Highlighted Links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reader Suggested Links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

Colleague Activities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  More Colleague Activity Listings

News and Opinion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More News and Opinion Links

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About the MBI Newsletters

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

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

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

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

Ways to Influence or Change Government Procedures or Decisions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Current Approaches to Public Participation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lead Photo Credit: ChatGPT made this!

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

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

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

Distrust of Government

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

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

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

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

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

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

Implications for Democratic Renewal Efforts

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

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

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

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

Relationship with Government

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

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

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

And then Vinay added:

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

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

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

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

Key Considerations

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

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

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

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

Lead Photo Credit: ChatGPT made this!

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About the MBI Newsletters

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

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Highlighted Links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reader Suggested Links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

Colleague Activities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  More Colleague Activity Listings

News and Opinion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More News and Opinion Links

Please Contribute Your Ideas To This Discussion!

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Contact Us!

About the MBI Newsletters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Earlier, we went on to say:

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

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

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

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

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

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Please Contribute Your Ideas To This Discussion!

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

Contact Us

About the MBI Newsletters

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

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

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

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Planning vs Learning in Complex Systems

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

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

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

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

The engineering model works for systems that are consciously designed by humans: complicated mechanical systems. They may be computers or computer programs, airplanes, cars, assembly lines, space stations — all sorts of complicated devices, large and small. Complete plans for those systems are available; they’re deterministic systems. They work the same way every time — at least, until they’re broken, and then in a sense, the system is just functioning differently, but it still is deterministic. That’s why you can troubleshoot complicated systems effectively. If you’ve got enough money and sufficient will, you can troubleshoot and repair just about any mechanical system, unless doing so will cost more than the repair is worth. In that case, you junk the machine and replace it with a new one.

The engineering model does not work nearly as well, however, for complex systems because they are not deterministic. Here you are dealing with systems that have evolved through natural and social evolution. The human body is one example of what systems theorists call a “complex adaptive system.” So, too are biological ecosystems, social systems, economies, and conflict systems.

There are no plans for these systems, because they weren’t designed. The closest we can come to “plans” are observational studies about how particular aspects of the system seem to work. So doctors understand the basic elements of the human body, and how all the “parts” are connected. Much of their work focuses on treating as many injuries and diseases as possible. For some kinds of ailments, doctors are usually able to produce a complete cure. They can give you penicillin for strep throat, and your sore throat will go away. They can set a broken bone, and it will heal correctly. For other problems, the best they can do is provide partial or symptomatic relief. You can take Tamiflu to lessen the duration of the flu, but doctors can’t cure it, as they can strep throat. They can suggest Claritin for hay fever in the spring, but that just reduces symptoms, it doesn’t get rid of them. Other kinds of problems doctors can’t treat, but they can help you live with them. That’s what the whole movement which produced the Americans with Disabilities Act was about: helping people live with incurable chronic conditions. Yet, there are still other conditions which are terminal, for which modern medicine does not have a cure. Many cancers are like that, as is heart disease. We can reduce risk factors by eating well and exercising, but doctors cannot entirely prevent heart attacks or cancer.

This continuum of treatments applies to conflicts, as well. We can’t prevent conflict; indeed, as we have explained elsewhere, we need conflict as it is what Guy calls “the engine of social learning.” But we do want to prevent conflicts from becoming destructive, and to limit their destructiveness, if we fail to prevent it. And just as we try to reduce medical risk factors by eating well and exercising, we can try to learn conflict management and resolution techniques such as learning how to listen to others effectively, or identify shared interests to find win-win agreements.

Just as is true with medicine, conflict outcomes can range from complete resolution to complete failure. Sometimes, there are misunderstandings that can be cleared up entirely with a good, honest conversation. Or apparently irreconcilable positions can have compatible interests underneath, allowing for a win-win interest-based resolution. In many other cases, what you’re providing is symptomatic relief. You help people who have irreconcilable differences learn to live with chronic conflict, but to do so in ways that limit casualties and costs. This is what dialogue facilitators do, when they get people who have fundamental moral differences to learn how to listen to each other and treat each other with respect, even if they don’t change their minds about the moral issue being discussed. And just as is true in medicine, there are some conflicts that are, in essence, terminal. We do not now have the tools that enable us to deal with these constructively. (Although some of our colleagues likely disagree, we would put the Israel/Palestinian conflict in this category).

