Highlighted Links

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

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  The Suicide of a Hegemon — The war in Iran depleted weapons important to American global power projection. Trump 2.0 shows how he is squandering the alliances needed to sustain it.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  See How the World Has Changed Since the Start of the Iran War — A great series of graphics (and accompanying text) that brings us up to date on the far-reaching and often unrecognized implications of the United States’ war against Iran.

• Education
  Forget Yourself — From University of Austin (Texas), President Carlos Carvalho’s 2026 Convocation Address and a vision for higher education worth considering.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  The Gaza War Everyone Thinks They Understand — One of the most documented wars in history may also be one of the most misunderstood. This essay explores some of many dynamics that are distorting public perceptions of the conflict.

• Suppressing Opponents
  Hook and Squeeze — A report on an extensive investigation into the hidden and very dark side of US politics (and the ways in which bad-faith actors are attempting to manipulate both individuals and the larger system).

• Social / Economic Complexity
  Six-Chart Sunday – Tailwinds Are Real. Will They Last? — Amid all of the gloom and doom and predictions of imminent economic catastrophe, hopeful news that there are important positive trends that point to a better future.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  Trump is making the Iranian people pay for his failed war — Trump promised Iranians that help was coming. Tragically his strategy has evolved into an effort to impoverish the Iranian people in hopes that their rulers well eventually surrender.

• Developing a Unifying Vision
  Ordinary Abundance — A thought-provoking essay that asks us to reflect on our exceptional good fortune by walking through the places in which we live and reflecting on the things that we have that earlier generations would have regarded as miraculous.

• Saving Democracy
  America Has an Uncontested Elections Problem — As U.S. Democracy is currently structured, roughly 70% of all elections are uncontested -- a fact that convinces many that they lack a meaningful voice.

• Social / Economic Complexity
  What if our biggest problems aren’t economic? — A long and especially well documented essay that explores the social factors that are critical to the success of a society and its economy.

• Class Inequity
  Is This a New Era of Class Warfare? — An update on instances in which the class tensions that are at the heart of our hyper-polarized politics cross the line into outright acts of violence.

• Interstate War
  Has World War III Already Started? — An excellent contribution to the series of articles that asks us to pay more attention to the expanding scope of the world’s most violent conflicts and the possibility that they could engulf the planet in a global conflagration.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  The Hatred That Broke American Politics — A comparison of the United States’ robust efforts to address the scourge of racism and its wholly inadequate efforts to address the problem of antisemitism.

• Saving Democracy
  Spencer Cox’s Crusade — Spencer Cox, the Republican governor behind the Disagree Better campaign, thinks he can drain the bile from partisan combat. This article explains how trying to do this “almost broke him.”

  

Colleague Activities

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

• Constructive Communication
  What Happens When We Stop Trying to Win a Difficult Conversation? — An explanation of the surprising advantages of abandoning efforts to win an argument.

• Civil Society
  Civil Discourse, Civic Friendship, and Civil Liberties. — Why intellectual humility, truth-seeking, and a willingness to engage those who disagree with us are essential to preserving civil discourse and protecting our fundamental liberties.

• Suppressing Opponents
  Terms of Engagement - How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear – Ash Center — What does it take to stand up for what you believe in when your personal safety, security and even liberty are at stake? This Ash Center discussion talks about speaking out in tumultuous times.

• Psychological Complexity
  Scouts and Soldiers in the Social Sector — This is an old Daniel Stid post that he referenced in a new one. Here he points out that we all tend to see the world as we want it to be, rather than as it is. We need to work to avoid that mistake.

• Psychological Complexity
  Why Smart People Keep Falling for Stupid Ideas — Four psychological biases explain how the smartest people can make the dumbest decisions and hidden logic behind the madness you see everywhere.

• Theories of Change
  PolicyLink - Project All - Insight Report -2026 — Project All was conceived as an exploration of curiosity and discovery to answer a fundamental question facing our nation: What would it take to realize a nation where all of us can flourish?

• Trust / Trust Earning
  Building Scaleable Trust - Of Identity, Commons and Governance with Grace Rachmany of Sideways Earth — We know we need to create communities of place, purpose and passion – but if we can do this, how do we find other communities to link with so we can scale from community to region (based on shared action)?

• De-Escalation Strategies
  “Must we be nice to Trump voters?” — How do we challenge incivility, disrespect, and hate without becoming doppelgangers of that which oppose?

• Developing a Unifying Vision
  Building A Culture of Repair: What It Is, and Why It Matters — America’s 250 birthday is a milestone that invites celebration, reckoning and a chance to reflect on what this country has built and what it has needs to repair.

• Theories of Change
  The Funder’s Palette: A Spectrum of Approaches for Systems Change — An examination of some of the most compelling examples of systems change and a review of the approaches, tools and mindsets that make success possible.

• Social / Economic Complexity
  Morality Is Cooperation — Our deepest moral commitments are the operating instructions for shared life. Morality and relationship are not two subjects. They are one subject, seen from two sides.

• Developing a Unifying Vision
  With Rights Come Responsibilities - That’s the American Way — Our fundamental freedoms and personal security ultimately depend on our willingness to take responsibility for helping provide these things to our fellow citizens.

• Developing a Unifying Vision
  The civic consensus beneath America’s political divide | Brookings — Hopeful new survey data that suggests that Americans remain more united in their civic identity than today’s polarized politics would suggest.

• Civil Society
  The Citizenship Test — A thought-provoking essay outlining the civic virtues and shared allegiances that we ought to cultivate and require.

• Corruption
  Why Anticorruption Campaigns Aren’t a Silver Bullet | Journal of Democracy — Calling for accountability against corrupt officials is a powerful message for building a reform movement. Unfortunately, it can also make it harder to attract support from opponents.

• Developing a Unifying Vision
  Breaking the Cycle: Transitional Justice in America After Trump — An article that asks us to think ahead to Post-Trump America and consider turning our transitional justice tools inward so that we can better reckon with societal failures we have long refused to face.

• Artificial Intelligence
  We’ve mistaken the coping mechanism for the job — The ‘Middle Layer’ of the social hierarchy plays a critical role in holding everything together. What happens if we replace people in these roles with AI agents?

• Constructive Advocacy
  The Interview: An Expert on Conflict Says Your Relationships Are Doomed Without It — In her new book, “The Art of Fighting,” the conflict resolution facilitator Priya Parker argues that we could use more conflict, provided that we get better at handling it.

• Saving Democracy
  Why democracy requires renewal — People are ready for bold democratic reform that the country hasn’t seen in decades, says Pew Research Center’s President Michael Dimock.

• Constructive Communication
  Listening Starts at Home | Blake Moore & Salud Carbajal — The latest Disagree Better Public Service Announcement with Representatives Blake Moore (R-UT) and Salud Carbajal (D-CA) who both explain how disagreement can be respectful and creative.

  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.)

• Social / Economic Complexity
  Economists Who Weren’t Worried About the Debt Are Now Panicking — An explanation of why the United States’ tendency to resolve short-term disputes by borrowing from future generations is so dangerous.

• Class Inequity
  Why the Welfare Debate Went Silent — An article that asks an all-important question, what’s the best way to aid the poor?

• Saving Democracy
  Alaska’s Ranked-Choice Voting Travesty — Disturbing news for supporters of ranked choice voting and an explanation of why it is so important to get the details right.

• Saving Democracy
  Democracies Need Creative Destruction — We can’t just complain about our government’s many failings, we have to find ways to fix things. This article, from Foreign Affairs, tries to do just that.

• Saving Democracy
  Are Americans Losing Faith in Capitalism? We Asked Them. — We asked Americans how they feel about capitalism versus socialism. The results suggest a major shift in the national attitude.

• Immigration
  This Could Be the Year Germany’s Far-Right Goes Mainstream — An important reminder that other countries are facing a populist rebellion against high levels of immigration from culturally dissimilar parts of the world.

• Race / Anti-Racism
  Blinded by Colour-blindness — From Free Black Thought: an essay outlining an alternative way of being black in contemporary society.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  Death and Sex in Palestine — A disturbing look at the Palestinian culture of martyrdom that explains much of the intractability of the ongoing conflict (while also raising important and difficult ethical issues).

• Artificial Intelligence
  The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical. — A direct link to Bill Gates’ widely quoted essay outlining the dangers associated with AI and the things which we might do to limit those dangers.

• Left / Right Conflict
  Woke 1 Was Anti-Populist, and Not in the Good Way — By demanding the purification of the individual and by branding broad swathes of the public as part of the oppressor class, ‘Woke 1’ besmirched the average Americans who Democrats once championed.

• Peacebuilding
  Here’s How One Country May Have Solved a Violent Uprising — A story about one of the rarest things: a contemporary peace agreement that actually seems to be working and offering real hope to the people of Turkey and its Kurdish minority.

• Progressive Left / Socialism
  Yes, Woke 1.0 Was Crazy. Now Where’s the Accountability? — An argument that efforts to move beyond the excesses of progressive peak-woke politics would be greatly facilitated by public apologies and serious efforts to put things right.

• Saving Democracy
  Unusual Spending Raises Prospect of Election Meddling in Alaska — A window into some of the things bad-faith actors are doing to distort the democratic process in ways that may unduly influence the outcome of the upcoming election.

• Artificial Intelligence
  AI and the New Age of Bioweapons — A worrying article outlining one of the most terrifying threats associated with AI and a big reason why we have to get past our hyper-polarized politics so that we can start working effectively together.

• Climate / Environment / Health
  Net Zero Won’t Fix Climate Change. Technology Will — A provocative essay that asks us to treat our warming planet as an engineering problem to be solved (rather than a moral failing).

• Developing a Unifying Vision
  The Concept Is as Old as Aristotle. It Can Still Cause a Ruckus. — An exploration of the long and complex history of a critically important concept -- the common good —with important implications for those trying to imagine a democracy in which we’d all like to live.

• Saving Democracy
  This Is Why People Hate the Government — An interview with Ann Lowrey, the author of ‘The Time Tax,’ a book that explains why so many people find so much of what government does to be so maddening.

• Left / Right Conflict
  There Is a Sickness Worse Than Wokeness — Amid the welcome willingness of people to start addressing the excesses of the woke left, an essay that explains how an equally, and perhaps more serious, a kind of wokeness is emerging on the right.

• Progressive Left / Socialism
  Confessions of a Former Social Justice Warrior — Sabrina Joy Stevens spent two decades building the progressive movement from the inside. She explains what finally made her walk away -- and what the movement she helped build has become.

• Rule of Law
  The Media’s Lawfare Enabling — An argument that legal journalists, who ought to know better, are cheering on meritless lawsuits against President Trump (and undermining confidence in the rule of law in the process).

• Interstate War
  Ukraine Planned to Swarm Moscow Airports With AI-Guided Drones — The stalled operation, code-named “M&Ms,” sought to isolate Russian elites and force Vladimir Putin to negotiate a truce. It also illustrates the kind of havoc that any small-scale drone campaign could unleash on any modern society.

  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.

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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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Newsletter 484 - August 27, 2026

We (the Burgesses) are excited to announce BI’s partnership with Braver Angels’ Civic Scholars Council (CSC) to publish their first round of papers on courageous citizenship. To do so, we have created a new section of BI on Courageous Citizenship which will be housed in the BI Knowledge Base.

The Courageous Citizenship Landing Page contains two sets of papers. First are the papers commissioned by the CSC for their first meeting in the summer of 2026. Right now, 33 of these papers are available; more are coming soon.

The second set of papers are things that were written on or relating to Courageous Citizenship on the BI Substack Newsletter, along with other papers that were on the same topic, but published elsewhere.

We are very pleased to be able to host the CSC papers here, and hope others will contribute their thoughts on how we can pursue Courageous Citizenship to strengthen American democracy (and democracies elsewhere.)

The following is Co-Chair of the CSC, Harry Boyte’s, introduction to this set of papers and the project from which they came.

-- Heidi Burgess and Guy Burgess

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We Are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For
Using the Braver Angels Library on Courageous Citizenship

Harry C. Boyte, Co-chair, Braver Angels Civic Scholars Council

Beyond Intractability, a highly regarded website, newsletter, and Substack in the field of conflict resolution, depolarization, and democracy, and the Braver Angels Civic Scholars Council (CSC) are partnering to publish thirty-three short and readable papers on Courageous Citizenship. The papers are free read and download on laptops and cellphones. They are inspiring and challenging, with different views about citizenship and what is to be done to meet the nation’s crisis of direction and division. They are full of ideas and practical tips to help readers advance the Braver Angels goal of making “courageous citizenship an honored norm.”

The CSC sponsoring these papers includes an initial twenty members, bringing together leading scholars and reflective practitioners. Those published today have different perspectives on active citizenship.

Overall, the collection greatly expands the meaning of “citizen,” beyond what the philosopher Sarah Stitzlein in her paper calls “civil” citizenship, a legal relationship to government, to “civic” citizenship, what citizens do together to build communities and the country. Civil citizenship, a singularly legalistic definition of the citizen, divides and polarizes. Civic citizenship does the opposite.

We sorted the papers into three groups reflecting civic traditions in American history that show how we can be united:

• Civic development, exploring methods and practices through which citizens grow in responsibility and maturity, as John Saunders puts it in his essay. Mature citizens become stewards, as described by Komal Razvi and her co-authors in “Courageous Stewards Rising.” Civic honor, invoked by the signers of the Declaration of Independence 250 years ago, needs different values and principles than local reputation in a tempestuous and challenging public world, described by Christy Provines. It draws deeply on religious traditions and humanities fields, as George Handley describes.
  

• Deliberative democracy, giving examples and ideas for citizens developing public judgment about wicked problems that involve value conflicts. In their papers, leaders in deliberation such as April Chatham-Carpenter, Randy Lioz, Jason Bornstein, Vinay Orekondy (papers forthcoming) and others describe the deliberative movement from different vantages and possible ways ahead.
  

