still knows some differences are chasms. We do not ask citizens to bridge these gaps because it is nice. We ask it because it is the only thing that has ever worked – because decades of practice have shown that contempt hardens obstacles to engagement, and that the alternative to living with people we believe are wrong is a country no one can live in.

The field possesses, in other words, a proven technology for exactly the problem the field has. We built it. We refined it on the hardest cases in America – on red families and blue families, on climate activists and coal-country parents, on people who each believe the other is dismantling democracy. We have never pointed it at ourselves. And the collisions can feel like betrayal precisely because often neither side sees the fault line producing them – the too often unseen fissures between us which this series was written to make visible.

The field would do well to adopt an approach we can call strategic generosity: applying the relational insights that help citizens overcome divides to the divides in our own field that slow our progress and dampen our momentum. Strategic, because it is chosen on the evidence – the collision tax is real, the window is short, hostility costs more than tolerance, and the tools demonstrably work. Generosity, because that is what the tools are made of: good faith extended before it is earned, the harder reading chosen over the easier one, standing granted precisely where it is hardest to grant. Not a gift. A strategy – one whose entire track record says it succeeds where attack fails.

A field that is teaching a divided country to talk across its worst divide does not lack the capacity to talk across its own. It can often, however, lack the clarity around what the divides actually are and the intention to leverage our own technology on ourselves – and to ask our field to demonstrate the same courage we ask of citizens.

The Discipline Parallel Effort Requires

There is a lazy reading of Massively Parallel Effort – a thousand flowers blooming, everyone doing their own thing, no shape to any of it. That reading is wrong, and the word it misses is “parallel.” Parallel is a discipline. A thousand efforts pointed every which way is not massively parallel effort. It is Brownian motion with a mission statement.

Parallel effort, sustained, behaves like a flywheel. The progress achieved by each approach adds momentum to a shared wheel – every citizen re-engaged, every community’s trust rebuilt, every reform that holds compounds the energy available to all of us intent on civic renewal. That is how a field with no central engine accelerates. But the flywheel logic cuts both ways: efforts that veer out of parallel – that turn to impede each other – do not merely waste their own energy. They brake the wheel. Intramural combat is not a private cost between combatants; it bleeds momentum from the entire system, at precisely the moment the system needs to be gaining speed.

This is the discipline urgency demands – not the soft ask of comity, but the hard geometry of the model itself. Hold your line. Add your momentum. And do not put your energy into the wheel’s brakes.

Conclusion

The civic renewal ecosystem has responded to democratic crisis with seriousness, urgency, and unprecedented ambition. Yet that response has not produced the cumulative impact one might expect. This essay has argued that much of the gap between effort and impact is not primarily about resources, strategy, or commitment. A significant contributor is self-inflicted damage: collision among practitioners who share the same destination, but hold different beliefs about what citizenship requires.

The fault lines are real. Practitioners hold different, deeply held beliefs about citizens – what we need from them, how to handle difference in democratic spaces, whether structural change or cultural change must come first. These differences will not be resolved. They reflect genuine and long-competing differences about how democracy works and what citizenship requires.

What can change is how we hold them. Two shifts – receiving those who oppose our approach as the loyal opposition, and saving our fire for the fight that warrants it – will not eliminate conflict. But every notch we reduce intramural hostility, we free resources for the actual work. Coalitions hold longer. Energy flows toward citizens and solutions. The ecosystem begins to function as Massively Parallel Effort envisions: many approaches, many vehicles, all moving toward a destination none can reach alone.

At Braver Angels, we say: “We believe all of us have blind spots and none of us are not worth talking to.” What is true of citizens is true of practitioners. The approach we find most misguided may be seeing something we can’t. The orientation we are most tempted to dismiss may be the corrective we most need.

There is a final irony worth naming: the same unspoken disagreements about what citizenship is and what citizens are capable of are not playing out only among civic renewal practitioners. These unseen fault lines are sending ongoing tremors across national politics itself. Much of the populist energy sweeping the country – on all sides – reflects citizens who feel they have been reduced to consumers of a democracy, managed by distant institutions, and who are demanding recognition as independent agents of their own governance. Other citizens seek to increase the legitimacy and responsiveness of key institutions, are discomfited by the inclusion of harmful voices, seek epistemological truth, and prioritize structural changes to the systems that perpetuate group-based inequities. The vehemence on both sides – those who see populism as democratic renewal and those who see it as democratic threat – reflects, in part, the same disagreements we’ve been reviewing.

Perhaps it is not surprising that a movement to renew democracy would get ensnared by the same tensions ensnaring democracy itself. We are inside the bigger problem – mirroring, and sometimes deepening, the very dynamics we seek to address. That recognition might be the most important fruit of making the fault lines visible. If we can learn to navigate these tensions among ourselves – holding our positions with conviction, while extending strategic generosity to those who hold citizenship differently – we might model something the country needs to see.

The destination is shared. The terrain is fractured. The work is to see the fault lines at all – and then to respond deliberately. The practitioners on different routes are our loyal opposition – not obstacles, and never the enemy. They are the rest of the effort.

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About the MBI Newsletters

Two or three times a week, Guy and Heidi Burgess, the BI Directors, share some of our thoughts on political hyper-polarization and related topics. We also share essays from our colleagues and other contributors, and every week or so, we devote one newsletter to annotated links to outside readings that we found particularly useful relating to U.S. hyper-polarization, threats to peace (and actual violence) in other countries, and related topics of interest. Each Newsletter is posted on BI, and sent out by email through Substack to subscribers. You can sign up to receive your copy here and find the latest newsletter here or on our BI Newsletter page, which also provides access to all the past newsletters, going back to 2017.

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Highlighted Links

A few suggestions about links that we think are especially interesting.

• Progressive Left
  Abolish Everything, Replace It With What? — For socialists demanding the abolition of so many of our society’s key institutions, timely and important questions about what they are offering in their place.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  Trump Has Only Terrible Choices With Iran — A sober and quite persuasive outline of the four principal paths that the war in Iran might take.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  A Way Out of the Iran Mess — A decision can be no better than the best option available. This article offers one view on the United States’ available options in Iran.

• Artificial Intelligence
  Is This the Fastest Opinion Shift in American Politics? — Is the gathering coalition of Americans against data centers going to be the next Occupy Wall Street or Tea Party?

• Leadership
  Authenticity And Charisma Are Not The Same As Virtuous And Wise — Thoughts on the all-important difference between building an attractive political movement and a movement capable of implementing morally sound policies that affordably deliver on their promises.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  When the Polycrisis and the Omnishambles hit the Strait of Hormuz — As world petroleum reserves drop to near record lows, thoughts about what might happen if this trend continues.

• Communication Complexity
  How Meta Engineers Your Reality — An important and frightening essay on how Meta’s linguistic dictatorship follows Orwell’s dystopian vision to the letter.

• Developing a Unifying Vision
  United Independents: Building the Infrastructure for Independent Leadership — The politically homeless are now the largest voting bloc in the United States. The United Independents are working to give independents the kind of political clout that their more partisan fellow citizens enjoy.

• Constructively Addressing Complex Issues
  Crucial questions to ask Senate candidates — With respect to Social Security, a timely reminder that we are rapidly approaching the point where tough decisions are going to have to be made by a political system that seems incapable of making such decisions.

• Saving Democracy
  A Democracy Safe for the World — From Foreign Affairs, a summary of an important new book on how to repair democracy: “The Political Consequences of Economic Ideas: Neoliberalism, the Left, and the Fate of Democracy.”

• Progressive Left
  Democrats’ extremism and stupidity are catching up with the GOP’s — Harsh, but thought-provoking, criticism of the Left’s turn toward a new kind of socialist populism.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  Rahm Emanuel Found His Applause Line. It Was My Children’s Generational Shame. — Reflections on yet another way in which Jews are held to moral standards that don’t apply to other groups.

• Psychological Complexity
  Gad Saad’s Empathy Alibi? — For a field that has long emphasized the positive benefits of empathy, more thought on the ongoing debate over whether empathy can become counterproductive

• Communication Complexity
  Is This What a Post-Literate Era Looks Like? — Contemplations about a likely future in which the ability to follow complex written arguments disappears, leaving us with nothing but a superficial, smartphone-based image of the world.

  

Colleague Activities

Highlighting things that our conflict and peacebuilding colleagues are doing that contribute to efforts to address the hyper-polarization problem.

• Peacebuilding
  It Shouldn’t Be This Easy to Wage War and This Hard to Make Peace — The alleged end of the Iran conflict offers yet another reminder of how far we have strayed from the standard set forth in the Constitution

• Constructive Communication
  Braver Angels’ 2026 Convention — A three-hour video with highlights of talks at this year’s Braver Angels’ convention.

• Saving Democracy
  50 Ways to Honor America’s 250th — For 250 years, America’s strength hasn’t come from everyone agreeing. It comes from learning how to disagree. To stay in the room. To find common ground even when it’s hard.

• US Politics
  Freedom 250: A Partisan Crowd Celebrating Its Own Ascendance — The “good vibes” at the “Great American State Fair” were real, but a large partisan crowd isn’t a national consensus.

• Constructive Communication
  What’s the difference between 2024 and 2026? 180 degrees. — Piper Hendricks, CEO of Stories Change Power reflects on the 2026 Braver Angels National Convention.

• Theories of Change
  In a World of Ugliness, Look for Beauty — When was the last time you went seeking beauty? And by beauty, Debilyn Molineaux includes a sense of awe and wonder. Seeking it everyday can greatly improve our mental health.

• Developing a Unifying Vision
  What is the American Story? Two senators, two parties, one message — Senators John Curtis and Mark Kelly are from different parties, different backgrounds, and different views on plenty of issues. Their message: we own our story, and it doesn’t have to be written about division.

  More Colleague Activities

News and Opinion

From around the web, more insight into the nature of our conflict problems, limits of business-as-usual thinking, and things people are doing to try to make things better. (Formerly, Beyond Intractability in Context.)

• Superpower Conflict
  The World’s Superpowers Are Scrambling for an Edge. It Makes All of Us Less Safe. — An overview of the intense and ongoing gray zone war that is driving the relationship between the major powers.

• Artificial Intelligence
  China, Russia and Others Seek to Inflame Debate Over A.I. Data Centers — Rare insight into the ways in which geopolitical rivals are attempting to use the United States’ open communication systems to inflame tensions so that they can better compete in the AI arms race.

• Theories of Change
  Change is God. — For a world in which it seems that everybody wants to be a change agent, thoughts about what change really is.

• Social / Economic Complexity
  Maui went from wildfires to purgatory. Here’s why it struggles to rebuild. — Another example of instances in which regulatory excesses are preventing us from getting critically needed things done.

• Climate / Environment / Health
  Beyond Lithium: New Battery Tech Starts to Break Through — A hopeful story about new battery technologies (and a reminder that new technologies really can make the world better).

• Artificial Intelligence
  Why I didn’t sign the “We Must Act Now” statement (yet) — In the context of AI, an essay examining the politician’s fallacy: “We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this.”

• Psychological Complexity
  What if It’s Not the Phones? — For a time when it’s fashionable to blame smartphone technology for most of the problems now being faced by young people, thoughts about another possible culprit.

• Left / Right Conflict
  How the Smithsonian Lost America’s Plot — For those really trying to understand the conflict, a more conservative perspective on the big debate over the Smithsonian’s objectivity and the Trump administration’s efforts to influence it’s many exhibits.

• Corruption
  The Most Corrupt Presidency in American History, by the Numbers — Based on hard data from recent financial disclosures, a report on what is (at least by past standards) the incredible corruption of the Trump administration.

• Disinformation
  How Wikipedia Turned a World Cup Controversy Into an Antisemitic Conspiracy Theory — A small, but significant, example of the ways in which social media platforms can be weaponized in the service of some political objective.

• Social / Economic Complexity
  Britain’s Exploding Disability Dole — For those advocating further expansion of the United States social safety net, a report from Great Britain’s increasingly unaffordable system.

• Saving Democracy
  A Win for American Democracy — A hopeful, and reasonably persuasive, argument that the recent Supreme Court decision (National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission) was a step in the right direction.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  Israel’s $50 Million Experiment to Change U.S. Public Opinion — A summary of Israeli efforts to defend themselves from info-war tactics being used against them.

• Interstate War
  Magazine Depth Crisis: The U.S. Military Is Running Out of Tomahawk Cruise Missiles — The description of yet another way in which the United States military clout is rapidly diminishing.

  More News & Opinion Links

Please Contribute Your Ideas To This Discussion!

In order to prevent bots, spammers, and other malicious content, we are asking contributors to send their contributions to us directly. If your idea is short, with simple formatting, you can put it directly in the contact box. However, the contact form does not allow attachments. So if you are contributing a longer article, with formatting beyond simple paragraphs, just send us a note using the contact box, and we'll respond via an email to which you can reply with your attachment. This is a bit of a hassle, we know, but it has kept our site (and our inbox) clean. And if you are wondering, we do publish essays that disagree with or are critical of us. We want a robust exchange of views.

Contact Us!

About the MBI Newsletters

Two or three times a week, Guy and Heidi Burgess, the BI Directors, share some of our thoughts on political hyper-polarization and related topics. We also share essays from our colleagues and other contributors, and every week or so, we devote one newsletter to annotated links to outside readings that we found particularly useful relating to U.S. hyper-polarization, threats to peace (and actual violence) in other countries, and related topics of interest. Each Newsletter is posted on BI, and sent out by email through Substack to subscribers. You can sign up to receive your copy here and find the latest newsletter here or on our BI Newsletter page, which also provides access to all the past newsletters, going back to 2017.

NOTE! If you signed up for this Newsletter and don't see it in your inbox, it might be going to one of your other emails folder (such as promotions, social, or spam). Check there or search for beyondintractability@substack.com and if you still can't find it, first go to our Substack help page, and if that doesn't help, please contact us.

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Newsletter 472 - July 16, 2026

This the second installment of David Eisner’s three-part series on the fault lines that are hampering the effectiveness of civic renewal and pro-democracy work. The first installment illustrated the different beliefs practitioners hold about citizens: whether to see them as recipients of democracy or its co-creators, and whether to interpret troubling behavior as malice, as incapacity, or as legitimately different priorities. In this installment, David explores the practical implications of these differences.

For those who do not know David, he has been a leader in government, business, and non-profit organizations, having served as the CEO of the Corporation for National and Community Service, the National Constitution Center, and Convergence Center for Policy Resolution, among other roles. Currently, he is volunteering with Braver Angels as Special Advisor to the CEO.

As we said in our introduction to the first installment, we have found this essay to be extremely thought provoking, and believe it should be “required reading” for all of us doing “pro-democracy” and “civic renewal” work. The third and final installment is planned for Thursday July 23, after our next Links post. (This link won’t work until that essay is posted.)

Citizenship Under Friendly Fire - Part 2: Who is the Enemy?

A three-part series on the civic fault lines that divide — and distract — those who would repair democracy.

by David Eisner

How Do We Handle Difference?

The first installment of this three-part essay argued that practitioners often hold positions informed by genuinely different — and often unspoken — beliefs about citizens: whether to see them as recipients of democracy or its co-creators, and whether to read troubling behavior as malice, as incapacity, or as legitimately different priorities. We experience these beliefs as obvious, as simple common sense — which is exactly why colliding with someone whose positions rest on different core beliefs can feel less like disagreement than like bad faith or stupidity.

In this installment we’ll continue showing how those beliefs about the nature of citizens don’t stay abstract. We’ll see how decisions about who to include or exclude, and whose knowledge to trust or not often emerge from where you stand on these fault lines — and those decisions are where the collisions turn sharpest.

Who Belongs? Inclusion and Protection Collide

No fault line fractures coalitions faster than this one: who belongs in the civic spaces we build, who decides, and on what grounds?

For practitioners who prioritize inclusion, every citizen must be included in democratic dialogue and decision-making, period. Inclusionists differ on what this requires of any single space: a minority holds that every space should be open to all, while most distinguish between governmental activities and private activities — a state-sponsored civic assembly usually owes openness to every citizen, while a nonprofit workshop or other privately convened space may not. But collectively, they argue, the spaces must do what no single one can: ensure that every citizen’s voice is heard and that all can take part in the work of building our democracy. No one is left out. It is a demanding vision, and for those who hold it, boundaries around any particular space are tolerable only because the wider ecosystem is meant to catch everyone any given space cannot.

Those who prioritize protection see this differently, and coherently so. If some who seek entry come in bad faith — to dominate, to dehumanize, to exploit the legitimacy of the space — then a blanket guarantee that everyone belongs somewhere is not a floor to defend, but an opening to be used. They separate two things that a call for inclusiveness can run together: first, what a democracy owes everyone, regardless of their views — standing under law, equal protection, a vote — and the more contested questions of voice, representation, and a meaningful place in deliberations. Almost no one proposes stripping the first set of rights; the fight is over the second. Inclusion, in this view, is not the unquestioned goal; it is one value among several. Sometimes it yields to the safety of other citizens, or to the imperative to reject ideas dangerous to the democracy they see themselves as building.

Both orientations believe they are protecting the vulnerable. They collide because they are working from different maps of who the vulnerable are.

Two Maps of Vulnerability

One map locates power in demographic and structural terms. White Americans, men, the wealthy, straight and cisgender people hold systemic advantages. People of color, women, the poor, LGBTQ individuals and others face unfairness born of structural disadvantage and of individual and systemic prejudice — enduring victimization and harm that civic spaces can either mitigate or reproduce. “Inclusion” that ignores these asymmetries forces vulnerable people to engage on unequal terms with those who benefit from their marginalization. On this map, protection means designing spaces that don’t sustain or foster such harm.

Another map locates power in cultural and institutional terms. Coastal elites, credentialed professionals, prestige media, and universities hold enormous influence over what counts as legitimate discourse — and routinely demean, dehumanize, and “cancel” those outside these institutions. They exclude the voices and dismiss the needs of the working class, the religious, the rural, those without college degrees. The people seeking to protect the vulnerable, as defined on the first map, are often exercising cultural dominance over — and harming — the people seen as vulnerable on the second map. And they are misusing the language of protection to do it.

Practitioners using one map may genuinely not see the power imbalances that the other map reveals — and they may instinctively reject them when named. Each tends to experience the other as acting in bad faith, either ignoring structural harm or weaponizing the language of harm to silence dissent.

Often, beneath the conflict between these two orientations lies the fault line we set up earlier: how a practitioner reads citizens who act in ways they find dangerous or undemocratic. The incapacity frame says “bring them in and inform them.” The legitimate-priorities frame “says “bring them in and understand them.” The malice frame says “keep them out — they enter in bad faith, and their inclusion does harm.”

This is the fault line driving friction over “who belongs”: those who read certain citizens as bad-faith actors will move to exclude them; those who don’t, won’t. And the stakes of that move are large — to those who see democracy as built through relationship, writing someone out is a relational severing that damages the civic fabric, whatever the justification.

But defining someone as a bad-faith actor doesn’t settle the matter — it only raises the next question: whether to act on that reading by excluding them. And here, even those who share the malice frame divide. Most do exclude. Others override their misgivings and include anyway. Some of these trust that bad faith can often be contained through careful methods and guardrails without shutting people out — they call it containment. Others refuse to hand anyone the authority to decide who gets written out at all. So the fault line runs in two stages: how we read the actor, and then whether — and by what right — we act on that reading. This surfaces the question that the loudest voices rarely reach: it is not whether some people act in bad faith, but who decides, and by what authority, which citizens carry that label.

The Hardest Case: Do They Belong?

The contradictions between these maps become the most fraught at the edges – especially when those who represent or protect the demographically vulnerable encounter those who argue to include people who embrace perspectives or behavior consider prejudiced or hateful.

This is where the belonging fault line stops being abstract, and where the two grounds for restraint we named earlier — containment and authority — do their hardest work. What should we think about organizations that engage people whose views most of us find repugnant — the practitioner who sits in dialogue with Klan members, the organizer who builds relationships inside Antifa, engagement with groups whose ideologies seem flatly opposed to democratic pluralism?

Here I step out of my diagnostic stance to say plainly what much of the field currently resists: no one gets written out of pluralistic democracy.

From my perspective, this is not a claim about how far any one organization should go, or whether extreme views deserve respect. It is a claim about authority — the second of our two grounds, now carrying the full weight. The question isn’t whether we’re better off including people who hold views we find abhorrent; there are strong arguments on both sides. Rather, the question is: even if we could agree on whether someone does or doesn’t deserve inclusion -- who gets to decide who belongs? This is the question almost no one in the field addresses — including those most confident about which extremists should be excluded: who should hold the power to draw that line at all?

My answer is: no one. Not because exclusion is never warranted in a given room, but because the power to exclude from democracy itself is the power to tyrannize. Once any faction — however well-intentioned — holds the authority to declare certain citizens outside democratic life, that authority will be abused. History offers no exceptions: McCarthyism, loyalty oaths, ideological litmus tests, the machinery of voter suppression. Each time, the power to define who belongs was captured by those who used it to entrench themselves and silence dissent. This is why the floor — standing in the democratic community — cannot be anyone’s to revoke, however dangerous the citizen. What remains contested is only the ceiling: which rooms engage them, and how.

Which is exactly where containment — the first ground — comes back in. To say no one can be written out of democracy is not to say every space must admit everyone. The two are different questions. Conflating them is the error underneath much of this fault line’s heat. Just because one believes that each citizen who lives in a democracy should be included in shaping it, does not necessarily mean that each dialogue-generating initiative must include each citizen.

Whether a given organization should engage that citizen is a question of mission and capacity — and, whether potential harm to others in the group can be contained through method and guardrails, rather than exclusion. Most organizations should not try to engage everyone. The vast majority are built to serve populations closer to the center, and that is exactly what they should do. An organization convening the wary middle isn’t doing lesser work than one engaging members of the Klan. It is doing different work, appropriate to its design — and both are legitimate precisely because the ecosystem needs the full range.

The implication for fellow practitioners is direct. If my organization lacks the capacity — or the willingness — to engage a particular person or group, that is fine; we should do what we do well. But, here’s the point I am building to: the organization that does engage them isn’t betraying the cause of civic renewal. It is a specialized vehicle reaching terrain ours can’t reach. Criticizing others for engaging a population we wouldn’t is friendly fire the field cannot afford — and it mistakes a boundary around our room for a verdict on who belongs in anyone’s room – that is, in the democracy itself.

When Facts Aren’t Enough

The question of belonging leads directly into a second question that generates its own heat: what is true? Who hasn’t felt the frustration of others simply refusing to acknowledge a “fact” we hold to be both obviously true and decisive for where one should stand? Sea levels rose half a foot or more over the past century. Border crossings tripled over four years. COVID may have originated in a lab. The national debt grew under presidents of both parties. Most House seats are safe, their winners chosen in low-turnout primaries. Each sounds like the kind of claim that could be settled by checking — yet each becomes contested, reinterpreted, or waved away, depending on what it seems to imply and who is listening. The question of whose fact should be trusted in democratic deliberation sounds abstract. It stops feeling abstract the moment someone refuses to grant what you consider a plain, verifiable fact — or insists on a “fact” you believe is false.

The frames assuming, alternately, incapacity, legitimate-priorities, and malice as the reason for what we consider bad action also shapes how we perceive what citizens know and believe is legitimate information. The polarity here comes in opposing perspectives about whether knowledge is made legitimate based on what we can call “institutional-authority” or “earned-legitimacy.”

The institutional-authority frame grounds trust in method and credential. The scientific method, peer review, credentialed expertise, and institutional vetting exist precisely to separate reliable knowledge from speculation, anecdote, and motivated reasoning. When experts converge, that consensus deserves deference — not because experts are infallible, but because the alternative is chaos, every opinion counting equally, regardless of evidence or training. What this frame fears is the erosion of shared epistemic ground: if expertise can be dismissed whenever it’s inconvenient, deliberation loses its footing in reality. Manipulation gets easy, and the loudest or most cynical voices win.

The earned-legitimacy frame grounds trust in track record and context. Knowledge claims are always embedded in social contexts, and the institutions that produce “authoritative” knowledge are themselves shaped by power, funding, ideology, and blind spots. Expertise deserves respect, but not automatic deference. The question is not only “what do the experts say?” but “why should I trust these experts?” — especially where their record is mixed, their interests entangled, and their errors fall on others. What the earned-legitimacy frame fears is capture and overreach: when expertise becomes a trump card that ends debate, or when questioning consensus is treated as ignorance or bad faith. This turns knowledge turns into a tool of domination, rather than a resource for shared understanding.

The citizenship continuum shapes which frame a practitioner leans toward. Those who see citizens as recipients of democracy tend to see them as recipients of authoritative knowledge — their task is to receive correct information and act on it. Those who see citizens as co-creators tend to see knowledge as something citizens help produce and evaluate, bringing lived experience, local context, and prioritized values that institutions lack. As before, this mapping is a tendency, not a rule.

The “Follow the Science” Earthquake

The pandemic exposed this fault line with unusual clarity, and the phrase “follow the science” became the flashpoint. In hindsight, both the institutional-authority and earned-legitimacy frames were partly right. Those grounding trust in institutional authority were right that public-health guidance had to be taken seriously and that politically motivated rejection of expertise cost lives. Those grounding trust in earned legitimacy were also right that institutions projected certainty they didn’t have — about masks, transmission, the virus’s origins — and that “follow the science” often functioned as rhetoric to end debate, rather than as a description of an evolving evidence base. Each time guidance shifted, it confirmed skeptics’ suspicion that authority was being wielded as a cudgel. And both failed: one side projecting false confidence, the other giving cover to conspiracy.

The language of “disinformation” and “misinformation” became part of this dynamic — and the terms themselves turned into contested ground. There is a real phenomenon that earns the label: state actors, particularly Russia, China, and Iran, deliberately inject divisive content into American discourse to destabilize the country. That is information warfare, and naming it precisely matters. But those who ground trust in earned legitimacy point out that the same terms got applied to something entirely different — American citizens voicing views at odds with institutional consensus. On their account, when a citizen who questions vaccine policy or disputes an official narrative is labeled a source of “misinformation,” domestic dissent is treated as functionally equivalent to foreign interference. That conflation, they say, is itself delegitimizing — and it deepens the very distrust it means to cure.

For many, the hardest part is this: some skeptics were right. The lab-leak hypothesis, once derided, became a legitimate subject of investigation; concerns about school closures, once dismissed, proved well-founded. And yet institutional guidance on the core questions — vaccine efficacy against severe illness and death, the reality of transmission — was largely vindicated, its failures ones of overreach, rather than of the underlying science.

What neither side did well was reckon with their own intransigence. Institutions rarely faced their own failure — not only getting things wrong, but prioritizing compliance over honesty, defending credibility, rather than earning it. And many skeptics rarely faced theirs — treating institutional overreach as proof that the underlying science was false, when even the guidance that overclaimed and bullied usually rested on something real. Each side found it easier to indict the other than to reckon with the uncomfortable complexity of its own position.

The composition of my own field, I’ll say plainly, made this harder to see. Bridge-builders — and civic-renewal practitioners generally — are drawn overwhelmingly from institutions: our organizations are themselves nonprofits, think tanks or university centers, and we are nearly always highly educated. That double pull made the institutional-authority frame feel like common sense, even to those with the strongest bridging perspective, rather than one position among two. And for bridge-building specifically, the cost was steep. Aligning with institutional authority on contested questions signaled which side we believed needed correcting — quietly moving us into the camp of those “fixing” the very citizens we claimed to engage as equals.

I was not immune to this challenge: early in the pandemic I set out to engage vaccine-hesitant citizens. I approached it, without quite admitting it to myself, as a problem of information — they had the wrong facts, and good engagement would fix that. Then, in one conversation, I heard myself — the tone I was taking, the way I’d already sorted them into people who needed better information. I realized I hadn’t come to understand them; I’d come to correct them. The discovery wasn’t that they were right. It was that I’d quietly dropped my own humility the moment I decided that the version of the facts I believed simply had to be the right one. I’d stopped treating them as equals.