Going back to Guy’s notion that conflict is the “engine of social learning,” conflict is what enables us to see that the way we have always done things, or the way we have always understood the world to be (or work), sometimes isn’t right. Or at least it could be improved upon. Sometimes the people who we are in conflict with actually have important things to tell us — things we would do well to learn, not just for them, but for our own well-being too. And sometimes we need to “learn from the system.” If it isn’t working as well as we hope it will, we need to study it to figure out what is going wrong, and experiment with different approaches to fixing it, rather than having one “solution” which we think is right, and implementing that same “solution” over and over again, even though it isn’t producing the results we want.

So that suggests a strong reason why, in David’s observation, “learners” beat “planners.” Planners are acting as if they are working on a complicated (deterministic) system, but learners recognize that they are working within a complex system and that their success depends upon their ability to adapt to ever-changing conditions.

A Further Note on “Winning.”

When we mentioned to David that we wanted to turn his observation into a post, he warned that some people are adverse to the idea of “winning,” seeing it as too competitive, and not adequately cooperative. Indeed, we have written a lot about the need to pursue a “power-with democracy,” rather than a “power-over democracy,” which is another way of saying we should try to cooperate more and compete less. And we stand by that advice. But in this sense, “winning” is not beating the other side, but rather doing a better job of pursuing shared or complementary goals surrounding democratic revitalization. Making things better is a win. No change or making things worse is a loss. And, it is desirable for funds to flow toward those organizations and projects that are most effective in doing in making things better.

So it is not a question of cooperation or competition. Indeed, we think that pursuing collaboration over competition is a likely winning approach to fixing our toxic, hyper-polarized political system. The question is who can most successfully facilitate the kind of cooperation that we need. Good intentions are not enough. We need genuine positive results. And, given the extraordinary challenge we face, we need to continue to push ourselves to do more and to do it better. We have seen many people and organizations do that when they pursue various forms of deliberative democracy. The results are most often very positive, both in terms of system change, and in terms of satisfaction among the participants. So we would call that a “win” for democracy. And the more people learn about this new way of “doing democracy,” the better off we are likely to be.

Individual projects and the people who fund those projects also need to be realistic in their expectations. We need to resist the temptation to over promise and funders need to resist the temptation to make unrealistic demands on their grantees. We also need to think about project evaluations as a way of encouraging and facilitating this kind of adaptive learning process. We need to be careful to focus on the things that really matter, not meaningless statistics. After all, there is considerable truth to the old axiom that “things that count are very difficult to count and things that are easy to count often don’t count.”

So maybe learning and planning aren’t really in competition, and they certainly aren’t in an either-or or zero-sum or win-lose relationship. But we need to be constantly attune to opportunities to learn, even after we have done what we think was excellent planning.

————————

Lead Photo Credit: ChatGPT

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About the MBI Newsletters

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

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Highlighted Links

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

• Social / Economic Complexity
  Why Capitalism Persists — An analysis of the ways in which competition and conflict play an essential role in producing the creative tension that has made capitalisms of so successful.

• Social / Economic Complexity
  So Nobody Is Going to Pay Taxes Now? — A description of just how far US politicians have gone in trying to win votes by offering ever more generous tax cuts (while avoiding the corresponding cuts to government services).

• Race / Anti-Racism
  The Self-Defeating Condescension of an Anti-Racist Education — A thought-provoking (and doubtless controversial) critique of the way in which progressives think about race and racism.

• Nihilists
  What the Hell Is Microlooting? — An exploration of an important new word -- a word that reveals yet another giant crack in the social contract and the socioeconomic system upon which we all depend.