• Public work, in which citizens are co-creators of a democratic way of life. The public work framework sees work and workplaces as sites for courageous citizenship and a way to renew the civic identity of local institutions which are formative influences. Robert Ceresa gives the inspiring example of a network of Black women teachers, called Jeanes teachers, who organized communities to build 5,000 “Rosenwald” schools and thousands of libraries in the midst of segregation which were centers of hope, learning, and citizen action. Romy Hϋbler describes how Towson University is preparing “citizen professionals.” Michelle Linford and Matthew Watson recount their initiative to return a more “social” identity and practice to social work. Nancy Kranich, birthmother of the modern civic movement among libraries when she served as president of the American Library Association, tells the story of libraries as civic centers that began with Benjamin Franklin before the nation’s founding.

The papers include many stories from American history, including the essay by Council member Trygve Throntveit, “Civic Courage as an American Political Tradition,” which recounts movements of everyday citizens who worked together to tackle injustices, build communities and advance toward a more perfect union. A short version was published in TIME magazine. Beth Malow and Jim Wilson give an account which shows that moments in American history with a “scarcity” mindset have been polarizing, how an “abundance” mindset changed the public mood.

“We the people” began with the exhilarating sense of an extraordinary shift -- a society of “subjects” to a nation of free and equal self-governing “citizens.” In 2010, scientists at the Library of Congress, after painstaking hyperspectral analysis, discovered stunning evidence of the shift from “subject” to “citizen” in Thomas Jefferson’s thinking. His July 2nd working draft of the Declaration of Independence addressed fellow “subjects”; then Jefferson changed his mind, crossed out “subjects” and replaced it with “citizens.” The change signaled recognition that people of the emerging United States were no longer subjects of a king but “We the People,” creating an emerging democracy.

The nation’s founding had deep exclusions and injustices as well as hope and promise. “We the People” was sharply limited in definition. Slaves were counted as only three fifths of a person in the Constitution and Blacks, free or enslaved, were denied elemental rights. Women were not full citizens. Poor, landless citizens initially lacked voting rights. But ideals of freedom and equality inspired those left out to create transformative movements for full dignity, equality, and recognition. Again and again these have revitalized our democracy, defined both by public institutions and practice like elections and also as a way of life.

Will Friedman, a Council member and former president of Public Agenda, the nation’s leading citizen-oriented polling firm, tells the little-known story of an inclusive, pluralist civic populist tradition in America far different than the exclusive and belligerent “populism” cited today. With his co-author Rebecca Trout, Doug Linkhart, president of the National Civic League, describe the venerable “All American Cities Award” program, an award which honors strong civically oriented communities each year – more than 500 since its founding in 1949.

The pledge adapted at the BA Convention in Philadelphia on June 28 recalls the founding line from the Declaration when signers pledged “lives, fortunes, and sacred honor.” The convention concluded with a new pledge: “I pledge to be a courageous citizen — to choose curious listening over contempt, to build alongside those with different politics, and to embrace our shared duty to renew America’s civic culture.”

For all the differences with the nation’s founding there are also similarities with today, when many feel powerless, divided, and worried about the future. A shift from “subject” to “citizen” will involve changes in identity akin to those in our country’s beginning. Recent works like Creating a Nation of Joiners and Democracy Schools by the historian Johann Neem, another member of the Civic Scholars Council, show how learning the identity of “citizen” required an enormous process of learning and citizenship education. Leaders like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Benjamin Rush stressed such citizen education, and the movement was taken up in communities and largely led by local citizens.

We have similar challenges today. The Courageous Citizenship papers are resources.

A civic learning movement of free spaces

One way to understand the challenge before us is to look at wellsprings of democratic movements and community building in the US and elsewhere. The historian Sara Evans and I named the concept, free spaces, out of our experiences in the American civil rights movement and found similar learning spaces in every broad, pluralist, future-oriented movement in our history, writing about them in our book, Free Spaces: The Sources of Democratic Change in America. Indeed such spaces were what made movements democratic and pluralist, not reactive and partisan. In the civil rights movement, churches, businesses, schools and many other settings functioned as free spaces, creating opportunities for uncoerced open discussion, civic learning, relationship and sometimes interaction across racial lines.

These examples illustrate free spaces as settings with relatively equal power relationships. They bring together diverse people in public with opportunities for reciprocal learning, listening, and collective action. They are self-organized. Highlander Folk School, the civil rights organizing center animated by leaders like Septima Clark, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks and Dorothy Cotton consciously developed what can be called free spaces, launching a movement of hundreds of citizenship schools across the South. Andy Young, then organizing such schools, later appointed US ambassador to the UN, called them “foundation of the movement.” Myles Horton, Highlander’s director recognized the power of the concept of free spaces and told me it applied to what they were doing.

Horton and Clark drew inspiration from folk schools and popular libraries in Denmark, at the heart of Scandinavian popular education. Such education transformed poor Nordic societies into flourishing nations. Civic learning continues. In Sweden today, 20 percent of the adult population are involved in study circles every year, another striking example of free spaces. Participants take joint responsibility for determining and attaining their learning objectives. Study circles encourage participants to develop a citizenship orientation.

Such collaborative, non-coercive learning spaces can play a key role in building democratic culture across societies. Marie Ström, active for twenty-five years as a democracy educator in South Africa, and now a local leader in Braver Angels at St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church in St. Paul, found the idea was an effective way to name civic learning sites across African countries.

Braver Angels created free spaces from the beginning. David Blankenhorn, founder of the Institute for American Values, had worried about polarization in the US. After the 2016 election, he enlisted David Lapp, a colleague in Ohio, to organize meetings between Trump and Clinton supporters to see whether common ground could be found. They brought in William Doherty, director of the Citizen Professional Center at the University of Minnesota. Doherty drew on experiences as a family therapist in planning a weekend workshop. It was designed to allow participants to “bring their best selves forward, listen to the other person and not just immediately get into an argument, and reflect on their contribution to the problem.” Doherty had developed “public work” approaches to family therapy which stressed a different role for professionals– “catalyzing the efforts of lay citizens with experts on tap not on top.”

Doherty’s workshop design asked people to become aware of themselves in a diverse public space and to recognize the positive dimensions in the other. Participants in the founding workshop —10 Trump supporters and 11 Clinton backers—wrote a closing statement that read, “A number of us on both sides began our meetings convinced that the other side could not be dealt with…We say unanimously that our experiences of talking with, rather than at or about each other, caused us to abandon our belief.”

Out of these efforts came Braver Angels with the mission of spreading an ethos and practices of courageous citizenship. Braver Angels’ method of creating free spaces where “reds” and “blues” meet to reflect on themselves in public, listen to others, develop respect, and discover resources for change has many possibilities. For instance, the Braver Angels’ debates “are not defined as a contest in which one side will emerge the victor,” said April Lawson, a founding architect. All are invited to speak: “the janitor, the videographer, or the president of an institution, a polished orator or a shy wallflower.”

Recent work like the Citizen-Led Solutions Initiative has shown how the Braver Angels way can assist residents in local communities working across partisan and other divides to address local problems. Since 2024, the Braver Angels “Citizen Commission on Immigration” has shown how the Braver Angels way can be taken to scale. The Commission has convened more than 60 workshops and discussions across the country and several national policy sessions and roundtables. The initiative aims to host events in all 50 states to build local red/blue consensus before publishing a final Report to the Nation.

The idea of multiple truths in public life about hot button issues on an issue as charged as immigration is hard for many to acknowledge, but the Commission showed it is possible. Indeed, Stitzlein in her piece on paradigms of citizenship, uses the Commission’s work as an example of developing a sense of “civic” citizenship.

Non-coercive, democratic learning experiences were once widespread in public life. I used Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s autobiography with my students at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs. His father (HHH the first) created a civic center in the town of Doland, South Dakota, in his drug store from 1915 to 1931. One of five Democrats in a town of 600 Republicans, the senior Humphrey was elected mayor, but he saw his most important achievement as building a vibrant civic culture. “In his store there was eager talk about politics, town affairs, and religion,” Humphrey wrote in his autobiography. “I’ve listened to some of the great debates of our time, but have seldom heard better discussions of basic issues than I did as a boy standing behind the soda fountain.”

Braver Angels shows that it is possible to create free spaces today. I see potential for the organization and its partners catalyzing an extraordinary civic learning movement that significantly transforms today’s public culture of division and fear.

The papers in the courageous citizenship library can be resources. I invite readers to think of ways they might be used, prompting study groups, discussions, forums, discovery of local civic history, celebrations of everyday courageous citizens, publicity for examples of citizen-led solutions. The possibilities go on and on.

This publication marks a beginning.

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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.

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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Newsletter 483 - August 25, 2026

On August 14, 2026, Guy and I were delighted to talk with Mónica Guzmán, whom we have known about and admired for a long time, but we have never before met her.

Mónica describers herself as “a bridge builder, journalist, and author who lives for great conversations sparked by curious questions.” She is the author of a best-selling book: I Never Thought About It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Deeply Divided Times and is the founder and CEO of Reclaim Curiosity. She is an advisor and debate chair at Braver Angels; and is the host of “A Braver Way” podcast, which she recently restarted.

She received an honorary doctorate degree from Wheaton College, and completed study and research fellowships at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, the Henry M. Jackson Foundation, and the University of Florida.

A Mexican immigrant and dual US/Mexico citizen, she lives in Seattle with her husband and two kids and is the proud liberal daughter of conservative parents. Read more about her and her work at moniguzman.com.

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This conversation happened when Hanna Hertel, who works with Mónica, wrote us, asking if we’d advertise Mónica’s podcast, “A Braver Way,” in our Newsletter. Heidi jumped at the chance, but went further, asking whether Mónica would do an interview with us about the podcast, her book, and other aspects of her work. And she agreed! So I am a bit embarrassed that we didn’t get around to talking about her podcast (except for descriptions of two particular episodes) until the very end. I’ll try to fix that oversight by talking about it first here.

Mónica started A Braver Way in 2023, in the run up to the 2024 election, and it ran every week until shortly after the election.

Now Mónica has restarted it in the run up to the 2026 election. BUT it isn’t a political podcast, at least not exactly. It is more a podcast about how we manage ourselves and our emotions and our relations with others in the context of very divisive and heated politics.

For instance, the first episode of the new series, which aired on June 5, is entitled “Speak Out or Work it Out: What’s Yours To Do Right?” It focuses on the pressures we all feel to “take a stand” or “keep the peace.” “How do you know the difference between the move that feels right, and the one that is right?” Mónica talks this over with her conservative friend and fellow bridge builder April Lawson. Among the questions they explore are:

• How do I avoid using “peacemaking” as a cover for a lack of courage?

• What’s the line between humanizing someone … and enabling them?

• When it comes to division in my community, my family, and my country: What will I wish I had done when my grandchildren ask what I did?

Another episode was with Axel Bouchon who set up connected phone booths in very progressive San Francisco, California and very conservative Abilene, Texas. They invited passersby to stop in and have a conversation with a person in the other city, who was, most likely, on the other side. How could this be fun, you might wonder? They report that it was! And lots of people did it.

But I didn’t start our conversation with that — I started, as I usually do, by asking Mónica about her background, and how she ended up doing what she does now. She said that she was guided by two paths, a professional path and a personal path, of which the personal was more powerful.

Mónica is part of a politically divided family of Mexican immigrants. She came to the U.S. when she was five, lived first in Texas, and then in New England.

My parents became citizens — they took the naturalization test and passed around the year 2000. I was 17, so I became a citizen then too. And as soon as they could vote, they went Republican. I went Democrat real fast. So hilarity ensued in the Guzmán household growing up.

The conversations we’d have for a while were tense and heated, but they didn’t feel all that painful until the 2016 election came along. Then it got really intense. Our ability to accept each other’s beliefs was tested — and I’ll be honest, it was mostly my ability to accept their beliefs. We got into some real, real heated conversations! But we were able to stay in them. I got to the point where I could really understand where they were coming from, and they could too, with me — it wasn’t all one way.

Mónica saw the same tensions boiling over around the country, saw people hurting each other or ending relationships altogether, and she thought that there must be a better way to engage these hot button issues.

This is where her journalism career came in. As a journalist, she said:

I learned really quickly how easily I can get people wrong. I would go up to a source I was interviewing thinking I already knew the story and just needed a quote, but every time I asked questions and questioned my own assumptions about what somebody was all about, I would learn the truth of who they were — because you have to get close enough to understand someone to actually understand them. I learned that lesson over and over again. ...

So all of that led me to the book — it sort of poured out of me. And when I first discovered the organization Braver Angels, the nonprofit, I couldn’t believe it. I thought, “I didn’t think this could exist, and it exists.” So I had to get involved.

Since then, she said, she’s learned that

there’s this whole universe of people, communities, and grassroots movements to help each other with this all across the political divide. We’re so far from done with this work; we’re just getting started. But it gives me a lot of hope, and it gives me a ton of fuel. It helps me meet incredible people. It helps make sure I’m not stuck in silos, because it’s very important for me to see the world as it is, not the way I imagine it to be.

So [she asked]— how do we open our eyes wider when the world wants us to stay in our lane? That’s what all this work is about.

I (Heidi) tossed that question right back to her, observing that

many people aren’t interested in opening their eyes wider, or they’re scared to, because they’re afraid of getting shut down, either from the person they’re being curious about or from their peers who say, “Well, why would you want to listen to them?” You talk about fearless conversations, but these conversations are scary!

Mónica quickly agreed. So, I asked, “How do we help people get over their fear?” She responded:

That’s the million-dollar question — that’s exactly the question I’ve been most focused on since the book came out. I don’t think my book actually did enough about that, because you started that question by saying “some people don’t want to open their eyes wider.” And I’d say, if asked, everyone would say they want to know the truth.

[But] what happens is two things. One, we think we already know the truth — that’s certainty. That’s what I think my first book ended up emphasizing: when we think we know, we won’t think to ask. And boy, do the assumptions we make cover up questions we could ask frequently these days. That’s one of the reasons someone will tell you, “What do you mean? My eyes are open very wide, thank you very much! I’ve seen everything I need to see. Now I need to act! I need to do these things, and I don’t want to talk anymore, I don’t want to learn anymore, because there’s nothing to learn over there anymore” — that kind of thing.