Navigating Who Counts — and Whose Facts Count

These tensions matter. Design choices about who belongs have real consequences for real people. Epistemic commitments shape what deliberation can even attempt. And practitioners hold genuinely different views, often forged by different experiences of harm. The point is not to resolve the two fault lines, but to hold them with enough clarity that disagreement stays navigable.

What would it look like to hold them well?

Practitioners who prioritize protection would acknowledge that exclusion carries costs — deepening alienation, foreclosing persuasion, confirming the grievances of the excluded. Designing for safety isn’t the same as silencing dissent, but the line between them takes constant vigilance to hold.

Practitioners who prioritize inclusion would acknowledge that some participants do cause real harm to others in civic spaces — and that designing for safety can be a legitimate approach, rather than just gatekeeping.

Practitioners who ground trust in institutional authority would acknowledge that credibility is earned, not assumed — and that defending expertise means reckoning honestly with its failures, not dismissing every challenge as ignorance.

Practitioners who ground trust in earned legitimacy would acknowledge that not all skepticism is equal — and that some institutional knowledge, however imperfect, is genuine collective learning that shouldn’t be cast aside because the institutions that produced it disappointed us.

None of this resolves the fault lines, and it isn’t meant to. The disagreements are real and worth having — sharply, in public, without apology. The journey to our destination can survive disagreement; what it cannot survive is contempt: practitioners treating those who work from the other framework as fools, sellouts, or enemies, rather than as colleagues who weigh the risks differently. Coalitions rarely fracture over the substance of these questions; they fracture when the substance curdles into mutual delegitimization — when “your view puts lives at risk” becomes “you’re a science-denying crank.” Or when “you over-trust institutions” becomes “you’re a credulous stooge.” The collision tax comes due not in the disagreement itself, but in the energy spent attacking each other rather than doing the work.

What Must Change First?

Even practitioners who agree on the destination face a brutal sequencing question: given limited resources and urgent timelines, what must change first — the structures that shape civic life, or the civic culture that animates them?

This is, in some ways, the strategic expression of the questions Parts I and II explored: what we need from citizens, and how we handle difference, ultimately shape whether we prioritize systemic or cultural change when we can’t do everything. Recall the bounded-to-expansive continuum from the first installment — the axis running from citizenship as episodic duty to citizenship as continuous practice. It surfaces here one last time, now as a question of sequence.

Structure or Culture?

Some practitioners believe structural reform must come first. Civic culture is largely downstream of the rules: how elections are conducted, how districts are drawn, how campaigns are financed, how votes are counted. When the structures are rigged, expecting citizens to behave well is asking them to flourish in poisoned soil. Fix the structures, and healthier civic culture becomes possible; leave them broken, and no amount of dialogue will matter.

Others believe civic repair must come first. Structures are downstream of culture — rules and formal systems reflect the civic health of the people who create and sustain them. When citizens are fragmented, distrustful, and unable to work across difference, even well-designed structures get captured or corrupted. Repair the relational substrate — rebuild trust, belonging, shared identity — and better structures become achievable; skip that work, and structural victories will be shallow and reversible.

The continuum shapes these positions, imperfectly as always. Those who see citizenship as bounded and episodic — centered on voting and institutional engagement — tend to prioritize the structures that shape those moments. Those who see it as expansive and continuous — centered on relational practice — tend to prioritize the soil in which relationships grow. Tendency, not destiny.

What Counts as “Rigged”?

The structural critique gains force from a claim about fairness: the game is rigged, so fixing the rules must come first. But what counts as “rigged” depends on who’s looking. One side points to gerrymandering, voter suppression, dark money. The other points to media gatekeeping, academic monoculture, professional environments where the wrong opinion invites reputational ruin. Cultural and institutional power rigs the game as surely as electoral rules do — and those calling loudest for structural reform are sometimes those who benefit most from cultural dominance. Practitioners who wave off one side’s experience of unfairness will struggle to reach the citizens who feel it most acutely.

The 2026 Collision

This fault line is not theoretical. It is playing out now, in funding decisions and organizational strategies, as the field struggles to help the country turn away from crisis and dysfunction.

Funders and organizations oriented toward structural reform are pouring resources into electoral defense. They see populist movements as authoritarian threats and frame the moment in existential terms: democracy itself is on the ballot, and every dollar not spent defending democratic architecture is wasted. They don’t experience this as partisan — they experience it as defending democracy against movements that would dismantle it.

Their critique of relational work cuts deep. Emphasizing understanding and inclusion, they argue, provides cover for movements actively dismantling democratic architecture. Insisting on “not demonizing” populist voters slides into not adequately opposing populist leaders. Dialogue risks legitimizing; symmetry risks laundering; inclusion risks demobilizing. The relational practitioner, in this view, isn’t neutral, but complicit — offering rhetorical cover to those who would end democracy, a useful innocent serving forces they’d never knowingly aid.

Funders and organizations oriented toward civic repair see it differently. They watch “pro-democracy” mobilization with alarm, hearing in it a framing that effectively means “anti-half-the-country.” And they wonder: if we win this election by further dividing the country, what exactly have we won?

Their critique of structural work cuts equally deep. When “pro-democracy” forces declare over and over that “democracy is on the ballot,” they argue, the message constructs a binary — you are with us, or you are against democracy itself. For millions who support populist candidates for reasons that feel legitimate to them — economic grievance, cultural displacement, distrust of elites — the message received is: you are outside the democratic community. And here, the relational practitioner argues, is the corrosive mechanism: tell people often enough that they don’t support democracy, and some begin to believe it — the label meant to isolate and shame grants permission instead, releasing people from obligation to a system they feel has already expelled them. On this account, structural strategies aren’t merely failing to solve the problem; they are constructing the very opposition they fear.

Each side experiences the other as making the crisis worse.

What If Both Critiques Are Right?

Here is what makes the structure-versus-culture fault line so hard: both critiques are at least partly right.

The structural critique of relational work is sometimes right — inclusion and dialogue can provide cover for anti-democratic forces; bridge-building can demobilize opposition when mobilization is what the moment demands.

The relational critique of structural work is also sometimes right — electoral combat can construct the opposition it claims to fear; “pro-democracy” framing might can expel millions from the democratic community and accelerate the very authoritarianism it opposes.

Both are true – at times. And understanding that changes everything. If I might be wrong, I need the other orientation in the field: not as an ally, but as the possible corrective to my own blind spot. The practitioner I find most misguided might be the one seeing what I can’t.

Navigating Civic Change — Structure and Culture

What would it look like to hold this fault line well?

Practitioners who emphasize structural reform would acknowledge that their victories are shallow without a civic substrate to sustain them — that winning elections while further fragmenting the citizenry may not be winning at all — and that citizens who experience “pro-democracy” framing as an attack on their legitimacy are not simply confused about what democracy means, but are feeling real harm.

Practitioners who emphasize civic repair would acknowledge that trust-building happens within structural constraints — that some conditions make healthy citizenship nearly impossible, and that even the most effective bridge-building cannot stop structural capture on its own — and that their work, however necessary, may not be sufficient to the moment.

Both would recognize that democratic renewal requires what each provides: structural integrity and citizens with trust, belonging, and agency. Neither alone suffices. Practitioners who dismiss the other’s contribution aren’t merely being ungenerous — they are undermining the shared project they both claim to serve.

This is the collision problem at its most acute — vehicles bound for the same destination, crashing because they can’t see the fault line beneath them. The parallel efforts that Massively Parallel Effort depends on don’t just fail to reinforce each other here; they actively undermine each other’s legitimacy, competing for finite resources while impugning each other’s motives. The collision tax in this case isn’t only inefficiency. It is escalation, fragmentation, and the very polarization both sides oppose.

Coming in Installment III: Taking Common Aim

And that is where this installment has to leave things — at the collision, unresolved. We have now mapped all the fault lines: what we need from citizens, how we handle those we find dangerous or wrong, and what we believe must change first. What we have not yet done is say how to travel terrain this fractured without the collisions themselves becoming the thing that defeats us.

That is the work of the final installment — not a call to set differences aside, and not a resolution of the fault lines, which don’t resolve. It is something harder, and more useful: a discipline for engaging with these disagreements constructively, not destructively, so that we can use these disagreements to make us stronger, more effective, and all moving with more speed toward our shared destination.

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Please Contribute Your Ideas To This Discussion!

David and we are very eager to get reactions to his three essays. But,

in order to prevent bots, spammers, and other malicious content, we are asking contributors to send their contributions to us directly. If your idea is short, with simple formatting, you can put it directly in the contact box. However, the contact form does not allow attachments. So if you are contributing a longer article, with formatting beyond simple paragraphs, just send us a note using the contact box, and we'll respond via an email to which you can reply with your attachment. This is a bit of a hassle, we know, but it has kept our site (and our inbox) clean. And if you are wondering, we do publish essays that disagree with or are critical of us. We want a robust exchange of views.

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About the MBI Newsletters

Two or three times a week, Guy and Heidi Burgess, the BI Directors, share some of our thoughts on political hyper-polarization and related topics. We also share essays from our colleagues and other contributors, and every week or so, we devote one newsletter to annotated links to outside readings that we found particularly useful relating to U.S. hyper-polarization, threats to peace (and actual violence) in other countries, and related topics of interest. Each Newsletter is posted on BI, and sent out by email through Substack to subscribers. You can sign up to receive your copy here and find the latest newsletter here or on our BI Newsletter page, which also provides access to all the past newsletters, going back to 2017.

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Newsletter 471 - July 13, 2026

We are delighted to post here the first of three installments of an extremely important and powerful essay by David Eisner. For those who do not know David, he has been a leader in government, business, and non-profit organizations, having served as the CEO of the Corporation for National and Community Service, the National Constitution Center, and Convergence Center for Policy Resolution, among other roles. Currently, he is volunteering with Braver Angels as Special Advisor to the CEO.

David and we have been talking about, and David has been working on this essay for quite awhile. It has become one of the most compelling and important essays we have posted on BI which has made us think about many things we had previously taken for granted, questionning both our values, and our approaches for achieving those values. Few other readings have done that recently — we are pretty set in our ways. But David’s essay opened our eyes to a new way of looking at our work and our field’s work.

This is longer than most of our newsletters, but it didn’t cut easily. The argument needs to be presented together. And it is well worth your time. This, along with the coming Parts II and III, should be “required reading” for all of us doing “pro-democracy” and “civic renewal” work. The second installment is scheduled for Thursday, July 16, and the third and final installment is planned for Thursday July 23, after our next Links post. (These links won’t work until those essays are posted.)

Installment One — The Aim of Citizenship

America is struggling, suffering from collapsing trust in institutions and each other; escalating rancor and dehumanization that increasingly spills into violence; atrophied civic capacity; gridlocked and dysfunctional politics; a citizenship increasingly stripped of power and agency, among other ills. Virtually everyone working in civic renewal agrees that these issues must be addressed. And they agree, at least roughly, on the destination: a democracy that is inclusive, fair, functional, and peaceful, sustained by thriving, engaged citizens who are unafraid to speak their minds and are able to work across difference. They need to be supported by institutions worthy of their trust and participation.

That shared commitment is real. It animates thousands of organizations and mobilizes resources at a scale rarely seen in modern American civic life. But the shared destination masks profound disagreement about how we get there.

Some people prioritize winning elections — political power is their prerequisite, and everything else follows. Others focus on structural reform: fix gerrymandering, transform campaign finance, institute ranked-choice voting, and healthier citizenship becomes possible. Still others believe institutions must better serve and include citizens before trust can be rebuilt. Others insist that any work to strengthen citizenship must first center those who have been most marginalized. And some — including the bridge-building tradition I work within — believe we must rebuild trust and understanding directly, citizen to citizen, as the foundation for everything else.

These aren’t just different tactics. They reflect different beliefs about citizenship itself — about what citizens are capable of, what citizenship requires, and what role citizens play in producing democratic life. Practitioners holding different beliefs routinely experience each other’s priorities as naïve, dangerous, or counterproductive. Coalitions fragment. Funders grow confused about why efforts don’t cohere. And the collisions happen, not because anyone is acting in bad faith, but because the underlying beliefs remain unexamined.

We’re all traveling toward the same destination, but there are fault lines in the terrain that cause collisions when we don’t see them. This essay maps those fault lines — not to resolve them, but to make them visible enough that collision becomes a choice, rather than the default.

The tension I’m describing has deep roots in democratic theory. One tradition sees democracy as something citizens produce through active practice — association, deliberation, civic habit, relational trust — an idea that runs from Tocqueville through Dewey to Putnam. Today the cross-disciplinary field of civic studies, as developed by Harry Boyte, Peter Levine and others, is anchored in Public Works theory and envisions citizens as creators of democracy and the common good. Another — from Schumpeter and Lippmann through today’s institutionalists — sees democracy as something institutions deliver: citizens choose among elite-crafted options, and quality depends on getting institutional design right.

Few practitioners explicitly endorse the latter view. But many operate from frameworks — inherited from democratic realism, civic education, and institutional reform traditions — that implicitly position citizens as needing correction or well-designed systems, rather than as capable agents. This tension plays out, often invisibly, in how practitioners design their work and read each other.

I write as a practitioner navigating this tension, not as a theorist analyzing it from above. I have spent forty years in this work, running national nonprofits, leading a billion-dollar federal agency, and founding a corporate foundation. I have sat in rooms where thoughtful people committed to the same destination regarded each other with mutual incomprehension. I’ve watched coalitions fragment over disagreements no one could name. I’ve made these mistakes myself.

In the interest of the honesty this essay advocates, I should name where I stand. Braver Angels, where I do much of my current work, holds that citizens are co-creators of democracy. We believe that trust, belonging, and the capacity to work across difference must be rebuilt by citizens themselves if structural change is to be durable. I hold this as a commitment, not a certainty. Practitioners who emphasize institutional repair, who prioritize structural intervention, who worry that inclusion provides cover for anti-democratic forces are responding to real threats I may be underweighting.

My aim here is not to argue for my position. It is to make visible the fault lines I’ve watched fragment coalitions and drain energy from work that matters. What follows is diagnostic and navigational: an attempt to help those of us doing this work see where we actually stand, understand why we keep colliding with people who share our destination, but not our paths toward it, and find ways to reduce the collisions we can no longer afford.

The most promising framework for understanding how civic renewal efforts could add up — if they weren’t colliding — comes from Beyond Intractability’s concept of Massively Parallel Effort. The premise is simple: complex social problems can’t be solved by any single organization, theory of change, or coordinated plan. They require thousands of independent efforts working simultaneously on different dimensions of the problem. The framework embraces pluralism — trusting that if enough organizations pursue their different approaches with energy and commitment, the cumulative effect will advance democratic renewal without tight coordination. This lack of top-level governance is what distinguishes the Massively Parallel Effort framework from Collective Impact and the more sweeping ambitions of systems design: these frameworks depend on a governing hand, which, by design, starves what it doesn’t prioritize.

This framework is right. But it has a predictable failure mode. The most powerful systems tend to carry characteristic vulnerabilities: free markets generate extraordinary innovation, but they also produce externalities and coordination failures that, left unaddressed, undermine overall performance. The response isn’t to abandon markets — it’s to identify the failure modes and design targeted interventions.

Massively Parallel Effort has the same structure. When parallel efforts operate from incompatible beliefs about citizens — their nature, capacity, and role in democratic life — they don’t just fail to reinforce each other. They collide. Organizations working toward the same destination undermine each other’s credibility and effectiveness — not from bad faith, but from unexamined differences that surface as friction, fragmentation, and wasted energy. The collision won’t stop the work. But it slows it. Resources dissipate. Attention scatters. And in a moment when democratic erosion is accelerating, slower may be too slow.

This essay maps where those collisions happen — three domains where practitioners’ underlying beliefs about citizenship generate divergent answers to strategic questions. This first installment takes up the first domain: what we need from citizens. The installments that follow take up how we handle difference, and what must change first — before turning to how we might navigate all three more constructively.

What Do We Need From Citizens?

Every civic renewal practitioner must answer a foundational question: what capacities, behaviors, or orientations do we need from citizens, and how do we design programs to cultivate them?

The answers diverge sharply — and the divergence traces back to different beliefs about what citizenship itself requires.

Bounded or Expansive?

Some practitioners see citizenship as a bounded set of duties, exercised episodically through formal mechanisms. Citizens vote, obey laws, pay taxes, stay informed enough to make reasonable choices, and hold officials accountable through elections and advocacy. These are important responsibilities, but they are discrete — citizenship is something you do at designated moments, primarily through interaction with institutions.

Other practitioners see citizenship as an expansive, continuous practice woven into daily life. Citizens participate in associations, maintain commons, serve their communities, engage in ongoing dialogue about shared challenges, build relationships across difference, and align their personal behavior with civic aspirations. Citizenship isn’t episodic — it’s a way of being in the world, enacted through relationships and habits, as much as through formal participation.

Most practitioners hold some blend of these views — falling somewhere along the continuum between the two poles, bounded at one end, and expansive at the other. But under resource constraints, the emphasis matters enormously, and where a practitioner falls on that continuum shapes what we build, what we measure, and what we ask of the citizens we serve.

Different Visions, Different Programs

Practitioners who lean toward bounded citizenship tend to design programs that improve what citizens receive: better information, more accessible institutions, fairer systems, clearer choices. Civic education corrects knowledge deficits. Institutional reform improves democratic delivery. Information campaigns counter misinformation. Voter access initiatives remove barriers to participation. The theory of change is: fix the inputs, and citizens will function better within the democratic system.

Success, from this orientation, looks like increased voter turnout, improved civic knowledge, greater trust in institutions, and policy outcomes that reflect citizen preferences. The citizen’s role is learner, recipient, and participant — someone whose democratic experience improves when the surrounding system improves. The practitioner’s posture is expert or educator, serving citizen needs by improving what citizens receive.

Practitioners who lean toward expansive citizenship tend to design programs that build citizens’ capacity to create democracy themselves. For instance, bridge builders build relationships and help people improve trust across difference. Dialogue facilitators improve cross-group understanding. Facilitators of collaboration and problem-solving processes help people build collective agency. Civic-practice programs help participants develop habits that extend beyond any single interaction, sometimes referred to as “civic muscle.” They strengthen habits of association and mutual obligation, thereby creating the civic culture that makes institutional engagement meaningful.

Success, from this orientation, looks like deeper relationships across divides, reduced contempt, increased capacity for collaboration, and citizens who see themselves as agents of democratic life, rather than recipients of it. The citizen’s role is agent, co-creator, and leader — someone whose democratic contribution flows from their own capacity, not just from the quality of surrounding systems. The practitioner’s posture is partner or peer, respecting citizen capacity and facilitating what citizens, themselves, create.

I’ll admit something. For too long I thought many of my institutionally minded colleagues were just dense. I come at this work convinced that trust comes first: that no system holds until people are not only willing to sit at the table together, but see themselves as among its authors, not just its audience. So, when I watched colleagues pour resources into fixing governance, building transparency, running citizen focus groups, drafting citizen bills of rights, I was quietly sure none of it would land until the trust was there. What took me a long time to see is that trust comes first, but it won’t take root without something to hold it. To build the systems that are fair, functional, and responsive is to create the vessel that keeps hard-won trust growing, rather than dissipating. I still think building citizens’ civic capacity part is the essential driver of renewal. But I’ve stopped thinking it’s the only part that’s necessary.

When Citizens Get It “Wrong”

The divergence extends beyond program design to something more charged: how practitioners interpret citizens whose choices concern them. When citizens vote for candidates who practitioners find dangerous, support policies they consider destructive, or embrace movements they believe threaten democratic life — what do practitioners believe about those citizens?

Three frames recur. Two of them follow from the citizenship continuum. The third stands apart from it — and that matters.

The first two frames are the “incapacity frame” and the “legitimate priorities frame.” Both sit on the bounded/expansive continuum and follow from where a practitioner already stands.

The incapacity frame: People who embrace the incapacity frame believe that citizens who “get it wrong” do so because they can’t see clearly. Practitioners who lean toward bounded citizenship and institutional delivery tend here. If citizens are shaped by the information and institutions surrounding them, then harmful choices reflect failures of the delivery system. They believe that these citizens have been misled by disinformation, manipulated by bad actors, or were failed by broken institutions. So, they are not seeing clearly — not because they’re stupid, but because the environment has distorted their judgment. The response, therefore, is to correct the inputs, repair the information environment, and improve what citizens receive. The frame’s risk is condescension — the quiet assumption that we see what they can’t.

The legitimate priorities frame: People who embrace the legitimate priorities frame believe that citizens who “get it wrong” are not malicious, or duped, but they are weighing trade-offs differently. Practitioners who lean toward expansive citizenship and citizen co-creation tend here. If citizens are capable agents making considered choices, then harmful choices may reflect different values and priorities, rather than incapacity. These citizens may share our concerns about certain consequences but they rank other concerns higher. The response, therefore, should be to understand their reasoning, engage their priorities, and build relationships across the difference. The risk of this frame is the mirror image of the incapacity frame’s — mistaking genuine malice or manipulation for mere difference.

The malice frame: People who embrace the malice frame believe that citizens of concern support the harm deliberately. If you vote for a candidate who attacks pluralistic democracy, you are attacking pluralistic democracy; the harm is the point, or close enough. Citizens seen this way aren’t considered confused, misled, or weighing other priorities — they’re considered to be aligned with what they’re enabling, which makes engaging them as good-faith partners seem misguided, dangerous, or even evil.

This frame draws on two very different sources. For some it flows from a considered view of human nature — the conviction, as old as the debates that produced the Constitution, that people are substantially self-interested and crowds are susceptible to passion and demagoguery. It is a serious position with a serious pedigree. For others, the malice reading is less considered — the motive is misattribution and moralization that polarization itself produces, assuming the worst about why people do what they do. Practitioners operating from this more situational version are, at least partially, importing into the work the very disease they hope to cure.

What sets the malice frame apart from the frames of incapacity and legitimate priorities is that it doesn’t take a position on what citizens need or what role they play. The malice frame reaches instead for something prior — whether people can be trusted to govern themselves — a question that runs athwart the bounded-to-expansive citizenship continuum, rather than along it.

These frames aren’t destiny. A practitioner might hold expansive views of citizenship, yet still read “wrong” choices through an incapacity lens. And the malice frame can capture almost anyone under enough pressure, precisely because it comes from the polarized climate, rather than from a considered position — which is what makes it worth watching for in ourselves.

Where the Collisions Happen

The collisions play out at multiple levels.

Between organizations: Practitioners who emphasize bounded citizenship and institutional inputs can experience expansive-citizenship work as naive. “You’re building relationships while systems are rigged. You’re running dialogue circles while disinformation spreads unchecked. Until we fix the information environment and repair institutions, your conversations are rearranging deck chairs” [on the sinking ship]. Practitioners who emphasize expansive citizenship and civic capacity can experience institutional work as elitist. “You’re designing programs for citizens, not with them. You’ve decided what citizens need and you’re delivering it to them — the consumer model. You’ve given up on people as democratic agents and put your faith in experts and technocratic fixes.”

Each group feels dismissed — not just strategically disagreed with, but condescended to. Each questions a core competence which the other prides themselves on.

Within bridge-building itself: The collision happens even among practitioners who appear to be doing identical work. Some bridge-builders hope participants will change — their views, their votes, how they engage politically. These practitioners operate from the incapacity frame, even if they’d never use that language. Their work is genuine: they want to listen, understand, create conditions for people to see things differently. But “differently” means, ultimately, more like how they see things.

Other bridge-builders hope for understanding, regardless of whether anyone changes. They operate from the legitimate priorities frame. Success means people engage across difference with more trust and less contempt — regardless of how anyone votes.

These practitioners might work side by side, use the same language, facilitate the same programs — and still be doing fundamentally different things. Participants can sense the difference. The moment someone feels they’re being “worked on” rather than genuinely engaged, trust collapses.

And this is where the hidden fault line does its quiet damage — because when bridge-building is experienced as conversion in disguise, it discredits the entire enterprise, including the organizations practicing genuine neutrality. The suspicion that “dialogue” is really about changing people poisons the well for everyone. The field’s inability to clearly name this distinction — between building understanding and seeking conversion — to say out loud that conversion-oriented and understanding-oriented work are different things wearing the same clothes — is part of why bridge-building has not earned the trust, or captured the momentum that it should have.

In funding decisions: Funders must choose where to allocate finite resources. A dollar spent on civic education is a dollar not spent on bridge-building. A grant to improve information environments is a grant not made to community organizing. When funders choose, they’re implicitly taking a position on what citizenship requires and what citizens need — often without recognizing the choice they’re making or understanding why their decisions generate resentment.

The Hardest Question: What Change Do We Really Want?

These orientations are easily missed because people simply assume that their way is the “right way” to do civic renewal or democracy work, and the other ways are “wrong.” They don’t seem like equally valid choices, or different approaches that can, and should, be pursued simultaneously — by different people, of course.

The diagnostic is uncomfortable but clarifying. Three questions show where you actually stand:

• When someone you’ve engaged with doesn’t change their view, are you disappointed?

• When you tell success stories, do they feature someone moving toward your position?

• If your side kept losing elections but citizens treated each other with less contempt, would you call that success?

That last question cuts deepest. If success requires your political goals advancing, you’re operating from an incapacity frame — however you describe your work. If success means citizens engaging with more trust and understanding regardless of political outcomes, you’re operating from a legitimate priorities frame.

This tension is particularly fraught among progressive bridge-builders — who make up much of the field. Many know intellectually that their work is about building trust, not changing minds. They would never describe themselves as trying to convert anyone. Yet they feel the process has somehow failed when conservative participants leave with their political views intact. The disappointment reveals what the stated values obscure: a hidden expectation that understanding should lead to change, that exposure to other perspectives should move people toward “better” positions. The conversion agenda isn’t concealed. It’s unconscious — which makes it harder to see and harder to address.

Practitioners who don’t recognize their own orientation will experience those with different orientations, not as holding different positions, but as being naive, elitist, or missing the point entirely.

Citizens’ Roles — Receiving and Shaping Democracy

Each orientation sees something real. Institutions do shape what’s possible for citizens — anyone who’s tried to participate in a gerrymandered district or navigate a broken information environment knows this. And citizens do animate institutions — the best-designed systems fail when citizens lack the capacity or will to make them work. Some citizens have been manipulated by disinformation and bad-faith actors. And some are making considered trade-offs based on values and priorities that differ from ours.

The question isn’t which view is correct. It is whether we can recognize our own orientation as an orientation — a position shaped by our experience, our institutional home, our theory of change — rather than as simply “how things are.”

Noticing that organizations bring different approaches here doesn’t necessarily mean they should not collaborate. In fact, counterintuitively, this fault line may be the one most naturally suited to partnership by organizations operating on opposite sides. Institutional repair designed with citizen leadership is more likely to stick than reforms delivered to citizens without their involvement. Civic capacity built within well-functioning institutions has more room to flourish than capacity-building in a broken system. The practitioner improving information quality and the practitioner building relational trust aren’t necessarily competing — each may be creating conditions for the other’s work to take hold.

The collision happens when either side treats its emphasis as the complete answer, or when funders force a choice that pits them against each other.

We are traveling shared terrain. Under Massively Parallel Effort, parallel approaches must accumulate, not collide. When practitioners operating from different beliefs about citizens interpret each other as naive or dangerous, rather than a working a different part of a complex problem, the collision tax begins — draining energy, fragmenting coalitions, slowing progress toward a destination we share.

Coming in Installment II: Who are the Enemies?

This first installment traced key fault lines in how practitioners see the world — including whether perceived “bad behavior” stems from incapacity, legitimately different priorities, or malice. The invisibility of these fault lines deepens the frustration and moralization practitioners bring to their more visible disagreements. Installment II carries those fault lines into harder terrain — where the divides we have mapped stop being interpretive differences and start forcing decisions: who gets included, who gets kept out; whose knowledge counts, whose doesn’t. There the buried fault lines surface as the field’s sharpest disputes, as we all work to renew a shared civic culture.