• Bridge Building
  Rejecting the Rejection of Empathy — More on the ongoing and surprising debate over whether empathy is a force for good or ill.

• Violence
  The Year of the Molotov Cocktail: American Antigovernment Violence Hits a 30-Year High — Disturbing data on the trend toward increasing levels of political violence -- something that is not very surprising, but very worrying.

• Communication Complexity
  Shoot the messenger — A provocative argument that the class of people who shape public debate can’t see our their blind spots.

Reader Suggested Links

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

• Theories of Change
  David Brooks: “I’ve Got One More 10-Year Chapter in My Career, Probably” — David Brooks has left the Times, but he is not disappearing from the pundit scene. He explains why he left, and what is next for him.

• Constructive Communication
  The Problem With Hasan Piker’s Einstein Story — A thought-provoking exploration of more and less constructive ways of engaging controversial ideas.

• Race / Anti-Racism
  “Pawns in a White Man’s Political Game” — A comprehensive review of the long history of the civil rights movement -- a review that helps us understand how we got to where we are now.

• Artificial Intelligence
  Why the A.I. Job Apocalypse (Probably) Won’t Happen — A hopeful and, we think, pretty persuasive description of the way in which societies and economies will adapt to AI’s ability to dramatically lower the cost of information.

• Constructive Communication
  Strict Uniforms. Ancient Philosophy. Can a Public School Cure Our Toxic Politics? — A pretty appealing description of benefits of a “classical” education focused on teaching people how to think and constructively interact with one another.

• Effective Problem-Solving
  The Ecosystem of Deliberative Technologies for Public Input — Ensuring public opinion and policy preferences are reflected in policy outcomes is essential to a functional democracy. A growing ecosystem of deliberative technologies aims to improve the input-to-action loop between people and their governments.

• Violence
  Idiots Killed Sanity — A sobering assessment of the sources of evil that have become increasingly accepted and normalized and increasingly dangerous.

  

Colleague Activities

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

• Constructive Communication
  Political Perception Gap Lesson Plan/Presentation — A slide deck from More Like Us that educators and others can use to teach about the Perception Gap and why diminishing it is so important.

• Bridge Building
  Art, Politics, and Strangers: The Unexpected Way to Bridge Our Divides — Conceptual artist David Deighton created ‘art as civic science’: talking politics with strangers in national parks. He uses active listening to bridge divides.

• Theories of Change
  Strategy Is Not the Problem: Why Issue-Based and Systems Approaches Break Under Pressure without Defensible Decisions — The central problem is not choosing a strategy. The central problem is making allocation decisions that cannot be sustained once they are tested.

• Theories of Change
  How a Smaller “Them” Gets Us to a Bigger “We” — A new image of what civic engagement work should be: the building of “long bridges” to others in an effort to recognize their shared humanity and stake in a shared future.

• Theories of Change
  Stop trying to ‘educate’ people into changing. Science proves it doesn’t work — When confronted with evidence that contradicts our beliefs, we’re more likely to question the evidence than to update our views.

• Psychological Complexity
  Democracy is about people: Are we paying enough attention to the brain? — “Brain capital,” as different from “human capital,” has both strong explanatory power in analyses of democracy and is an organizing concept for policy interventions to support democratic resilience.

• The Hyper-Polarization Threat
  Why We Viscerally Resist Talking to the Other Side – Mónica Guzmán — This episode explores why we’ve come to view curiosity as a threat and how our political labels have been transformed from descriptions of our beliefs into shields that prevent us from seeing the humanity in our neighbors.

• Constructive Communication
  How To Motivate Americans’ Conversations Across Politics — James Coan and Imre Huss explain the power of Perception Gap corrections and other methods to lower barriers and increase positive motivation.

• Civil Society
  Defending Local Stability: The Business Response — How business owners and leaders can prepare for possible federal deployments, protect their teams, and advocate for their communities.

• Developing a Unifying Vision
  Building the Democratic Economy Now — Scot Nakagawa reflects on the economic infrastructure we need before Democrats can win.