[As I (Heidi) was listening to this, my mind went to our “Fiddling While Rome Burns” conversations and David Eisner’s “Citizenship Under Friendly Fire” Essays.]

The fear, though, is really the biggest thing. Back to your question — how do you help people get over the fear?

My first response, as I think about it, is that it really starts by aiming curiosity within. I think there’s a lot about our culture today that is about interiority. It’s almost been therapized, our contemporary culture — even our movies. Now the hero is always crying and thinking about themselves. It didn’t use to be that way.

But I think there’s a reason for that. And I think it’s because of all kinds of things about our communication landscapes and technologies, and how we’ve revolutionized how many people we can connect with. It’s also given us this opportunity to see reflections of ourselves in our conversations with others, to wonder if we’ll be judged for something we believe.

And then our divisions come in and make that so much more consequential. We all need to belong, we all need to be understood. But it’s a scary, turbulent world. All of that, I think, has conspired to create this landscape where one of the biggest mistakes we can make is not wondering about our own emotions, our own nervous system — what is triggering us, and why. ... But the only way through it — you can’t avoid the fear, you have to learn from it. You really have to ask, “What makes me afraid? Can I look at that fear deeply to understand what’s really going on?”

Because if you don’t question that, and something triggers you, now you are on an autopilot you didn’t set up. You lose your agency, and you’ll end up saying or doing something you’ll probably regret. I can’t tell you how many people tell me that kind of thing — “When I look at what I posted on Facebook, I can’t believe it. I don’t know what came over me.”

Alternatively, Mónica said, we just don’t say anything. That, she pointed out that staying silent

gives more ground to the vocal edges of things, raising the stakes and the temperature for everybody. It’s a vicious cycle wherever you go.

We talked a lot about how to talk to people we disagree with in a respectful way, when to do it, and when not to. Should you do it with family? When? How? With friends? With strangers? Again, when and how?

She talked about two of her podcasts, one recent, one in the past. The recent one was with her friend Travis Tripodi. She explained that she’d been nervous about doing this for months.

I initially didn’t want to do it. It’s me openly disagreeing about current-event issues that really bother me with my friend Travis Tripodi, who’s way on the other side of me politically, and him bringing the issues and headlines that bother him most to me.

We’ve been testing this for months, since Trump took office again, actually. One thing he and I absolutely agree on is that the world needs more models of this — good-faith conflict.

What does it look like? It’s possible. People can be fully honest, say it all fully and freely, without fear. I say in that episode, “I’m so mad right now” — because of something he believed, that he wouldn’t come with me on something. But I was able to name it. I said, “I’m so mad right now,” and we actually laughed about it. He said, “I think that was our biggest fight yet.” And I said, “Yeah, you’re right — and I kind of loved it.”

She went on to observe that:

We forget something my friend Sam Rechek said on the podcast once: “disagreement can be fun.” It actually can. I think the more we’re stuck in this place of either screaming bloody murder at each other or avoiding each other — and those two things are the things that get elevated — we just don’t have faith anymore that there’s a middle ground where people just hash it out. And if it doesn’t go well, you forgive each other. You apologize. If you hurt each other—you say “sorry about that,” and you come back later. There are all these little ruptures you can quickly stitch up. That’s most of it, actually — most of it is not a nightmare at all. If you just bother to try, find the right person, find the trusting relationship, and give it a shot.

It’s a lot more difficult when you’re afraid that person is really out to get you. Travis and I are not out to get each other. We really do try to learn from each other, so we’re very honest with each other.

And she says, that kind of conversation transforms you.

It’s not just the psychology of people feeling heard and then being more receptive to other ideas, though that’s true. But there is also something I haven’t quite figured out how to articulate. Maybe you’ve run into this and can tell me about it. What I observe over and over is that when people engage in this process of putting it all on the table, giving themselves the time, the way they approach the issue to begin with — the way it looks to them — starts to transform. It transforms in a way that can only happen because they’re talking to somebody who sees it a different way. Suddenly, everything they thought they could or couldn’t accept, they have a different angle on. It’s like taking a prism and looking at it from this side, then that side — it gains more dimensionality. That transformation of how the issue looks ends up changing you a little bit.

It’s through that transformation that the most beautiful kind of compromise happens — where we’ve heard each other out totally, and now some of the stuff that stressed us out, that we thought we’d never accept, but when you put it that way, it actually seems okay, especially if the people involved are okay with something we didn’t expect them to be okay with.

Now I’m future-casting in my mind, imagining the world with a little more color — filling it in with the actual beliefs of the other side, rather than what I projected onto them. It turns out there are actually multiple ways to have a good world, not just the one I came in with. So now I’ve constructed this other one — let’s go with that. We can get there. It’s that process of transformation that’s so necessary — but you have to actually be together to make that work.

We talked more about compromise because that’s often seen now as a “dirty word” and a bad thing to do. But it is not just cutting what you want or get in half. “We look at it a little too cognitively,” Mónica observed

There’s an emotional aspect [to it too.] In a way, you can think of this other kind of compromise we’re trying to flesh out as less about the exchange of items in a rational sense, and more about people trying to figure out how they can all feel good about something. Is there something we can all feel good about? The act of finding things I can feel good about is a transformative thing that happens when you complexify issues. It’s as much about feelings as it is a transaction — an account of things, a percentage, all on a spreadsheet. That’s not what this is.

I do worry that because our world is constructed today such that everybody’s billboarded everything — meaning I can go look at your tweets, Facebook posts, Instagrams, everything you’ve written — it’s easier for me to think, “Look at all the material I can review from this organization, this advocacy group, this activist community. I already know what they believe. I don’t need to be in the room with them to figure it out. It’s all right there.” That’s wrong. That’s actually not true. How we message stuff to the public and how we truly believe and think about something are two different things. So the conversation is the place of the most complexity. When we tell ourselves we don’t need the conversation because we’ve got volumes of material we’ve already read, that’s not actually telling you what you need to know.

We also talked about journalism, particularly why journalists and the media, more broadl,y isn’t trusted anymore, and what journalists can do about that.

And we finally talked about the podcast at the end. Mónica explained:

The shortest way to say what it [the Braver Way podcast] is out to do is to help people meet division with strength.

What is strength? That can vary. One way I think of it is staying grounded and engaged in dangerously divided times — hearing and being heard, that’s strength. Staying curious when it’s hard, that’s strength. These are things that, when you look a couple levels down, you realize we need to do better at. None of us want to be hijacked by our own emotions. None of us want to do things that rupture relationships we value, because we just didn’t know how to handle a certain situation. All the skills kind of fall underneath that for me.

Episodes come out every other Friday, and she has guests every week.

I bring on fascinating people who’ve either demonstrated courage in bridging divides or shed light on insights we desperately need. I’m also trying experiments, like the conversation I mentioned earlier with my friend Travis, who’s a conservative libertarian — we just take the news and go.

There’s a text line, and an email address — we respond to everything. It’s a community as well, because I certainly don’t know these answers, I’m as curious as everybody else, I’m just trying to find them. It’s “better together,” right? So everybody come in — if this sounds fun and interesting and useful for you, let’s figure it out.

We’ve run out of space here, but I hope you’ll check out our full interview with Mónica, and then head on over to the Braver Way Podcast! It is fascinating, and yes, good fun!

Go to the Full Interview

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.

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 482 - August 20, 2026

Neither of the authors we are featuring today thought they were writing a piece on courageous citizenship. But they were.

Lorelie Kelly sent us a short piece introducing her new project running Local Impact Field Hearings a “new civic infrastructure to gather, organize, and preserve community knowledge so it can become part of the deliberations lawmakers use for making decisions.” So while her project envisions structural change — a new process for collecting evidence — it also tells a story of courageous citizens who choose to take part.

Lorelei is now with the Public Good Group, where she helps design and implement strategies to strengthen civic knowledge and engagement (on a wide range of topics), and in turn enables democracy to be more responsive, productive, efficient and accountable. She has opne similar work before that, particularly focused on improving the functioning of Congress with programs at Georgetown University, the Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation, and with the Smart Congress Initiative.

Mónica Inés Espíndola sent us her piece, entitled “I Choose Peace,” asking if we would be interested in adding it to our Peacebuilder Reflection section of BI. We said we were eager to do so, but also wanted to send it out in a newsletter, as it makes a very simple, but important point that many of us forget in the heat of the moment, when the conflict is ours, not someone else’s. She is asking us, in essence, to be courageous citizens and to act the way we speak when we say “we want peace.”

Mónica is an Argentine lawyer, mediator, and specialist in dialogue processes and peacebuilding. She holds a Master’s degree in Negotiation, Mediation, and Restorative Justice and has pursued studies in Peace Education. Drawing on her experience in judicial, family, and community contexts, her work explores peacebuilding as a human capacity and reflects on how dialogue and individual choices can transform the way people respond to conflict and create possibilities for peaceful coexistence.

Local Impact Field Hearings: A New Way to Move Democratic Functions Closer to the People

by Lorelie Kelly

Democracy depends not only on voting and representation, but on the capacity of communities to listen, speak, and remember together. Local Impact Field Hearings are a new model I am piloting in the states to move these critical democratic functions closer to the people most affected by public decisions. Developed in collaboration with Democracy Forward, the hearings create a structured, in-person setting where 5–8 community witnesses document the local impacts of federal policy through lived experience—what we call civic evidence. These hearings are modeled on congressional field hearings, but are community-centered, rather than member-led: elected officials can participate as witnesses and listeners, while the community retains the role of authoring the record. The goal is not to collect opinions or grievances, but to build a durable public memory of what is happening in a place, when it happened, and what people learned from it. For our current moment, former public servants make excellent witnesses, as they have the administrative knowledge that we will need to repair and renew the federal government. We are working with the Internet Archive, a federal depository library, to explore how this testimony can ultimately become part of the Congressional Record and a lasting civic archive for use by the public and lawmakers.

This approach is especially important in a period when communities are already mobilizing around disruption, loss, and institutional uncertainty. A Local Impact Field Hearing can transform that mobilization from resistance into demonstration: rather than simply protesting what is broken, communities can practice a different way of governing—gathering evidence, making knowledge visible, and creating a shared record that can inform decision-making and hold leaders accountable.

At Effigy Mounds National Monument in Iowa, for example, we gathered people who had been organizing locally for more than a year around threats to a public institution. We asked them not only to describe the harm, but to articulate what they hoped to preserve and build. In this sense, the hearings are both a listening infrastructure and a peacebuilding practice: they create a disciplined space for people with different experiences to construct a common account of what matters.

The larger ambition is to build a civic supply chain connecting lived experience to public memory and, ultimately, to community-informed lawmaking—strengthening democratic capacity by putting listening, voice, and memory back into the hands of the people.

If you’d like to organize a Local Impact Field Hearing, please connect with me on LinkedIn.

The Power of Three Words

“I choose peace.”

Three simple words. A statement of hope, a declaration of intention, and a way of expressing who we aspire to become. But perhaps these words carry a deeper challenge. What does it truly mean to choose peace?

Many people value peace, describing it as something desirable and necessary for individuals and communities to live together. However, choosing peace is not only about believing in it. It is about discovering what that choice requires from us when circumstances become difficult.

The words “I choose peace” become meaningful only when they ask something of us. As long as peace remains an aspiration, it is easy to embrace. But when conflict demands a response, those same words become a personal commitment. The question is no longer whether we value peace, but whether our choices continue to reflect that value when it becomes difficult.

Peace Beyond the Absence of Conflict

Peace is not simply something we hope for; it is something we continually build through our daily choices. Conflict is inseparable from human life, arising wherever people coexist, bringing along different needs, perspectives, experiences, and expectations.

Therefore, the goal of peace is not to create a world without disagreement. The deeper challenge is learning to navigate disagreement without losing sight of each other’s humanity.

The Moment of Choice

It is easy to choose peace when we feel respected, understood, safe, and when conversations are calm and perspectives are shared. But conflict changes everything. It tests not only our ideas, but also our identity, challenging how we see ourselves and how we see others.

When we are hurt, feel threatened, or believe confrontation is justified, that is when the choice truly begins. Conflict exposes the distance between what we believe and how we act. It confronts us with moments in which fear, anger, disappointment, or the desire to prevail can easily shape our response.

It is precisely in those moments that choosing peace becomes more than an ideal. It becomes a conscious decision about the kind of person we want to be. Peace is built in the moments when conflict gives us every reason to choose otherwise.

Peace as a Practice

Choosing peace does not mean denying pain, avoiding disagreement, or surrendering our values. It does not mean accepting injustice or ignoring harm. It means asking a deeper question: How can we respond to conflict without allowing conflict to define who we become?

Perhaps peace is not a quality that some people have and others do not, but rather a capacity that must be practiced. Every conflict presents a moment in which choices are possible. We can choose responses that deepen division, or we can remember that every person is more complex than the conflict in which we encounter them. This does not remove accountability or erase consequences; it recognizes that the way we respond helps shape the kind of world we create with others.

Every response to conflict leaves something behind. It can reinforce distrust and make future dialogue more difficult, or it can preserve respect and create conditions in which coexistence remains possible. The choice is rarely easy, but it is always significant because every interaction contributes to the future we are building together.

We build peace in ordinary human interactions:

• In conversations where we decide whether to listen or interrupt.

• In disagreements where we decide whether to understand or simply defend.

• In moments when we decide whether conflict will become a reason for permanent distance or an opportunity to choose a different path.

The Questions We Must Ask

Perhaps the question is not only: “Do I choose peace?” Most of us would answer yes. The deeper questions are: “What kind of peace am I building through the way I respond to conflict?” and “Will my choices build the peace I say I choose?”

These questions do not ask us to be perfect; they ask us to be aware. Because peace is not only something we desire, it is something we create. Every conflict gives us another opportunity to decide what kind of peace we are willing to build.

In the end, peace is the world we begin to create through the choices we make when conflict tests us.

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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.

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.

• Social / Economic Complexity
  America Is Atomizing — A really insightful story that explains the limitations of the hyper-polarization narrative and the importance of recognizing that social fragmentation has torn our society into a vast array of much smaller groups.