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About the MBI Newsletters

Two or three times a week, Guy and Heidi Burgess, the BI Directors, share some of our thoughts on political hyper-polarization and related topics. We also share essays from our colleagues and other contributors, and every week or so, we devote one newsletter to annotated links to outside readings that we found particularly useful relating to U.S. hyper-polarization, threats to peace (and actual violence) in other countries, and related topics of interest. Each Newsletter is posted on BI, and sent out by email through Substack to subscribers. You can sign up to receive your copy here and find the latest newsletter here or on our BI Newsletter page, which also provides access to all the past newsletters, going back to 2017.

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Highlighted Links

A few suggestions about links that we think are especially interesting.

• Developing a Unifying Vision
  Democrats Became Great by Fighting the Left — An important and timely history lesson that tells us about the period following World War II, when socialists and communists struggled with liberals for control of the Democratic Party.

• US Politics
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• Developing a Unifying Vision
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• Progressive Left
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Reader Suggested Links

Highlighting links suggested by our readers. Please send us links to things that you find useful.

• Family / Gender / LBGTQ+
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  The People Who Will Thrive in the AI Age — More thoughtful, practical advice on strategies for surviving coming economic and social upheavals related to AI.

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• US Politics
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• Race / Anti-Racism
  How Jack Became Black - FAIR SCREENING — For our increasingly multiracial society, a story highlighting ways in which the current system frequently asks people to make uncomfortable and unreasonable choices -- choices that ask them to disavow much of their ancestry.

• Constructive Communication
  ‘Disagreement itself has become morally legible’: Glenn Loury critiques self-censorship — A thoughtful exploration of the far-reaching implications of an intellectual climate in which people self-censor with the goal of not having to defend even remotely controversial ideas.

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  Toward Ethical Populism — From a right-leaning, populist perspective, thoughts about how their movement might be improved in ways which would give it a more positive impact.

  

Colleague Activities

Highlighting things that our conflict and peacebuilding colleagues are doing that contribute to efforts to address the hyper-polarization problem.

• Inflammatory Media
  How to Handle Conflict Entrepreneurs — A new mini course and toolkit with constructive suggestions for persuading conflict profiteers to start acting in ways that strengthen, rather than undermine, democracy.

• Artificial Intelligence
  Can AI Strengthen Deliberative Democracy — or Will It Only Simulate It? New Carnegie Research Makes the Case for Democratic Governance Infrastructure — An article examining the genuine democratic possibilities of AI-augmented deliberation -- and the governance infrastructure that does not yet exist to realize them responsibly.

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  Taken Together — John Paul Lederach reflects on the meaning and health of U.S. democracy, and how it relates to the health of the world.

• Peacebuilding
  Renewing the UN’s Toolbox for Peace and Security — Amidst growing funding constraints, hardening geopolitical rivalries, and surging conflicts, how should the UN “get back to basics”?

• Interstate War
  Non-nuclear Weapons for First Strike Missions — Assessment of current conventional weapons for strategic counterforce and mutual reassurance.

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  How Do Peacebuilders Raise Money? — Dylan Mathews, CEO of Peace Direct, talks about how peacebuilders raise money in an era of shrinking aid budgets and shifting political priorities.

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  Post-U.S. International Democracy Support: Aspiration in Search of Substance — A Carnegie Endowment for International Peace report analyzing whether major donors’ renewed commitment to development is being matched by concrete action and what a post-U.S. democracy agenda might actually look like.

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  Renewing Peacebuilding for a Disrupted World Incubation Space — A report from the recent Geneva Incubation Space that explored how the peace and security architecture can adapt to a rapidly changing global context.

• Saving Democracy
  How the pro-democracy movement is misreading Gen Z — This National Youth Takeover Day, let’s stop misdiagnosing young people as apathetic about democracy.

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  Deliberative Technologies in Youth, Peace & Security: Promise, Practice, and the Uptake Gap — A report examining instances of peacebuilders putting AI-enabled deliberative tools into practice, what these efforts enable, what obstacles they face, and the lessons that the field can learn.

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  This Juneteenth, what will it take to create an America that works for all of us? — A reflection co-authored by Rich Harwood and Lawrence Wofford, Chair of the Selma-Dallas County NAACP.

• Psychological Complexity
  The pressure to be unlike people we despise — Can the fact that “they” like chocolate ice cream make us like it less? Zachary Elwood asks.

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• Communication Complexity
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News and Opinion

From around the web, more insight into the nature of our conflict problems, limits of business-as-usual thinking, and things people are doing to try to make things better. (Formerly, Beyond Intractability in Context.)

• US Politics
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• Corruption
  The Trump Family and ‘Honest Graft’ — From the Wall Street Journal, a jaw dropping and reasonably unbiased summary of just how much money the Trump family has made from his second Presidency.

• Media Reform
  In Praise of Substack Philosophy — An enlightening article that explains why Substack is so different and why that difference allows it to make such a strong contribution to the larger media environment.

• Developing a Unifying Vision
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  Changing the Constitution: Five Proposals for a More Perfect Union — For those looking for ways in which we might be able to strengthen U.S. Democracy, a compilation of ideas.

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• Interstate War
  War by Other Means — Another excellent article that helps us better understand the way in which warfare is changing and the implications of those changes.

• US Politics
  The Democracies Can Still Triumph — For a time in which democracy seems to be in decline everywhere and authoritarianism seems to be spreading, a hopeful argument that democracy is still stronger.

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• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
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• Saving Democracy
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• Artificial Intelligence
  We Are Losing the Ability to Discover What We Didn’t Know to Ask — Another article that helps us understand how AI is changing the way we think (and whether the changes are something we should resist or something we should embrace).

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  #2 Recovering the Founders’ Vision of Civic Education — As we start to think about ways in which civic education might help us better address democracy’s difficulties, an article that summarizes what nation’s founders thought should be taught.

  More News & Opinion Links

Please Contribute Your Ideas To This Discussion!

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Contact Us!

About the MBI Newsletters

Two or three times a week, Guy and Heidi Burgess, the BI Directors, share some of our thoughts on political hyper-polarization and related topics. We also share essays from our colleagues and other contributors, and every week or so, we devote one newsletter to annotated links to outside readings that we found particularly useful relating to U.S. hyper-polarization, threats to peace (and actual violence) in other countries, and related topics of interest. Each Newsletter is posted on BI, and sent out by email through Substack to subscribers. You can sign up to receive your copy here and find the latest newsletter here or on our BI Newsletter page, which also provides access to all the past newsletters, going back to 2017.

NOTE! If you signed up for this Newsletter and don't see it in your inbox, it might be going to one of your other emails folder (such as promotions, social, or spam). Check there or search for beyondintractability@substack.com and if you still can't find it, first go to our Substack help page, and if that doesn't help, please contact us.

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This is the second half of our Fourth of July post. The first half compared what Americans think now about the holiday, compared to what they thought about it last year (according to ChatGPT). We then observed that we have a choice: we can continue to fight over what America was, is, and should be. Or we can try to use this holiday as an impetus to come together to figure out how we want to overcome our many challenges and improve U.S. democracy together. We explained why we thought we should do the latter, and today we go on to consider what that might mean.

We ended yesterday’s post by saying:

Before condemning democracy, its critics should spend more time looking outside their immediate lived experiences to the experiences of people who have had to live under [what Winston Churchill referred to as] “all of those other forms of government that have been tried” — forms of government that Churchill knew were far worse [than democracy]. We need to remember that, despite our many differences and difficulties, there are bigger things that should hold us together.

Among those are...

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

We believe that we ought to see the United States’ 250th birthday as a time to come together to celebrate and reaffirm our comittment to work together to defend and advance democracy’s founding goals of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

Life

We should honor life. That isn’t an anti-choice statement; We are not talking about abortion here. We are talking about the fundamental miracle of our own and others’ humanity and the larger wonder of creation. I (Heidi) was quite taken recently by an article in the Atlantic “The Ordinary Miracle of Existing.” It points out how “being alive at all is the most extraordinary stroke of good luck any of us will ever experience.”

Alan Lightman, the author, explains that

Far more possible arrangements of human DNA exist than there are atoms in the observable universe — each arrangement corresponding to a different human being. One of those many possible arrangements is each of us. ...

Each human female has about 300,000 eggs during the fertile period of her life. Each male ejaculation has about 300 million sperm. Thus each conception contains about a hundred thousand billion different possible combinations of DNA. In other words, there are a hundred thousand billion unique and different human beings that could result from each procreation event. Only one of those possible combinations led to each of you reading this article at this moment. Here’s a way to visualize that extremely tiny fraction. If you took a very long ruler that stretched from here to the planet Pluto, one inch of that distance would be you. The rest of the distance would be other possible human beings that could have been, but never were. Each of us has won a lottery with a hundred thousand billion different players. ...

Yet it [the miracle of our life] is the easiest to overlook, to take for granted. We wake up in the morning, have our coffee, make breakfast, send the kids off to school, go to our jobs, move through our routines, worry about deadlines, check off items on our to-do list. And we forget that beneath all of it lies something profoundly rare: existence itself. The simple fact that we are here, conscious and aware, is so unlikely that it borders on the miraculous. Because we experience that miracle every day, we treat it as ordinary, even guaranteed, mostly unnoticed at all. We postpone joy, assuming there will always be more time. We don’t see the beauty in small moments. We simply go about the business of life, without taking a second to notice life itself.

I put that together with the point Debilyn Molineaux made in her interview with us about how we, in the United States, don’t notice democracy; we don’t see how it impacts us.

Democracy is so assumed in our culture that we don’t understand its impact in our day-to-day life. And therefore, we also can’t imagine what our life would be like if we didn’t have it, or if we had a better system, a healthy political system.

And this made me think of today’s Free Press article by Coleman Hughes entitled “Progressive Patriotism.” It’s subtitle said: “There’s a reason the groups most valued by progressives — people of color, the poor, residents of the ‘global South’ — want to migrate to America.” And he went on to say

progressive ideology takes for granted what are in fact precious gifts that most people on Earth still don’t have or have only partially — societal wealth, reliable law and order, political rights.

Now progressives, of course, would argue that wealth is unjustly distributed, our “law and order” too frequently does not follow the rule of law. Many people, they point out, have suffered serious infringements on their political rights, and, too often, even their lives have been lost.

Fortunately, we live in a system that gives us remedies when our rights are violated. Our system does give us viable options should we feel that government policies promote unfair distribution of wealth and income (or fail to control corruption). People who live under “all those other forms of government” lack such options. So, we argue, we should appreciate the tremendous luck we all have benefited from, enabling us to be here at all, and instead of complaining about how bad everything is, use our great luck to fix the things we don’t like and make the our country closer to the ideal we wish it would be.

Liberty

The notion of “liberty” has been core to the American ideal since the beginning, and it remains so today. No, not everyone had it in the beginning, but the cognitive dissonance created by the institution of slavery and the Declaration of Independence was great enough to drive abolitionists to fight for the end of slavery since before the Declaration was signed. As Hughes further explained,

The American Founding Fathers were born into a world in which slavery existed all over the world and had existed for thousands of years unchallenged. Having a slave was as unremarkable as having a nanny is today. But a revolution in morality took place on the issue of slavery during their lifetimes, and that revolution was in large measure spurred on by the spirit of ’76—the new obsession with liberty that the American Revolution created. It is not an accident that the oldest abolitionist society in the world was founded in Pennsylvania in 1775.

Liberty has been a goal for all of the political parties we’ve had in recent memory. When Guy and I were in graduate school, we learned that the term “liberal” was based on a focus on “liberty.” Liberatrains, too, get their name from a focus on liberty. And now, conservatives are said to value “freedom” more than progressives do. So we all have the notion of “freedom” or “liberty” in our history, if not in our current goals. Certainly none of us want to be locked up. None of us want to be told how to run our lives or what to think. So can’t we all agree that we want to work toward “liberty for all?”

As we do that, we need to remember that liberty entails more than the ability to act in ways favored by those who dominate society. Liberty gives us the right to, within broad limits, live life as we choose. But it also entails the responsibility to help guarantee that others enjoy those same rights. This responsibility to help assure everyone enjoys the same liberties is a big part of why we enact laws that restrict our behavior. These laws do not, however, restrict our right to say what we believe, even if it is unpopular. We retain the right to read whatever books we want to, even though others may think that those books are bad. And we have a right to live lifestyles that others may disapprove of — be it the gay or trans lifestyle (which is disapproved by some conservatives) or the tradwife lifestyle (which many progressives may scorn). Liberty allows all of those lifestyles, and many more.

The Pursuit of Happiness

In many ways, the pursuit of happiness is the most foundational element of democracy. It is not a guarantee of happiness. But is a guarantee that Americans will have the opportunity to pursue happiness in any way they choose, again, as long as they stay within the law and accept the consequences of their choices.

This brings us back to Heidi’s conversation with Debilyn Molineaux again: When Debilyn asked people to imagine where they hoped they would be 5, 10, or 20 years in the future, they all named, as she put it, 3.5 things.

In every interview I’ve ever conducted, people want to have a deep connection with the people in their lives, so they feel like they belong. They want to have a community around them that supports them being themselves and accepts them for who they are. And they want to contribute back to others and to their community. I call it the 3 Cs to make it easy to remember: deep connection, a community of belonging, and a way to contribute back.

And the half: the half is about their relationship with nature, because not everybody mentions nature. But people who do mention nature want to have access to green things, a way to interact with a park, a hiking trail. They want to live on a farm. There’s something about nature that about half the people mention in their future.

Debilyn’s “3Cs” are very similar to conflict scholar John Burton’s notion of fundamental human needs, particularly identity, security, and recognition. Burton argued that these needs are so fundamental that if they are threatened or absent, people will fight to get them — something that is relatively easy to do in a democracy and much harder to do an autocracy. What many people don’t notice is that these needs are not win-lose entities; they are actually win-win. The more security I have, the less I will feel a need to attack you, so the more security you will have. The more I feel secure with my identity, the less I will feel a need to attack yours.

Further, if our human needs are met — if we feel secure, if we can express and pursue our identities freely, if we are recognized as good and valuable people — that, we would argue, contributes significantly toward happiness. It might not if we take these needs for granted, and feel dissatisfied if we don’t constantly get more and more. Or, they might not lead to happiness if we feel a need to constantly out-compete everyone else. But the only people who can do that are the people who are lucky enough to have their fundamental needs met. People who lack them are definitely not happy. So Debilyn’s 3Cs and Burton’s human needs, we would argue, are integral to happiness.

And since these fundamental needs are win-win, we are more likely to attain them, and hence, to be happy, if we pursue cooperative, rather than competitive, win-lose approaches with other people. When we pursue win-lose approaches, we are constantly insecure, as we might lose, and we probably don’t feel adequately recognized, since we are always seeking more. When we pursue collaborative win-win relationships, we are much more likely to feel secure and recognized as both “good” and belonging.

This is the key to building the large coalitions that enable people to work together in ways that simultaneously advance everyone’s interests and solve mutual problems. And this, too, contributes to happiness. In a well-functioning democracy, the system is structured in ways that encourage and reward this kind of behavior. The system does not, however, reward those who fall into the schadenfreude trap of defining our happiness in terms of another’s pain. This creates the kind of terrible win-lose conflicts that tear societies apart. This is why Trump’s “own the libs” and the left’s oppressor-oppressed mindsets are so divisive. It is also a big reason why U.S. democracy is so dysfunctional and why happiness is so hard to come by these days. The solution, we think, is to re-embrace a more collective approach to the pursuit of happiness — something that the Thriving Together U.S. Project is focused on pursuing.

Bringing the Declaration of Independence Back to Life

So instead of continuing to bicker about whether America is good or bad, worth celebrating or not, whether American democracy or America itself is dying or thriving, wouldn’t it be better to come together to see how we can bring the Declaration of Independence back to life? How can we get back to the job of pursuing the American dream?

Long ago, Abraham Lincoln asserted that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” At the time, Lincoln was talking about slavery. The country could not endure when half embraced slavery and the other half did not. That division has been resolved; but others (some closely related) have taken its place.

But Lincoln’s assertion still seems correct. A house as hyper-polarized as ours is currently cannot stand. If we don’t tear ourselves apart, external actors (such as Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, or other authoritarian regimes) will do it for us. Indeed, they already are trying to do just that. And our lack of understanding and believing science, or media, or facts beyond our personally lived experiences is making it much more difficult or even impossible to respond effectively to natural disasters or challenges as well as even more serious array of social challenges and military threats.

If we want any chance of having life, liberty, and the ability to pursue happiness, we are going to have to start working together, not against each other. We need to remember that the United States’ 250 year history of extraordinary success is attributable to a culture of freedom and liberty gives everyone the opportunity to get ahead in life by doing things that their fellow citizens believe make life better and are, therefore, worth supporting. This is what we call “the engine of social learning.” And, this is what societies plagued by corrupt plutocracies and rigid orthodoxies lack. This is something we need to rediscover and pursue.

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Contact Us

About the MBI Newsletters

Two or three times a week, Guy and Heidi Burgess, the BI Directors, share some of our thoughts on political hyper-polarization and related topics. We also share essays from our colleagues and other contributors, and every week or so, we devote one newsletter to annotated links to outside readings that we found particularly useful relating to U.S. hyper-polarization, threats to peace (and actual violence) in other countries, and related topics of interest. Each Newsletter is posted on BI, and sent out by email through Substack to subscribers. You can sign up to receive your copy here and find the latest newsletter here or on our BI Newsletter page, which also provides access to all the past newsletters, going back to 2017.

NOTE! If you signed up for this Newsletter and don't see it in your inbox, it might be going to one of your other emails folder (such as promotions, social, or spam). Check there or search for beyondintractability@substack.com and if you still can't find it, first go to our Substack help page, and if that doesn't help, please contact us.

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Our Fourth of July post, like so many of our others, has gotten so long that we have divided it into two posts. Here is the first one; the second half will come out tomorrow.

This Saturday is the Fourth of July — America’s Independence Day holiday. As all Americans know, but some of our non-U.S. readers may not, this is a particularly notable holiday, as it is the United States’ 250th birthday.

A year ago we posted a newsletter noting how divided America was over what America stands for, and how or if, the 4th of July should be celebrated. In keeping with our observation that AI’s large language models are especially good at listening to and reporting on society’s aggregate opinions, last year we asked ChatGPT what it thought Americans believed about the holiday.” We asked: “Can you tell me what progressives think about celebrating the 4th of July in the United States?” and “Using a similar style, can you tell me what conservatives think about celebrating the 4th of July in the United States?” Today, a year later, we asked ChatGPT if “the attitudes you found then are largely similar now, as we approach America’s 250th birthday. Are we still as divided about our history? What about our future?” ChatGPT responded yes...

The basic pattern from last year still holds, and in some respects it is sharper as the 250th approaches. The shorthand remains: many conservatives treat July 4 as a straightforward celebration of national founding, freedom, sacrifice, and continuity; many progressives treat it as a day for mixed celebration and critique, with emphasis on who was excluded from the promise of 1776 and what remains unfinished. That is very close to the progressive/conservative split described in your 2025 newsletter.

It went on to say:

A June 2026 Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 64% of Republicans, but only 27% of Democrats, planned to display an American flag or bunting outside their home on July 4. It also found that 65% of Republicans, but only 24% of Democrats, described the Fourth as “a day where I celebrate the United States of America.” Democrats were more likely to describe it as a day for friends and family, a day off work, or just another day. Republicans were also more likely than Democrats to wear red, white, and blue, attend fireworks, attend parades, and otherwise take part in the more traditional patriotic rituals.

More hopefully, however, ChatGPT noted that

A UMass Amherst poll found that 74% of Americans, including 76% of Republicans and 79% of Democrats, still say there is more that unifies Americans than divides them; 59% say the Declaration still guides the country in meaningful ways; and 57% say the country has made important progress toward the Declaration’s ideals.

It also citied Gallup’s 2026 American Dream study which found that

a majority in all partisan groups say the [American] Dream is unfinished: 57% of Republicans, 60% of Democrats, and 59% of independents. Republicans are more likely to say it has succeeded; Democrats are more likely to say it has failed; but the largest group across all three sees it as incomplete, rather than either triumphant or dead.

And an AP-NORC poll which found that

Americans continue to attach overwhelming importance to core civic freedoms: 87% say freedom of speech is important to U.S. identity, 86% say the same about the right to vote, and 80% say the same about freedom of religion. The conflict is over which rights are most threatened and by whom: Democrats are more likely to see voting rights and free speech as under major threat, while Republicans and independents are more likely than Democrats to see gun rights as under major threat.

There is also considerable agreement about America’s future, but that agreement paints a pretty grim picture.

Reuters/Ipsos found that 38% of Americans do not believe the U.S. will still exist as a single country 250 years from now, including 40% of Democrats and 26% of Republicans. The same poll found that 64% agree American democracy is in danger of failing, including 85% of Democrats, 60% of independents/others, and 50% of Republicans. It also found that 77% expect political violence to increase over the next five years.

ChatGPT concludes that

We are still as divided about our history, and probably more anxious about our future. But there is still a latent shared civic language: freedom, voting, democracy, constitutional rights, the American Dream, and the idea of an unfinished project. The problem is that the same words now point to very different perceived threats. ...

The 250th could therefore become either another performative battlefield or a rare opportunity. A constructive framing would not ask Americans to choose between celebration and criticism. It would say: the United States is worth celebrating because its ideals have repeatedly inspired people to correct its failures; it is worth criticizing because those ideals still matter. That framing is much closer to the “unfinished American Dream” consensus than to either triumphalism or rejection.

As we continue to struggle over a seemingly endless series of conflicts about how we should think about the United States’ past, we found ourselves thinking back to one of the wiser things we learned early in our career in the conflict resolution field. This is the idea that, if people really want to just keep fighting over the past, there is relatively little that the conflict resolution field can do to help them. If, on the other hand, they are willing to focus on building a new, more positive future, there are a lot of ways in which we can all work together to make this a reality.

This suggests that our 4th of July celebrations would be more constructive if we focused on asking “where do we go from here?” We can keep on fighting about what is going wrong, and who is to blame, or we can start focusing on working together to fix our many problems and build a better future.

We can see clearly what happens if we keep on fighting — in earlier writing, we have likened that process to a broken pendulum. In the physical world a pendulum swings a little less far each time, the friction of the air diminishing the swing, until the pendulum is at rest in the center of its arc. In our hyper-polarized politics, however, the pendulum seems to be violating the laws of physics and swinging ever further with each cycle. During the presidencies of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, political oscillations were much closer to the center. George W. Bush was farther right than was his father (H.W.), and Obama was farther left than Clinton. Trump, during his first term, was certainly more extreme (though on a new populist dimension that did not track directly with the past liberal/conservative oscillations). Sharply reversing things, Biden took us to in a new more progressive (rather than liberal) direction. Today, in his second term, Trump is pursuing an even more extreme agenda — though, again, that is even further removed from traditional conservative principles. Where do we go next? Centrists certainly are not on the ascendency — they are usually denounced as “soft” or “wishy-washy” or even “treasonous.”

Nothing gets fixed when we swing back and forth between these unstable victories. Whatever one side accomplishes, the other side undoes. Compromise is rare, collaborative solutions are all but non-existant, leaders are unable (or unwilling or uninterested in) solving our fundamental problems. The American population grows increasingly frustrated, alienated, fearful, and hateful of those on the other side. They increasingly feel as if they have no agency, so say in political affairs. More and more distrust elections, distrust our leaders, our institutions, our media, our scientists. The end result is a collapse in support for democratic norms and institutions — a collapse that is opening the door to all sorts of dystopian possibilities.

While we might hope that people can at least agree that pendulum politics isn’t going to solve our problems, we can’t, alas, even agree on that. Far too many people still think that intensifying our hyper-polarized politics so that their side can, ultimately, decisively defeat the other, is the way out.

Churchill and Santayana

A big part of what makes these pendulum swings possible is that we’ve increasingly lost track of the underlying stake that we all have in the preservation, defense, and improvement of democratic norms and institutions. As we have tried to understand the mechanisms behind this trend, we have found ourselves going back to a recent and quite insightful David French essay built around two classic quotes that together tell us a lot about our predicament. The first is Churchill’s famous observation that “democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried” and Santayana’s reminder that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

What makes Santayana’s observation so relevant this is the fact that so many people (including, especially, those on the progressive left) have come to the conclusion that history is little more than a worthless effort by the oppressors of the past to sugarcoat their domination of others. This, sadly, has been accompanied by a large-scale repudiation of Western civilization (and the role of the United States’ democratic experiment in that history). In its place, we are increasingly told that the only reliable source of information is our personal “lived experiences” (and maybe the experiences of our close friends and associates).

This brings us to Churchill’s reference to democracy as the “worst form of government.” For those young enough to have escaped the horrors of World War II and the horrors of Soviet and Chinese communist expansionism, the lived experience of U.S. democracy in recent decades has, admittedly, left people with lots to complain about. (We have certainly joined in the chorus of people highlighting democracy’s many deficiencies.)

While these deficiencies are certainly quite real and significant, they also have a decidedly “privileged” tinge to them. Life for those who complain most vociferously is actually pretty good when compared with other parts of the world and other periods of history. The violence associated with microaggressions is really very different from barbaric forms of violence routinely visited on those unlucky enough to live under brutal authoritarian regimes in places like Iran, Russia, North Korea, China, or much of the developing world. It is these horrors and lack of opportunities that accompany them that explain why so many people want to immigrate to the United States.

In other words, before condemning democracy, its critics should spend more time looking outside their immediate lived experiences to the experiences of people who have had to live under “all of those other forms of government that have been tried” — forms of government that Churchill knew were far worse. We need to remember that, despite our many differences and difficulties, there are bigger things that should hold us together and that we should work toward preserving and improving.

We will explore what these are tomorrow.

Please Contribute Your Ideas To This Discussion!

In order to prevent bots, spammers, and other malicious content, we are asking contributors to send their contributions to us directly. If your idea is short, with simple formatting, you can put it directly in the contact box. However, the contact form does not allow attachments. So if you are contributing a longer article, with formatting beyond simple paragraphs, just send us a note using the contact box, and we'll respond via an email to which you can reply with your attachment. This is a bit of a hassle, we know, but it has kept our site (and our inbox) clean. And if you are wondering, we do publish essays that disagree with or are critical of us. We want a robust exchange of views.

Contact Us

About the MBI Newsletters

Two or three times a week, Guy and Heidi Burgess, the BI Directors, share some of our thoughts on political hyper-polarization and related topics. We also share essays from our colleagues and other contributors, and every week or so, we devote one newsletter to annotated links to outside readings that we found particularly useful relating to U.S. hyper-polarization, threats to peace (and actual violence) in other countries, and related topics of interest. Each Newsletter is posted on BI, and sent out by email through Substack to subscribers. You can sign up to receive your copy here and find the latest newsletter here or on our BI Newsletter page, which also provides access to all the past newsletters, going back to 2017.

NOTE! If you signed up for this Newsletter and don't see it in your inbox, it might be going to one of your other emails folder (such as promotions, social, or spam). Check there or search for beyondintractability@substack.com and if you still can't find it, first go to our Substack help page, and if that doesn't help, please contact us.

If you like what you read here, please ....

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Highlighted Links

A few suggestions about links that we think are especially interesting.

• Interstate War
  Losing the War of the Future — From Foreign Affairs, an extremely important, must-read, article that explains just how dramatically the balance of military power has changed and why the United States is no longer the super power we all think it is.

• Interstate War
  How Iran Devastated an American Naval Base—and Caused a U.S. Recalculation — A report on Iran’s under-reported attacks on U.S. forces in the recent war -- attacks that led the United States to conclude that its military position was much weaker than previously thought.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  Iran Won the War but May Lose the Peace — A longer term look at the likely consequences of the recent Iranian war -- a look that tries to anticipate the complex interactions that will arise when those affected by the war attempt to apply its lessons.