• Saving Democracy
  Bowling with Strangers: Fresh Theory for Reviving Struggling Democracies through Demonstrations 2.0 — What if the future of democracy depends not on louder protests, but on deeper human connection? In Bowling with Strangers, Marc Gopin says the power of civic gatherings are the relationships we build while we are there.

• Saving Democracy
  3/4 of Americans Say the System Is Broken. That’s Where Our Movement Begins. — What if the issues both parties use to tear us apart could be transformed into places where we could prove that “We the People” can still govern ourselves?

• Saving Democracy
  Policy by the People — A book review examining experiments across the world that have tried to remove politicians from the decision-making process. Have they worked?

• Saving Democracy
  The Prerogative to Pardon — As with everything else, Donald Trump is pushing the pardon process to the breaking point. Can it be salvaged? Should it?

• Artificial Intelligence
  Crocodile tears: Can the ethical-moral intelligence of AI models be trusted? — This paper introduces an ethical-moral intelligence (EMI) framework for evaluating AI models across dimensions of moral expertise, sensitivity, coherence, and transparency.

• Education
  Harvard Law faculty share ‘Why I Changed My Mind’ — Though (ideally) academia is a place where revising one’s ideas is a constant, in reality getting something ‘wrong’ can be scary. Three former Harvard professors share such moments of reckoning in this video.

• Non-Violence
  Why Gen-Z Is Rising — Erica Chenoweth and Matthew Cebul analyze the global surge of Gen Z-led protest movements, showing how economic insecurity, exclusion from power, and corruption are driving youth mobilization worldwide.

  More Colleague Activity Listings

News and Opinion

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

• Interstate War
  A ‘Crushing Victory’ and a ‘Military Mistake for the Ages’ — From a military perspective, a revealing and much more nuanced look at the successes and failures associated with the actions of all parties to the ongoing war with Iran.

• Artificial Intelligence
  There’s a 900-Year-Old Answer to Our Most Modern Problem — An extremely perceptive assessment of the ways in which common law-based strategies are able to constrain unreasonable behavior by AI firms without the need for any new legislation.

• Effective Problem-Solving
  My politically homeless views — A compilation of great ideas that neither political party seems to want to champion -- ideas that a new moderate political party might pursue.

• Race / Anti-Racism
  Ideas of Slavery: John Samuel Harpham’s ironic history — An in-depth attempt to write a global history of slavery (and related practices) -- a history that goes beyond simple stereotypes and helps us understand the forces that made this type of inhumanity possible.

• Education
  Documenting a Decade of Academic Meltdowns — An attempt to write a history of the complex array of events surrounding the academic “cancel culture” that has done so much to shape our contemporary political environment

• Social / Economic Complexity
  America is losing its most valuable resource: People — More insight into the complex relationship between long-term demographic change and a society’s vitality.

• Violence
  Private industry needs anti-drone defenses too — A startling essay that makes clear just how much of our society’s critical publicly and privately owned infrastructure is vulnerable to attack by small, easily smuggled drones.

• Artificial Intelligence
  The AI people have been right a lot — As we struggle to imagine a future dominated by AI, an appeal to listen to the folks who know this technology best.

• Social / Economic Complexity
  Truckers Kill More Than 5,000 People a Year. Regulators Are at Fault. — An eye-opening look at the inconsistent way in which our society addresses the risks associated with various industries.

• Psychological Complexity
  Fuel for thought — A profound essay asking us to reflect on the biological nature of our brains and our thinking.

• Social / Economic Complexity
  What will be scarce? — An essay that applies lessons from past periods of great technological innovation to the AI revolution. It simply asks how we will want to spend the money that we save by using AI technologies.

• Climate / Environment / Health
  RCP8.5 is Officially Dead — Good news -- the most dire projection of the likely impact of climate change is being withdrawn because it’s no longer thought to be a realistic possibility.

• US Politics
  The YOLO Presidency — Yet another attempt to understand President Trump’s complex psychology. This article focuses on his apparent desire to ultimately be seen as one of the most transformative leaders in world history.