• Social / Economic Complexity
  Who Are the Good Guys and the Bad Guys? I’m No Longer Sure. — Reflections on the plight of the politically homeless and thoughts about how one deals with a world in which one lacks strong political allies.

• US Politics
  Are the Democrats going to save us this time? — An especially thorough update on the status of the Democratic Party and its prospects of placing limits on the excesses of the Trump administration following this fall’s elections.

• Saving Democracy
  Liberals Are Now Fighting a Two-Front War — An argument that defenders of liberal democracy now have to come to terms with the fact that Donald Trump and his political movement are not the only challenges that they face.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  The Iran war outcome is even worse than most realise — An honest military assessment of where things now stand with the probable outcome of the Iranian war -- a reality in which we’re all going to have to live.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  The Islamic Republic’s Revolutionary DNA (featuring. Haviv Rettig Gur) — Key to understanding any conflict (and preventing or at least resolving any war) is understanding how the other side thinks. This podcast explains how so many in the West have gotten so much so wrong.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  How the U.S. Squandered Its Strategic Advantage — More insight into the devastating impact that the Iran war has had on the United States’ strategic position and the likely consequences of these changes.

• Social / Economic Complexity
  We’re all Machiavellians now — A story about the long shadow cast by Machiavelli’s insights into the harsh realities of human nature and our political system.

• US Politics
  Republicans Are About to Repeat the Democrats’ Biggest Mistake — An update on the ways in which those on the right are developing their own brand of divisive identity group focused politics.

• Interstate War
  See the Battlefield Innovations Reshaping the Russia-Ukraine War — An update on some of new weapons that are emerging from Ukraine’s desperate struggle for national survival (and the arms race surrounding that struggle.)

• Interstate War
  Why We Should Fight — From Foreign Affairs, a primer on what the US has learned about when to and how to fight wars -- insights that have, unfortunately, largely been forgotten.

• Developing a Unifying Vision
  Challenges in Navigating the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of American History. — A report on a compromise-oriented history curriculum that is based on an honest effort to respond to the interests and concerns of those on both the left and the right.

  

Colleague Activities

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

• Monitoring and Evaluation
  Measuring What Truly Matters — Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts. The Four Directions Dashboard helps organizations move beyond compliance-driven measurement and toward learning, accountability, and transformation.

• Developing a Unifying Vision
  Potentialism: An Expansion Pack for Liberalism — Daniel Yudkin explores liberalism’s and potentialism’s assumptions about rights and responsibilities.

• Developing a Unifying Vision
  The Collective Imagination Practices Toolkit — Tools from Collective Imagination practitioners around the world, for anyone who wants to build the capacity to explore and learn ways of creating better, more hopeful futures, together.

• Artificial Intelligence
  Can AI Help Us Find the Books That Bridge Political Divides? — A story about how artificial intelligence can contribute to the search for constructive narratives that can help bring our society together.

• Constructive Communication
  Lorelei Kelly talks about Local Impact Hearings — A short Facebook post about how Local Impact Hearings bring “the power of listening and memory back into the hands of “We the People.”

• Civil Society
  What America250 Revealed About Civic Identities That Last — America’s 250th anniversary should have been a rare opportunity to create a unifying national moment. It wasn’t. This article explains why.

• Civil Society
  Yordanos Eyoel of Keseb on Democracy Entrepreneurship — Yordanos Eyoel is the Founder and CEO of Keseb, a nonprofit helping to build a transnational civil society ecosystem that advances inclusive and resilient democracies. She joins host Daniel Stid on The Art of Association podcast.

• US Politics
  11 Facts That Will Change How You See US Politics — The Builders share eleven facts that scramble the usual narrative and might just change how you see your country — and the neighbors who call it home.

• Artificial Intelligence
  The AI for Good Summit and America’s AI Sovereignty Problem — Research Analyst Giulia Neaher reflects on her experience at the AI for Good Summit and highlights some key takeaways for global AI governance discourse.

• Constructive Communication
  ‘Debate me!’ doesn’t work. Here are better ways to disagree – and maybe change minds — Debate is broken as a tool to inform, explore ideas and persuade an audience. It’s time to find another way. One good one: sharing stories.

• Peacebuilding
  Dead Men Walking Podcast: Comprehensive Peace Agreements — Once considered the gold standard of international peacemaking, the episode explores the viability of peace agreements and asks whether contemporary conflict realities and trends require a different type of ambition and approach.

• De-Escalation Strategies
  From Belfast to America: Learning to Prevent Political Violence and Heal Division — The Carter Center published a video exploring what the Troubles -- one of the world’s most protracted conflicts -- teaches us about the state of American democracy.

• Saving Democracy
  Reclaiming Citizen Power in an Age of Broken Politics — How practical, tech-driven tools can help citizens flip broken incentives, bypass outrage, and hold legislators accountable to their districts.

• Immigration
  A New Standard for Ethical Immigration Reporting — Ethical immigration reporting is essential for helping audiences understand the immigrant experience and making these communities feel heard. Here are ideas on how to do that.

• Artificial Intelligence
  Does AI Detection Make Things Better When It’s This Flawed? — David Beckemeyer discovered that Substack’s AI detector couldn’t tell the difference between human and AI-generated content. So is it useful? Seems not!

• Constructive Communication
  How to Be a Pebble in Someone’s Shoe — The paradox of persuasion, explained by two American cousins, who despite being on opposite sides politically, actually like each other!

• Media Reform
  Re-blurring the lines between journalism and civic life — A Q&A with journalist, network-builder, and civic strategist, Darryl Holliday

• Communication Complexity
  When the Bots Show Up to the Wrong Fight — A video about an incident in 2011 (when Obama was President) about the role played by bots in attempts to influence public perceptions about the Occupy movement.

• Saving Democracy
  Congress Has an Age Floor and No Ceiling. That’s Backwards for Gen Z. — Congress’s age problem is not a string of individual judgment calls. It is a structural feature of the Constitution itself, and it is quietly reshaping who gets represented in American government.

• De-Escalation Strategies
  “I’m a Conservative Who Got in a Blowout Fight With My Liberal Future Father-in-Law. Now I’m Wondering if the Marriage Will Work” — Every wedding in history has been two clans of oddballs and hotheads and people who vote differently learning, slowly and imperfectly, to sit at one table.

• Civil Society
  Reclaiming Citizen Power: How Tech & AI Can Fix Broken Congress Incentives — A discussion of how practical, tech-driven tools can flip broken political incentives and force representatives to answer to their districts.

  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.)

• Saving Democracy
  The Case for a Liberalism That Dares Again — An important reminder that liberalism has been able to defeat some of history’s most brutal authoritarian regimes (and an argument that, with creativity and determination, it can do so again).

• Saving Democracy
  What Locke Knew About Elites — An exploration of the complex philosophical relationship between popular, democratic, self-government and those at the top of the social hierarchy.

• Education
  Universities Need Reform. It Shouldn’t Matter Who’s Telling Them. — In the context of Trump administration efforts to promote higher education reform, an argument that many of the Administration’s goals are valid and ought to be pursued.

• US Politics
  Has America Already Undergone a Soft Breakup? — An update on the complex and destructive dynamics that are leading the United States through social estrangement to something approaching a true divorce.

• Artificial Intelligence
  The unexpected issue dividing parties and midterms candidates — An especially perceptive and detailed analysis of the rapid emergence of bipartisan opposition to the new data centers and AI more generally.

• Progressive Left / Socialism
  DSA socialism is Peter Pan politics for sandbox revolutionaries — From George Will. a snarky, funny, but also quite insightful critique of Democratic Socialism.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  What Is the Flynn Network? — With respect to the activities of former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, an investigative report on one instance in which foreign powers are seeking to advance their interests by contributing to the United States’ political divisions.

• Interstate War
  How the Greenland standoff pushed Europe to prep for war with the U.S. — A story about just how much more precarious the global security situation has become. NATO allies are now preparing for war against one another!

• Suppressing Opponents
  Conservatives spent heavily in key Democratic primaries, filings show — A small window into a much bigger problem -- political parties that promote extremists on the other side in the often mistaken belief that they’ll be easier to beat.

• Education
  College Has a Political Problem, but It’s Not Woke Brainwashing — An analysis of the way in which politics threatens higher education -- an analysis that goes beyond simplistic partisan claims.

• Corruption
  The Watchdogs Are Barking Themselves Hoarse — For an America that has become too exhausted by stories of corruption to bother listening -- an important update on just how bad things have become.

• Artificial Intelligence
  The 4 Bits of Jargon That Will Help Determine Whether the Market Will Crash — An especially clear and concise primer on four things that we all need to understand before we can begin to forecast technology’s impact on our lives.

• Saving Democracy
  Liberalism Is the Underdog Now, and it’s Time to Act Like It — A perceptive observation with important tactical implications -- yesterday’s challengers of the power elite have now become the power elite (and vice versa).

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  How the Axis of Resistance Recovered — An explanation of why Iranian proxy forces surprisingly still constitute a significant threat (despite their devastating battlefield losses).

• Family / Gender / LBGTQ+
  The Betrayals of Modern Feminism — An exploration of the contradictions between the original goals of the feminist movement and the goals of its modern day counterpart.

• The Hyper-Polarization Threat
  In 25-Country Survey, Americans Especially Likely To View Fellow Citizens as Morally Bad — Yet another statistic highlighting the depth and seriousness of the United States’ hyperpolarization problem. We don’t just disagree, we think our fellow citizens are evil.

• Interstate War
  How Ukrainians Are Surviving — A report on what life during the war is really like in Ukraine (and a powerful reminder that avoiding such horrors should be our top priority).

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  How Hamas’ Attack on Israel Is Transforming American Politics — A lengthy and heavily documented report on what is likely to be the decisive battlefield in the war between Iran and Israel -- US politics.

• Progressive Left / Socialism
  How Colleges Produce Socialists — An interesting hypothesis: young college graduates are more supportive of socialism because today’s college experience incorporates so much of the socialist vision (lots of free goods and services paid for in ways that don’t entail immediate costs.)

• Progressive Left / Socialism
  Socialism Is the Wrong Answer, but the Questions Are Real — Amid all of the anxiety about the Democratic Socialism’s Program of action, a reminder (from The Wall Street Journal) that the problems the socialist movement seeks to address are real and demand attention.

• Artificial Intelligence
  I’m Begging You: Never Write With A.I. — An exploration of the critical role that writing plays in human thought and social relations. Plus, thoughts about what happens should we make the mistake of outsourcing this critical part of our humanity to machines.

  More News & Opinion Links

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Newsletter 480 - August 13, 2026

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A couple of months ago, Harry Boyte responded to our posts on Courageous Citizenship and Government (this, this, and this) by observing that there is an important difference between advocacy and “public work” that we didn’t clearly distinguish. We asked if he would be willing to write something for BI that explained that difference, and this is the second of what turned into two essays on that topic. The first essay described the concepts of “public work” and “civic organizing” and showed how they were different from advocacy, protest, and traditional community organizing.

For those who don’t know Harry, he is a co-founder of the Institute for Public Life and Work at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he is now an Emeritus Senior Scholar. He founded and for 20 years directed and co-directed the Center for Democracy and Citizenship (CDC) at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs (which moved to Augsburg in 2009). As a young man he worked in the citizenship schools sponsored by SCLC, Martin Luther King’s organization. Drawing on these experiences, he established the youth civic education initiative called Public Achievement, which now greatly informs his work with Braver Angels and its Civic Scholars Council, which he co-chairs.

Civic Organizing: Beyond Advocacy, Protest, and Community Organizing - Part 2

Addressing the Problem of Technocracy

by Harry C. Boyte

Putting experts and expertise on tap, not on top

The world is deluged with panaceas, formulas, proposed laws, machineries, ways out, and myriads of solutions. It is significant and tragic that almost every one of these proposed plans and alleged solutions deals with the structure of society, but none concerns the substance – the people. This, despite the eternal truth of the democratic faith that the solution always lies with the people. --Saul Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals 1946

Saul Alinsky here gave a vivid description of the way technocratic politics replaces “the democratic faith” with “myriads of solutions.” His alternative was drawn from the experiences of organizing the Back of the Yards organization in Chicago. Indeed, his first book, Reveille for Radicals, can be seen as a powerful statement of such organizing. For example, in his chapter on community traditions, Alinsky argues that the task of the organizer in any community is not to “convert” or divide along ideological lines. Rather, the organizer must engage in a deep process of listening to community values, traditions, mores, and habits. Community organizing, he said, is about bringing forth the democratic potentials that exist in any community.

I learned this democratic politics as a young man, working as a field secretary for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) from organizers like Dorothy Cotton, and Septima Clark, and Bayard Rustin who had been shaped by 1930s experiences. SCLC’s politics – full of alliance building and efforts to mine the symbols, images, and cultures of diverse democratic and religious traditions – was sharply different than the politics of caution typified by the NAACP, or the politics of polarization in the left wing of the movement.

The challenge today is to revive civic organizing skills, civic professional sensibilities, and the larger strategic framework of groups like SCLC and earlier movements and adapt these for a radically different age. There is no quick fix, but there are resources to build on.

In social theory, for instance, the concept of “social capital,” with its relational, communal associations has replaced an individualist and economic emphasis on “human capital.” In experimental psychology, new research emphasizes humans as unique agents of their own development. Thus, for instance, the late child development scientist Esther Thelen pioneered in developing a “grand unifying theory” of the field. Her approach was based on a relational, interactive, emergent understanding of complex systems and how to theorize them. In her view, the scientist herself is part of the equation. Theory grows not only from use of the scientific method, but also from a rich and interactive set of plural relationships, with “amateurs,” as well as other scientists. Thelen’s theory has challenged views of infants as passing through pre-determined “stages” of development to understanding infants to be experimental and self-realizing agents, profoundly relational and interactive with their context.

New theory challenges technocratic, one-size-fits-all interventions in development. The recent volume edited by Vijayendra Rao and Michael Walton, Culture and Public Action, drawn from UN and World Bank experiences around the world, is a case in point. Through case studies and cultural theory, contributors develop an overwhelming critique of technocratic and ideological approaches that have dominated development activities recently. They call for work that is respectful of, knowledgeable about, and skilled in negotiating local cultures in development literature and practice.