• US Politics
  The Democrats have their own MAGA now — News that dynamics similar to the ones that produced the extremists of the MAGA right are now starting to produce comparably extreme political figures on the left.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  The next Iran War starts now — One of the most realistic assessments I’ve seen of the U.S.-Iranian peace deal -- an assessment that makes it clear that the best we can hope for is a brief interlude in which everybody prepares for the next phase of this long-running confrontation.

• Artificial Intelligence
  AI Warfare Is at the Point of No Return. What Now? — The war in Ukraine has made it abundantly clear that there is no realistic hope of escaping a future driven by AI-empowered weapons and AI-based military tactics and strategy.

• Theories of Change
  To beat socialists and populists, liberalism must get radical — As populists on the left and right threaten to overrun the more moderate liberals in their political center -- an argument that the center could best defend itself by admitting and correcting its past mistakes.

Reader Suggested Links

Highlighting links suggested by our readers. Please send us links to things that you find useful.

• Saving Democracy
  One-Party Rule Is Hiding in Plain Sight — A surprising and quite perceptive argument that, despite the deep divisions that exist within U.S. society, a majority of us effectively live in jurisdictions governed by one party rule with no meaningful political opposition.

• Class Inequity
  See What Your Lifestyle Says About Your Economic Class — A different way of thinking about class differences that sheds new light on the depth of the chasm that divides U.S. society.

• Civic Education
  How America Gave Up on Its Own History — The description of the far-reaching, and potentially catastrophic, implications of our desire to avoid, rather than constructively engage, the tough questions surrounding United States’ history.

• Media Reform
  The Miseducation of American Journalists — A scathing indictment of the way in which the U.S. has, in recent years, trained its journalists and an explanation of why this training is responsible for much of our hyper-polarized political dysfunction.

• Peacebuilding
  Meet the world’s new peacemakers — A surprising article about the increasingly prominent role that autocracies are playing in peacemaking efforts.

• Constructive Communication
  Introducing: The Honesty Project — A report on a new effort to better understand what we really think -- an effort based on an innovative new polling strategy.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  The Left-Wing Case Against Anti-Zionism — An important argument that explains why the left, if it is to be true to its principles, should support, rather than oppose, Israel.

  

Colleague Activities

Highlighting things that our conflict and peacebuilding colleagues are doing that contribute to efforts to address the hyper-polarization problem.

• Developing a Unifying Vision
  What Democracy Does . . . And Does Not Do — An informative meta-analysis of the benefits of democracy.

• Saving Democracy
  The 45% Vacuum: Can You Build a Political Tribe Out of the Moderates Left Behind? — Congress has stopped passing bills, the parties have abandoned the middle, and 45% of voters are stranded. Can a new party actually organize them?

• Civic Education
  10 Moments That Almost Broke America, But Made Us — We hear it a lot: America is more divided than ever. But we’ve survived worse. Much worse. And every time we did, we came out stronger than before. Here’s some history worth remembering.

• Saving Democracy
  Turning Our Tools on Ourselves — Danielle Reiff’s assessment of the United States’ democracy, using the assessment tools USAID used abroad in past years.

• Rule of Law
  How AllSides Creates Balanced News: A Step-by-Step Guide — An explanation of what AllSides does to help all of us become better informed.

• Culture and Religion
  Water, Systems, & the Stories We Tell Ourselves — We swim in the water of the systems we’re in. And because we’re used to this water --these systems -- they come to be an invisible and inevitable part of our lives.

• Constructive Communication
  7 Questions to Ask Someone You Disagree With — Nobody in the history of the world has ever been insulted into changing their mind. What about instead of trying to land the knockout punch, get curious. Ask a real question and then actually listen to the answer.

• Theories of Change
  How Embodiment Transforms Systems Change — Just as education matured beyond drills and rewards, systems change practice must evolve beyond predominantly cognitive approaches to integrating more embodied ways of being and making sense of the world.

• Theories of Change
  Launch of “Renew American Democracy (RAD)” Strategy — Homegrown organizers fuse with the experts who spent careers fighting autocrats abroad. The strategy they built together may be our most comprehensive answer yet.

• Trust / Trust Earning
  Politics can’t save us — We suffer from a pervasive crisis of belief -- in our leaders, institutions, systems, even one another, writes Rich Harwood of the New Civic Path.

• Developing a Unifying Vision
  A Democracy That Works for All — The new website of the Democracy Renewal Group, a community of global democracy and peacebuilding specialists using their experience and expertise to protect and strengthen U.S. democracy for all.

• Suppressing Opponents
  Nonprofit Toolkit: Resources for organizations facing government investigations — This toolkit offers best practices for responding to politicized government investigations so that organizations can keep doing lawful, mission-based work.

• Saving Democracy
  Democracy Accelerator — Information about the new Democracy Accelerator platform, designed as a place for democracy organizations to share information, resources, and collaborate on projects.

• Authoritarianism
  How Dictators Are Defeating Democracies — For defenders of democracy, an update on the ways in which authoritarians are challenging democratic societies.

• Developing a Unifying Vision
  Democracy Stories Lab — The world needs compelling storytelling about democracy -- stories that touch people’s hearts and minds, that can move them to participate in many forms of public life and, in doing so, create social and political change.

• Theories of Change
  Hahrie Han of Johns Hopkins University on What Moves People to Act Together — Hahrie Han joins Daniel Stid to talk about her research on belonging, civic action, and transformational community organizing.

• Constructive Communication
  America @ 250 Dialogue Guide — On our 250 birthday, the United States stands at a crossroads, facing critical dilemmas and existential challenges. Dialogue can help us face these together. Essential Partners shows how.

• Crime / Policing / Guns
  Victims Ignored Is Justice Denied — Upholding victims’ rights is an essential part of serving as a federal prosecutor. An argument that under President Trump, DOJ leadership has been consistently ignoring its obligations and losing the trust of crime victims.

• Saving Democracy
  The Importance of Civic Culture to Democracy, with Laurie Patton, President of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences — A podcast discussing how civic culture is democracy’s foundation and that a strong civic culture calls for us to engage in a way that recognizes each other’s humanity.

• Developing a Unifying Vision
  Shared Stewardship: How We Build a Thriving Democracy Together — A rising movement of stewards is working across differences to help every community thrive.

• Theories of Change
  “What Can I Do?” -- The Answer in Less than 30 Minutes — Stories Change Power has a short video specifically designed for people who are distraught about what is happening in and to the United States and want to know “what they can do” to help turn things around.

  More Colleague Activity Listings

News and Opinion

From around the web, more insight into the nature of our conflict problems, limits of business-as-usual thinking, and things people are doing to try to make things better. (Formerly, Beyond Intractability in Context.)

• Social / Economic Complexity
  Systems Get Gamed — An interesting and likely valid theory about our many institutional failures -- eventually people figure out loopholes that allow them to exploit the most well-meaning institutions.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  I escaped Hezbollah — and found the truth about Israel. — A case where lived experience can tell us a lot about misconceptions embedded in the widely believed stereotypes about the ongoing conflict between Israel and Iran.

• Media Reform
  School phone bans make big promises. They won’t solve this problem. — A timely and important reminder that the use of phones during school time is not the only media threat facing young people. What about the rest of the day?

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  The U.S.-Iran Deal: Glass Half-Full? — An exceptionally good analysis of the on-again, off-again Iranian ceasefire deal -- an analysis that goes beyond simply deciding who won and lost and starts thinking about what comes next.

• Progressive Left
  Coleman Hughes: The Case for Progressive Patriotism — An argument that, in the United States, patriotism is consistent with, rather than antithetical to, progressive ideals.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  A good offence is the best defence — For those who believe they have been targeted by a large-scale disinformation campaign – thoughts about how to respond constructively and effectively.

• Family / Gender / LBGTQ+
  The Price of British Multiculturalism: Women as Livestock — From Great Britain, a heart-wrenching story about what happens when the core goals of the feminist movement collide with the multicultural imperative to combat anything that might see as Islamophobic.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  The Betrayal of the Iranian People — A timely and important reminder of the brutally repressive nature of the Iranian regime -- a regime that is finding its power dramatically enhanced by the revolution in inexpensive drone warfare.

• Race / Anti-Racism
  The Comfort of Victimhood — A thought-provoking exploration of the downsides of seeing oneself as a victim (even when one has been victimized).

• Artificial Intelligence
  Assume You Will Be Hacked — A blunt warning about one way in which AI is already threatening critically important infrastructure.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  Israel keeps winning wars. So why are we losing? — A perceptive and critically important observation that the decisive battles in the ongoing wars against Israel are being fought in the court of world opinion, not on a conventional battlefield.

• Effective Problem-Solving
  We’re dermatologists. Sunscreen isn’t the problem. — In the context of the great debate over sunscreen safety an explanation of the important difference between proven dangers and theoretically possible risks.

• Effective Problem-Solving
  The American West is burning. This maze provides kindling. — As we, in the western United States, enter another round of red flag weather, a timely article that looks at the way in which bureaucratic hurdles undermine our efforts to contain wildfire risks.

• Culture and Religion
  The Reconquest of Mainline Protestantism — An enlightening analysis of the decline in mainstream Protestant denominations in the United States, the role of culture war conflicts in that decline, and the ongoing resurgence of many of these religious communities.

• Communication Complexity
  Does anything I write matter anymore? — From Noah Smith, a man we count on to write consistently insightful and well-documented essays, thoughts about the diminishing audience for such thought-provoking work.

• Saving Democracy
  What’s the Matter With Congress? — For those who want to quit complaining about Congress and try to understand what’s gone wrong and how it might be put right -- a compilation of the latest political science thinking.

• Superpower Conflict
  China’s Last Moonshot — For those impressed by China’s astonishing ability to build things, a look at what happens when the things that are built are unneeded.

• US Politics
  Trump Is Turning Journalists Into Criminals — A detailed assessment of the complex legal questions surrounding the Trump administration’s efforts to prosecute journalists who publish unfavorable reports.

• Theories of Change
  America Needs a New Sputnik Moment — As the world’s geopolitical rivals are about to embark on an unprecedented arms race, a call for the United States to mobilize the next generation of talented young people.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  America’s Big Mistake in Iran — An article that looks at US and Israeli strategy in the recent war against Iran from the perspective of a longer-term debate about the efficacy and morality of strategic bombing.

More News and Opinion Links

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About the MBI Newsletters

Two or three times a week, Guy and Heidi Burgess, the BI Directors, share some of our thoughts on political hyper-polarization and related topics. We also share essays from our colleagues and other contributors, and every week or so, we devote one newsletter to annotated links to outside readings that we found particularly useful relating to U.S. hyper-polarization, threats to peace (and actual violence) in other countries, and related topics of interest. Each Newsletter is posted on BI, and sent out by email through Substack to subscribers. You can sign up to receive your copy here and find the latest newsletter here or on our BI Newsletter page, which also provides access to all the past newsletters, going back to 2017.

NOTE! If you signed up for this Newsletter and don't see it in your inbox, it might be going to one of your other emails folder (such as promotions, social, or spam). Check there or search for beyondintractability@substack.com and if you still can't find it, first go to our Substack help page, and if that doesn't help, please contact us.

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This is the sixth in a series of newsletters on Braver Angels’ notion of courageous citizenship.

• Our first Courageous Citizenship newsletter explained and expanded upon Braver Angels’ term and explained why we think the concept is so important.

• In the second newsletter, we explained more about the courage that citizens need to be effective, and gave the example shared earlier by Harry Boyte about how this was done so well in the past by participants in Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement.

• The third newsletter and fourth newsletters looked at how citizens can and should interact with government.

• The fifth newsletter in this series was a guest newsletter by Julie Silverbrook on “Civic Parenting.”

Now we are going back to the question of how citizens can work with government, even when they do not see the government as being immediately forthcoming or helpful.

To offer practical, real-world example of how citizens can work within the system even when “the system” is not working with you, I (Guy) would like you to tell a personal story about my multi-year effort to influence the way in which Boulder, Colorado manages its prized Open Space and Mountain Park (OSMP) system. I share the full story in this video (which is an updated version of a lecture that I routinely gave to my conflict and peacebuilding students). This newsletter contains an excerpted version of the story, along with commentary and a few details I didn’t put in the video. Since the video is a good bit different, we think that is also worth a watch/listen (or you can read the transcript.)

Go to the Video/Transcript

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Heidi and I have lived in Boulder, Colorado since the late 1960s, taking one year off to do post-docs at M.I.T. One of the main reasons we stayed so long — probably the main reason — is because we cherish Boulder’s Open Space and Mountain Parks (OSMP) system and the lifestyle that it makes possible. Boulder lies in a spectacular valley where the Great Plains meet the Rocky Mountains. Unlike many communities, Boulder has, from its earliest days, worked hard to preserve, rather than develop, its spectacular surroundings. The resulting OSMP system with its over 155 miles of trails is, in many ways, worthy of national monument status.

We live about a mile away from the nearest trail, so daily exercise hikes have long been part of our routine. That’s even how I write: I dictate into my phone as I walk. I then use AI to transcribe the dictation, which I then edit. I find it much harder to write at a desk! Heidi uses open space differently — it is her therapist. Many of her friends wonder how we stay sane, spending so much time focusing on the darker sides of politics and conflict. She uses open space as an escape, focusing on the flowers and birds, the sky, the forest, and the mountain backdrop. It’s our “happy place,” as Heidi’s friends put it. And we try hard to go there every day.

The story I want to tell starts back in the 2010s, when a sign first appeared, blocking one of my favorite trails, saying that the trail was now reserved for nearby homeowners only. This was a previously public trail from a public street to publicly owned OSMP land. The homeowners association was trying to use their ownership of this small strip of land between the street and open space to effectively deny anyone but their members access to this particularly spectacular part of the OSMP system. What followed from this relatively minor and simple frustration was an experience that taught me a lot about citizenship. The goal of this post and accompanying video is to share some of what I learned.

The lessons from this experience are widely applicable, as it tells a lot about how local decision making works in our democracy. I have another similar story about the six years I spent deeply involved in school politics at the middle and high school levels. Others who have been engaged in such controversies can doubtless tell other similar stories. This is especially true for those who were able to successfully influence the system. Those who get frustrated, give up, and disengage, not surprisingly, are much less likely to make a difference.

Here I tell the story, in terms of the lessons I learned.

Lesson 1: Try to Understand the Other Side’s Perspective

After the sign appeared, I called a few of the people I knew who lived nearby (and hence were members of the homeowners’ association) and I asked why they felt a need to put up that sign. They explained that parking was getting to be a problem — so many people were parking in front of their houses to go on a hike that they and their visitors sometimes couldn’t park in front of their own houses. Noise and litter were getting to be problems too.

I could understand these concerns. We, too, live right across the street from a big city park, and our street gets all parked up on the weekends, and sometimes on weekdays as well. And we get litter in our yard. Still, we figure that putting up with such behavior is part of the price of living next to a popular public amenity.

This neighborhood association, however, did not agree. (There is reason to believe they were primarily concerned with monopolizing access to this particular part of open space because, when I raised the possibility of constructing a visitor parking lot in a hidden area to service these trails, they objected strenuously.)

So, that’s the first lesson I learned: it helps to find out the reasoning behind your opponent’s behavior. You don’t have to agree with them — I certainly didn’t. But I better understood where they were coming from. I could also understand why, since they owned a short stretch of land between the street and open space, that they thought they had the right to close it. Still, to me, this didn’t seem fair to other Boulder citizens who had been paying for this open space for many years. So, I decided to lodge a complaint.

Lesson 2: Appeal to Responsible Authorities

I didn’t just walk away angry and decide that this was another reason to conclude that democracy didn’t work. And though I thought about simply ignoring the sign, daring them to have me arrested, I decided that wasn’t likely to be a good strategy, because they probably would, and I wouldn’t win. That would be trespassing.

So, I decided to go to the department that manages the open space, assuming that this was something OSMP wouldn’t condone. First I called a park ranger and complained. I quickly learned this was a “system level” policy matter that he wasn’t authorized to address. He suggested that I contact the OSMP Director’s Office. I did.

This is where I discovered that what looked like a simple access issue for one trail was actually part of a much wider and deeper philosophical dispute over the proper balance between environmental preservation and open space access and recreation. I learned that the preponderance of opinion within the environmental community had concluded that OSMP properties were being “loved to death,” and strenuous measures were needed to reduce access. OSMP administrators, it turned out, thought that homeowner’s association action was a positive step in that direction, since the only people who would now go to this area were relatively few local homeowners.

Though I could understand this point of view, I still thought that it was deeply mistaken. (Why is a long story, but briefly, if people don’t have access to nature, they won’t have the incentive to protect it, and political pressure to develop it is more likely to succeed. I also believed that the environmental threat was nowhere near as serious as it was being portrayed. Evidence of human presence is not the same thing as environmental damage. We had lots of stories of instances in which humans were able to coexist with the natural environment just fine.)

Lesson 3: Don’t Be Afraid to Take Your Issue to the Broader Public

At this point I decided to go to the city newspaper and tell them that “I had a story they might be interested in.” And I was right! They were interested. A reporter came and interviewed me, and they took my picture next to the No Trespassing sign. It went on the front page of the newspaper — this was before smart phones and social media, so it was a time when people actually read the newspaper.

This was when I started to get a better sense of just how big of a story (and a dispute) this was. I got contacted by many other people, who had similar (or related) concerns. Their favorite trails (other trails) were being closed off too. The City was starting to build, instead of its older, beautiful trails, what I call “cattle chute trails” — trails between two fences, usually right near the road, that keep hikers and/or bikers right on the periphery of open space, not out in the open areas themselves.

I found out that this was happening more and more. 90% of the land purchased by the Open Space Department between 1967-1976 was open to public access. Only 52% of lands purchased in the following decade was open. For lands purchased in the decade after that, the accessible percentage was down to 30%. And, for lands purchased between 1997-2006, only about 4% was open to the public. So, by 2010, increasing numbers of Boulder citizens recognized that we weren’t buying open space anymore; our tax dollars were being used to buy closed space! A large number of us concluded that if we didn’t fight this trend, more and more land was likely going to be declared off limits.

So, I decided to join the Boulder Area Trails Coalition (BATCO) — a coalition of hikers, bikers, runners, climbers, dog walkers, and equestrians who were concerned about maintaining access to open space. BATCO soon joined a newly-formed organization called the Boulder Outdoor Coalition which was an effort to build an even stronger political force. Members included the Action Committee for Eldorado--a climbers’ organization, the Boulder County Horse Association, the Boulder Mountain Bike Alliance, the Boulder Trail Runners, FIDOS (Friends Interested in Dogs and Open Space), the Flatirons Climbing Council and the Rocky Mountain Hang Gliding and Paragliding Association.

Lesson 4: Control Internal Disputes

The Coalition did have internal conflicts: the hikers didn’t like bikers (and some didn’t like dogs). (I was among that group, as I have been bitten several times while hiking the trails. But a majority of hikers in Boulder seem to have dogs, so I recognized a dispute I couldn’t win. The bikers didn’t like much of anyone else, because they felt that the others had successfully lobbied in the past to close most of Boulder’s trails to bikes. But we all realized that we shared more common interests than opposing interests, and it was worth our while to compromise with each other and cooperate to make as strong a case as possible to keep the trails we all cherished accessible.

This was particularly true because the preservation side of the dispute — the people who advocated the closure of as many trails as possible — had been well organized for much longer than we had. They had been working politically to elect like-minded council members, who then selected like-minded Open Space Board of Trustee Members, who then set the policy for the Open Space staff to follow. So we were swimming upstream. But access to open spaces was such a critical part of our lives that we weren’t willing to give up. So we continued to look for ways in which we could persuade the city to change policies.

Lesson 5: Contend Constructively

Heidi and I have been advocating for something that we call “constructive confrontation” for a long time. Constructive confrontation takes the lessons from the conflict resolution and peacebuilding fields and applies them to advocacy. It calls for treating the opposition with respect, listening (and seriously considering) their interests and needs, and seeking, wherever possible, ways that you can work together to attain mutual goals.

This was fairly easy within our own coalition; it was a much more challenging task with the preservation-minded organizations (and the homeowners associations) that were anti-access.

We were advocates for a reasonable, balanced approach — the kind to approach that, in most other cities in the United States, would have had us labeled as “environmentalist.” We cared deeply about the health of our natural environment. We wanted our mountain parks to be healthy environments for all the creatures and plants that lived there. We just thought it was possible for that to happen, and still have people around. If a good case could be made that human presence was threatening something, we were all for protecting it. So, for instance, the climbers have not fought the closure of many climbing routes to protect nesting raptors — they respect the environment too, and choose to climb elsewhere during raptor nesting season.

All we asked was that the preservationists considered our desire for access to areas where we were not doing harm. And we thought we had good reasons, not just for us, but, as I indicated earlier, ultimately for the continued protection of the whole system. People who don’t go out in the parks don’t necessarily understand their value, and might be willing to let them be developed for other valuable goals, such as affordable housing, for instance, sometime in the future. So, we argued, access was actually necessary for preservation, not opposed to it. We also argued that the impact of a particular recreational use needed to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. At the time, environmentalists were defining a healthy environment as simply the absence of human presence. We thought we should do better than that.

Lesson 6: Take Advantage of Public Participation Opportunities and Work Your Way up the Political Power Hierarchy

One of the first things that the Boulder Outdoor Coalition did was start looking for ways in which it and its members could participate in (and hopefully influence) the OSMP decision-making processes. We learned that there are mandated public participation opportunities — opportunities that we decided to start taking advantage of. After all, as one of my new-found allies was fond of saying, “The world is run by those who show up.”

Since OSMP administration was making policy decisions we disapproved of, the first obvious question was, who is in a position to tell it to revise it’s governing philosophy? We learned that OSMP policies are set by a Board of Trustees and there are public participation opportunities at Board meetings. After attending a few such meetings, it was clear they, too, were strong supporters of OSMP’s increasingly strenuous environmental protection policies.

So, we asked how he Board members were selected. We learned that they are appointed by the City Council for five year terms, with one person being appointed each year. So we decided to try to convince the Council to balance OSMP’s trustees by selecting more pro-access members. Unfortunately, most members of the Council were also still quite supportive of policies that prioritized preservation.

So, we decided to try to make access questions a major issue in the upcoming City Council election. To do that, we interviewed all the Council candidates and selected and campaigned for those we thought would be most supportive. This required a major effort to explain why we thought that the environmental benefits of the current generation of access restrictions did not justify their adverse quality-of-life impacts.

These are just some of political power options we considered. More are explained in the accompanying slideshow/lecture.

Lesson 7: Collaborate When You Can

Slowly, after several years of contention, the Open Space Department realized that the Boulder Outdoor Coalition was not going away. It had strong and increasing public support, and it wasn’t being unreasonable. And, the same was true for the preservationists. So, OSMP decided to pursue a consensus building process with all the interest groups involved. There was some haggling about who would be involved, how it would be run, and such things, but it finally was formed and settled down to work.

I wound up serving on what came to be called the Community Collaborative Group. It took a lot of time. We spent two years once or twice a month, four hours each night, plus field trips, and homework, going through and thinking about how to balance access and environmental protections on pretty much every foot of every trail in the system. It was an often acrimonious, difficult negotiation process that nobody was very pleased with. But it did balance everyone’s interests. And if the test of doing this right is everybody being sort of equally uncomfortable, it did a pretty good job. Eventually, we did come up with a final set of recommendations that everyone at least grudgingly agreed to. A lot of people were unhappy about it — we all had to give up a lot of things we wanted. But we all, also, got a lot of things we wanted. And we all agreed, after two years of haggling (which followed several prior years of fighting before the process started) that this was the best we were likely to be able to do.

Lesson 8: It’s Not Over ‘til It’s Over

Even when you go through a collaborative process like this, you’re still going to have to defend the agreement. The recommendations still had to be approved by the City Council. And people who were not involved in the process, who did not understand the necessity of tradeoffs, who did not see all the data that we saw, argued against it at the City Council meetings. All the fights were fought over again. But the Council understood the nature of the process we had completed. They understood that we had examined all the issues in great depth and came up with what was, indeed, likely to be the best compromise possible. So, ultimately, they approved our recommendations, and the agreement. And, to its credit, it has now held for over a decade. (While there continue to be disputes, those disputes have been relatively minor with nowhere near the animosity that was common in the earlier era.)

Lesson 9: Stay In It for the Long Haul

The big lesson in all this is that effective courageous citizenship requires a long-term commitment. While the involvement of specific individuals may wax and wane over time, it is important that interest groups remain continuously and actively involved. Public policies result from the outcomes of a seemingly endless series of disputes — disputes that may be resolved through agreement, Board of Trustees actions, Council decisions, lawsuits, elections, or other processes. Defending group interests requires continual involvement in all these areas. This is why democratic citizenship is invariably a group process that requires individuals to work together to support one another.

Lesson 10: If Want Democracy to Work, You Have To Work at Democracy

This is how democracy is supposed to work — at least at the local level. Ideally, the federal level should work this way too, but there are so many more stakeholders, so many more competing interests, that copying this model at the national level is difficult. But, it is probably not impossible.

And not everything at the local level is as contentious, as difficult, as open space management was in Boulder. Open space is just so integral to what Boulder is, and to who Boulderites are. So the process we went through to assure its protection and its access for generations to come was a hard-learned lesson in how to do democracy right.

Our Community Collaborative Group took an enormous amount to time and effort. And the issues were so numerous, so complex, with so many different stakeholders, that it would probably take that long if it were being done today. But a lot of innovations are happening in public participation that are enabling much shorter processes to work on simpler problems. Deliberation processes, such as the ones described by Martin Carcasson and Jacob Bornstein, and citizen assemblies are usually much shorter than our process was. (Actually, Jacob worked on water conflicts in Colorado, which probably are even more contentious and took even longer. But his story is another good lesson in democracy done well.)

So, these processes always take effort. And they are often initiated by citizens themselves who, like I did long ago, saw a problem they wanted to fix. Courageous citizens take responsibility for solving their own problems. They don’t expect other people to solve them for them. But they do so constructively, working with people on all sides of a dispute, to work out a solution that works for as many people as possible, not just for “their side.” Because that’s what Courageous Citizenship is all about.

Please Contribute Your Ideas To This Discussion!

In order to prevent bots, spammers, and other malicious content, we are asking contributors to send their contributions to us directly. If your idea is short, with simple formatting, you can put it directly in the contact box. However, the contact form does not allow attachments. So if you are contributing a longer article, with formatting beyond simple paragraphs, just send us a note using the contact box, and we'll respond via an email to which you can reply with your attachment. This is a bit of a hassle, we know, but it has kept our site (and our inbox) clean. And if you are wondering, we do publish essays that disagree with or are critical of us. We want a robust exchange of views.

Contact Us

About the MBI Newsletters

Two or three times a week, Guy and Heidi Burgess, the BI Directors, share some of our thoughts on political hyper-polarization and related topics. We also share essays from our colleagues and other contributors, and every week or so, we devote one newsletter to annotated links to outside readings that we found particularly useful relating to U.S. hyper-polarization, threats to peace (and actual violence) in other countries, and related topics of interest. Each Newsletter is posted on BI, and sent out by email through Substack to subscribers. You can sign up to receive your copy here and find the latest newsletter here or on our BI Newsletter page, which also provides access to all the past newsletters, going back to 2017.

NOTE! If you signed up for this Newsletter and don't see it in your inbox, it might be going to one of your other emails folder (such as promotions, social, or spam). Check there or search for beyondintractability@substack.com and if you still can't find it, first go to our Substack help page, and if that doesn't help, please contact us.

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On June 15, 2026, I (Heidi Burgess) talked to Debilyn Molineaux, who describes herself as a "civic entrepreneur, strategist, and storyteller dedicated to advancing a thriving, just, and healthy democratic republic in the United States." For more than 20 years, Debilyn has helped build and strengthen the democracy ecosystem by launching, leading, and advising organizations such as LivingRoom Conversations and the Bridge Alliance— organizations that work to expand civic participation, bridge divides, and support long-term democratic renewal. She now leads an organization she created call JEDI Futures (formerly American Future) that aims to help people envision better lives for themselves--and their communities. She explains why she is doing this, and how she hopes it will help strengthen democracy here in the United States and beyond.