• US Politics
  Two Cheers for Abundance Liberalism — A thoughtful assessment of the advantages and disadvantages one of the most promising strategies for building a broadly based political consensus.

• Corruption
  The Evolution of Trump’s Corruption — New information on the staggering (and, likely, unprecedented) level of corruption surrounding the Trump White House.

• Violence
  The American Way Is Under Fire — Thoughts on the far-reaching implications of the attack on the White House Correspondent’s Dinner (and so many other recent acts of political violence).

More News and Opinion Links

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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In Newsletter 452, we introduced Braver Angels' new concept of "Courageous Citizenship" and explained why we think this idea is so important. We also lay out a set of thought patterns and behaviors that we think courageous citizens should engage in, if they want to help build a stronger and healthier society in the United States. (Here we mean civic health, not just physical health.) In this post, we continue on with that discussion, explaining more about the courage that courageous citizens need, and give 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. Following Kenneth Boulding's First Law: "If it exists (or if it happened before), it must be possible," we think the lessons of the 1950s and 60s civil rights movement have a lot to say about why courageous citizenship could help us now, and about what we all should do now to be "courageous citizens."

Courage

Doing the work we described in the last newsletter takes real courage — not the popular fiction kind of courage in which heroes (who are usually using violence) are always successful and ultimately lauded for their efforts.

Real courage entails a willingness consider the possibility that one may have been wrong, and that, if so, one should admit those errors and change one’s behavior accordingly. (This is something that psychologists have long recognized as being so painful that we avoid it, if at all possible.) Part of what makes this so painful is that it frequently involves challenging norms of the groups to which one belongs. This means that courageous citizens must be willing to do unpopular things that threaten their relationships with people and communities that are really important to them. They may find themselves repeatedly having to patiently explain to skeptical audiences what they are doing and why. They are also likely to have to answer charges that they are compromising their group’s core beliefs in ways that give “aid and comfort” to “the enemy” (the other side).

They may also have to endure more than criticism. In our hyper-polarized society, it has become common for people who do not wholeheartedly support the left’s progressive “party line,” to be subjected to any of a wide range of “cancel culture” sanctions. A parallel thing happens to those who are not adequately supportive of the right’s orthodoxies (they just don’t call it the cancel culture, but, for instance, they accuse people of being “RINOs”--”Republican in Name Only” and ostracize them on that basis). Such sanctions can threaten an individual’s social standing, their livelihoods, and, sometimes, their physical security. Take a moment to think about all of the people who were canceled for daring to highlight another side of a story. Or, think about government officials who have had their actions unjustly vilified – officials who must now take precautions to protect themselves and their families from violent threats or actual attacks. Or, consider the way in which the No Labels’ effort to offer voters a moderate choice between the extremes of the left and right in 2024 was suppressed.

Being a courageous citizen can be dangerous, and ultimate success is by no means assured — it depends upon how many people have the courage to be courageous citizens in the face of difficult challenges. It may seem too risky, and it may seem unlikely to succeed. But we believe in Kenneth Boulding’s “First Law”: “If it exists, it must be possible.” Only a slight rephrasing creates “If it existed in the past, it must be possible.” And it did exist in the past: just look at the courageous citizenship practiced by the followers of Martin Luther King. And look at how successful they were! (Their efforts did not make racism go away, but the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act brought about huge improvements.) And as dire as things look now; they must have looked far worse to Blacks in the 1950s. Harry Boyte, a scholar and trainer who has long focused on citizenship and nonviolence, participated in that movement back in the 60s, and told us about it in his latest interview.

Civil Versus Civic Citizenship

Last January, when we talked with Harry, he pointed out that there are two meanings of the word “citizen” that need to be distinguished. One is “civil citizenship,” which is a legal term, meaning that one is a legal citizen of the United States. There are few responsibilities of civil citizenship, beyond obeying the law. In the U.S., you aren’t even required to vote!