This shift is from “structural thinking” to relational “citizen thinking,” and from ideological politics to alliance-building politics. Structures and institutions are neither the solution to complex public problems, nor enemies. Rather, they need to be seen as resources with citizens at the center. Today’s categories like “conservative,” “liberal,” or “left” are most often counterproductive. We need detailed mappings, as Alinsky once put it, of what makes for “constructive democratic action” and what impedes or opposes such action.

The theory of public work and examples from Public Achievement spread across South Africa and then Africa after Marie Ström, Director of the democracy education efforts for the Institute for Democracy in South Africa, learned the framework as an international Humphrey Fellow from 2001-2002. She adapted Public Achievement and public work to the African context working with adults, where she witnessed striking shifts in how people understood themselves, each other, and democracy. In Burundi, where public work education was taken to villages, the adult educators with whom she worked spoke about the dramatic impact. Emmanuel Manwangu commented,

I was afraid that people at village level might get lost in the training, but even if it was a little challenging for them at the beginning, their minds were awakened and they very quickly came up to speed. Democracy started to become concrete for them—the power to take action on issues right where they live.”

Eusébie Nzorijana described a dramatic relocation of “politics” that decentered the concept and the practice:

At the beginning, some participants were uneasy about conducting interviews. ‘This is politics,’ they said. Later a participant said proudly, ‘I can do politics myself now!

Trainers reported remarkable change in themselves as well. Julienne Mukankusi said,

I had done research and training on democracy before this, but I had not lived it. Now I seen that a skilled citizen has more power than one can imagine.

Manwangu described shifts in the meanings of democracy and citizenship:

This course changes one’s understanding of democracy itself. Our language has changed. Citizens are at the center.

Addressing Teen Drinking Through Citizen Professionalism

Public work and citizen politics proved valuable to counter professional practice which uses mobilizing and advocacy approaches that predefine both problem and solutions. Indeed, complex problems, or “wicked problems,” are rarely discrete phenomena around which generic professional interventions can be mounted successfully. If one is attentive to overall community well-being, with a focus on organizing for culture change, “problems” come to be understood as interconnected. Lead poison in housing, for instance, may be tied to the jobs that require people to live in certain areas. Problems are also woven into the life of civic communities. They are different in every community, requiring distinctive approaches that take account of local cultures, with their unique histories, networks, capacities, and identities.

In Tomah, Wisconsin, in a collaborative project called Communities Mobilized for Change on Alcohol with the University of Minnesota’s department of epidemiology on teenage alcohol use, we found that a focus on public work transformed public health practices while developing new approaches to collaboration and public leadership development. The customary approach of public health, in which “evidence-based interventions” focus on policy change to deal with a particular health problem, shifted to strategies based on changing the civic culture.

To accomplish this shift, Jeanne Carls, the organizer in Tomah, created a strategy team with diverse groups and interests who had never worked together, and did not agree on the definition of “the problem.” Yet all agreed that something was wrong, after several teenage deaths in alcohol related incidents. Police, bar owners, merchants, church leaders, teenagers, parents, and public health professionals became involved. “You tell people that there are going to be many different people coming together who you may have thought would never be at the same table, but can see the need to work on the same issue,” Carls recounted. “It was like bringing lions to the table. People would sit across the table and never talk to each other directly, but they all had an interest in youth, and in Tomah.” Health care workers, city officials, and lay citizens worked to define what “the problem” entailed.

What emerged was a view of teenage alcohol use as inextricably tied to the civic culture of Tomah as a whole community. They realized that the annual festival, in which beer drinking was the central ritual for people of all ages, was both a symbol and wellspring of the town’s drinking culture. All were responsible for the “problem,” understood in this fashion. And many different groups would be required to change it. Such a change also entailed a shift in professional practices from one-way policy interventions to collaborative public work. “I bring some specific skills and knowledge, like how things are decided in city politics,” said Dave Berner, the city manager. “But many others make contributions as well.” Work on teen alcohol abuse resulted in Berner’s rethinking his job in far more civic ways.

Mike Huggins, on the city staff in Tomah at the time, later took the citizen professional approach in city management to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, up the river. The organization he catalyzed, “Clear Vision Eau Clair,” won national recognition as an outstanding example of citizen-led solutions, described in my co-authored book, Awakening Democracy through Public Work.

Translation

Other democratic organizers in modern times have seen the challenge similarly. As Isak Tranvik puts it, Vaclav Havel, a leader of the Czech freedom movement, drew on traditions of “honest and responsible work in widely different areas of life,” akin to public work. In Havel’s view, political institutions or ideology could not create a good society. “Life is something unfathomable, ever-changing, mysterious and every attempt to confine it within an artificial, abstract structure inevitably ends up homogenizing, regimenting, standardizing and destroying life.”

It is important to recognize the large obstacles to such perspectives in a world when state-centered theories of democracy and citizenship defined by formal political communities are overwhelmingly dominant, shaping the views of those labelled “citizens” and “noncitizens” alike. As the Swedish theorist Jonna Pettersson has observed, “The fields of critical human rights theory and cosmopolitan and multicultural citizenship theory [reproduce] the criteria for political subjectification [as] inclusion in the [formal political] community, leaving the political subject without any emancipatory power of its own.” Put differently, abstract theory focused on the state contributes to the segmentation and fragmentation of the civic field which David Eisner describes. (See also this and this.)

A state-centered view emphasizes the constitution as the fundamental question. A citizen-centered view emphasizes the constitution of a democratic people and the skills, habits, and mindsets which are essential as most important.

In 1939 John Dewey issued a challenge in this vein to those who believed that democracy rests on formal institutions. Beware, he said, of the “belief that [totalitarian] states rest only upon unmitigated coercion and intimidation.” As Melvin Rogers puts it,

For Dewey, democracy’s survival depends on a set of habits and dispositions – in short, a culture – to sustain it. Checks and balances do not have an agency of their own. A democracy is only as strong as the men and women who inhabit it.

A citizen-centered view also asked the question, what larger goal can inspire and energize people with different ways of looking at problems and different ways of acting on them to work together. In St. Paul, building the playground was the aim. In Tomah, the challenge was the drinking culture.

In our time, there are many large challenges which can focus attention. Pope Leo’s new encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, addresses dangers of AI and asks how such technologies be tools, not substitutes for human agency. He begins with the Biblical story of Nehemiah, the Old Testament leader who called the diverse people – 40 groups are named in the Bible – to work together on the challenge of rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem. As people rebuilt the walls, with Nehemiah joining in the work, they regrew their identity.

We need such stories to rebuild our democracy.

Lead Graphic Credit: ChatGPT created the lead graphic.

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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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Newsletter 479 - August 10, 2026

A couple of months ago, Harry Boyte responded to our posts on Courageous Citizenship and Government (this, this, and this) by observing that there is an important difference between advocacy and “public work” that we didn’t clearly distinguish. We asked if he would be willing to write something for BI that explained that difference, and this is the first of what turned into two essays on that topic.

For those who don’t know Harry, he is a co-founder of the Institute for Public Life and Work at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he is now an Emeritus Senior Scholar. He founded and for 20 years directed and co-directed the Center for Democracy and Citizenship (CDC) at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs (which moved to Augsburg in 2009). As a young man he worked in the citizenship schools sponsored by SCLC, Martin Luther King’s organization. Drawing on these experiences, he established the youth civic education initiative called Public Achievement, which now greatly informs his work with Braver Angels and its Civic Scholars Council, which he co-chairs. — Heidi Burgess

Civic Organizing: Beyond Advocacy, Protest, and Community Organizing - Part 1

by Harry C. Boyte

The new Braver Angels Civic Scholars Council charter, supporting the Braver Angels’ (BA) focus on courageous citizenship, charges the council to equip Braver Angels members to become ambassadors for inclusive, empowering and large ideas of citizenship. This aim is to help BA members take public leadership roles in communities and local institutions.

This will mean pushing back against widespread legalistic definitions of citizenship, which are used to weaponize citizenship, dividing people into “citizen” versus “noncitizen.” Legal definitions are an element of citizenship, but as I have described earlier in Beyond Intractability, such reduction to “civil” citizenship neglects empowering “civic” citizenship — how people work with each other to build thriving communities.

Civic citizenship traces back to the shift from “subject” to “citizen,” which occurred during the American revolution and its aftermath. Alexander Dallas, an immigrant to the new society, captured the appeal of citizenship: “Citizenship is equality; allegiance is the badge of inferiority; Citizenship is freedom; allegiance is servitude.”

It was a simple-sounding shift, but as Johann Neem (a member of the Civic Scholars Council) describes in his book, Democracy’s Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America, it involved enormous changes in identity and practice and took many forms of education to achieve. To renew such citizenship in our time will require change methods today different from advocacy, protest, and community organizing. We need what can be called “civic organizing” in institutions and elsewhere.

Civic Organizing

The concept of “civic organizing” emerged during the early years of our civic engagement work with a project called the Project for Public Life at the Humphrey Institute (now School) for Public Affairs. It informed our partnerships. Two associates, Peg Michels and Tony Massengale, developed the Midwest Active Citizenship Initiative using civic organizing as the framework. They showed that it can work with groups as diverse as the Citizen League, a respected nonpartisan policy group, and Kowalsk's, a local group of supermarkets.

We began our civic engagement project in 1987 with the aim of revitalizing the public spirit and civic identity of local institutions, qualities which I had seen in the civil rights movement as a teenager and young adult working for Martin Luther King’s organization, SCLC. Local civic organizations, like the thousands of Rosenwald schools and libraries, were centers of power and civic development, as Robert Ceresa, a colleague on the Council, has shown in his essay published in the Harvard Social Impact Review.

To address this challenge of combining culture change, as well as change in institutional structures, we used the idea of every day “citizen politics,” cross-partisan problem-solving, and the creation of common goods. These activities required negotiating differences, a politics far different than partisan politics. Citizen politics was adapted from the most effective community organizing I had studied, especially the Industrial Areas Foundation network. I believed that such politics could change local institutions.

Civic organizing and its citizen politics are relational, empowering, down-to-earth, and oriented to problem-solving and creating things of public value. Such politics is rooted in local civic life, stressing grassroots democratic action. It puts citizens at the center. It emphasizes that the most important task in a troubled world is developing the civic muscle of whole communities. Citizen politics is also elevating, reviving the idea conveyed by the Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurther’s statement that “In a democracy the highest office is the office of citizen.”

We developed the idea of public work as we sought to translate citizen politics into institutional change and civic repair. A group of institutions in Minneapolis/St.Paul – the College of St. Catherine, Minnesota Cooperative Extension, St. Bernards Elementary School, Augustana Nursing Home, ARC, a low-income Black parents group concerned about schools, and several others – wanted to revitalize the civic identities of their institutions and organizations, not simply to undertake civic activities.

We soon realized that institutional civic identity required “making work more public.” For instance, cooperative extension agents shifted from thinking of their work as service-delivery to developing community capacities for public action. St. Bernards’ principal, Dennis Donovan, a close associate in our work, challenged teachers and other staff who asked him to address their concerns to come up with their own ideas for action. Donovan became a supporter, not a fixer. The Cooperative Extension, St. Bernards and others sent teams to regular learning conferences in the Twin Cities where people shared lessons from challenges and successes in different environments.

Public Work

Public work — sustained, uncoerced effort by a mix of people who create things of lasting civic or public significance — makes work more public in several different ways. Work is done in more open and “public” fashion. It is undertaken by a mix of diverse people — “a public.” It is filled with public purpose. Public work is an approach to citizenship in which citizens are co-creators, builders of the common world. They are not simply voters and helpers on the side who fit into that world, or protesters who oppose it. Democracy, itself, is a way of life, built through civic labors. It is far more than just elections.

The concept of public work proved to be a powerful idea in many settings, including nonprofits, faith communities, schools, local businesses, local government, as well as colleges. Public work emphasizes the importance of sustained relationship-building, which goes against the grain of professional cultures based on information. Pope Francis brilliantly described the problem in his climate encyclical, Laudato Si, calling it the “technocratic paradigm,” which affects nearly all of modern societies:

The basic problem…is the way that humanity has taken up…an undifferentiated and one-dimensional paradigm [that] exalts the concept of a subject, who, using logical and rational procedures, progressively approaches and gains control over an external object.

Maria Avila, after a decade of community organizing explains in her book, Transformative Civic Engagement, how she found the difference with institutional organizing when she became Director of Community Engagement for Occidental College in Los Angeles. In a college setting, she encountered the technocratic hierarchy of knowledge power: many people’s opinions simply didn’t count, especially if they didn’t have formal credentials. She overcame this by “building something based on people who [are] clear about their interests and passions, the things that matter to them deeply and enough to sustain their involvement over time.” This was different from the “predominate culture of wanting quick, concrete, predictable results . . . [that] undervalues process and relationality.” In her public work, everyone had something to contribute.

Making work more public leads institutions to look outward, stressing the civic possibilities of work and workplaces, including faith communities, schools, businesses, unions, nonprofits, and government agencies. Public work requires and develops citizen professionals who build and sustain such settings. It involves free spaces where citizens learn to work across differences in uncoerced intellectual environments. It creates community wealth, including schools, public spaces, and libraries, as well as music and healthy civic norms and values—a commonwealth of public usefulness and beauty. Citizen politics and public work are antidotes to hopelessness and irresponsibility. Public work expands concepts of citizen, democracy, and the engaged institution. It highlights work and worksites as places for citizen action.

The Center for Democracy and Citizenship and its partners generated many stories. Here is one:

Public Achievement

From its beginning in 1990, Public Achievement (PA) the youth civic education and empowerment initiative that I founded in St. Paul, Minnesota with the mayor, Jim Scheibel, and a diverse team of educators, addressed a different set of questions than conventional civic education. The emphasis was developing young people’s civic identities, civic habits, and civic agency, not increasing the numbers of voters, success on standardized tests scores, or changes in policies. We asked the questions: Can civic agency grow on a significant scale? What are the pitfalls? What lessons might be drawn from the Public Achievement experiences for democracy building efforts generally?