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I started my conversation with Debilyn by asking her to tell me her how she got into the field and how her career has changed since she began working on democracy-related efforts in 2003. She explained that she started out briefly working in politics, and soon met a number of people who called themselves “transpartisans” — a label and work she found appealing.

We were hosting leadership retreats where Grover Norquist would sit down and talk to Joan Blades from MoveOn—so Grover from Americans for Tax Reform, very libertarian, conservative-ish, and Joan from MoveOn, very progressive. We were helping these leaders have very meaningful conversations and understand each other better.

After a few years of doing that, Joan called her and said:

Hey, I have this idea—what if people could do something in their living rooms and have a conversation that leads somewhere and helps them understand each other better?” Her concern at the time was, why don’t people believe in climate change? She just could not understand it. This was 2010. And out of that bloomed Living Room Conversations.

Then, fast forward a few years, we decided that conversing was not enough. We actually needed a coalition, because there were so many people who were not only doing dialogue work, but there was structural reform work that needed to be added, and there was policymaking and think tanks that needed to be engaged, and then media came along.

So the Bridge Alliance was actually trying to help people who were ensconced in their silos—civic engagement, or structural reform, or policy writing, or media—connect with each other for the sake of a better democracy. So the bridge was across the silos, not between the people.

So, Debilyn explained, throughout her career, she has seen a need for something, helped develop it, led some of these efforts for awhile and then she move on to something else that needed doing. So, after she’d led The Bridge Alliance for awhile, she saw that the field was doing a lot of “mental, system-thinking work,” but it wasn’t “helping people understand how democracy impacted their everyday life.”

For Joe Smith in the Midwest, or for somebody in the Northeast or in Arizona, democracy is so assumed in our culture that we don’t understand its impact in our day-to-day life. And therefore, we also can’t imagine what our life would be like if we didn’t have it, or if we had a better system, a healthy political system. So this idea of having a personal stake in democracy is where it [JEDI Futures] came from.

Initially it was [called] American Futures, and then I realized it really shouldn’t just be limited to the United States, so I shifted over to JEDI Futures. JEDI is an acronym for justice, equity, dignity, and inclusion. It’s a free tool online. Anybody can start imagining their future and then share it with their friends and family and neighbors, and start building out the future vision of what we all want to live into. And that will, in turn, help us build a better democracy.

I asked whether her tool helped people develop a personal vision about what people want to do with their own lives, or does it focus on community or the nation? Debilyn explained that it focuses on what people what to do with their own personal lives. If you ask what people want their community to be like, she explained, they tend to point out how they want other people to change. She wants people to envision what they want for themselves, and then notice how that intersects with what other people want for themselves — which then can lead to what people can build together.

People can fill out the questionnaire online, or they can download it and do it offline — either alone or together with others. When people fill out the questionnaire online, Debilyn gets a copy of their answers, which she keeps in a private database. From that she has aggregated the answers to observe “what we all want.”

She noted that there are “three and a half things” that we all want.

In every interview I’ve ever conducted*, people want to have a deep connection with the people in their lives, so they feel like they belong. They want to have a community around them that supports them being themselves and accepts them for who they are. And they want to contribute back to others and to their community. I call it the 3 Cs to make it easy to remember: deep connection, a community of belonging, and a way to contribute back.

And the half: the half is about their relationship with nature, because not everybody mentions nature. But people who do mention nature want to have access to green things, a way to interact with a park, a hiking trail. They want to live on a farm. There’s something about nature that about half the people mention in their future.

When people do it [the questionnaire] offline, they can do it with others and compare answers. This has the potential of leading more quickly to interpersonal understandings and sometimes collaborative action to help a set of people achieve their goals. Once you’re visioning your own life—what you’re proud of, how you’re going to feel, how you spend your time—these are really important questions to build out what you want for your own future life.

[Then] I do what I call the “me to we” flip in the questions. I ask people, “Okay, so we’ve built out this beautiful vision. What is the community that supports you in that?” And this is why I love it when people fill out the online visioning tool and share their information with me. But even better is when they download the PDF and do it with people in their life. Because then, especially if they interview each other, or do the visioning tool together, they start to build community just by using the tool.

I noted that I was surprised with Debilyn’s 3Cs because I expected people to talk about fundamental human needs as first postulated by John Burton and other human needs theorists. Their notion (drawn from Maslow) is that all humans have fundamental needs and when those are not met, people will fight to get them met. Although these needs include fundamentals like food and shelter, Burton and human needs theorists in the conflict resolution and peacebuilding fields focused particularly on identity, security, and recognition. I expected people to focus more on those kinds of things -- feeling safe, and secure in who they were, particularly.

Debilyn explained that the answers actually did correspond to that, at least to some extent:

I’m trained as a life coach, and the visioning tool is actually a coaching interview. The way the questions are framed is, “Okay, how many years do we want to go into the future?” We’d go 5, 10, 20 years into the future. And I’d say, “Okay, we’re going to go and observe your older self.” So I’m setting up their imagination. The first question is, “Okay, we have arrived on the platform. Where are we? Describe your surroundings.” And then, “As you’re observing your older self, what are you most proud of?” So I’m already putting them in a mind-frame where they’ve already done what they wanted to do, and they’ve got what they want. All of those survival needs are already met. Asking those survival questions would imply that they don’t have it, and therefore they want it. So I started from a different place. But I find it interesting that I could almost match up the community of belonging, the deep connections, and the contribution with identity, security, and recognition. I certainly see the sense of belonging linking up [to those ideas].

I also noted that I was impressed that all people said that they want to contribute back to others and their communities. Scholars have long pointed out that the U.S. is highly individualistic, with people being more concerned about their own well-being than with the well-being of their communities or society, which is more common in what scholars call “communitarian cultures.” This seems even more true now, with the epidemic of loneliness, lack of perceived agency, and apparent increasing prevalence of narcissism.

But Debilyn’s finding that all of her respondents said that they want to contribute back to others and to their community contradicts that notion. After the interview, Guy pointed out that Debilyn’s findings were consistent with our observations that most of our students seemed to want to find a way to “make a difference.” So that makes the notion of “courageous citizens,“ which we have been exploring a lot lately, more feasible.

We went on to discuss several of Debilyn’s blog posts that she had in her Substack over the last several months. One I particularly liked was entitled “Bridging Is Not Sufficient to the Task of Fighting Authoritarianism.“ I explained that it related to the long-running series of posts we’ve put on our Substack on whether or not bridging is “fiddling while Rome burns.” (This series, so far, has included seven posts, all of which are linked to the last one.) So, I asked Debilyn, where did she weigh in -- is bridging just “fiddling while Rome burns?” She said, yes, it is.

That is my assessment today, June 15th, 2026. Because getting along with our neighbors—understanding our neighbors and their motivations—doesn’t change our behavior enough to fight authoritarianism. What we need to protect democracy in the United States is to act like the citizens our country needs us to be. And that goes beyond bridging.

One of the things that I found in the bridging community, when I was a deep part of it and a leader in it, was that so many of the people who are doing bridging are doing it because they’re trying to avoid conflict. And as we are seeing our system of democracy fail, our institutions fail, we have to address the conflict in order to set up the new structure—because we’re all going to want different things. How we argue and debate and decide what is next is going to be conflictual. And I would rather have straight-up conflict that’s honest and in good faith than a “let’s smooth it over and keep the waters calm” effort. Not everyone in my bridging community is like that, but there are some people who are conflict avoiders, and they’re not helpful right now.

I noted that I have long thought that some mediators went into the profession because they didn’t like conflict, and wanted to “fix it.” Scholars, on the other hand, I noted, mostly believe that conflict is a normal and essential social process —but it can be done more or less constructively. Guy has long referred to conflict as “the engine of social learning.” So if you get rid of conflict, you are also getting rid of social learning.

So then I asked if Debilyn thought bridging was destructive, or just not helpful?

It is, of course, not destructive. I think it needs to be thought of, though, as a skill set, or a tool that we use to keep our relationships alive—so that, as we’re having conflict, they’re strong enough to survive.

Because the other reason that bridging is insufficient right now is that there’s a group of people out there that I call “conflict profiteers.” I didn’t like Amanda Ripley calling them “entrepreneurs,” because I’m an entrepreneur. So I wanted to put some negative connotation on it—actually, a friend suggested it. These conflict profiteers have figured out how to hijack our neural pathways and put us in survival mode—fear and anger—and live there. When that happens, we don’t have access to our prefrontal cortex to do the critical thinking to get out of it. And bridging requires a prefrontal cortex. So the bridging community is at a complete disadvantage already. And then you provide profit incentives for these people who sow division for the sake of sowing division, and they make money off of it. So we have all these perverse incentives that keep that going. That’s the other reason that bridging is hard right now, and insufficient.

We also talked about the fact that if attitudes about “the other” change through dialogues, the change usually doesn’t last more than a week or two. And it doesn’t translate into changed behavior or changed voting patterns or changed government. So it doesn’t help democracy.

So, I asked, what do we do instead?

This is where I go back to the personal visioning tool. Figure out what you want to build. Figure out what your neighbor wants to build. Figure out what your cousin, or your Uncle Bob, wants to build. And you build stuff together. The bridging skills come in really handy, because while you’re building stuff together, the relational skills are going to be helpful for handling any conflict that comes up. But building things together, to me, is the answer. We need to build things together.

I wondered again how building things together locally will defeat authoritarianism, because authoritarianism is, by definition, top down, not bottom up. “It’s tough”, Debilyn said, but the primary approach is through “grassroots efforts that swell up.” That’s where JEDI Futures is placed and where the personal visioning tool is placed. It is trying to help people envision what a better life for themselves would be like, and how that would link to others’ images of a better life to form a goal for a better community.

There are a lot of folks who are working at the ground level to swell up. There are other groups of people who are working to do top-down, policy-level stuff. The challenge here is that Project 2025 was a top-down initiative. We are all living through the implementation right now of Project 2025. We don’t have enough there there,** in my opinion, to have an antidote for Project 2025. There’s not enough money or time to put together a 50-year plan like the Heritage Foundation did. So if it can’t come from the top down, because we don’t have the resources to do that, then it has to come bottom-up. ...

Until we, the people, know what we want and act like the citizens our country deserves, and then we demand that from the government [then authoritarians will still have the upper hand]. The authoritarians have the advantage right now because they’re in power. They have too much power. And it’s corrupt power. They’re trying to rig all of the systems to hold on to power forever.

We talked about how to counter that. Beyond visioning, Debilyn thinks that the best answer is structural change. We agreed, however, that structural change [such as ranked choice voting and open (non-partisan) primaries] are difficult because the two primary parties are dead set against it, and are working to block it in what ever ways they can. Another problem with it, Debilyn said, was

Structural reform is one of those things that’s too wonky. People don’t understand how it impacts their day-to-day lives. They know there’s a primary, and they’re like, “Hey, if I have time, I’ll go vote.” Whereas actually that’s more important, the way everything’s gerrymandered these days. We need something that people connect to their own life, to make sense for them to take action on.

She sees JEDI Futures as providing that.

We talked about many other things as well: the problem of corruption, and how that is helping authoritarians; and about silos that prevent 1/2 of America from seeing or understanding what is really going on). We talked about who should be “in” our new coalitions and who should be “out.” And we talked about how much had changed since we both grew up in the Cold War era. These and other topics are covered in more detail in the full interview.

————————

* Debilyn did interviews using her visioning questionnaire before she put it online. That’s why she uses the term “interview” here. She talks more about the pilot findings in this video.

**This is a reference to a joke that was popular in the 1960s about Oakland, California: “The trouble with Oakland is that when you get there, there isn’t any there there.”

Go to the Full Interview

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Two or three times a week, Guy and Heidi Burgess, the BI Directors, share some of our thoughts on political hyper-polarization and related topics. We also share essays from our colleagues and other contributors, and every week or so, we devote one newsletter to annotated links to outside readings that we found particularly useful relating to U.S. hyper-polarization, threats to peace (and actual violence) in other countries, and related topics of interest. Each Newsletter is posted on BI, and sent out by email through Substack to subscribers. You can sign up to receive your copy here and find the latest newsletter here or on our BI Newsletter page, which also provides access to all the past newsletters, going back to 2017.

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Highlighted Links

A few suggestions about links that we think are especially interesting.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  Anatomy of a debacle — A must-read article explaining the magnitude of the United States and Israel’s defeat in the recent war with Iran. This is an event that will cast a very long shadow and will require dramatic changes in the way we think about war and peace.

• Media Reform
  Why You Should Be a Techno-Skeptic — Sensible advice about how we should, especially with respect to the next generation, think about each next new thing that emerges from the world of high-tech.

• Nihilists
  The Destructivists — A must-read story that helps us better understand how the left and the right’s incessant criticism of the establishment is leading us toward a kind of destructive nihilism that is threatening society’s very foundations.

• Interstate War
  America Can’t Build for War Anymore — A more in-depth examination of one of the many newly discovered limits on US power -- its inability to affordably produce the munitions needed to defend itself and its allies in today’s protracted armed conflicts.

• Interstate War
  The World’s Great Powers Are Learning They Have Limits — More insight into the era’s biggest revelations --the fact that the world’s great powers are nowhere near as great or powerful as they would like to think.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  Why Iran Continues to Choose War Over Peace — An important article explains how cultural differences that have made the conflict between Iran, Israel, and the United States so intractable (and peacemaking efforts so futile).

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  Iran is Trump’s Katrina — Another must-read article that explains the catastrophic consequences of Operation Epic Fury and the enormous changes that will be required in the war’s aftermath.

Reader Suggested Links

Highlighting links suggested by our readers. Please send us links to things that you find useful.

• Social / Economic Complexity
  The Ordinary Miracle of Existing — As we struggle through our little (and not so little) frustrations, grievances, and conflicts, an argument for stepping back and remembering the miracles that make us and our world possible.

• Social / Economic Complexity
  What the Cult of Efficiency Costs Us — Important reflections on the downside of an economic system that ruthlessly channels resources to the most efficient producer of any good or service.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  Haviv Rettig Gur: When Will the War with Iran End? — An article written before the recent peace agreement that offers important insights into the long-term nature of the Israeli Iranian conflict.

• Psychological Complexity
  The Cult of Delayed Gratification Is a Lie — An updated look at the famous marshmallow test which sought to predict a child’s future by his or her willingness to delay the gratification that comes from eating piece of candy.

• Developing a Unifying Vision
  Independent Cascadia? Greater Idaho? Disunited States Look Toward Divorce — One of the keys to making democracy work is a structure that allows communities to manage their own affairs wherever possible. This article reviews efforts to redraw political boundaries in ways that would apply this principle.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  Israel’s greatest threat isn’t Hamas, Hezbollah or Iran — An important reminder that the decisive battle in the wars against Israel is being fought in the court world opinion (a court that will also do much to decide determine whether Israel’s neighbors can escape the curse of Islamic extremism).

• Developing a Unifying Vision
  The Real Reason We Can’t Talk to Each Other — A compelling argument that the key to constructive communication (and building a society that actually works) lies in treating our fellow citizens as if their problems really matter.

  

Colleague Activities

Highlighting things that our conflict and peacebuilding colleagues are doing that contribute to efforts to address the hyper-polarization problem.

• Developing a Unifying Vision
  Chapter 2: A Theory of Gifts — Potentialism argues that everyone has a gift, and has both the right and responsibility to develop and share that gift. But what is a “gift” in this sense?

• Peacebuilding
  The Real Reason the World Cup Matters — The game’s greatest contribution isn’t measured on a scoreboard. It’s found in the connections it creates, the common ground it reveals, and the common good that follows.

• Saving Democracy
  Barack Obama: ‘You wonder why Congress doesn’t work?’ — It’s easy to blame the people in Washington and a lot harder to look at the incentives that shape how they get there.

• Developing a Unifying Vision
  Universal Governance Design — A more upbeat article from somebody who has been thinking about what it would take to build a system of government that really could earn and enjoy the public’s support.

• Peacebuilding
  2026 Global Peace Index — The 2026 Global Peace index documents a year of record-breaking global violent conflict and the deterioration of global peacefulness for the 12th consecutive year.

• Peacebuilding
  The Aid Report: Peacebuilding and Stabilization After U.S. Aid Cuts — An article documenting the real-world impacts of U.S. foreign aid cuts.

• Saving Democracy
  When the State Loses Moral Legitimacy — When governments abandon objective facts, they destroy the foundation of a free society — and the consent of the governed.

• Peacebuilding
  Book Talk with Adam Kahane: Collaborating with the Enemy — Liz Hume talks with Adam Kahane, discussing key lessons from the second edition of his book, “Collaborating with the Enemy: How to Work with People You Don’t Agree with or Like or Trust.”

• Nihilists
  The Psychology of Nothing – Understanding the Pathway to Nihilistic Extremism: Adolescence, Trauma, and a Public Health Model for Prevention — A report arguing that understanding pathways to violence requires a broader framework that draws from developmental psychology, trauma research, and public health approaches, rather than focusing solely on ideological analysis.

• Violence
  The End of Violence: Eliminating the World’s Most Dangerous Epidemic — A book talk with Gray Slutkin on his new book documenting how violence spreads in our minds, and how to stop it.

• Peacebuilding
  The Strategic Blind Spot: How Neglecting Peacebuilding Undermines Global Security — A Reflection Paper, commissioned by the Civil Society Platform for Peacebuilding and Statebuilding (CSPPS) that looks, not only at the problem, but also possible responses to it that would reinvigorate peacebuilding work.

• Civil Society
  The U.S. Civil Society Working Group on Women, Peace, and Security — USCSWG is a non-partisan network of 50+ civil society organizations with expertise on the impacts of conflict on women and their participation in peacebuilding.

• Peacebuilding
  Unlocking the Peace Premium — An evidence-based review of the potentials and pitfalls of private sector finance for conflict transformation.

• Violence
  Key Political Violence and Resilience Trends From 2025 — This report identifies 5 key political violence trends that emerged in the United States in 2025, and discusses three effective resilience and response strategies that can inform mitigation efforts in the coming months.

• Saving Democracy
  Why the Carter Center is Monitoring U.S. Elections — Jason Carter of the Carter center explains what can be done to instill more trust in the voting process in advance of the 2026 U.S. midterms.

• Peacebuilding
  Hope in Action: Stories from the Frontlines — A webinar where SFCG staff shared examples of communities choosing dialogue over division, preventing violence before it escalated, and rebuilding trust in places where hope can feel hardest to hold onto.

• Peacebuilding
  Disrupting Peace: What Leads People to (and Away From) Violent White Supremacy? with Peter Simi and Sara Winegar Budge — A podcast discussing what makes individuals vulnerable to white supremacist beliefs, what it means when extremism becomes mainstream, the surprising permeability of these groups, and how to talk to people in your life who express racist ideology.

• Peacebuilding
  “We Canceled Silence:” How Local Peace Committees Rebuild Trust in Syria — An article on a women-led peacebuilding organization in Syria that brings together women, youth, returnees, and community leaders for dialogue, connection, and collective action in communities deeply affected by war and displacement.

• Bridge Building
  Ten Years In — Terry Kyllo reflects on his ten years working to find the path to cross-group, cross-difference understanding.

• Peacebuilding
  2026 United States Counterterrorism Strategy Escalates Crackdown on Civil Society — A Charity & Security Network (C&SN) analysis of the recently released 2026 U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy and its implications for nonprofit organizations.

• Rule of Law
  How the Carter Center Defends the Rule of Law — A short video exploring how the rule of law helps protect rights, strengthen democracy, and build more just societies by equipping citizens to access justice, safeguard freedom of speech, and maintain government accountability to its constituents.

  More Colleague Activity Listings

News and Opinion

From around the web, more insight into the nature of our conflict problems, limits of business-as-usual thinking, and things people are doing to try to make things better. (Formerly, Beyond Intractability in Context.)

• Saving Democracy
  The West’s Greatest Innovation—An Independent Judiciary — A chance to appreciate (and a reason to work to help preserve) one of the most essential components of democracy -- and independent judiciary focused on making our rule-of-law based system actually work.

• Interstate War
  The Next Domain of Warfare Lies Underground — A perceptive article that sheds further light on just how dramatically the nature of war is being transformed by drones and related technologies. Efforts to prevent war simply have to figure out how to adapt to this new reality.

• Family / Gender / LBGTQ+
  The TQ+ Threat To LGB Rights — One perspective on the important,but seldom recognized, conflicts that exist within the broader gender rights movement.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  The Art of the Non-Deal — From France’s Fukuyama, another perspective on the United States capitulation in its war with Iran.

• Non-Violence
  Protests Are Not Emotional Support Groups — A thoughtful critique of the “No Kings” protests with suggestions about what it’s really going to take to alter our destructive political trajectory.

• Constructively Addressing Complex Issues
  The neglected importance of boring methodological disputes — A welcome and much needed reminder that we can only get closer to the truth if we pay attention too a whole series of complex methodological disputes. Otherwise we’re just using science to rationalize our personal preferences.

• Race / Anti-Racism
  Act Your Race — From Free Black Thought, a succinct, well-written critique of anti-racist ideology -- a critique that argues that it is making our race-based problems worse, not better.

• Culture and Religion
  Civilizations That Forget Themselves Invite Others In — As we continue to criticize our society and our civilization’s many failings, an argument that we also ought to remember and defend its many good points -- good points that include the right to to be so critical.

• Media Reform
  A “Failure of Journalism” in Canada — A story about a particularly egregious case in which the media uncritically promoted a particularly divisive story that ultimately turned out to be untrue.

• Peacebuilding
  Can US Engagement Rescue the United Nations From Irrelevance? — A sharp critique of the many ways in which the United Nations has failed to live up to its lofty ideals, with suggestions on how the United States might be able to help promote much needed changes.

• Climate / Environment / Health
  Can America Build Nuclear Again? Part 1 — A fresh look at nuclear power -- a power source that could play a critical role in promoting energy security and combating climate change.

• Social / Economic Complexity
  A Reading List for the End of Civilization — If you want a list of future opportunities, this is a compilation of information about all of the things that are going wrong. The opportunity is in figuring out how to fix those things.

• Artificial Intelligence
  What If Artificial Intelligence Progress Explodes? — Contemplations about what might happen when the power of artificial intelligence starts feeding back on itself in a kind of positive feedback system.

• Interstate War
  Ukraine Is Not Losing. Russia Is Not Winning. — An update on the hurting, high-tech stalemate that now exists on the Ukrainian/Russian front.

• US Politics
  Beyond Red vs. Blue: The Political Typology — An update on Pew’s long-standing effort to illuminate the fact that the U.S. political divide is far more complex than the simple red/blue dichotomy suggests.

• Saving Democracy
  Is California’s Election ‘Rigged’? — A more in-depth look at the way in which California actually votes (with insights into why those on the conservative side of the political spectrum have real questions about the system’s fairness.)

• Race / Anti-Racism
  The White Identitarians Are Having a Moment — An exploration of the ways in which identity politics plays out on the right-leaning side of the political divide.

• Left / Right Conflict
  Anti-Woke, or Just Wounded? A Typology of Two Types of Anti-Woke Intellectuals — An article illuminating a seldom-recognized distinction between two distinct reasons for challenging progressive policies.

• Social / Economic Complexity
  Rigor or Ruin: Sociology’s Reckoning Has Arrived — As a sociologist who has long been frustrated with the politicalization of my chosen profession, I find this call for rigorously analyzing social problems and possible solutions to be a much needed step forward.

• Saving Democracy
  Politics Cannot be Simulated — An article highlighting the human component of democratic processes -- democracy isn’t just an algorithm for making wise, equitable, and technically sound decisions.

More News and Opinion Links

Please Contribute Your Ideas To This Discussion!

In order to prevent bots, spammers, and other malicious content, we are asking contributors to send their contributions to us directly. If your idea is short, with simple formatting, you can put it directly in the contact box. However, the contact form does not allow attachments. So if you are contributing a longer article, with formatting beyond simple paragraphs, just send us a note using the contact box, and we'll respond via an email to which you can reply with your attachment. This is a bit of a hassle, we know, but it has kept our site (and our inbox) clean. And if you are wondering, we do publish essays that disagree with or are critical of us. We want a robust exchange of views.

Contact Us!

About the MBI Newsletters

Two or three times a week, Guy and Heidi Burgess, the BI Directors, share some of our thoughts on political hyper-polarization and related topics. We also share essays from our colleagues and other contributors, and every week or so, we devote one newsletter to annotated links to outside readings that we found particularly useful relating to U.S. hyper-polarization, threats to peace (and actual violence) in other countries, and related topics of interest. Each Newsletter is posted on BI, and sent out by email through Substack to subscribers. You can sign up to receive your copy here and find the latest newsletter here or on our BI Newsletter page, which also provides access to all the past newsletters, going back to 2017.

NOTE! If you signed up for this Newsletter and don't see it in your inbox, it might be going to one of your other emails folder (such as promotions, social, or spam). Check there or search for beyondintractability@substack.com and if you still can't find it, first go to our Substack help page, and if that doesn't help, please contact us.

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I (Heidi) just recently discovered Julie Silverbrook’s article on Civic Parenting that was originally published in the Fulcrum on May 5, 2026. It is a wonderful article, which seemed very relevant to our series on courageous citizenship (see Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4), so I wrote Julie and asked her if we could reprint it here with attribution. She said “yes,” so here it is. Put in our words, this article is about the way parents can (and should) teach their children to be “courageous citizens.”

Julie, by the way, is Chief Content and Learning Officer at the National Constitution Center and host of the new podcast Civic Parenting. We thank her for her willingness to share this article here.

From the founding, Americans understood that a republic depends on the character and judgment of its citizens. In the years after the Revolution, that insight took shape in what later came to be called “republican motherhood,” the belief that the success of the new nation required raising children with the virtue, knowledge, and discipline necessary for citizenship. The concept reflected the limits of its time, assigning that responsibility narrowly to mothers. But it also captured a deeper truth. Constitutions do not sustain themselves. Self-government endures only when each generation is prepared to understand, value, and uphold its principles.

For much of our history, preparing young people for citizenship was a shared responsibility. Families, schools, and civic institutions reinforced one another, creating a culture where civic learning was woven into daily life.

Today, that balance has broken down.

We have steadily placed more responsibility on schools to prepare young people for citizenship, even as we have reduced the space devoted to civic learning within them. At the same time, the broader ecosystem that once supported this work has weakened. In some communities, these institutions have disappeared altogether, creating what researchers describe as “civic deserts.” In others, they still exist but are no longer central to daily life. Participation in community organizations, religious institutions, and even cultural spaces like museums and historical sites has declined, leaving fewer shared spaces where people regularly encounter one another, engage across differences, and connect to our civic story.

Research from the Brookings Institution estimates that 60 percent of rural youth and 30 percent of urban and suburban young people now live in areas lacking these traditional civic institutions. Civic learning has steadily diminished in schools, even as expectations for what schools should deliver in preparing citizens have grown. Fewer than one-quarter of eighth graders perform at or above proficiency in civics, and many adults cannot name all three branches of government.

We are asking schools to do more, with less, while the institutions that once reinforced that learning have grown weaker or more distant from everyday life. It is an imbalance we can no longer ignore.

The responsibility once described as republican motherhood now belongs to all of us. Parents, caregivers, and families of every kind share in preparing the next generation for life in a constitutional democracy. This is the work of civic parenting.

Civic parenting is not a formal program. It lives in the ordinary rhythms of daily life. It is the intentional practice of welcoming children into the American story and helping them develop the habits that self-government requires.

When a parent reads a book about the American Revolution with a child, that is civic formation. When a family visits a museum or attends a historical program together, that is civic formation. When a parent asks a child to take responsibility at home, that is civic formation. When a parent encourages a child to explain their thinking or works through disagreement with patience rather than dismissal, that too is civic formation.

These moments may seem small, but they are where the habits of citizenship begin. Listening. Reasoning. Exercising restraint. Engaging across difference. These are not learned in a single civics class. They are developed over time, in families, schools, and communities.

If we want a citizenry capable of self-government, we must rebalance the system.