The second meaning, Harry explained, is “civic citizenship,” which is a way of engaging with one’s neighbors, community, state, and country. It involves working to maintain and support our communities, actually putting in the time and effort to work with our neighbors and fellow citizens (legal or not) to create the healthy communities and a nation we want to live in. This second meaning, Harry observed, “is at the heart of American democracy, but it has almost entirely disappeared from use.”

It’s been kind of appalling that citizenship has shrunk in the last 20 years. George Bush made his campaign in 2000 about the call to citizenship, the communitarian service version, which is important. Barack Obama, in 2008, said citizenship is “us all doing our part. “All hands on deck,” was a slogan [he used], along with “yes we can” and “I’m running to revitalize citizenship. Government can’t solve complex problems by itself.” Those campaigns were high-profile. But since then, the language of citizenship has largely disappeared from public discussion. Horizontal or civic citizenship has been replaced with vertical citizenship — this notion of legal status [which, of course, is what Trump is stressing.]

Courageous Citizenship in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement

Having come of age in the 1960s U.S. civil rights movement, Harry saw civic citizenship being widely practiced and taught among the black followers of Martin Luther King. Back then, participation took tremendous courage. Civil rights marchers were routinely attacked with viscous dogs, fire hoses, and police batons. But they were not deterred. They kept on marching, nonviolently, until their calm and respectful demeanor won the day, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and The Voting Rights Act of 1965 were passed. America was transformed by their efforts. A majority of Congress, but also a majority of Americans, recognized that Blacks deserved the same rights as Whites — they were people (and citizens) equally deserving of respect.

In an earlier interview that Harry did with us, he told a story about how his father worked with Martin Luther King in the civil rights movement and, in 1963, was with King for his “I Have a Dream Speech.” So was Harry, then 18 years old:

I put my sleeping bag on dad’s hotel floor and heard King practice his “I Have a Dream” speech in the room next door. The march was very powerful for me, because I was an angry kid. I didn’t know any other white kids that I could talk to about desegregation. And my teachers were afraid to talk about it. There was a climate of fear in the South in the ‘50s and ‘60s. But the calm and the demeanor and the dignity of the marchers was what really impressed me. I thought, “Where did they learn to do that?” This was really the first expression of nonviolence on a large scale that I’d ever seen. And of course, it was also growing out of Montgomery, the bus boycott, and the sit-ins and the beginnings of the citizenship schools across the South, which taught nonviolence. It had a big impact.

Harry went on to teach in those citizenship schools. In our January 2026 interview with him, he explained:

We had about 900 citizenship schools. Tens of thousands of people went through them. Andy Young [leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and close confidant to King] called them the leadership base of the whole movement. And I think that’s probably true in communities across the south. Citizenship was far more than legal status. It was about a new sense of what King called “somebody-ness,” dignity, pride, self-worth. . ... Citizenship schools taught nonviolence, but they also talked in depth about a different kind of citizenship. And people would have long conversations, very animated, energized conversations about what a citizen is.

Working with Braver Angels, Harry is hoping to once again make what he calls “civic citizenship,” and what Braver Angels calls “courageous citizenship” a widely practiced endeavor. In an article forthcoming in the journal Freedom Schools: A Journal of Democracy and Community, Harry is proposing creating new “freedom schools” (in other words, “citizenship schools” adapted to the digital age. He reports that several efforts to create such schools are already happening in Texas and the U.S. Southwest. He wrote:

In a digital age characterized by widespread feelings of powerlessness, hopelessness, and loneliness, there also is a hunger for the kind of democratic experiences of agency widespread in the Freedom Movement, conveying positive liberty, while there is also a widespread sense of the need for a revival of productive, commonwealth building citizenship, far more than the shriveled consumer view that now dominates in both political parties. Careful planning and resource development will be essential. But a concerted effort could help to catalyze a civic renaissance, with foundations in a new generation of freedom schools.