PA aimed to cultivate grassroots capacities, confidence, and the public identity of “citizen” as the foundational agents of democracy. It eventually spread to communities across the United States and more than 20 countries. Its offshoots took many other forms.

Public Achievement differs from the predominant civic education focus on knowledge (with its emphasis on government) and skills (with its emphasis on changing public policies and problem solving, narrowly understood). Most broadly, it challenges the idea of democracy as an institutional system of government and elections. It puts citizens at the center as civic producers or co-creators.

In Public Achievement, young people work as teams on issues they choose. They make a public contribution, using nonviolent and legal means.They tackle issues ranging from bullying, racism, gang violence, drugs, and sexual harassment to playground improvements, curricular changes, and better school lunches. Teams are coached by adults, often college students, who help them develop public strengths and talents. They use concepts which challenge conventional views. For instance, young people are described as citizens who are “co-creators” of schools and communities, not citizens waiting to vote. Citizen Politics is about creating a world of shared resources, not simply fighting over scarce resources. This involves a generative understanding of power as “power to,” not simply power over others’ actions.

This chart compares civic action in different frameworks of civic education.

Civics and service have a lot to contribute, but the public work frame adds questions of identity, culture, and the meaning of democracy. It also highlights the civic potential and roles of teachers, support staff, and school leaders to promote and sustain youth civic empowerment through their work – to become “citizen teachers,” “citizen staff,” and “citizen administrators.” The difference between PA as a set of skills and PA as a philosophy of democracy creates tension and opportunities.

Citizens as civic producers

Public Achievement teaches new ways of looking at politics, citizenship, power, and democracy. An iconic story of Public Achievement, told around the world, is about teams of fifth, sixth and seventh graders at St. Bernard’s Elementary School in St. Paul, (the first real home of Public Achievement) who worked for five years to build a playground in a neighborhood that adults had thought too dangerous.

In the late fall of 1998, just as snow began to fall, the lot donated by Saint Bernard’s Catholic Parish to children to build a playground filled early one morning. Children, teachers, and neighbors joined with college students and a few professors and staff from the University of Minnesota to assemble the playground. Some adults helped children put together swing sets. Others dug sand pits. Churchwomen served refreshments. At the end of the day, all dedicated the playground with a plaque etched with drawings of cat feet: “PAWS: Public Achievement Works.” The incoming governor, Jesse Ventura, visited the new playground on February 26 and in his State of the State address the next week recognized five team members with the Governor’s Award for a Better Minnesota for “reforming Minnesota every day through their good works.” Joe Lynch, an eighth grader at Saint Bernard’s who accepted the award for the group, was portrayed in Ventura’s flamboyant style as a “citizen hero prevailing against all odds.”

Years later, Alaina Lynch, Joey’s sister who also worked on the playground, remembered the overall lesson. “It was a ‘no-brainer’ to have a playground for kids instead of an old lot, but that didn’t mean that making it happen was straightforward,” Alaina explained. She learned about city politics. “Public Achievement opened my eyes to the processes of government—petitions, connecting with the city council, commenting, obtaining permits. [These were] not things I would have thought about as a ten- or eleven-year-old otherwise.” She also learned about neighborhood politics. “I learned there are multiple sides to every idea. Even something that seemed straightforward to me could have negative ramifications from another point of view.” For her, the gang issue was “not a huge concern”. But others saw it differently. “We had to demonstrate that we had a plan for mitigating any risk—a fence, with the playground closed after certain hours.” She learned about different perspectives and compromise.

The teams got the parish council on their side. They negotiated zoning changes with city officials. They raised more than $60,000 from local businesses in the North End Business Association and other groups. To accomplish these tasks, the children learned how to interview people, write letters, give speeches, and call people they didn’t know on the phone. They worked to understand the views of adults they originally thought were opponents. They mapped power, did research, and negotiated. Throughout, they had a sense that their efforts were public work, suggested in the name young people chose for the park: Public Achievement Works. They also learned political concepts—power, interests, and politics itself. “For most of my life, I’ve wanted to get involved with politics,” said Jeremy Carr, a pioneer of Public Achievement. “When [Public Achievement] came around and I found I could do the stuff I wanted to change—and got adults to treat me seriously—I got excited.” This also was the opportunity the principal, Dennis Donovan, was looking for. “We wanted kids doing citizenship-type things,” he said. “More than just reading to other little kids.”

In Public Achievement, power is not simply “power over” but “power with,” the view advanced by Beyond Intractability, the capacity to act with others of different views and interests to shape the world around us. “I got a lot of empowerment from Public Achievement,” said Tamisha Anderson twenty years later. Tamisha, an African American student at Saint Bernard’s, worked on a team trying to change clothing rules. “We didn’t get white shoes, but we got the uniforms changed. It was empowering to know that your voice matters, regardless of what color or size or age you are.” The lessons stayed with her. “I use [the example of] ‘the little train that could’ to this day with kids I talk to. I push them to stay involved, even though they get knocked down.”

Public Achievement participants learn and practice politics that is different from partisanship. Zach Baumann, of German American background who became conservative as an adult, worked for several years on the playground. “We had neighborhood meetings. We worked with the city to get the zoning changed and interacted with local business leaders to try to get some money. We met with the county commissioners.” Zach said he learned to be accountable, which was “a huge deal for people that age. You were letting down your team if you dropped the ball. We knew we had to rely on each other to get things done.” He learned to work across differences. “Civic involvement has a stereotypically liberal quality in a lot of the media, but it’s about conservative values, taking responsibility for what’s going on, contributing how you can to improve to improving your world, not about asking somebody to do something for you.” He understood that there were different views. “I didn’t care what someone else’s thoughts on immigration were. We were trying to get the playground. That’s one of the biggest things Public Achievement can bring: the ability to put aside your differences for a common goal. You don’t have to like the person to work with them. Standing up and walking out of the room isn’t going to accomplish anything.”

In St Bernard’s, the practices of Public Achievement became part of broad culture change, in which teachers, support staff, and involved parents also developed new ways of working together and thinking about the world and themselves in the world.

Harry shares other examples of different approaches to public work in Part 2, coming out Thursday.

Lead Graphic Credit: ChatGPT.

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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.

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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Highlighted Links

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

• Developing a Unifying Vision
  Workers Deserve More! — A must-read document for those trying to separate claims about what Democratic Socialists believe from what they’re really saying. This is their official program (and an outline of their revolutionary agenda).

• US Politics
  A Small Band of Socialists Is Sowing Panic in the Democratic Party — A long, well-documented, and critical profile of the Democratic Socialists who are surging to prominence in our deeply divided democracy.

• US Politics
  I Was in the DSA. Here’s What They Really Believe. — A long profile of the Democratic Socialists of America – a profile that explains just how much of the U.S. democracy and economic system it seeks to dismantle (and how little we know about what they want to put it in its place).

• US Politics
  Welcome to the Age of Slopulism — An explanation of a useful new term “slopulism” – a populist political movement based on extravagant and unrealistic promises (plus a very poor understanding of the problems that they are trying to fix).

• US Politics
  ‘The Easiest Explanation for This Phenomenon Is That Ideology Really Matters’ — Another attempt to understand the nature of the new socialist movement and explain why it has suddenly garnered so much support. This one compiles what political scientists are saying on a topic.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  The War That Could Swallow the World — Avoiding catastrophe requires anticipating the things that could go wrong and then taking steps to avoid those things. This article explores ways in which the ongoing confrontation between the US and Iran could go wrong.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  Iran has Trump exactly where it wants him — An argument for recognizing the magnitude of the United States’ defeat in its war with Iran and for seriously considering what this means for global security.

• Theories of Change
  The Public Intellectuals America Needs — Thoughts about the positive role that trustworthy experts can play at a time when institutional credibility has collapsed.

• US Politics
  The DSA Is a Parasite — This critical article accuses Democratic Socialists of staging a hostile takeover of the Democratic Party by exploiting the primary processes (which is biased toward activists). This parallels Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party.

• Social / Economic Complexity
  The Two Great Threats to Truth — A thought-provoking article that highlights the symbiotic relationship that exists between moral relativism and fanaticism – a relationship that is seldom recognized.

• Interstate War
  This Is What’s Keeping Me Up at Night — A hopefully paranoid, but quite possibly prescient, exploration of the factors that are increasing the risk of a third world war.

  

Colleague Activities

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

• Effective Problem-Solving
  Democracy Resource Hub Learning Series — A collection of practical learning resources to help people build civic trust, host democratic conversations, and take action across differences.

• Trust / Trust Earning
  At a glance: Six key findings from our second community survey report — The Trust for Civic Life’s second community survey reveals insights into what cultivates trust, agency, belonging and participation in rural communities.

• US Politics
  The Rise of the DSA — An Allsides analysis, showing what the right and the left think of the Democratic Socialists of America.

• Saving Democracy
  Beyond the Doom Loop: The Tactical Reality of Independent Campaigns — Political consultant Nathan Smolensky exposes the strategic blind spots of the two-party duopoly and how tech is leveling the playing field.

• De-Escalation Strategies
  Philanthropy and Polarization: Ten Ideas from a Foundation Leadership Retreat — The Institute for Integrated Transitions, in cooperation with the Andrew Carnegie Foundation and the Paris Institute for Advanced Study published these recommendations on how funders can help reduce polarization.

• Saving Democracy
  The Next Frontier for Democracy — What happens when democracy advocates stop working country-by-country and begin learning together across borders? Daniel Stid talks with Yordanos Eyoel.

• Conflict Advice
  7 Ways to Disagree With Someone You Love (Without Torching the Relationship) — The people closest to us are often the ones we clash with hardest, because we actually care what they think. The real skill is learning to explore ideas without torching relationships.

• De-Escalation Strategies
  Beyond Polarization: Why you might be wrong about the ‘other side’ — Polarization is a threat to American democracy and peace. How can we disagree better? Part 1 of the Beyond Polarization series from Making Peace Visible.

• Saving Democracy
  Building the Alternative: Bridging Gen Z Movements and Governance for Lasting Change — A report that analyses over 500,000 global protest datapoints to map the architecture, drivers, risks, and impact of contemporary youth-led movements.

• Social / Economic Complexity
  What Money Can’t Buy — The commodification of connection risks accelerating the inequality in our social lives, while debasing the sacred good of human relationships. It’s on us to define where markets do and don’t belong.

• Saving Democracy
  Distrust in our Election System Runs Deeper Than Belief in Trump’s Claims — Trump voters react to President Trump’s primetime address on election security and integrity.

• Saving Democracy
  Why Post-Watergate Fixes Won’t Save the DOJ — Historical reforms required national consensus on what broke. What happens when we no longer agree on what a crisis is?

• Theories of Change
  The Engagement Staircase: A Strategic Guide for Catalyzing a Network of Changemakers for Systemic Change — For anyone wanting to catalyze systemic change, the question isn’t if they need to engage others, but how, and when. It is far more complex than “getting people on board.”

• Theories of Change
  A Shared Framework for a Maturing Field: FIDE North America Releases Theory of Change for Citizens’ Assemblies — This document identifies three core problems that citizens’ assemblies address — limited electoral accountability, unrepresentative decision-making, and governmental inability to resolve contentious issues.

• Culture and Religion
  The Verdict Is the Tell — What to do when disagreement gets treated as a moral failing.

• Constructive Communication
  Listen Like You Might Be Wrong’: Harvard Student Goes Viral For Stunning Speech On Trump Amid Feud — A powerful commencement speech urging people to reject division and embrace mutual understanding.

• Communication Complexity
  Supreme Court Media Coverage Silences Legitimate Debate — When the Supreme Court announces its decisions, political tailwinds understandably follow. Each decision is binary in nature, and this year’s docket saw disappointments for both the left and the right.

• Leadership
  Wanting Leaders with Good Character — Amongst the many reasons today’s political leaders disappoint, one stands out -- character.

• Saving Democracy
  Encore! A Table Talk on Democracy with Joel Kauffman — What is the state of our democracy in the U.S. today? What does it mean to be a democracy? Lamar Roth and Tom Klaus check in with historian Joel Kauffman on these and other questions.

• Civil Society
  Building Civic Muscle, Together: Notes from the July Civic Innovation Forum — A theme ran through every conversation: our differences are not the problem — our distance is. And closing that distance takes intention.

• Social / Economic Complexity
  DORA, Adam Smith, and the Opportunity Hidden in Regulation — Resilience, trust and commercial success are often mutually reinforcing outcomes rather than competing objectives.

  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.)

• US Politics
  The Return of the God That Failed — A look at the last time socialism was major political force in the United States. This article profiles a classic book in which former supporters of these movements explain why they concluded that they had made a serious mistake.

• Saving Democracy
  A revolution is unfolding. Voters everywhere are furious. — A comparative, global look at the way in which populist movements on the left and right are threatening the various foundations of democratic societies. The problem isn’t just Trump.

• Artificial Intelligence
  What will more intelligence actually do for us? — AI is dramatically increasing access to and lowering the costs of “intelligence.” This article explores the likely social effects of this trend.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  The War Is Lost. Now Fix What It Broke. — Another article that encourages us to face the reality of the United States’ stunning strategic defeat in its war against Iran and start thinking about what we can do to repair the damage.

• Artificial Intelligence
  The end of the age of heroes — A new and enlightening contribution to efforts to understand the complex implications of the AI revolution. This one focuses on what technology will do to our ability to access collective societal knowledge.

• Constructively Addressing Complex Issues
  Is It Time to ‘Liquidate’ the Study of Sociology? — A highly critical and doubtless controversial argument that sociology has abandoned its core mission: understanding societal problems and finding ways to solve them.

• Superpower Conflict
  The Small Suffer What They Must? — In a world where major powers are increasingly seeking to forcibly impose their will on others, a call for collective defense -- the only effective means of protection.

• Saving Democracy
  Britain’s New Prime Minister Sees Proportional Representation as a Cure to Polarization — A European, parliamentary perspective on one proposed strategy for reversing the United States’ hyperpolarized politics -- proportional, rather than winner-take-all, representation.

• US Politics
  Independents Are Nearly the Majority — News that politically homeless moderates are on the verge of outnumbering the combined population of Democratic and Republican partisans.