That means continuing to support teachers and schools, while also recognizing that they cannot carry this responsibility alone. It means rebuilding the connections between classrooms, homes, and communities. It means creating accessible entry points that spark curiosity and invite participation. And it means meeting families where they are, with tools and experiences that make civic learning part of everyday life.

Institutions have a role to play here, not as replacements for families, but as partners. At the National Constitution Center, we are working to support this effort by creating pathways that begin with moments of curiosity and lead to deeper constitutional learning, whether in classrooms, online, or around kitchen tables.

The nation’s 250th anniversary this year is not simply a moment to look back. It is an invitation to decide what we will carry forward. It marks the beginning of a civic decade leading to the Constitution’s 250th anniversary in 2037, a period that calls for reflection, renewal, and recommitment.

It should be the decade we correct this imbalance. A decade that makes civic parenting a cultural expectation, not an afterthought. A decade that restores a founding understanding that families, schools, and civic institutions must work together to prepare each new generation for self-government.

This work is not beyond reach. It requires intention. And it can be meaningful and even joyful. When families are supported in it, the impact is profound. It strengthens the nation by preparing citizens capable of self-government. It helps young people develop judgment, curiosity, and civic confidence. And it deepens connections within families themselves.

The Constitution promises the blessings of liberty to “ourselves and our posterity.” That promise depends on what we choose to pass on.

The civic decade calls us to meet that responsibility together and to make civic parenting not the exception, but the expectation.

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About the MBI Newsletters

Two or three times a week, Guy and Heidi Burgess, the BI Directors, share some of our thoughts on political hyper-polarization and related topics. We also share essays from our colleagues and other contributors, and every week or so, we devote one newsletter to annotated links to outside readings that we found particularly useful relating to U.S. hyper-polarization, threats to peace (and actual violence) in other countries, and related topics of interest. Each Newsletter is posted on BI, and sent out by email through Substack to subscribers. You can sign up to receive your copy here and find the latest newsletter here or on our BI Newsletter page, which also provides access to all the past newsletters, going back to 2017.

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On May 19, I (Heidi Burgess) talked with Daniel Yudkin, the Founding Director of the Beacon Project, a part of More in Common. The Beacon Project is a multi-year effort to develop a positive, unifying vision for America, which they call "potentialism." Before that, Daniel was instrumental in producing the two particularly well known More in Common reports: (Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape and The Perception Gap: How False Impressions are Pulling Americans Apart. These reports have been highlighted in multiple presidential campaigns and featured in over 3,000 news articles, including on the front page of the New York Times.

Go to the Full Interview

We have written about More in Common and the Perception Gap and Hidden Tribes reports quite a bit in this newsletter, but since not everyone watching or reading this video would have seen those references, I started by asking Daniel to explain what More in Common does, and what those reports were about. It turns out More in Common was started in the UK in 2016, in response to the assassination of a British member of Parliament, Jo Cox. Initially, it hosted events that brought people together over dinner and other gatherings to help people have better conversations and resolve differences. Soon, chapters were formed in other countries, including the U.S., Poland, Spain, Brazil, France, and Germany. Daniel joined More in Common in 2017 in the U.S. Here they started out doing social psychological research on political polarization, hoping to use those insights to help resolve conflicts and heal divisions.

Their first major report was Hidden Tribes, which

tackled the question of whether America is a 50/50 country, as we are commonly led to believe. Is it really red versus blue, liberals versus conservatives, Democrat versus Republican?

We did a survey of 8,000 Americans. We asked them a range of questions about what we call their “core beliefs” — their underlying views and values, how they think about group identity, what their moral values are, their parenting philosophy, their views about agency and personal responsibility, and other questions. We used a statistical technique called hierarchical clustering to identify groups of people in the American population who hold similar core beliefs. This approach yielded seven different groups — what we call “tribes” — ranging from progressive activists on the far left, about 8% of the population, to devoted conservatives on the far right, also about 6% to 8% of the population, and a number of different groups in between: traditional liberals, moderates, the politically disengaged, traditional conservatives, and so on.

What the report did was break open this notion that we’re such a divided country, and really began to shed light on the different kinds of perspectives that Americans hold — perspectives that don’t necessarily adhere to the traditional stereotypical view of either side.

In addition, we discovered a group that we call the “exhausted majority.” The exhausted majority is about two-thirds of the American population. They experience politics a little bit differently from the people on the political wings. They are less likely to get involved in political arguments and post political content online. They’re more flexible in their views, and they’re more frustrated with political division. They want politicians to work together to solve shared problems.

The overall picture that emerged is that the American political landscape is far more nuanced and complex than we’re typically led to believe by the traditional narrative. We have a lot of Americans who hold more nuanced and complex perspectives and beliefs than you might think based on their party affiliation, where they live, their racial identity, or anything else.

I asked Daniel whether they were finding similar tribes outside the U.S., and he replied “no.”

I think the United States is a unique situation. We are more polarized than the vast majority of other democracies in the Western world. You also have more extreme views being held on the wings — the wings are farther apart from each other than in other countries.

There are more extreme or wing-identified groups in other country settings, but their differences are tame compared to the differences we have in the United States. It’s a complex story, because on one hand we want to say that Americans often do have more in common than they typically believe. But that is really true mostly for the people in the middle. Whereas the active and vocal, very convinced members of the political wings really do have considerable differences.

The Beacon Project was a spin-off of the Hidden Tribes report. That report showed that the Exhausted Majority

feel as though their views and values are not reflected in political discourse. They feel as though the wings don’t speak their language, don’t resonate with their actual views.

The question then emerges: if the prevailing narratives don’t speak to the exhausted majority, what is a narrative that can speak to this group? What is a story, a framework, a set of values that resonates with this group of Americans? That is the question the Beacon Project was set up to investigate and try to solve.

Daniel and his colleagues on the Beacon Project are using a variety of tools to answer this question.

We conduct surveys and polls, We also engage with political science research, social psychology, political philosophy, and history to identify trends and narratives over the course of American history that have resonated and are deep in our founding mythology. Sometimes these are stories just below the surface of people’s awareness — things that people take for granted but don’t always explicitly acknowledge.

We also have conversations with ordinary Americans as well as with experts and scholars, and we bring people together to make progress on this question: what is a defining vision for America’s exhausted majority?

One of the projects under the Beacon Project Umbrella is entitled Agency, Justice, and the American Potential. I (Heidi) was particularly interested in this one because it found that most people believe that they do have agency—that their success is driven more by their own hard work than by luck. That runs counter to Guy’s and my (and many others’) observation that people do not feel they have agency when it comes to influencing politics or political decisions. So I asked about that discrepancy. Daniel replied:

This is a major report that we wrote over many years. We kept finding this very basic, pervasive, pattern in our survey responses over the course of almost a decade. When you ask Americans how much control they feel they have over the way their life turns out — and what plays a bigger role, luck or hard work — Americans across all demographic groups, all generations, all races, all political parties really have this cherished belief in the power of the individual to transcend difficult circumstances and make the most of their situation. This is a pervasive and ubiquitous trend, and it relates very much to the mythology of the American dream. ...

[But] when you ask people, “Do you feel like politicians care about people like you?” — [people answer] “no.” “Do you think you have a voice in the political system?” — “no.” “Does your vote matter?” — “no.” You’ve really hit the nail on the head with this distinction: when it comes to making a successful life, people believe in individual agency. When it comes to affecting the political system, they don’t have that same confidence.

I think it must have to do with personal experience. When it comes to the American Dream or personal agency, people see the successful people in their lives as people who worked hard and applied their skills and aptitudes in particular ways. That gives them evidence to support the belief that people have control over the way their lives turn out. But it’s very easy to be fatalistic about the state of politics. And so, I can definitely see a tension between these two forms of agency.

I wondered what it would take to broaden the notion of personal agency into political agency and Daniel responded by talking about how they are trying to do just that.

Over the past several years, we’ve done an enormous amount of work — hundreds of conversations, thousands of data points. Our research has led us toward a particular framework or idea that we think holds promise for offering a vision for the exhausted majority. It begins with a really simple premise: everyone has something to offer. Everyone has a gift. When we share our gifts, it helps other people, and it also gives our lives a sense of meaning and purpose.

The story we’re exploring is this: if we take as a basic assumption that everyone has something to offer — that everyone has a gift — what does that mean for how we think about the social contract, about what we owe each other?

The first thing you might say is that you want a society where everyone has an opportunity to develop and share their gifts. This means implementing various policies that ensure a basic threshold of fairness for everybody, so that no one is unfairly deprived of the opportunity to develop and share their unique gifts because of circumstances outside of their control.

But if sharing and developing our gifts is something that gives meaning to our own lives and also helps the people around us, we should think of it, not just as a right, but also as a responsibility. So, what this looks like is a renewed understanding of the active role that we each play in enhancing and improving our own lives and the lives of the people in our country and community.

The really simple framework that comes out of this is: everyone has a gift, and a right and responsibility to develop and share that gift. Because this is a framework that speaks to fundamental questions of how we structure our society — what our rights and responsibilities are, what the social contract is — you can think of it as a political philosophy. And we actually give this framework a name—we call it potentialism.

Potentialism is a political philosophy that says: everyone has a gift, and a right and responsibility to develop and share that gift. When we have conversations with people, it often strikes them as fairly intuitive. The idea that everyone has something to contribute — that contributing is an important part of living a meaningful and directed life — resonates. And we should see it as an obligation, because it is something we can do to improve our communities.

Potentialism differs in important ways from other prevailing political philosophies. In its commitment to securing people’s right to contribute, it actually has a higher floor of social support than, for example, libertarian philosophy, which says the government needs to leave people alone. But in emphasizing the notion of responsibility, it goes beyond much thinking in liberal and progressive circles, which are typically reluctant to say that people have duties or responsibilities aside from pursuing their own good in their own way.

So, it differs from other philosophies, but it is intuitive. Because of this, we think it holds promise as potentially offering a new way of understanding what our rights and responsibilities are as citizens — a stronger social contract in which we expect more of ourselves and ask more of each other.

Daniel went on to explain how this speaks to my question about broadening the sense of personal agency into the political realm.

Potentialism explicitly acknowledges the ways in which our personal flourishing is wrapped up in the well-being of the community. We all have gifts that we have a responsibility to develop not just for our own sake, but for the sake of the collective and to share with other people. That is an element of our civic identity — seeing ourselves as integral members of a civic community who have an obligation to show up and contribute.

... When we’re truly manifesting our personal agency — truly being our best selves — it has civic implications, because it allows us to show up in our communities in the fullest possible way. Through that mechanism, we come to see ourselves as having the ability to impact other people’s lives, and that becomes a cyclical, positive flywheel.

Playing the devil’s advocate for a moment, I asked Daniel what happens if a person’s gift is being an accomplished con man, one who is very good at swindling others. Daniel replied that liberalism has a good solution for this.

The basic idea of liberalism is: you should pursue your own ends as long as they don’t interfere with other people’s ability to pursue their own ends. We can adopt the same idea. Your gifts should be manifested only to the extent that they don’t interfere with other people’s ability to do the same. And societies can impose rules that say: you might think that’s a gift, but that’s not the kind of gift we support. We mean the gifts that are helpful and that increase other people’s ability to develop and share their gifts. If the consequence of you developing yours is that it makes it more difficult for other people to do that, that’s not a gift.

I then asked David how people might be convinced to adopt potentialism. As he said at the beginning of the interview, people’s core beliefs don’t change much. So then, I wondered, why would they change to believing in potentialism? He replied that potentialsim is not a new core belief, but rather an old one.

For many, many people, “everyone has something to offer” would strike them as deeply intuitive. In fact, the idea of contribution and the “virtuous life” is deeply embedded in our founding documents. Jefferson and the founders were really influenced by classical thought and Aristotelian ideas of virtue. For them, the pursuit of happiness is not just a feeling — it’s an activity, the activity of living a virtuous life. That’s what Aristotle thought: that happiness and living a virtuous life were basically identical. That has been somewhat lost in the way we think about the pursuit of happiness, but it’s implicit in a lot of these founding documents.

So I don’t actually think the basic ideas around potentialism are new. I think they are old ideas that have been forgotten. One bet we’re taking is that this is actually a recovery — that when you say things in this way or explain it to people, it strikes them as so intuitive that it doesn’t really require a change in their core beliefs. It’s just a naming and a formalization of a set of beliefs that people already hold.

Daniel also explained how they are working to get people to adopt this “core belief,” even though he admits getting it widely adopted is “comically ambitious.” But he hopes they can achieve that the same way that other social movements have succeeded: “very slowly, and then all at once.”

For more information about Hidden Tribes, Potentialism, and more, please read/watch the full interview.

Go to the Full Interview

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About the MBI Newsletters

Two or three times a week, Guy and Heidi Burgess, the BI Directors, share some of our thoughts on political hyper-polarization and related topics. We also share essays from our colleagues and other contributors, and every week or so, we devote one newsletter to annotated links to outside readings that we found particularly useful relating to U.S. hyper-polarization, threats to peace (and actual violence) in other countries, and related topics of interest. Each Newsletter is posted on BI, and sent out by email through Substack to subscribers. You can sign up to receive your copy here and find the latest newsletter here or on our BI Newsletter page, which also provides access to all the past newsletters, going back to 2017.

NOTE! If you signed up for this Newsletter and don't see it in your inbox, it might be going to one of your other emails folder (such as promotions, social, or spam). Check there or search for beyondintractability@substack.com and if you still can't find it, first go to our Substack help page, and if that doesn't help, please contact us.

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Highlighted Links

A few suggestions about links that we think are especially interesting.

• Authoritarianism
  The Fire of Stupidity Cannot Be Contained — A must-read article that helped me better understand the ways in which our society’s vanishing memory of the horrors of fascism, communism, and global war have placed everything that we care about at risk.

• Artificial Intelligence
  Tyler Cowen: Seven Ways to Avoid Losing Your Job to AI — Especially good and practical advice as we all worry about the ways in which AI might threaten our livelihoods.

• Interstate War
  All non-drone militaries are obsolete — An especially clear and comprehensive explanation of why drones are so dramatically changing the nature of war, the balance of military power, and prospects for peace.

• Social / Economic Complexity
  The National Debt’s Unforgiving Math — It is said that “things that can’t go on like this, don’t.” This article applies this concept to the global trend toward the deficit financing of current consumption.

• Communication Complexity
  How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation — A detailed look at the way in which major social media platforms have structured incentives in ways that encourage inflammatory and misleading content.

• Saving Democracy
  American Democracy Wasn’t Designed for This — An important reminder about just how much things have changed since the US Constitution was written and how important it is that we continue to thoughtfully adapt to these changes.

• Social / Economic Complexity
  The $375,000 Drinking Fountains — For those who wondered why our society can’t seem to do the most basic things, an explanation of the real problem -- the interaction of too many well-meaning projects with one another.

Reader Suggested Links

Highlighting links suggested by our readers. Please send us links to things that you find useful.

• Corruption
  Can America Escape the Cycle of Vicemaxxing? — An illuminating article that coins a new term to describe our increasing tolerance for boundless corruption — in many ways the opposite of virtue signaling.

• US Politics
  Is There a Door No. 3 for Democrats? — For a United States in which overwhelming majorities distrust both political parties, speculation about some more attractive third way.

• Psychological Complexity
  The “Learned Helplessness” Of 2026 — An exploration of an important and destructive psychological dynamic -- our tendency, after we repeatedly encounter difficulties, to give up and quit trying.

• Theories of Change
  A Sweeping Theory of Everything Is Revolutionizing the Democratic Party — An exploration of a new theory of change that is gaining support within the Democratic party -- the idea that all of our problems can be solved by just cracking down on corporate consolidation.

• Education
  A Way to Challenge the Groupthink of Scholarly Journals — The key to solving a great many of our problems is listening to the reformers -- those insiders who understand an institution, want it to succeed, and have realistic ideas for overcoming its current difficulties.

• US Politics
  Americans don’t like either political party. We asked them why. — A report on a different and more promising strategy for understanding the public’s disillusionment with US political parties and rebuilding the public’s trust.

• Progressive Left
  Tyler Cowen: Wokeness Has Peaked. What Followed Is Worse. — A disturbing argument that the relatively benign “woke” cancel culture is being replaced by a new more militant type of activism -- one more tolerant of violence.

  

Colleague Activities

Highlighting things that our conflict and peacebuilding colleagues are doing that contribute to efforts to address the hyper-polarization problem.

• Bridge Building
  A Braver Way with Monica Guzman — With political tensions at a new peak, the pressure to take a stand -- or keep the peace -- can be intense. Which should you do? Monica Guzman, a liberal, relaunches her podcast by exploring this with a conservative friend.

• Civil Society
  Citizen-Led Solutions — The landing page for Braver Angels’ Citizen Led Solutions program, explaining what it is, how it works, with case videos and write-ups showing how citizens can work together across difference to solve problems.

• Constructive Communication
  How Polarizing Is Your Feed? Now We Can Tell — Build Up’s new polarization footprint, like the carbon footprint, lets us measure the divisive consequences of social media feeds.

• Leadership
  Leadership for a New Civic Future — A discussion between Daniel Stid, Ash Hanson and Liz Joyner about T-shaped civic leadership and its role in creating a new civic future.

• Developing a Unifying Vision
  Building common ground for the common good. — In this current political climate, imagine if we could use AI technology to bring citizens together at scale to collaborate and find solutions to problems in their community. AI can help do this.

• Civil Society
  Recap: The Raleigh Civic Assembly — On May 5, the Raleigh City Council unanimously accepted recommendations developed by the city’s first-ever civic assembly (not to mention the biggest one east of the Mississippi!). Here’s a story about what they did.

• Developing a Unifying Vision
  We the People America: 250th Anniversary in Conversation. — The Napolitan Institute and Google’s Jigsaw launched “We the People,” a nationally representative series of AI-powered conversations leading up to America’s 250th anniversary. The first conversation explored freedom and equality.

• Artificial Intelligence
  How can I stay Up To Date? — The resource page from the Council on Technology and Social Cohesion with links to articles and organizations of particular importance and interest.

• Developing a Unifying Vision
  The Democratic Tradition We’ve Forgotten — Trygve Throntveit, a member of the Braver Angels’ Citizens Scholar Council writes that we need to remember the American tradition of working together across difference to build a “commonwealth.”

• Artificial Intelligence
  AI and DEMOCRACY Perspectives from an Emerging Field — A research project to understand how funders, researchers, advocates, technologists, and policy experts working at the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and democracy are working together.

• Bridge Building
  Bridging is not sufficient to the task of fighting authoritarianism. — Debilyn Molineaux writes about how and why she modified her theory of change from bridging to visioning a future which fulfills our own and others’ fundamental human needs.

• Media Reform
  Prosocial Design Network — Prosocial Design Network fosters healthy online spaces by connecting research to practice. Evidence is presented on 52 interventions that improve behavior and outcomes of social media activity.

• Civil Society
  Civic Signals — Civic Signals can help clarify how well or poorly our existing digital platforms meet critical public needs. They tested the Civic Signals framework with thousands of social media superusers in 20 countries.

• Saving Democracy
  America’s Next 250: A Toolkit To Be Part of What’s Next 🇺🇸 — In this webinar, the ‪National Issues Forums Institute‬ introduces America’s Next 250, a nationwide initiative designed to help Americans turn conversation into action where they live, work, and learn.

• Theories of Change
  Using the Power of Story to Grow Democracy: Actionable Insights for Advocates — A webinar discussing how entertainment media can shape people’s understanding of government and find ways that we can tell better stories about democracy. These findings translate to storytelling across media.

• Effective Problem-Solving
  Expeditionary — Expeditionary is an applied AI research, product, and global advisory company partnering with the world’s most ambitious enterprises to deliver intelligence and strategy for complex negotiations.

• Developing a Unifying Vision
  We Cannot Heal Society With the Tools That Burned It Down — We need a mass activation of people willing to rebuild the social contract, writes Terry Kyllo, through the slow, courageous work of helping people know one another again.

• Theories of Change
  What Is Dialogic Systems Change? — An approach to meaning-based change in complex human systems -- which are even more complex and difficult to change than are non-human complex adaptive systems.

• Saving Democracy
  Veterans and Community Leaders Unite to Renew Trust in U.S. Elections — Trusted local leaders join to make voting welcoming, reliable, and grounded in civic pride.

• Saving Democracy
  Rebuilding the Relational Foundations of US Democracy — While economic hardship is real, the deeper challenge is a waning belief in democracy itself. What once appeared as localized democratic strain --visible in rural communities for years -- is now manifesting as a national condition.

• Developing a Unifying Vision
  From Protecting the Status Quo to a Vision for Change: Framing Democracy in a Time of Authoritarianism — This report offers a strategic roadmap for democratic resilience, shifting conversation away from the fear of loss and toward an aspirational, collective vision of what democracy can and should be.

  More Colleague Activity Listings

News and Opinion

From around the web, more insight into the nature of our conflict problems, limits of business-as-usual thinking, and things people are doing to try to make things better. (Formerly, Beyond Intractability in Context.)

• Social / Economic Complexity
  The year of cosmic shock: We’re living through a new Copernican Revolution — Science enabled humanity to dramatically improve its understanding of the world in which it lived. This article suggests that we’re embarking on a period of even more radical improvement in our understanding of the world.

• Social / Economic Complexity
  No Wonder Everyone’s Rallying Around This Terrible Idea — The latest iteration of one of the most destructive (from a long-term perspective) strategies -- give everyone what they want and pay for it by sticking the next generation with unpayable bills.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  Islam as an imperial project — An interesting effort to use AI to help us better understand the very different way in which Muslims thinks about international relations.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  The theology of resistance: how Iran sees this war — One of the keys to understanding conflict, and especially military conflict, is understanding how the other side thinks (and not assuming they think like you do).

• Social / Economic Complexity
  The Economic Experiment That Upended Reality — An update on the predicted economic calamity that was predicted to follow increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour -- it didn’t happen.

• Family / Gender / LBGTQ+
  Steve Stewart-Williams on Sex Differences and Human Nature — A thought-provoking and probably controversial effort to think through the complex relationship between social and biological determinants of gender identity.

• Education
  Schooling Alone — A worrying extrapolation of where the now widespread practice of using highly individualized computer-based instruction is likely to take us.

• Developing a Unifying Vision
  Six-Chart Sunday – And Now for the Good News — Something that is, unfortunately, rare -- an article with good news about issues that really matter.

• Artificial Intelligence
  Cut Off — An article that reminds us that the most powerful forms of artificial intelligence are likely to be monopolized by those with deep pockets -- people who will then use that intelligence to strengthen their already powerful positions.

• Race / Anti-Racism
  When Diversity Erases the Children It Claims to Include — A thought provoking essay that explains about how simplistic approaches to racial identity politics frequently break down when applied to those with multi-racial backgrounds.

• Saving Democracy
  Packing the Court Would Shred the Constitution — A sharp critique of Democratic proposals to reform the Supreme Court in ways that would make it more supportive of Democratic goals and constituencies.

• Education
  We Forgot to Teach Americans How America Works — One of the big reasons why western democracies are so dysfunctional is that our institutions of higher education quit teaching students how they could use the system to make things better.

• Saving Democracy
  How to End the Gerrymandering Doom Loop Forever — For those outraged at the way in which both political parties are using gerrymandering to disenfranchise their political opponents, thoughtful ideas about how to get out of this mess.

• Education
  Stanford’s War on the Western Canon — A thought-provoking critique of Stanford’s new Civic, Liberal, and Global Education requirements.

• Race / Anti-Racism
  Old McDonald Had a Race Preference — An example of the kind of controversial program through which the Biden administration gave preferential treatment to predominantly Democratic, race and gender based constituencies.

• Interstate War
  Real-Time Satellite Intelligence Is Making Ukraine’s Drone Strikes Deadlier Than Ever — Startling news that commercial satellites services are now willing to sell us detailed and almost real-time images of any part of the planet -- images that can be used to target the now widely accessible drones.

• Developing a Unifying Vision
  America needs liberal nationalism back — For a time when self-criticism of US society dominates, an argument for remembering, celebrating, and defending what has made liberal democratic societies so exceptional.

• Interstate War
  Putin’s deliberate brutality in Ukraine has a backstory — An important reminder that keeping the peace also requires an ability to defend oneself against the most terrible forms of violence and brutality.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  Qatar’s Influence-Buying in America Is Even Worse Than We Thought — This article explains how, with unlimited amounts of money and a singularity of purpose, a nation can change the way another society thinks about the world.

• Progressive Left
  Challenging Adult Supremacy Through Ethnic Studies — A story about just how extreme efforts to repudiate and abandon collective social wisdom have become.

More News and Opinion Links

Please Contribute Your Ideas To This Discussion!

In order to prevent bots, spammers, and other malicious content, we are asking contributors to send their contributions to us directly. If your idea is short, with simple formatting, you can put it directly in the contact box. However, the contact form does not allow attachments. So if you are contributing a longer article, with formatting beyond simple paragraphs, just send us a note using the contact box, and we'll respond via an email to which you can reply with your attachment. This is a bit of a hassle, we know, but it has kept our site (and our inbox) clean. And if you are wondering, we do publish essays that disagree with or are critical of us. We want a robust exchange of views.

Contact Us!

About the MBI Newsletters

Two or three times a week, Guy and Heidi Burgess, the BI Directors, share some of our thoughts on political hyper-polarization and related topics. We also share essays from our colleagues and other contributors, and every week or so, we devote one newsletter to annotated links to outside readings that we found particularly useful relating to U.S. hyper-polarization, threats to peace (and actual violence) in other countries, and related topics of interest. Each Newsletter is posted on BI, and sent out by email through Substack to subscribers. You can sign up to receive your copy here and find the latest newsletter here or on our BI Newsletter page, which also provides access to all the past newsletters, going back to 2017.

NOTE! If you signed up for this Newsletter and don't see it in your inbox, it might be going to one of your other emails folder (such as promotions, social, or spam). Check there or search for beyondintractability@substack.com and if you still can't find it, first go to our Substack help page, and if that doesn't help, please contact us.

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This is the second in a series of newsletters on ways that courageous citizens can take fuller advantage of the many longstanding and new opportunities that exist for citizens to participate in democratic decision-making processes. It is also the fourth newsletter in our “Courageous Citizenship” series. Our first Courageous Citizenship newsletter explained and expanded upon Braver Angels’ term “Courageous Citizenship” and explained why we think the concept is so important. In the second newsletter, we explained more about the courage that citizens need to be effective, and gave the example shared earlier by Harry Boyte about how this was done so well in the past by participants in Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement.

The third newsletter in this series talked about the obstacles to courageous citizenship and about ways those obstacles can be overcome. Here we get more specific, talking about past, present, and future approaches to citizen participation with, in, and around government.

Ways to Influence or Change Government Procedures or Decisions

As we argued in the previous newsletter, we firmly believe that we shouldn’t throw out or “burn down” government in its entirety, but it clearly must be improved at all levels. And insiders seldom have the incentive to do that. That’s where citizens come in.

If a group of citizens isn’t happy with something that is going on (or isn’t going on that should be), they can appeal to the government to fix it. And they can keep pressing until their voices are recognized and responded to. They won’t always get their way — particularly when other stakeholders want different things. But everyone should be able to have a voice — to have their ideas, interests, and needs considered fairly.

There are many ways to pursue that voice. At the local level, individual citizens or advocacy groups can appeal to particular local government agencies or leaders to make changes to policies or procedures or facilities. This is often done by writing letters to officials, or speaking briefly in public hearings or town halls or school board meetings. But there are more and less effective ways of doing that.

Years ago (1993) Spencer Havlick, a long-standing member of the Boulder City Council gave a talk at one of our seminars explaining how to do this effectively. We described his talk in a newsletter we sent out in August of 2020.

When he was approached by an angry citizen demanding action to protect his or her “backyard,” Havlick would explain that he didn’t think that it would be appropriate for him to go to the Council and advocate for policies that would only serve the narrow interests of one particular citizen.