Parallel Efforts

We have been learning about and trying to write about many parallel efforts which are now growing rapidly, much like the citizenship schools grew in the 50s and 60s. We talked to Rich Harwood whose efforts to help people follow a “New Civic Path“ are, in many ways, a version of the citizenship schools Harry talk about. So, too, is the training that Better Together America (BTA) is doing with its “hub builders.” (See our interview with Caleb Christen and Jacob Bornstein about BTA’s progress.)

When I went to BTA’s website to prepare for that interview, I saw that the words that first came up were “Re-imagining Democracy where you live.” In preparation for our conversation, I sent Caleb and Jacob some questions, one of which was based on the fight-versus-bridge discussion we were writing about at the time. Jacob wrote an extensive answer which both relates to that topic (but didn’t fit into the last post on that topic), but also relates to the notion of courageous citizenship:

Since 1994, the 20+ democracies that took an authoritarian turn and then turned back toward democracies, failed to sustain that turn around. Within 6 years, every one turned back toward authoritarianism. Fighting isn’t going to solve this. While the broader movement needs people to fight, the successful and sustained movements I’ve studied also had those who created the “reasonable” path. [I read this “courageous citizens.”] We see this in the civil rights movement, the marriage equality movement, and the women’s suffrage movement. So, when it comes to what I call “better together” civic infrastructure or others may call the thriving together movement, we probably do need fighters, but we also need the transpartisans. We need to create an on-ramp for the many many millions of Americans who aren’t getting their needs met by the established status quo. In order to break this pattern, we need positive vision, and to demonstrate how democracy can and should work better than we had it before. The only way we can demonstrate true shifts in outcomes that make people’s lives better is at the local and state levels. Bridging alone was never enough. We’ve known that for some time. But, the skills of bridging to collaboratively problem solve, to bring partners together to do shared work? To demonstrate that we indeed are better together than we are apart? We need shared work that demonstrably makes people’s lives better. [And that is courageous citizenship!]

So often we focus on big national political issues. These definitely have their place. Unfortunately, they typically build the constituency off anger and othering. To build the constituency on shared experience, we need to do the hard work in place, and support the leaders who emerge from these efforts and believe in this collaborative work who have the community behind them. Without a huge upswing in investment, this is a long burn, and will be needed regardless of where our national politics take us.

I read this as a strong endorsement of courageous citizenship. So, too, are The Inter-Movement Impact Project, Braver Angel’s Citizen-Led Solutions, and the Ripple Foundation’s Movement to Thrive Together. All are examples of people trying to encourage the development of a new way of people being in their communities. Not, as spectators and boosters, but as participants and builders. Or, to use Harry’s terms, as “civic citizens,” not just “civil citizens.” Or as Braver Angels’ calls them, “courageous citizens.” Though differing somewhat in their approach, all these efforts seem to be focused on giving people a sense of agency (which so many of us now lack), and the skills to work across difference (political or otherwise) to accomplish shared goals, at least at the local level.

There seems to be widespread agreement that doing this at the national level is going to be much harder. But if the local initiatives are successful and become widespread, then the pressure for our national leaders to engage constructively with courageous citizens will be much greater. (The way Jacob put this, was “local+local+local = national.”)

Bottom line, we love the concept of “courageous citizenship,” and think it is one that we all should try to emulate, whether we are a Braver Angel or not. The more of us who do this, the easier it will become for others to do this, the more successes we will have in changing relationships, changing people’s sense of agency and meaning, and increasing the pressure (we hope) on leaders at the national level to start being courageous leaders as well.

__________

Lead Graphic: Dorothy Cotton teaches a student cursive in a Southern Christian Leadership Conference Citizenship Education Program class, Alabama, 1960s. This mattered because literacy tests were used to block Black citizens from registering to vote. Photo by Bob Fitch, Bob Fitch Photography Archive, Department of Special Collections, © Stanford University Libraries. Licensed CC BY-NC 4.0. https://therockwalltimes.com/2020/01/news/the-civil-rights-activist-so-close-to-martin-luther-king-jr-she-was-thought-of-as-his-other-wife/

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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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First, an Announcemen

t

On Wednesday May 20, the Council on Tech and Social Cohesion is hosting its 2026 Global Expo: one event, eight hours, two segments (one in Kyrgyzstan and the second in Washington, DC) designed to reach audiences from San Francisco to Jakarta. The event will bring together technologists, civil society, researchers, regulators, and peacebuilders to mark a shift the field has been building toward for a while — moving away from harm mitigation and toward the intentional design of technology that fosters trust, collaboration, and peace.