• Interstate War
  My company’s drones hit Russia — and showed what the Pentagon doesn’t know — A big part of the reason why the US is in so much trouble is that our military industrial complex is nowhere near nimble enough to keep up with the rapidly changing nature of war. This article why the Ukrainians are doing better.

• Superpower Conflict
  The Lost Art of Coercion — All negotiations occur within the context of coercive power relationships. In the context of international relations, this article talks about how the Trump administration is failing to use coercive power effectively.

• Saving Democracy
  The Long, Slow Death of Social Democracy — More insight into the widening gulf between the professional managerial elites and the rest of society -- a gulf that will not easily be bridged.

• Terror
  He Was Once the Most Famous Terrorist in the World. His Brand of Violent Chaos Is Returning. — A revealing look at an old but increasingly prominent form of terrorism -- one driven by amoral individuals willing to commit terrorist acts for a fee.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  Scope of Hacks on U.S. Water Supply Widens as Evidence Points to Iran — A worrisome story that offers one of the many reasons why we, in the United States, should not see ourselves as immune to the violence engulfing the Middle East and Ukraine.

• Interstate War
  Jacobsen’s ‘Biological War’ is a disturbing summons to seriousness — An important reminder that nuclear weapons are not the only weapon of mass destruction that we should be worrying about, plus a warning about the complacency that we’ve allowed to creep into our response to these threats.

• Social / Economic Complexity
  Why free markets beat capitalism — A thought-provoking essay exploring the differing political fates of two synonyms: free markets and capitalism.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  Entryism Comes to America — A report on the way in which the French have attempted to distinguish the genuine threat posed by Islamic extremists in their society from the Islamophobia that is often directed against the many Muslims who are good French citizens.

• Interstate War
  Putin’s Human Safari Is the Dystopian Future of War — An important reminder of the stakes involved in the war in Ukraine and of the vile, murderous nature of Russia’s attempt to conquer the country.

• Family / Gender / LBGTQ+
  Sex Differences Above the Neck — A review and summary of an important new book that compiles what scientists, using a wide range of methods, have been able to find out the biological differences between men and women.

• Artificial Intelligence
  A personalized scam is coming for you — A warning about the ways in which AI is being used to craft extremely sophisticated, personalized swindles (and, a warning about how similar techniques could be used to manipulate democratic societies).

• Superpower Conflict
  The Slow Death of the Global Commons — A report on what may turn out to be the most consequential result of the Iranian war — the loss of the freedom to navigate the high seas (and the globalized economy that that navigation made possible).

  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.

Subscribe now

Newsletter 477 - August 3, 2026

Gbemiga Dasylva is is a governance analyst and civic researcher whose work examines how institutional erosion, polarization, and civic fragmentation reshape public life and what it takes to rebuild legitimacy. His research has included work with communities in the United States, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Horn of Africa, applied to governance reform, peacebuilding, and civic resilience. He holds a Ph.D. in Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution from George Mason University’s Carter School. He also has his own substack: gbemigadasylva.substack.com which has more articles on related issues.

Gbemiga sent us this article in mid-July, asking whether we would be interested in publishing it. As you will see, it is on themes we have been covering extensively, and adds an interesting (and sobering) comparison of the United States and West Africa, both of which have been suffering from hyper-polarization. We thought his paper was worth sharing, so, here it is.

Around the world, we tend to notice democratic decline once it reaches formal politics. Elections lose legitimacy, legislatures become dysfunctional, constitutional rules are manipulated, and public trust collapses. Hyper-polarization may already be visible by then, but even polarization is often treated as the starting point, as a problem of attitudes and beliefs, rather than a symptom of civic culture that has been weakening for years.

Democratic institutions may begin losing their foundations before their formal breakdown is evident. The earlier warning signs may appear in the civic conditions that make self-government possible. Building on Beyond Intractability’s framing of hyper-polarization as a complex, self-reinforcing conflict system, this essay adds a community-level diagnostic. It asks what happens locally before that system hardens nationally. My argument is that civic fragmentation may be one of the conditions that allows polarization to harden.

The Pattern

Across very different contexts, I have encountered a recurring dynamic. Civic fragmentation may first appear as grievance without shared language, organizations working in parallel, and people transferring responsibility to leaders and institutions for problems they no longer believe they can address together. By the time we can point to a stolen election, a captured legislature, or a purged court, the civic foundations beneath democratic life may have been weakening for years.

Institutions and civic life shape one another. Douglass North described institutions as the “rules of the game”: structures that shape incentives and, over time, influence behavior and expectations. That insight matters. But the causal relationship also runs in the other direction. Relationships, norms, and civic practices help determine whether institutions can function legitimately and effectively in the first place.

Tocqueville described the associational habits through which citizens learned to act together without waiting for a central authority. Putnam later argued that similar institutional designs produced different results partly because they rested on different traditions of horizontal civic association. North, Tocqueville, and Putnam approach the question differently, but they point toward a common insight: democratic institutions cannot sustain themselves indefinitely without the civic habits on which they depend.

What Communities Taught Me

The pattern is not abstract. The American experiment was never sustained by institutions alone. It has always depended on what people are willing and able to do with one another in the places they share. Democracy is not only a constitutional arrangement or an act performed at the ballot box. It is a practice people learn by deciding what matters, listening across differences, making decisions, taking responsibility, and staying involved long enough to see what those decisions set in motion. This is how democratic strength is built: not in the absence of conflict, but in a community’s capacity to address conflict without losing the relationships, common purpose and sense of possibility needed to move forward.

The reforms that widened American democracy were often built civically before they were secured institutionally. People came together around shared aspirations. They formed associations, developed leaders, organized, modeled alternatives, and created examples that others could recognize and join. Institutions eventually responded, but the public will that made change possible was built first among people. A country can inherit institutions. It cannot inherit indefinitely the habits of self-government. Each generation must practice them again.

Civic erosion begins when that sense of ownership disappears from public life. In communities across the country people could readily describe what was wrong. They could also articulate the future they wanted for their children, their neighborhoods, and the places they called home. But they did not always have trusted ways to find one another, develop a common language for those aspirations, and decide what they were prepared to act on. (Harwood et al., 2024)

Organizations were active, but much of their work remained parallel (Harwood & Conroy, 2024). Leaders kept showing up, yet responsibility continued to circulate through separate networks and familiar circles. The same people carried the load, while many others remained on the edge of public life - concerned, observant, and unsure where or how to enter. That was not apathy. The civic will was there. What was missing was a shared pathway for acting together.

When those practices weaken, people begin to outsource their agency. They wait for elected leaders to produce a different future, then direct their frustration at those leaders when the future they envisioned does not arrive. Leaders must be held accountable - but accusation alone is not a civic strategy, and a different politics will not emerge simply because citizens demand better leaders. It also depends on whether communities begin modeling a different kind of public life.

A different kind of public life can be built. It often starts small: a youth program people want to keep alive, a dangerous road residents want fixed, a public space neighbors want reclaimed. Residents gather across familiar lines, choose one achievable step, act on it, and stay with the work long enough to see what changes. None of these wins solves everything, but each gives people something they can point to - proof that collective effort can still change conditions. That proof is what restores civic faith: the belief that people can act together and shape the places where they live.

What West Africa Reveals Under Greater Pressure

The comparison is not one of equivalence. A U.S. county and a Sahelian state face radically different pressures. But the higher-stakes cases in West Africa help reveal what can happen when prolonged insecurity and declining institutional legitimacy coexist with few credible channels through which citizens can exercise agency between elections.

The clearest case is Mali. Before the military seized power in August 2020, citizens had already spent months protesting disputed elections, corruption, deteriorating security, and the government’s inability to respond. The coup did not create that crisis of legitimacy. It entered a political environment in which many citizens had already lost confidence that the existing civilian order could act on their behalf. Visible public support for the overthrow suggested that some citizens experienced it not primarily as the loss of a democratic order worth defending, but as the removal of a government they believed had ceased to work.

That is what West Africa reveals under greater pressure. When people no longer believe civilian institutions can respond, and civic and political organizations have not built durable ways for them to act together between elections, public hope can migrate toward an actor that appears capable of decisive action. Military intervention may then be experienced not only as a constitutional rupture, but as a transfer of hope. People do not necessarily stop wanting accountable government. A coup is not the inevitable endpoint of civic erosion, but it can expose how far the connection between public will, collective action, and constitutional authority has already weakened.

The comparison does not show that civic fragmentation inevitably leads to military rule. It shows how prolonged institutional failure can become more dangerous when citizens lack durable civic and political channels through which to organize their will, demand accountability, and act between elections.

What National Measures Cannot See from the Ground

Existing democracy indices, including Freedom House and V-Dem, are indispensable for macro-level analysis. They capture important dimensions of participation, association, rights, and institutional performance. What they are less equipped to capture is how civic life actually functions inside communities: whether people can find one another, recognize a shared purpose, organize their will, and see that collective action can change something.

Bermeo’s analysis of contemporary democratic backsliding shows how decline increasingly proceeds through executive aggrandizement and manipulation from within formal institutions rather than through their immediate destruction. Institutions can therefore appear procedurally intact even as their democratic substance weakens.

But this leaves a vital upstream question: why do these legal and executive manipulations sometimes encounter so little organized public resistance? Part of the answer may lie in the civic ecosystem. When horizontal trust and shared agency have already fractured, the public’s capacity to coordinate in defense of democratic institutions weakens.

Institutions rarely weaken in isolation. Their deterioration may follow or accompany the fragmentation of trust, relationships, norms, and public practices on which they depend. An early-warning system built on that premise would not track only what the state is doing. It would also examine whether civic relationships, shared language, leadership pathways, and experiences of agency are expanding or contracting.

The issue is not simply whether fragmentation exists; every community contains divisions. The more revealing question is whether people are becoming more or less capable of working across those divisions over time.

If civic fragmentation is an upstream condition of hyper-polarization, some of the earliest warning signs may be found not in election results or national opinion surveys, but in the ordinary organization of community life.

Are residents able to describe what they want together, or only what separate groups oppose? Are organizations connected around shared aspirations, or working through parallel networks? Is public responsibility widening, or are the same people carrying the civic load? Can residents point to examples where collective action changed a real condition? Are there recurring places where people work through disagreement before it becomes a crisis? None of these conditions on its own predicts democratic breakdown. Taken together, however, they reveal whether a community still possesses the relationships, shared language, and sense of agency needed to address conflict constructively.

What This Changes About Intervention

For practitioners, then, the question is not only whether opposing groups are willing to talk. It is whether the community is rebuilding the capacity to act, learn, and remain in relationship after the conversation ends.

Dialogue remains important, but that alone cannot repair a civic culture in which people no longer experience themselves as capable of shaping public life. The work is to help communities move from expression to shared public work and through that work, build repeated experiences of shared agency: finding one another, naming an aspiration they hold in common, working through real differences, acting on something concrete, and making the result visible.

Small wins matter for this reason. A changed school practice, a safer road, a reclaimed public space, or a budget decision shaped by organized residents does more than solve one problem. It gives people evidence that public action organized around a common aspiration can change something. That evidence becomes a civic resource others can recognize and build upon.

Hyper-polarization becomes harder to interrupt when people lose the experience of working together and seeing tangible results. When civic life thins out, politics starts doing too much work. It gives people a place to belong, a language for their frustration, someone to blame, and a sense of power. Grievances that communities have not worked through together get pulled into partisan conflict.

The answer is not to retreat from politics. It is to stop treating politics as the only place where public life happens. A healthier politics becomes possible when people have practiced a different kind of public life first: seeing one another clearly, working through disagreement, acting on shared concerns, and proving that collective effort can change conditions.

This is the civic layer that early-warning systems must also examine: not only whether an election has been stolen or polarization has hardened, but whether people, in the places where they live, are still practicing the habits that make self-government possible.

Hyper-polarization and institutional failure are not identical. But both can reflect the same deeper problem: people losing the capacity to work through conflict, exercise agency, and shape public life together.

References

Bermeo, N. (2016). On democratic backsliding. Journal of Democracy, 27(1), 5–19

Beyond Intractability. (n.d.). Constructive Conflict Initiative framing papers. https://www.beyondintractability.org/constructive-conflict-initiative-framing-papers

Freedom House. (n.d.). Freedom in the World.

Harwood, R. C., & Conroy, J. P. (2024). Building a Better Owensboro: A New Path Forward for Owensboro-Daviess County. The Harwood Institute for Public Innovation and Greater Owensboro Leadership Institute.

Harwood, R. C., Conroy, J. P., Prihoda, M., & Dasylva, O. (2024). DeSoto County Coming Together: Unleashing the Community’s Potential. The Harwood Institute for Public Innovation and The Patterson Foundation

North, D. C. (1990). Institutions, institutional change and economic performance. Cambridge University Press.

Putnam, R. D., Leonardi, R., & Nanetti, R. Y. (1993). Making democracy work: Civic traditions in modern Italy. Princeton University Press

Tocqueville, A. de. (2000). Democracy in America (H. C. Mansfield & D. Winthrop, Trans. & Eds.). University of Chicago Press.

V-Dem Institute. (n.d.). The V-Dem dataset.

Lead Graphic Credit: ChatGPT.

Subscribe now

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.

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 ....

Subscribe now

Highlighted Links

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

• Trust / Trust Earning
  Six-Chart Sunday – All Trust is Local, 2026 — An intriguing compilation of charts and statistics on one of the most important aspects aspects of society --the presence or absence of trust.

• Superpower Conflict
  Russia and America Are Rediscovering the Limits of Nuclear Weapons — First, the good news: The military utility of nuclear weapons is extremely limited. The bad news is that these limits are opening the door to other potentially devastating types of warfare.

• Progressive Left
  The Resistance’s favorite poker metaphor makes no sense — Thoughts about whether the emerging conflict between Democratic Socialists and the rest of the Democratic Party will overwhelm the larger conflict between Democrats and Trump-era Republicans.

• Social / Economic Complexity
  America’s political economy is pretty bleak right now — An essay that explores the contradiction between the United States’ apparently booming economy and its dismal politics.