Instead, he would challenge the citizen to open a conversation with other members of the community who, in one way or another, had related concerns or were either positively or negatively affected by the issue. If this group could come up with some broadly (though not necessarily universally) supported approach for protecting and, hopefully, advancing the interests of all affected parties, then he would enthusiastically take the proposal to City Council with his strong backing. He suggested such conversations on an ad-hoc basis for awhile, and then became instrumental in the formation of the Boulder Neighborhood Alliance which tried to institutionalize such multi-person, multi-neighborhood problem-solving.

The neighborhood alliance idea was a bit ahead of its time, and it didn’t succeed immediately. But there have been several iterations since, and it very much aligns with the movement toward “civic hubs” that are becoming increasingly common now.

Heidi did her dissertation back in 1978 on methods of public participation in government. Public hearings were by far the most commonly used method at that time, but they were seen both by government representatives and citizens as the least useful approach. Other mechanisms, such as polling, advisory committees, and oversight committees were generally seen as more effective, again by both citizens and government. But they took much more time, money, and for those and other reasons, were used much less frequently.

It is also important to recognize that public participation is a two-way street. Just as it is important to help government leaders understand public interests and concerns, it is important for the public to better understand the reasoning behind government proposals and actions. There are lots of good reasons for doing unpopular things and a democracy that works has able to do those things (and explain to the public why the sacrifices are truly necessary). This, of course, also requires a public that’s willing to listen, and not merely discount everything that government says as “worthless lies.”

Current Approaches to Public Participation

When I went to research public participation options for this article, I found that public hearings are still widely used, and still widely disliked, as people only get a short time to speak, they tend to grandstand for an audience, making as strong a case for their side as possible, and offering no chance for effective exchange of ideas between speakers or between speakers and government listeners. So public hearings tend to exacerbate polarization, not reduce it.

Sometimes citizens get more deeply involved, by serving on citizens’ advisory or oversight panels. Or they can participate in deliberative processes in which ordinary citizens come together to learn the details about a particular civic issue, and then deliberate together on how best to solve it. Some of these deliberative approaches are done with anyone who wants to participate. See, for example, some of the deliberations Martin Carcasson talked about in his discussion with us in June of 2024.

Other approaches, such as citizen assemblies, select people at random in an effort to get a group of people who accurately represent the community as a whole. These people then spend a lot of time (many meetings over weeks or months) learning the ins and outs of a particular issue from all relevant points of view. Through skilled facilitation, they work to develop a consensus set of recommendations that can then be given to the authorities who will, hopefully, enact the assembly’s recommendations. However, getting the assembly process and outcomes firmly integrated into other political decision making procedures is still a work in progress. Advisory committees do something similar, only they tend to focus on bringing together representatives of all of the different stakeholder groups, rather than random citizens, and they may not come up with consensus proposals, just comments on city proposals.

Deliberative polling is another approach that uses a random sample (or sometimes polls the entire population as Jay Rothman did Antioch, Ohio). Respondents are given balanced background materials, and are sometimes encouraged to participate in formal structured discussions at which they can question experts, each other, and have their opinions measured before and after the process. Or, as Jay did in Antioch, he asked people to explain the reasoning behind their answers — and got lots more highly nuanced information that tends to be much more useful than a typical yes-no or a “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree” poll would give.

Another approach to public participation in government is participatory budgeting. This strategy involves citizens having direct involvement in budgeting decisions. The process was first used in Brazil, but now, according to the New York City Council, which uses it, there are hundreds of cities using it around the world. In New York, the city holds community meetings in October and November in which residents brainstorm ideas and recruit volunteers to be “Budget Delegates” for the current cycle. In December through February citizens work with city agencies and staff to create real proposals. Budget Delegates select a few projects that they think best meet the needs of their communities. The proposals are put out for a districtwide vote in April, and winning projects are included in the Fiscal Year budget that is released in June. In May and June, staff and stakeholders evaluate the process and oversee implementation of funded projects.

Although participatory budgeting is most often done at the local level, Lorelei Kelly explained in her March 2024 interview with us that Congress does this too, in a sense, through what are called Congressional “Community Grants.”

A considerable amount of money now is going out as determined by communities. [Congress] Members work with their community to apply for money in the appropriations process. But the issues and the projects themselves come from the communities. It’s the closest thing we’re going to get to participatory budgeting in the United States. ... Anybody who’s listening to this, if you do a search on your member’s name and community grants, you’ll see what’s being funded in your district right now.

Technology is providing additional ways for people to become involved in their government, sometimes called “digital participation” or “e-participation. For example Google’s “Jigsaw” project is using Gemini AI to measure public attitudes about democracy. This technology was first used in Bowling Green, Kentucky where it enabled one of America’s largest ever town halls. (Also see this write up about the Bowling Green process.) Jigsaw is now broadening its work across the United States in its “We the People Initiative,“ which is convening a national conversation exploring the concepts of freedom and equality. (See also https://wethepeople-250.org).

We have invited thousands of Americans from every corner of the country to share their beliefs, opinions, and experiences on these topics.

Our goal is to help create a living, breathing portrait of what it means to be American today. To fully capture this conversation, we will use the latest Gemini AI models to analyze, distill and present the many perspectives shared, fostering a deeper understanding of Americans’ opinions on these topics.

Another example of digital participation is The South Carolina Forum. This forum, which is open to all South Carolina citizens, used an online platform to determine what citizens thought were the most pressing issues that they wanted state leaders and residents to work on in the coming legislative session. They collected over 1,200 different issues and almost 22,000 reactions to those issues on their digital platform. Then using AI, they identified 25 issues with the strongest cross-demographic consensus. In a second round they asked participants to vote on the top 25 issues, and came up with six that would be further explored in face-to-face and online conversations to consider “possible solutions that could attract broad cross-partisan support among legislators and constituents.” The results of these conversations will then be presented at a lottery-based civic assembly with 100 delegates who will “evaluate and finalize supermajority-backed proposals for state legislators.” This is Spence Havlick’s neighborhood associations on steroids!

Although it doesn’t yet exist, Gideon Lichfield described other ways that technology could enable us all to become involved in government decision making and other civic activities easily. Although his ideas are not yet reality, the rate of advancement of AI is making all that he proposes quite feasible quite soon. Instead of just lamenting how dangerous AI is and how we should stop it, we might also consider how it could actually help us strengthen democracy in ways that simply weren’t possible before the age of AI.

As we argued in Newsletter 108, AI is especially good at doing the two big things that are at the core of all conflict resolution, peacebuilding, and democracy building efforts: listening in an attentive and nuanced way to a very large number of voices, and distilling those voices into workable statements of community views. These statements can then be used to identify areas of common ground and hence opportunities for mutually beneficial collaborative action (and to clarify any remaining points of disagreement).

Alternatively, people can try to fix problems on their own (without AI and without government involvement). But most likely, they will run into roadblocks when they need to get permission or approval or data or money from the government. Given that, it is better to think of government as collaborators, not as adversaries or competitors. AI can also be used as a collaborator, not as a replacement for real people’s work.

If government isn’t initially interested in addressing an issue in collaboration with citizens, the citizens can form a “civic hub” or “neighborhood alliance,” or “study group,” or whatever they want to call it, and together do their research, come up with a good understanding of the problem, research potential solutions, and then approach the local government, not as an individual complainant, but as a cohesive group that has “done their homework.” This is likely, as Spence Havlick suggested, to be much more persuasive to local governmental leaders. And such efforts will be even more persuasive if the local government leaders are treated respectfully as potential collaborators, not as “enemies,” or “roadblocks” to be overcome. While such efforts are likely to encounter opposition from some parts of the government, they are also likely to find strong sources of support. So one key is to look for, and cultivate, such support.

So, again, as we said before, citizenship is much more than voting. It is getting involved in the public sphere and working collaboratively, across partisan divides, to make our towns, states, and country as good as they can be. That is what we think of when we think of “courageous citizens.”

Lead Photo Credit: ChatGPT made this!

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In May we posted two newsletters on Braver Angels’ term “Courageous Citizenship.” In Part 1 we introduced the concept and explained why we thought it was so important. We also laid out a set of thought patterns and behaviors that we think courageous citizens should pursue as they work to build a stronger and healthier democracies in the United States and elsewhere.

In the second newsletter, we explained more about the courage that courageous citizens need, and gave the example shared earlier by Harry Boyte about how this was done so well in the past by participants in Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement.

Here we talk more about the obstacles to courageous citizenship and add ideas about ways those obstacles can be overcome. Because of its length, we are dividing this post into two parts. Here we will talk about the obstacles and what we call “key considerations.” In the next newsletter we will get down to specific ways citizens can strengthen democracy and build healthier communities by participating in and working to improve governmental processes more effectively.

Distrust of Government

One of the dilemmas courageous citizens face is what to do with or about their governments.

According to a December 2025 Pew poll, only 17% of Americans said that “they trust the government in Washington to do what is right “just about always” (2%) or “most of the time” (15%). This is close to the lowest level of confidence in the U.S. federal government Pew has measured over seven decades. While trust is always higher among members of the party that controls the presidency, Pew reported that “only 26% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say they trust the federal government,” which, they say, is “on par with GOP views during the first Trump administration.”

And the problem isn’t just with the president; Congress is viewed even more poorly. Quoting from a Gallup poll done in April 2026, “Americans’ approval of Congress has fallen to 10%, barely above its all-time low of 9%, while disapproval has climbed to 86%, tying the record high for the institution.”

Trust in state governments is higher and trust in local governments is higher yet, but it is still not great. Another poll taken by Gallup in November, 2025 showed that in the 2020s, the percentage of people who had a “great deal,” or “fair amount” of trust in their state governments ranged from 54% (for independents), to 56% (for Republicans) to 66% (for Democrats). The percentage of people who had a “great deal,” or “fair amount” of trust in their local governments ranged from 63% (for independents), to 68% (for Republicans) to 75% (for Democrats).

This is more than just a public relations problem. The media is full of lots of solid, well-written horror stories explaining why much of what the government does is not worthy of the public’s trust. And even when the government acts in good faith, passing bills and enacting regulations that make sense in one context, they can create nightmares (as described in this article about a $375,000 drinking fountain.)

The problem isn’t, however, just with the government. Citizens (and the interest groups through which they commonly try to exert their influence) commonly demand that the government do all sorts of expensive things — things that advance their narrow interests at the expense of most everyone else (and, in the process, also undermining the public’s trust in government). Also, too few citizens take advantage of the many opportunities that do exist for challenging unwise and unfair processes and decisions and promoting actions that genuinely do advance the common good.

Implications for Democratic Renewal Efforts

The widespread distrust in the federal government has led many (probably most) people who are working in the democratic renewal field to focus their efforts at the state and local (most often local) level, where they feel they can make more of a difference. Even so, there is palpable distrust of government among many of these actors, and hence, a large fraction of democratic renewal activity is happening outside of government through civil society-run mechanisms such as bridge-building dialogues, citizen’s assemblies, and civic hubs.

In some cases, that makes sense. Civil society actors can run bridge-building dialogues just fine. (In this sense this can be seen as a domestic counterpart to the international system’s Track II Diplomacy.) But more and more bridge builders are coming to the conclusion that even if dialogues reduce polarization (and it isn’t clear that they do so over the long run), that, alone, will not be enough to reverse democracy’s ongoing slide. In order to really build a democracy in which we would all like to live, long-term relationships need to change, and problem-solving strategies have to change. People need to be willing to listen and consider views that differ markedly from their own, they must be willing to consider the possibility that they and their group is wrong and has made mistakes in the past; and they must be willing to compromise, and engage in collaborative action.

That is why Braver Angels has moved from just doing bridge building, to a focus on “citizen-led solutions“ and “courageous citizenship,” which according to CEO Maury Giles, means “the intentional effort to engage in human connection the Braver Angels Way: contend without contempt, listen with dignity, and work where values overlap. Relationships. People. Dialogue. Action.”

Better Together America’s (BTA) Civic Hubs have similar goals. In our interview with BTA CEO Jacob Bornstein and Caleb Christen, Jacob explained that “civic hubs are working on community-building, collaborative problem-solving, and combined action.”

Relationship with Government

While they sometimes do this in conjunction with local governments, neither Braver Angels, nor Better Together America, nor most others working in the democracy renewal area see these efforts as primarily led or driven by government. Rather, they are primarily led and driven by private citizens who are willing to put in the work to improve their communities (and, ultimately, their nation).

When we first talked to BTA Co-Founders Caleb Christen and Vinay Orekondy, I asked them “how hubs get people involved and excited, when so many people have given up, thinking politics is hopeless and there’s just no point in trying to fix it.” Caleb replied that

as a country, we have delegated a lot of problem-solving to, especially, the Federal government, but institutions as a whole. And we’ve centered ourselves on issues, very polarizing issues. So what this [BTA] is offering, and a reason why it’s a place to refocus our energies, is it’s focusing on communities and that we have the power to solve our problems. So we don’t have to entirely rely on politicians and elected officials. We can still work with them. And it’s not to say that they’re not important in their own right. But that together, I guess it’s in our name, but together, we can solve problems. And there’s excitement in that. There’s also very real, and in some ways, unrealized potential there that we’re tapping into.

And then Vinay added:

When people say “you know, it’s all pointless,” I’ll say, “Well, let’s look at what’s dysfunctional and sidestep that.” Because actually, the whole model is built on sidestepping that which is dysfunctional.

This notion of “sidestepping that which is dysfunctional” has meant that some hubs and other civic actors have tried to sidestep government, because they see it as dysfunctional or otherwise not supportive of citizen-led efforts. But this causes problems when citizens need governmental approval to do something. Or they need government money. Or expertise. Or data. So figuring out how to successfully work with government, and how to get government involved in and supportive of these citizen-led efforts — without having the government take over leadership — is very important.

We also need to remember that democracy is, at its core, a rule-of-law based system that gives duly-elected and appointed leaders the authority to make decisions on behalf of the public. This includes the allocation of public resources and the making and enforcement of the laws.

We can’t fix democracy by writing public officials out of the process. That would almost certainly wind up violating the law in some important way. And, even if it were successful, it would wind up producing the kind of revolutionary change that (as we argued in our essay on the Crane Brinton Effect) almost always leads to terrible tragedy, as bad faith actors are able to hijack reform efforts. A much better approach focuses on taking fuller advantage of many opportunities that do exist for meaningful public participation — the kind of participation that, if pursued vigorously, can push the government back on track.

Key Considerations

While it is true that many government agencies and institutions are not working as well as we wish, we still depend on government to do many things. When we asked ChatGPT “what are the primary functions of local government,” we got a really long list: public safety; infrastructure and public works; land use, zoning, and development planning; utilities and environmental regulations and services; education; public health and human services; parks, recreation, libraries, and cultural facilities; transportation and mobility services; courts, records, and local administrative services; and local taxation, budgeting, and governance. And each of these areas had five to ten items listed under them. So we may think that government isn’t doing anything for us — but imagine what would happen if all that went away!

The same is true for the state and federal governments. We have gotten glimpses of what this means during the occasional federal government shutdowns in the U.S., which fortunately, have never been total government shutdowns. (For non-American readers, these partial shutdowns happen due to our very polarized government, which prevents passage of necessary government funding bills as a tactic for exerting political pressure on the other side.) Some government agencies and workers are always considered “exempt” from shutting down because they are too important. So we still get the military and most national security operations, federal law enforcement and border control, air travel safety (the FAA and TSA), major benefits payments (such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Veterans Benefits), the Post Office, and segments of other agencies, as decided on a case-by-case basis. Despite these exemptions, the importance of government services quickly becomes apparent to the many people who are hurt by their absence. So we can’t just do without government.

And we also can’t “burn it all down” and start over, as some very frustrated people have advocated. There is a tremendous amount of knowledge, and data, and systems that have been developed and accumulated by government workers over many years. Eliminating all of that (as Trump apparently did with USAID and USIP), is losing incalculable amounts of knowledge that will take decades to replace. Throwing all current expertise and starting over would be like burning down a city and expecting construction workers to be able to rebuild it quickly — and better. Have you ever seen how long it takes to rebuild a city after a wildfire? (We have, living just four miles from the devastating Marshall Fire of 2021). It takes a LONG time. And that is if you are dealing with simple systems — buildings that have blueprints, known supply chains, known building methods, etc. Social, economic and political systems are what are called “complex adaptive systems.” They have evolved over many years or even decades. No one knows exactly how they work, or what worked well, and what didn’t. But to the extent people know these things, they are most likely the people who have worked there. So throwing them all out, never to return, is throwing away enormous stores of useful knowledge. And, as mentioned above, it would also create opportunities for bad-faith actors to take advantage of political uncertainties and craft sweetheart deals that give them unfair advantages.

Truly fixing our broken political system requires taking the time to truly understand why things are going wrong and then figuring out ways to overcome those difficulties. We will talk in more detail about how to do this in the next newsletter.

Lead Photo Credit: ChatGPT made this!

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About the MBI Newsletters

Two or three times a week, Guy and Heidi Burgess, the BI Directors, share some of our thoughts on political hyper-polarization and related topics. We also share essays from our colleagues and other contributors, and every week or so, we devote one newsletter to annotated links to outside readings that we found particularly useful relating to U.S. hyper-polarization, threats to peace (and actual violence) in other countries, and related topics of interest. Each Newsletter is posted on BI, and sent out by email through Substack to subscribers. You can sign up to receive your copy here and find the latest newsletter here or on our BI Newsletter page, which also provides access to all the past newsletters, going back to 2017.

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Highlighted Links

A few suggestions about links that we think are especially interesting.

• Disinformation
  Inside the Digital Intifada — In the context of October 7, a surprising article (with far-reaching implications) about the sophisticated and deceptive ways in which combatants are influencing world opinion.

• Social / Economic Complexity
  The Crisis of the West Isn’t About Who Governs, but That No One Can — An illuminating argument that we have misdiagnosed our central political problem. Instead of blaming our political opponents for our difficulties, we ought to focus on the flaws in our system of governance that are making those difficulties so intractable.

• Saving Democracy
  The Part of the Declaration Nobody Reads — As we prepare for the United States 250th anniversary, an essay that explains what we’re missing by not reading the entirety of the Declaration of Independence.

• Developing a Unifying Vision
  The Book That Changed How I Think About Liberalism — More insight into the complex relationship between the many strains of liberal thought and efforts to protect and strengthen democracy.

• Psychological Complexity
  The Era of Rational Discourse Is Over — A profile of the late Jürgen Habermas -- one of the world’s leading thinkers on the relationship between democracy, debate, and back-and-forth argument.

• Developing a Unifying Vision
  Founding Principles — Drawn from an examination of human nature, this article explores the principles and virtues that shape the American republic.

• Social / Economic Complexity
  The West Is on a Suicide Mission — An interview with the author of “Suicidal Empathy” -- an important, controversial, and thought-provoking new book that asks hard questions about some of the most fundamental beliefs of the conflict and peacebuilding fields.

Reader Suggested Links

Highlighting links suggested by our readers. Please send us links to things that you find useful.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  Israeli nonprofit hopes new report on Oct. 7 sexual violence becomes ‘watershed moment,’ gets attention of world parliaments — A story about an exhaustive new report that documents the many instances of sexual violence that occurred on October 7, 2023.

• Progressive Left
  Progressive Activists Are Sometimes on the Wrong Side of History — With respect to Gaza, Hamas, and Israel, a reminder that no political group is infallible and that all views should be subject to challenge and debate.

• Race / Anti-Racism
  “The Civil Rights Act of 1964 Does Not Include Whites” — An article (and a trailer for an upcoming movie) that seeks to explain why so many people object so strongly to the anti-racism, DEI movement.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  I’m a Democrat. My Party Has a Double Standard on Antisemitism. — A helpful contribution to the ongoing debate within the Democratic party over how to respond to Israel’s ongoing wars and the rising tide of antisemitism.

• Psychological Complexity
  Why is anger so addictive? A psychologist weighs in. — More on the complexities of human psychology and the central role that anger plays in our thinking.

• Education
  Something Big Is Happening on Campus — From David Brooks, welcome news that our institutions of higher education are starting to look seriously at their failings, and more importantly, starting to make needed corrections.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  “Rape is just part of war”: what happened when I spoke in Amsterdam — For those trying to understand hate, unspeakable atrocities, and antisemitism, a controversial story about propaganda, intimidation, moral inversion, and the pro-Palestinian movement.

  

Colleague Activities

Highlighting things that our conflict and peacebuilding colleagues are doing that contribute to efforts to address the hyper-polarization problem.

• Media Reform
  Making Sense with More in Common: Iran war, cost of living, and political violence — A new series to help you make sense of the week ahead. They share charts and data points from their research and recent polls to help you make sense of the coming week’s news.

• Psychological Complexity
  Authoritarian Collaboration Fueled Transnational Repression in 2025 — Freedom House’s latest report found that 30 governments -- including six new governments -- interfered in other countries and fueled transnational repression in 2025, providing further evidence of rising democratic backsliding around the world.

• Psychological Complexity
  Case Study: The Unfiltered Mindset of a Deep State Believer — David Beckemeyer interviews a MAGA “true believer,” offering a case study in radical political skepticism through an unedited look at the clashing epistemologies and ‘fact gaps’ that make our national division feel so absolute.

• Developing a Unifying Vision
  Pluralism Is Infrastructure — An essay that starts with the assumption that “everyone wants pluralism.” It then explores the fact that there is little in American political life that is focused on making pluralism possible.

• Peacebuilding
  Alliance for Peacebuilding’s 2025 Annual Report — This report outlines AfP’s achievements over the last year and where the organization is going in 2026 and beyond.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  Who Was Really Behind October 7? — A thoughtful effort to establish who exactly was responsible for the horrors of October 7.

• Media Reform
  This Nonprofit Whispers in Hollywood’s Ear About Polarization. They Hope You Tune In. — Bridge Entertainment Labs aims to be the entertainment consultancy for the bridge-building field. Its goal is to move beyond “us-versus-them” narratives and toward “a cohesive you-and-I story of what we can build together.”

• Effective Problem-Solving
  Deliberative Tech — The Deliberative Tech Hub shares insights from practice and research on the use of deliberative tech to facilitate dialogue, bridging, and inclusion in peace processes across divides and in polarized communities.

• Constructive Communication
  New NCDD-ALA Facilitation Guide on Leading Polarizing Conversations is now live! — This 45-page guide provides libraries with practical tools for convening community conversations on divisive issues through planning, conversation design, facilitation best practices, and follow-up strategies.

• Artificial Intelligence
  Packard Foundation Releases Landmark Report on How AI Is Reshaping Democratic Systems — This report synthesizes insights from various stakeholders on how AI disrupts democratic institutions, elections, government, information ecosystems, civic participation, labor markets, and the economy.

• Constructive Communication
  Essential Partners Demonstrates How Dialogue Can Bridge Decades-Long Divides on Firearm Policy — An article describing Essential Partners’ facilitation of the Bridging the Divide on Firearm Policy Initiative which brought together 23 gun rights and gun safety advocates to come up with a comprehensive policy all could agree to.

• Artificial Intelligence
  Building civic resilience in the age of AI — Report from a panel discussion examining the potential benefits and dangers of AI to democracy and civic health.

• Civil Society
  Kettering-Gallup Study Finds Community Involvement and Civic Education Strengthen Democratic Participation Despite Widespread Barriers — A Kettering/Gallup study of 20,000+ Americans finds widespread doubt about whether citizens have real influence in democracy, but shows that community involvement and civic education strongly increase civic confidence and participation.

• Artificial Intelligence
  AI and Democracy: Mapping the Intersections — AI poses substantial threats and opportunities for democracy. Despite the threats, AI technologies can also improve representative politics, citizen participation, and governance if wisely developed.

• Trust / Trust Earning
  Not All Contact Builds Trust — Terry Kyllo reflects on the ways in which inter-group contact can undermine trust and ways of counteracting this effect by promoting more constructive group interactions.

• Effective Problem-Solving
  Participatory Budgeting: What the Evidence Really Shows About Transparency, Trust, and Fiscal Discipline — Participatory budgeting (PB) has moved from a niche democracy innovation to a mainstream governance tool, now used in thousands of cities worldwide. This report evaluates these processes.

• Left / Right Conflict
  You Need Conservatives. Here’s How to Engage Them in Your Mission. — Insights and tips from a conservative who believes nonprofits will fail in their mission if they muster support only from people who think -- and vote -- like they do.

• Authoritarianism
  Beware the Illusion of the Linear Authoritarian Timeline: On Ruptures, Breakups, and Detours — Many people in many countries see democracy eroding and think that authoritarianism is inevitable. It is not!

• Artificial Intelligence
  An Unexpected Solution to AI Economic Uncertainty — More in Common found that the American public broadly supports national service programs as a potential response to AI-driven economic disruption for young people.

• Violence
  The Impact Projects’ Security Map — A report on a new Security Map based on a comprehensive dataset which systematically documents violent threats to America’s public servants.

• Constructive Communication
  Examining Generational Divides – Political Attitudes and Behavior — Recent polling conducted by YouGov reveals significant generational divides in the ways people identify with political representation, conceive of government legitimacy, consume information, and interact with one another.

  More Colleague Activity Listings

News and Opinion

From around the web, more insight into the nature of our conflict problems, limits of business-as-usual thinking, and things people are doing to try to make things better. (Formerly, Beyond Intractability in Context.)

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  The Paper Trail of Nicholas Kristof’s Smear — For those trying to make sense of the controversy over Israeli treatment of Palestinian prisoners, an article that that does an exceptionally good job of separating unfounded accusations from legitimate criticisms.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  I saw America vilified in Iran. Then came the culture shock. — From an Iranian immigrant, an informative perspective on U.S. and Iranian culture.

• Psychological Complexity
  The Psychology of Disinformation — An exploration of how propagandists use a complex understanding of human psychology to manipulate people.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  How three ‘isms’ failed the people of the Middle East — For those wishing to understand the contemporary Middle East, a look at how nationalism, socialism, and Islamism have reshaped the region over the last three quarters of a century.

• Media Reform
  We Took Away the Phones — Now What? — Reassuring news that people are now starting to think beyond simple efforts to remove phones from public schools. The real trick is figuring out how to cultivate healthy student communities.

• Artificial Intelligence
  AI’s big messaging pivot — An in-depth look at the AI industry’s shifting messaging campaign -- a campaign focused on claims that the technology will ultimately turn into a job creator.

• Interstate War
  Tyrants are losing wars — A hopeful, but still tragic, argument that aggressive tyrants who seek to dominate others are, for the most part, failing.

• Artificial Intelligence
  This Is What Should Unite the Right and the Left on A.I. — Proposed consensus steps that those on the right and the left might be willing to take to reduce the threats posed by AI-related technologies.

• Social / Economic Complexity
  A Hidden Liability for U.S. Cities: Looming Infrastructure Repair Costs — One of the ways in which societies resolve disputes in ways which leave everyone feeling better off, is by deferring infrastructure maintenance in ways that impose extra burdens on the next generation -- people without a “seat at the table.”

• Social / Economic Complexity
  Humanity Is Still Evolving—and Fast — An important reminder that the essence of complexity -- the evolutionary dynamics that produced humanity and the wonders of the natural and social environment -- continue to operate.

• Psychological Complexity
  The Kind of Men Who Flummox Trump — A description of the vast conflict that exists between those with strong and altruistic cultural beliefs and those who simply struggle to accumulate as much wealth and power as possible.

• Education
  Colleges, Maybe Try Teaching! — More thoughts on a critically important topic, how to pass on the knowledge and values needed to sustain free democratic societies.

• Artificial Intelligence
  A.I. Populism Is Here. And No One Is Ready. — A story about a new kind of populism -- one capable of uniting the left and the right in a popular rebellion against the many threats posed by AI technologies.

• Social / Economic Complexity
  Creators and Destroyers of Worlds — An essay exploring the inevitable downsides that accompany humanity’s great leaps forward and an argument that despite the pain, progress is generally worth it.

• World Order
  Samizdat #1: The Betrayal of the Rules-Based Order — It is said that things fail slowly, then all at once. This article explores the slow erosion of the rules-based world order -- an erosion that preceded the ongoing collapse of that order.

• US Politics
  Trump Has Gone From Unpredictable to Unreliable — Supportive coalitions are the key to most every type of social and political power. To sustain such coalitions, one must be seen as trustworthy by coalition partners. (This is an area where Trump is failing.)

• Immigration
  Why won’t Democrats moderate on immigration? Here’s a clue. — A surprising story about the electoral impact of non-citizens -- while they can’t vote, they are included in the census (and they are counted in the apportionment of legislative districts).

• Artificial Intelligence
  What A.I. Did to My College Class — From a member of the first AI-era cohort of college students , a first person account of how the technology has changed life on campus.

• Freedom of Speech
  Ten Arguments Against Free Speech — A helpful article for those trying to decide on the appropriate balance between free speech rights and limits on those rights.

• Race / Anti-Racism
  Schrödinger’s Race — Thought-provoking insights into strategies for thinking sensibly about our complex and interlocking identities.

More News and Opinion Links

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As we celebrate this Memorial Day in the U.S., we think it is worth taking the time to think about what the day means — what we are memorializing. We live in Boulder, Colorado (USA). Every year on the Memorial Day holiday, our city runs the “Bolder Boulder,” one of the biggest 10K road races in the country, usually with over 50,000 runners. The race is a party too — with food, music, dancers, water slides — entertainment, the organizers promise, “around every corner.”

Finishers and their families and friends assemble in the University of Colorado football stadium, where again there is more music, more food, and more fun. There are also short speeches, recognizing local veterans from long-ago wars. Over the years, the Bolder Boulder website says “we have honored Gold Star Families, Tuskegee Airmen, the 10th Mountain Division, Navajo Code Talkers, Special Forces and Medal of Honor recipients, among others.” A 21-gun salute is carried out by the University of Colorado ROTC members. “Taps” is played. There is a thrilling (quick and loud) flyover by military fighters, and skydivers land in the stadium carrying the flags of each military branch (having jumped out of much slower planes). The speeches talk about sacrifice and honor. The Bolder Boulder website says “This ceremony gives our community the opportunity to pay our respects by honoring the men and women who have fought to protect our country and made the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom.” With as many as 70,000 spectators, this has become one of the nation’s largest Memorial Day events.

These commemorations are, of course, most likely to be meaningful to those who have served (or are currently serving) in the military and their families — a group largely composed of those who do not receive college degrees (and who are, therefore, poorly represented in Boulder’s college town population).

It is not surprising, therefore, that Boulder views Memorial Day primarily as festive holiday that marks the beginning of summer in a town that is noted for its athleticism. Apart from the relatively modest observations mentioned above, it is not a sober time for reflection on the causes and consequences of war.

Another reason why Boulderites (and so many others) have trouble taking Memorial Day as seriously as we should is that we collectively have deeply mixed feelings about recent wars and US involvement in those wars. While there is broad support for honoring the sacrifices made during World War II and, to a lesser extent, the Korean War, we are much more conflicted about how we should think about the United States’ role is more recent conflicts (including, especially, Vietnam, the 1991 Gulf War, the post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the highly controversial war now being waged against Iran).

This is, in part, a positive development. As a society, we are recognizing that patriotic images of war as a simple battle between good and evil do not adequately reflect war’s harsh realities (including the fact that the US does not always act in honorable ways). One result of this recognition has been the emergence of a conflict and peacebuilding field, devoted to combining theory and practice in ways that reduce the incidence and severity of violent conflict, while promoting a more just society.

Within this field, as there is a temptation to conclude that anything and everything associated with the military (and especially with the US and other Western “colonial” militaries) is bad. If we could just defund these militaries, it is assumed, the world would be a much better place. While there are certainly plenty of horror stories that support this view, we think that it is mistaken. Peacebuilding efforts can only succeed in a climate of physical security. Societies that lack the ability to deter aggression expose themselves to attack from those who are willing to use the most ruthless and brutal forms of violence or, in today’s world, highly sophisticated and effective hybrid warfare tactics.

We need to recognize that national defense and peacebuilding are mutually interdependent components of the larger effort to prevent the need for future Memorial Days. In the United States, we have been phenomenally lucky to have a military that sees itself as subservient to civilian political commanders and focused solely on defending the United States, its allies, and its interests.

Still, under its civilian political leadership, our military has done lots of things that are easy to criticize. And, like any large organization, it has lots of internal failings that, given the lethality of its mission, often produce tragic consequences. Still, we are vastly better off than people who live in societies where the military has turned its power on its own citizenry in ways that make it virtually impossible for citizens to escape the most terrible forms of oppression and tyranny. We shudder to think what the world would be like, had Western democracies not been able to successfully defend themselves from history’s long march of aggressive authoritarian regimes.

So, we don’t have a problem acknowledging the role that the military has played in protecting the rights, freedoms, and material prosperity that we so cherish. We also recognize that, when problems arise, the problem most frequently lies with the civilian political leaders that we, as citizens, put into office. If we don’t like the orders that these leaders have been given, it is our responsibility to use our ultimately decisive influence to change those leaders — and hence, those orders. This, of course, also requires defending democratic norms and institutions that give us those powers. — norms and institutions that are now, obviously, under attack.

The words we wrote on this blog two years ago also noted that those of us in the conflict and peacebuilding fields often see the military as antithetical to the goals of peacebuilding. But then, as now, we said that is a mistake. We noted then that

this event (and countless similar holidays held in other countries around the world) should be a time to reflect on the successes and failures of efforts to make and keep the peace, while also defending fundamental human rights and freedoms against the forces of tyranny and oppression. It should be a time to remember that each one of the events being memorialized today represents the failure to resolve a conflict nonviolently. We should embrace this holiday as an occasion to recommit ourselves to the goal of eliminating the kind of events that will later be seen as deserving of remembrance on future Memorial Days.

We should also recognize the common cause that exists between the efforts of our field and the efforts of others who have committed themselves to preventing such future tragedies. We should do this with a sense of deep humility and explicit recognition that we do not have close to all the answers, and we have much to learn from people who approach efforts to prevent war from other perspectives, including military perspectives.

The problem is not (as some assert) that insufficient numbers of people have listened to the advice of the peacebuilders or that our “marketing” hasn’t been good enough. Rather, the problem is that insufficient numbers of people find our advice persuasive enough to gamble their lives on its effectiveness. The truth is that we have yet to build a compelling track record of past success. We need to continue to work to find better ways of dealing with the problems of scale, complexity, and intractability that lie at the core of so many violent conflicts.

While this has always been important, it is seeming especially so now, when conflicts are spiraling out of control in so many different parts of the world simultaneously, and when widespread hyper-polarization is tearing apart so many democratic societies. On October 6, 2023, few people in Israel or Gaza had any idea about the catastrophe that was about to befall them. Though Russia had been saber-rattling for awhile, few people in Russia or Ukraine probably knew what was about to befall them in February 2022. Are we about to witness similar catastrophes in Sudan? Taiwan? South Korea? Europe? The U.S.?

In the two years since this was written, the situation, of course, has continued to deteriorate. The end of the war in Ukraine is nowhere in sight. The attacks of October 7 have metastasized into a widening series of wars that now threaten critical foundations of the global economy. Even more worrying is the long series of articles posted on our weekly Links Newsletters highlighting many ways in which the danger of large-scale violence and war is increasing.

Peacebuilders (using that term broadly to include anyone who works for peace, whether they call themselves “peacebuilders” or not) must greatly accelerate their efforts to bring peace to the warring regions and conflict transformation, reconciliation, and violence prevention to places that are teetering, including the U.S.

Earlier, we went on to say:

This means that we have to work together to find better answers to a lot of very difficult questions. For example, we need to do a much better job of figuring out how to defuse the hyper-polarized conflict between the right and the left in the U.S. — a conflict that is leading to open talk of a U.S. civil war and more immediate claims of authoritarian power.

We also need to figure out how to defuse the new Cold War that is emerging between Western democracies and Russia and China (as well as more minor, but still dangerous, powers like Iran and North Korea). We are already engaged in a wide range of serious “gray zone” skirmishes that involve most everything short of large-scale “kinetic” violence, plus a rapidly accelerating arms race focused on assembling a terrifying array of new 21st-century weapons.

In addition, we need to figure out how to better respond to threats like Hamas — a belligerent that has no interest in making peace because war is their raison d’être. It is the only way of life they know, and it brings them honor and purpose in life, while at the same time bringing death, destruction, and despair to so many others, including many “on their own side.”

In short, the relative peace and calm which many of us still cling to is not something that we should take for granted. If we don’t take today’s threats much more seriously, we could easily unleash more of the kinds of tragedies that memorial days around the world urge us to never forget.

Lead Graphic Credit: Arlington National Cemetery: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Spring_Time_at_Arlington_National_Cemetery,_Arlington,_Virginia_on_March_12,_2024_-_19.jpg; By: Arlington National Cemetery; Permission: Public Domain; Date Acquired: May 25, 2024.

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About the MBI Newsletters

Two or three times a week, Guy and Heidi Burgess, the BI Directors, share some of our thoughts on political hyper-polarization and related topics. We also share essays from our colleagues and other contributors, and every week or so, we devote one newsletter to annotated links to outside readings that we found particularly useful relating to U.S. hyper-polarization, threats to peace (and actual violence) in other countries, and related topics of interest. Each Newsletter is posted on BI, and sent out by email through Substack to subscribers. You can sign up to receive your copy here and find the latest newsletter here or on our BI Newsletter page, which also provides access to all the past newsletters, going back to 2017.

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Planning vs Learning in Complex Systems

Yesterday we were talking with David Eisner about ways of responding to the governance crisis in the United States. David asked a very interesting question: “Who wins?” he asked (referring to which projects will wind up having the greatest positive impact on efforts to advance our shared goal of strengthening democracy). “People who learn faster — or people who plan better?” We often think poorly of people who act without planning — without carefully analyzing the situation, and then thoughtfully planning their response to match it — before they act. Just acting on the basis of “gut feelings” is generally thought to be rash and ineffective.

David argued that the winners actually tends to be the people who learn faster. That’s because we are all attempting to influence a complex system that is constantly changing as a result of competing citizen efforts to push society in their desired direction. It is impossible to understand the whole system well enough to know how it will respond to any particular action. And since the system is constantly changing, the social circumstances upon which initial plans were based are likely to change significantly by the time that those plans are implemented. So things seldom go according to plan. Successful projects are those that are able to adapt to unforeseen circumstances, while projects that fail to adapt often run into serious trouble. Such adaptation requires thoughtful, continual monitoring of the ways in which a project is unfolding, and a willingness to make minor modifications and, sometimes, major changes. One of the big struggles that the peacebuilding community has had with many funders revolves around their desire to have a firm work plan for an entire, often multi-year project — a work plan that often lacks the flexibility needed to respond to changing circumstances.

Now, of course, this is an over-simplification. It certainly helps to understand as much as possible about a situation before deciding upon a course of action. As Kenneth Boulding was fond of putting it, we should prepare to be surprised about the way in which events will unfold. Still, with careful thought and planning, we can avoid being dumbfounded. There is much that is knowable, and those things often make a big difference. But not everything is knowable; we must expect surprises.

This way of thinking reflects the importance of distinguishing between complicated and complex systems and the ways of “fixing them” when they aren’t working as we wish. As we explained in Newsletter 324, there are two very different approaches to fixing broken systems, which we refer to as the “engineering” and the “medical” models. As we wrote then,

The engineering model works for systems that are consciously designed by humans: complicated mechanical systems. They may be computers or computer programs, airplanes, cars, assembly lines, space stations — all sorts of complicated devices, large and small. Complete plans for those systems are available; they’re deterministic systems. They work the same way every time — at least, until they’re broken, and then in a sense, the system is just functioning differently, but it still is deterministic. That’s why you can troubleshoot complicated systems effectively. If you’ve got enough money and sufficient will, you can troubleshoot and repair just about any mechanical system, unless doing so will cost more than the repair is worth. In that case, you junk the machine and replace it with a new one.

The engineering model does not work nearly as well, however, for complex systems because they are not deterministic. Here you are dealing with systems that have evolved through natural and social evolution. The human body is one example of what systems theorists call a “complex adaptive system.” So, too are biological ecosystems, social systems, economies, and conflict systems.

There are no plans for these systems, because they weren’t designed. The closest we can come to “plans” are observational studies about how particular aspects of the system seem to work. So doctors understand the basic elements of the human body, and how all the “parts” are connected. Much of their work focuses on treating as many injuries and diseases as possible. For some kinds of ailments, doctors are usually able to produce a complete cure. They can give you penicillin for strep throat, and your sore throat will go away. They can set a broken bone, and it will heal correctly. For other problems, the best they can do is provide partial or symptomatic relief. You can take Tamiflu to lessen the duration of the flu, but doctors can’t cure it, as they can strep throat. They can suggest Claritin for hay fever in the spring, but that just reduces symptoms, it doesn’t get rid of them. Other kinds of problems doctors can’t treat, but they can help you live with them. That’s what the whole movement which produced the Americans with Disabilities Act was about: helping people live with incurable chronic conditions. Yet, there are still other conditions which are terminal, for which modern medicine does not have a cure. Many cancers are like that, as is heart disease. We can reduce risk factors by eating well and exercising, but doctors cannot entirely prevent heart attacks or cancer.

This continuum of treatments applies to conflicts, as well. We can’t prevent conflict; indeed, as we have explained elsewhere, we need conflict as it is what Guy calls “the engine of social learning.” But we do want to prevent conflicts from becoming destructive, and to limit their destructiveness, if we fail to prevent it. And just as we try to reduce medical risk factors by eating well and exercising, we can try to learn conflict management and resolution techniques such as learning how to listen to others effectively, or identify shared interests to find win-win agreements.

Just as is true with medicine, conflict outcomes can range from complete resolution to complete failure. Sometimes, there are misunderstandings that can be cleared up entirely with a good, honest conversation. Or apparently irreconcilable positions can have compatible interests underneath, allowing for a win-win interest-based resolution. In many other cases, what you’re providing is symptomatic relief. You help people who have irreconcilable differences learn to live with chronic conflict, but to do so in ways that limit casualties and costs. This is what dialogue facilitators do, when they get people who have fundamental moral differences to learn how to listen to each other and treat each other with respect, even if they don’t change their minds about the moral issue being discussed. And just as is true in medicine, there are some conflicts that are, in essence, terminal. We do not now have the tools that enable us to deal with these constructively. (Although some of our colleagues likely disagree, we would put the Israel/Palestinian conflict in this category).

Going back to Guy’s notion that conflict is the “engine of social learning,” conflict is what enables us to see that the way we have always done things, or the way we have always understood the world to be (or work), sometimes isn’t right. Or at least it could be improved upon. Sometimes the people who we are in conflict with actually have important things to tell us — things we would do well to learn, not just for them, but for our own well-being too. And sometimes we need to “learn from the system.” If it isn’t working as well as we hope it will, we need to study it to figure out what is going wrong, and experiment with different approaches to fixing it, rather than having one “solution” which we think is right, and implementing that same “solution” over and over again, even though it isn’t producing the results we want.

So that suggests a strong reason why, in David’s observation, “learners” beat “planners.” Planners are acting as if they are working on a complicated (deterministic) system, but learners recognize that they are working within a complex system and that their success depends upon their ability to adapt to ever-changing conditions.

A Further Note on “Winning.”

When we mentioned to David that we wanted to turn his observation into a post, he warned that some people are adverse to the idea of “winning,” seeing it as too competitive, and not adequately cooperative. Indeed, we have written a lot about the need to pursue a “power-with democracy,” rather than a “power-over democracy,” which is another way of saying we should try to cooperate more and compete less. And we stand by that advice. But in this sense, “winning” is not beating the other side, but rather doing a better job of pursuing shared or complementary goals surrounding democratic revitalization. Making things better is a win. No change or making things worse is a loss. And, it is desirable for funds to flow toward those organizations and projects that are most effective in doing in making things better.

So it is not a question of cooperation or competition. Indeed, we think that pursuing collaboration over competition is a likely winning approach to fixing our toxic, hyper-polarized political system. The question is who can most successfully facilitate the kind of cooperation that we need. Good intentions are not enough. We need genuine positive results. And, given the extraordinary challenge we face, we need to continue to push ourselves to do more and to do it better. We have seen many people and organizations do that when they pursue various forms of deliberative democracy. The results are most often very positive, both in terms of system change, and in terms of satisfaction among the participants. So we would call that a “win” for democracy. And the more people learn about this new way of “doing democracy,” the better off we are likely to be.

Individual projects and the people who fund those projects also need to be realistic in their expectations. We need to resist the temptation to over promise and funders need to resist the temptation to make unrealistic demands on their grantees. We also need to think about project evaluations as a way of encouraging and facilitating this kind of adaptive learning process. We need to be careful to focus on the things that really matter, not meaningless statistics. After all, there is considerable truth to the old axiom that “things that count are very difficult to count and things that are easy to count often don’t count.”

So maybe learning and planning aren’t really in competition, and they certainly aren’t in an either-or or zero-sum or win-lose relationship. But we need to be constantly attune to opportunities to learn, even after we have done what we think was excellent planning.

————————

Lead Photo Credit: ChatGPT

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About the MBI Newsletters

Two or three times a week, Guy and Heidi Burgess, the BI Directors, share some of our thoughts on political hyper-polarization and related topics. We also share essays from our colleagues and other contributors, and every week or so, we devote one newsletter to annotated links to outside readings that we found particularly useful relating to U.S. hyper-polarization, threats to peace (and actual violence) in other countries, and related topics of interest. Each Newsletter is posted on BI, and sent out by email through Substack to subscribers. You can sign up to receive your copy here and find the latest newsletter here or on our BI Newsletter page, which also provides access to all the past newsletters, going back to 2017.

NOTE! If you signed up for this Newsletter and don't see it in your inbox, it might be going to one of your other emails folder (such as promotions, social, or spam). Check there or search for beyondintractability@substack.com and if you still can't find it, first go to our Substack help page, and if that doesn't help, please contact us.

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Highlighted Links

A few suggestions about links that we think are especially interesting.

• Social / Economic Complexity
  Why Capitalism Persists — An analysis of the ways in which competition and conflict play an essential role in producing the creative tension that has made capitalisms of so successful.

• Social / Economic Complexity
  So Nobody Is Going to Pay Taxes Now? — A description of just how far US politicians have gone in trying to win votes by offering ever more generous tax cuts (while avoiding the corresponding cuts to government services).

• Race / Anti-Racism
  The Self-Defeating Condescension of an Anti-Racist Education — A thought-provoking (and doubtless controversial) critique of the way in which progressives think about race and racism.

• Nihilists
  What the Hell Is Microlooting? — An exploration of an important new word -- a word that reveals yet another giant crack in the social contract and the socioeconomic system upon which we all depend.

• Bridge Building
  Rejecting the Rejection of Empathy — More on the ongoing and surprising debate over whether empathy is a force for good or ill.

• Violence
  The Year of the Molotov Cocktail: American Antigovernment Violence Hits a 30-Year High — Disturbing data on the trend toward increasing levels of political violence -- something that is not very surprising, but very worrying.

• Communication Complexity
  Shoot the messenger — A provocative argument that the class of people who shape public debate can’t see our their blind spots.

Reader Suggested Links

Highlighting links suggested by our readers. Please send us links to things that you find useful.

• Theories of Change
  David Brooks: “I’ve Got One More 10-Year Chapter in My Career, Probably” — David Brooks has left the Times, but he is not disappearing from the pundit scene. He explains why he left, and what is next for him.

• Constructive Communication
  The Problem With Hasan Piker’s Einstein Story — A thought-provoking exploration of more and less constructive ways of engaging controversial ideas.

• Race / Anti-Racism
  “Pawns in a White Man’s Political Game” — A comprehensive review of the long history of the civil rights movement -- a review that helps us understand how we got to where we are now.

• Artificial Intelligence
  Why the A.I. Job Apocalypse (Probably) Won’t Happen — A hopeful and, we think, pretty persuasive description of the way in which societies and economies will adapt to AI’s ability to dramatically lower the cost of information.

• Constructive Communication
  Strict Uniforms. Ancient Philosophy. Can a Public School Cure Our Toxic Politics? — A pretty appealing description of benefits of a “classical” education focused on teaching people how to think and constructively interact with one another.

• Effective Problem-Solving
  The Ecosystem of Deliberative Technologies for Public Input — Ensuring public opinion and policy preferences are reflected in policy outcomes is essential to a functional democracy. A growing ecosystem of deliberative technologies aims to improve the input-to-action loop between people and their governments.

• Violence
  Idiots Killed Sanity — A sobering assessment of the sources of evil that have become increasingly accepted and normalized and increasingly dangerous.

  

Colleague Activities

Highlighting things that our conflict and peacebuilding colleagues are doing that contribute to efforts to address the hyper-polarization problem.

• Constructive Communication
  Political Perception Gap Lesson Plan/Presentation — A slide deck from More Like Us that educators and others can use to teach about the Perception Gap and why diminishing it is so important.

• Bridge Building
  Art, Politics, and Strangers: The Unexpected Way to Bridge Our Divides — Conceptual artist David Deighton created ‘art as civic science’: talking politics with strangers in national parks. He uses active listening to bridge divides.

• Theories of Change
  Strategy Is Not the Problem: Why Issue-Based and Systems Approaches Break Under Pressure without Defensible Decisions — The central problem is not choosing a strategy. The central problem is making allocation decisions that cannot be sustained once they are tested.

• Theories of Change
  How a Smaller “Them” Gets Us to a Bigger “We” — A new image of what civic engagement work should be: the building of “long bridges” to others in an effort to recognize their shared humanity and stake in a shared future.

• Theories of Change
  Stop trying to ‘educate’ people into changing. Science proves it doesn’t work — When confronted with evidence that contradicts our beliefs, we’re more likely to question the evidence than to update our views.

• Psychological Complexity
  Democracy is about people: Are we paying enough attention to the brain? — “Brain capital,” as different from “human capital,” has both strong explanatory power in analyses of democracy and is an organizing concept for policy interventions to support democratic resilience.

• The Hyper-Polarization Threat
  Why We Viscerally Resist Talking to the Other Side – Mónica Guzmán — This episode explores why we’ve come to view curiosity as a threat and how our political labels have been transformed from descriptions of our beliefs into shields that prevent us from seeing the humanity in our neighbors.

• Constructive Communication
  How To Motivate Americans’ Conversations Across Politics — James Coan and Imre Huss explain the power of Perception Gap corrections and other methods to lower barriers and increase positive motivation.

• Civil Society
  Defending Local Stability: The Business Response — How business owners and leaders can prepare for possible federal deployments, protect their teams, and advocate for their communities.

• Developing a Unifying Vision
  Building the Democratic Economy Now — Scot Nakagawa reflects on the economic infrastructure we need before Democrats can win.

• Saving Democracy
  Bowling with Strangers: Fresh Theory for Reviving Struggling Democracies through Demonstrations 2.0 — What if the future of democracy depends not on louder protests, but on deeper human connection? In Bowling with Strangers, Marc Gopin says the power of civic gatherings are the relationships we build while we are there.

• Saving Democracy
  3/4 of Americans Say the System Is Broken. That’s Where Our Movement Begins. — What if the issues both parties use to tear us apart could be transformed into places where we could prove that “We the People” can still govern ourselves?

• Saving Democracy
  Policy by the People — A book review examining experiments across the world that have tried to remove politicians from the decision-making process. Have they worked?

• Saving Democracy
  The Prerogative to Pardon — As with everything else, Donald Trump is pushing the pardon process to the breaking point. Can it be salvaged? Should it?

• Artificial Intelligence
  Crocodile tears: Can the ethical-moral intelligence of AI models be trusted? — This paper introduces an ethical-moral intelligence (EMI) framework for evaluating AI models across dimensions of moral expertise, sensitivity, coherence, and transparency.

• Education
  Harvard Law faculty share ‘Why I Changed My Mind’ — Though (ideally) academia is a place where revising one’s ideas is a constant, in reality getting something ‘wrong’ can be scary. Three former Harvard professors share such moments of reckoning in this video.

• Non-Violence
  Why Gen-Z Is Rising — Erica Chenoweth and Matthew Cebul analyze the global surge of Gen Z-led protest movements, showing how economic insecurity, exclusion from power, and corruption are driving youth mobilization worldwide.

  More Colleague Activity Listings

News and Opinion

From around the web, more insight into the nature of our conflict problems, limits of business-as-usual thinking, and things people are doing to try to make things better. (Formerly, Beyond Intractability in Context.)

• Interstate War
  A ‘Crushing Victory’ and a ‘Military Mistake for the Ages’ — From a military perspective, a revealing and much more nuanced look at the successes and failures associated with the actions of all parties to the ongoing war with Iran.

• Artificial Intelligence
  There’s a 900-Year-Old Answer to Our Most Modern Problem — An extremely perceptive assessment of the ways in which common law-based strategies are able to constrain unreasonable behavior by AI firms without the need for any new legislation.

• Effective Problem-Solving
  My politically homeless views — A compilation of great ideas that neither political party seems to want to champion -- ideas that a new moderate political party might pursue.

• Race / Anti-Racism
  Ideas of Slavery: John Samuel Harpham’s ironic history — An in-depth attempt to write a global history of slavery (and related practices) -- a history that goes beyond simple stereotypes and helps us understand the forces that made this type of inhumanity possible.

• Education
  Documenting a Decade of Academic Meltdowns — An attempt to write a history of the complex array of events surrounding the academic “cancel culture” that has done so much to shape our contemporary political environment

• Social / Economic Complexity
  America is losing its most valuable resource: People — More insight into the complex relationship between long-term demographic change and a society’s vitality.

• Violence
  Private industry needs anti-drone defenses too — A startling essay that makes clear just how much of our society’s critical publicly and privately owned infrastructure is vulnerable to attack by small, easily smuggled drones.

• Artificial Intelligence
  The AI people have been right a lot — As we struggle to imagine a future dominated by AI, an appeal to listen to the folks who know this technology best.

• Social / Economic Complexity
  Truckers Kill More Than 5,000 People a Year. Regulators Are at Fault. — An eye-opening look at the inconsistent way in which our society addresses the risks associated with various industries.

• Psychological Complexity
  Fuel for thought — A profound essay asking us to reflect on the biological nature of our brains and our thinking.

• Social / Economic Complexity
  What will be scarce? — An essay that applies lessons from past periods of great technological innovation to the AI revolution. It simply asks how we will want to spend the money that we save by using AI technologies.

• Climate / Environment / Health
  RCP8.5 is Officially Dead — Good news -- the most dire projection of the likely impact of climate change is being withdrawn because it’s no longer thought to be a realistic possibility.

• US Politics
  The YOLO Presidency — Yet another attempt to understand President Trump’s complex psychology. This article focuses on his apparent desire to ultimately be seen as one of the most transformative leaders in world history.

• US Politics
  Two Cheers for Abundance Liberalism — A thoughtful assessment of the advantages and disadvantages one of the most promising strategies for building a broadly based political consensus.

• Corruption
  The Evolution of Trump’s Corruption — New information on the staggering (and, likely, unprecedented) level of corruption surrounding the Trump White House.

• Violence
  The American Way Is Under Fire — Thoughts on the far-reaching implications of the attack on the White House Correspondent’s Dinner (and so many other recent acts of political violence).

More News and Opinion Links

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About the MBI Newsletters

Two or three times a week, Guy and Heidi Burgess, the BI Directors, share some of our thoughts on political hyper-polarization and related topics. We also share essays from our colleagues and other contributors, and every week or so, we devote one newsletter to annotated links to outside readings that we found particularly useful relating to U.S. hyper-polarization, threats to peace (and actual violence) in other countries, and related topics of interest. Each Newsletter is posted on BI, and sent out by email through Substack to subscribers. You can sign up to receive your copy here and find the latest newsletter here or on our BI Newsletter page, which also provides access to all the past newsletters, going back to 2017.

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