• The Hyper-Polarization Threat
  Our Never-Ending Race to the Bottom — Thoughts on an all-important mystery: why is it that the dynamics of political competition are pushing us toward an ever more dysfunctional (and increasingly unpopular) government?

• Family / Gender / LBGTQ+
  Explaining Sex to an Anthropologist — The stunning report on the ways in which gender orthodoxies are taking precedence over traditional academic values in the field of anthropology.

• Developing a Unifying Vision
  Liberalism, Heal Thyself — Hard questions for liberals lamenting the decline of Western democracy (and they’re diminishing political influence).

• Progressive Left
  Meanwhile, Among The Democrats ... — One perspective on the emerging fight for control of the Democratic Party -- a fight that, in many ways, resembles the fight between Donald Trump supporters and old line Republicans.

• Communication Complexity
  The Death of History — In the context of contemporary antisemitism, reflections on the way in which algorithms and artificial intelligence have sacrificed truth on the altar of spectacle.

• Civic Education
  Teach Your Children to Love Reading: Why It Matters More than Ever — A welcome call for parents and educators to teach the next generation about the wondrous window into the human spirit that reading provides.

• Developing a Unifying Vision
  A Guide to a Muscular Liberalism — For a time when liberal democracy is struggling to defend itself from populists on the left and right, thoughts on how to defend democracy more effectively.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  That One Time Israel Tried to Help Gaza — A story about a forgotten history (from not that long ago) when there was a serious plan for building a vibrant prosperous Gaza that lived in peace with Israel (and why that plan failed).

• Class Inequity
  I have never been working class — Honest and thoughtful reflections on the vast gulf that exists between society’s working classes and its professional and managerial elites.

  

Colleague Activities

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

• Theories of Change
  From Protest to Policy — The next generation of civic technology isn’t about amplifying voices. It’s about helping societies make better decisions together.

• Networking
  Thinking Like a Network 2.0 — Networks are different from coalitions, collaboratives, or alliances. This article explains how networks are different, and why that matters for social change.

• Constructive Communication
  Clip Compilation on Courageous Citizenship for 2026 National Convention — A diverse group of speakers explain why they think that “courageous citizenship” is so important.

• Superpower Conflict
  Global Governance Innovation Report 2026: Advancing the Pact for the Future and a New Peace & Security Architecture — This report encourages ambitious thinking on renewing global governance, with innovative approaches for strengthening United Nations peace and security work.

• Networking
  Creating a Connected Ecosystem — No one organization can renew our society. Everything is connected. That means renewal must be connected as well.

• Media Reform
  Welcome to the GreenEarth Feeds — Social media algorithms built for people who hate social media algorithms.

• The Hyper-Polarization Threat
  The 34% Illusion: What the Topline Numbers Miss About American Polarization — The latest nationwide data shows a deeply polarized electorate, intense independent skepticism, and a shared exhaustion with structural games.

• Networking
  Weaving Networked Action for Systemic Change - A Practical Guide — This short guide synthesizes the practice of weaving for leaders, social entrepreneurs, and facilitators looking for holistic ways to co-create systemic change.

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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
  How Americans Are Engaged With News, Politics, Religion and Civic Life — From Pew research, a report on the differing ways in which citizens engage with news and politics.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  Trump Owes Americans a Better Explanation About Iran — A look at what is arguably the biggest mistake that the Trump administration has made in its war with Iran -- deciding there was no need to obtain domestic or international support for the war.

• Race / Anti-Racism
  The Racialist State — From a right-leaning perspective, a controversial, but thought provoking, critique of societies that attempt to address problems of past racism by creating a new racialist future.

• Saving Democracy
  The Price of Politicizing the Supreme Court — A report on one of the many downsides of treating the judicial system as a political body, rather than an impartial enforcer of the rule of law.

• Education
  A Crisis in the Humanities — The norms governing scholarship now often serve to protect a rigid orthodoxy on certain politically charged issues—with ideological tests substituted for proper academic standards.

• Interstate War
  Fighter Jets Are Passé — Yet another article that tries to come to terms with the fact that the United States vast arsenal of high-tech weapons is a rapidly diminishing military significance.

• Psychological Complexity
  The Selfie Generation Is the Baby Boomers’ Mistake — An argument that the boomers’ parenting style with their constant efforts to offer their children every possible advantage wound up undermining their children’s lifelong prospects.

• Psychological Complexity
  The Book That Changed How We Think About Thinking — An article for those interested in going beyond our current troubles and contemplating the nature of human thought.

• Freedom of Speech
  The Principle of Institutional Neutrality Is What Matters, Not the Name — An Interview with J.P. de Ruiter, who helped lead Tufts in its adoption of “institutional pluralism.”

• Artificial Intelligence
  Six-Chart Sunday – The Bonfire of the Data Centers — Interesting charts and statistics on what is shaping up to be one of the most significant and divisive conflicts of our era -- AI.

• Constructively Addressing Complex Issues
  What Happens When the Public Record Shrinks — An article that explores yet another way in which our shared image of objective reality is being deliberately undermined.

• Culture and Religion
  See How Your Values Stack Up Against the Rest of America — An intriguing online questionnaire that gives us the ability to see how your values coincide with (or differ from) those of your fellow citizens.

• Education
  I’m a College Professor Inflating Grades. I Need Help. — An explanation why the higher education grading system (and the accompanied incentives to work hard) have almost completely collapsed (and what it going to take to fix this).

  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.

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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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Here is another very insightful article by our colleague, Anne Leslie, who is with IBM and has an amazingly impressive and daunting title — or maybe this is more a description of what she does. But next to her name of LinkedIn she writes: Cloud Risk & Digital Resilience Leader | NED & Board Advisor | Sovereignty, Cybersecurity, Post-Quantum Readiness, and Financial Services Risk Oversight.

I hardly understand a word of that, but Guy and I met Anne when all three of us were participating in a project on hybrid warfare called Project Seshat. That project brought together conflict resolution experts and security experts to figure out how we can better prevent, detect, and respond to hybrid threats. Since then we have learned a great deal from Anne.

Anne has a newsletter called Fathoming 42, which she publishes on LinkedIn bi-weekly. As she explains in this recent article, which first appeared on Fathoming 42 on July 13 of this year, her newsletter has seemed to cover a wide range of topics. But it all boils down, she observes, to our tendency to oversimplify reality, and the trouble we get into when we do that. That seemed to me to be very appropos of David Eisner's last post, so I asked her if we could republish it here, and delightfully, she said “yes.” — Heidi Burgess

by Anne Leslie

When I published the first issue of Fathoming 42, I began with a question about artificial intelligence, its place in society, and the extent to which technological progress can be reconciled with human dignity and fundamental rights. At the time, it seemed a reasonable point of departure for a newsletter that aimed to grapple with the consequences of living in an increasingly complex world.

Since then, however, the subjects have ranged rather widely. I have written about friendship and marriage, arguments and divorce, resilience and contentment, failure and recovery, regulation and sovereignty. Viewed purely through the lens of subject matter, the newsletter may appear to wander from one domain to another.

The longer I write it, the less I believe that is true.

What has become increasingly apparent to me is that these essays have all been attempts to examine the same underlying habit of mind: our tendency to reduce reality to choices between competing absolutes when reality itself rarely presents us with such clean distinctions.

Much of modern discourse is organised around binaries. We are encouraged to declare ourselves for or against, optimistic or pessimistic, progressive or conservative, regulated or free, resilient or vulnerable. The categories vary, but the structure remains remarkably consistent. Faced with complexity, we seek refuge in simplification.

The problem is not that distinctions are useless. The problem is that many of the distinctions we rely upon are false.

Technology can empower and diminish. Regulation can protect and constrain. Relationships can be sources of both joy and suffering. Failure can be destructive, but it can also be instructive. Resilience is not always admirable, nor is vulnerability always a weakness. Most things that matter contain tensions that cannot be resolved merely by choosing one side of an argument and dismissing the other.

Yet there is something deeply seductive about binary thinking. It reduces cognitive effort. It offers certainty where uncertainty exists. It provides identities to inhabit and narratives to defend. Above all, it allows us to avoid the discomfort that accompanies genuine complexity.

Reality, unfortunately, has little interest in accommodating our preference for simplicity.

The most capable leaders I have encountered, and the most contented people I know, are rarely those who possess unwavering certainty. More often, they are the people who can hold competing truths in mind without rushing to eliminate one of them. The strongest relationships are not those that avoid contradiction, but those that learn to navigate it. The most durable institutions acknowledge trade-offs rather than pretending they can transcend them.

Wisdom, I increasingly suspect, consists less in arriving at definitive answers than in resisting premature conclusions.

Many of the failures that interest me, whether personal, organisational, or societal, begin with a refusal to see things as they are. We become attached to categories that no longer explain reality. We confuse clarity with oversimplification. We mistake confidence for understanding. We insist upon coherence even when the evidence points towards ambiguity.

What follows is not insight but distortion.

The recurring theme of Fathoming 42 has therefore never been artificial intelligence, relationships, resilience, governance, or any of the other subjects that have occupied these pages. Those have simply been different vantage points from which to observe the same phenomenon.

The real subject has been complexity itself: the challenge of looking at the world without reducing it to caricature, the discipline of questioning false dichotomies, and the willingness to accept that reality is under no obligation to become simpler before we can understand it.

If there is a common thread running through every issue published so far, it is the conviction that understanding begins when we stop demanding that the world conform to our preferred categories and allow it, instead, to be exactly what it is.

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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.

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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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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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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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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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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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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  Socialists Spell Trouble for Democrats — From a veteran political analyst, and argument that the new socialist candidates will undermine Democratic prospects this fall.

• 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.

• Developing a Unifying Vision
  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.

• Developing a Unifying Vision
  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.

• Peacebuilding
  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.

• Peacebuilding
  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.

• Peacebuilding
  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.

• Constructive Communication
  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.

• Race / Anti-Racism
  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.

• Media Reform
  What if Algorithms Rewarded Bridge-Building? — Explore how Aemula flips the math on media polarization by financially compensating writers who pull diverse communities closer together.

• Constructive Communication
  Legendary Pitmaster Ryan Mitchell Tells Us What He’s Learned About Bringing People Together — BBQ expert Ryan Mitchell talks about why sharing a meal face-to-face matters more than ever and what generations of his family sacrificed to keep the barbecue tradition alive.

• US Politics
  Voting Red Again: How Social Capital and Local Change Drove the Trump Swing — Bonding social capital -- the formal and informal ties that hold communities together from within -- is robustly connected with higher Trump vote margins, while bridging social capital runs the other way.

• Civil Society
  Snohomish County is Showing us What Civics Looks Like — A summary of the Snohomish County, Washington’s civic assembly on governmental use of AI.

• Constructive Communication
  Stop Talking, Start Building: Rich Harwood on How Divided Towns Can Build Something Together. — What does it take to heal a divided town? Less talking, more building, says Rich Harwood.

• Communication Complexity
  What Stories Are Americans Watching — and What Does It Mean for Democracy? New Research from Harmony Labs — Harmony Labs, a media research organization, has released a series of findings from its multi-year partnership with Democracy 2076, examining how entertainment media shapes Americans’ beliefs about government and democratic participation.

• Saving Democracy
  Trustworthy Elections — A collaborative effort to strengthen trust in elections through education, dialogue, and community connection.

• Constructive Communication
  Talking politics with friends, families, and voters — Two videos from Erica Etelson on ways of talking successfully with people “on the other side.”

• Constructive Communication
  NYC works with civic engagement groups to refine public meetings — An important reminder that there are lots of opportunities for the public to participate in democratic decision-making processes (and that these opportunities can and are being improved upon.)

  More News & Opinion Links

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
  The Democrats have their own MAGA now — An especially informative look at just how different the Democratic Party’s new socialists are from what had previously been the party’s mainstream.

• Superpower Conflict
  The Foreign-Policy Debate Democrats Need to Have — An important reminder that the ongoing battle for control of the Democratic Party is also a hugely consequential battle over the direction of the nation’s foreign policy, should the Democrats return to power.

• US Politics
  A Working-Class Party Without Many Workers — A compilation, with lots of links, to political science research into the growing divide between the Democratic Party and the working classes that used to be its core constituents.

• 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
  What Real Diversity Looks Like — A profile of the Becket Fund -- an organization does an especially good job of promoting diversity by defending religious liberty for people of disparate faiths.

• Saving Democracy
  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.

• Media Reform
  The Miseducation of American Journalists — A look at the complex effect that recent changes in the teaching of journalism have had on the way we learn about and view our society.

• 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.

• Culture and Religion
  Liberals Are Preaching Moral Values. What Took Them So Long? — After a long period in which moral relativism led many on the left to see all value systems as equally valid, there is now a major trend toward the articulation and defense of specific value systems.

• Interstate War
  The Military and the Republic — As technological changes are forcing the United States into a massive new arms race, thoughts about the proper relationship between the military and larger society.

• Climate / Environment / Health
  Ending respiratory infections — A helpful story explaining how we might realistically be able to eliminate the respiratory infections that cause so much misery. All we need to do is quit fighting and start working together effectively.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  The Key Difference Between Jewish Extremists and Islamists — An eye-opening look at the Jewish extremists who are fighting for a secure state and the Islamists who are fighting to destroy Israel.

• Race / Anti-Racism
  Evanston’s Race Reparations in the Dock — A summary of Evanston, Illinois’ reparations program and the intense legal controversy it has provoked.

• Progressive Left
  Progressive Asceticism Will Never Win Elections — A thought-provoking article that explains why the left’s constant focus on all of the things that are wrong with our society may actually be undermining its support.

• Race / Anti-Racism
  How a Nation of Immigrants Traces Its Roots — Some really great graphics highlighting the astonishing array of immigrants that have come to call the United States home.

• Saving Democracy
  Is This Liberalism’s Last Stand? — Another summary (with more links) to what political scientists think about the coming struggle between traditional liberals and the ascendant Democratic Socialists of America.

• 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).

• Civic Education
  #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

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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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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.

Please Contribute Your Ideas To This Discussion!

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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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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.

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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.

• 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

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 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.

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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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