Across the day speakers will explore how platforms (from social media to gaming) are rethinking design for healthier outcomes, how regulation and research are reshaping incentives, how civil society and peacebuilders are using tech to build trust in real-world contexts, and how deliberative tools and AI are transforming participation and decision-making. Guy and I are going — hope many of you will too!

The essentials:

• Date: Wednesday May 20, 2026

• Two segments with full time-zone breakdowns on the page

• Co-hosted with: Search for Common Ground (Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan) and the Alliance for Peacebuilding (Washington, D.C.)

• Online via Zoom, with limited in-person options at both host locations

• Register & full agenda: https://www.techandsocialcohesion.org/expo-2026-register

  ---

Braver Angels’ Courageous Citizenship

In September of 2025, Braver Angels revised their mission statement to go beyond de-polarization and bridging to something more fundamental: what they call “courageous citizenship.” As their then-new CEO, Maury Giles, explained in a November 23, 2025 email to members:

Years ago, I worked with Southwest Airlines. They famously insisted they weren’t in the airline business, they were in the freedom business. That simple shift in identity guided everything they did, from the way flight attendants greeted passengers to the way executives made decisions.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about that clarity of purpose because Braver Angels is at a similar moment of definition. For nine years, we have understandably described our amazing work with terms like “bridging” and “depolarization.” These are both true, it’s what we do in the same way that Southwest flies people across the country in planes.

But our purpose is simpler, truer, and far more powerful: Braver Angels is in the courageous citizenship business.

By courageous citizenship, we mean the intentional effort to engage in human connection the Braver Angels Way: contend without contempt, listen with dignity, and work where values overlap. Relationships. People. Dialogue. Action. [bold in original]

We like that concept a lot, but see it, perhaps, in a somewhat broader way than the way Maury described it in his email. So we thought discussing what it means to us would be worthwhile.

Democracy is Not a Spectator Sport

We’ve said frequently in the past that “democracy is not a spectator sport.” I thought Guy made that line up, but clearly not — I was surprised to see a sign with that message sitting on the front lawn of a neighbor’s house recently, and I have since found out that you can buy T-shirts and hats with that message too.

Despite its commercialization, the basic idea is something many of us seem to have forgotten. Most of us say we “like” or “believe in” democracy, but we engage in it as if we are rooting for our favorite team. We cheer whenever we win an election, a Congressional vote, or a judicial decision; we moan and groan when we lose.

This is the same way people tend to think about rival sports teams and their supporters. While these thoughts are usually just good-natured rivalry, they can (especially when people have had too much to drink) cross the line into open hostility and sometimes violence. Rooting for the home team (and booing home team players when they play badly) is a widely enjoyed hobby (one that even has the virtue of often crossing political divides within otherwise politically divided communities).

What makes these sports rivalries benign is their low-stakes nature. If your team loses, there will always be the next game or the next season. The outcome doesn’t really affect your vital interests (unless you’re a highly paid superstar).

Big problems, however, arise when we treat high-stakes political conflict in similar ways.

Unfortunately, apart from voting in occasional elections and sometimes sending money to candidates, far too many people treat citizenship as if it were just another hobby. They buy, wear, and display politically themed “swag,” and put up signs that declare their political orientation. They also sometimes make snarky signs and go to “No Kings” rallies, if they are Democrats, or go to Trump / MAGA rallies if they are Republicans. This is all easy stuff to do, and it is fun. These events are much like parties with good friends. There’s music, sometimes food, costumes, and lots of people who think the same way all around us, making us feel as if everyone is on our side, that our ideas are right and virtuous, and that we are fighting the good fight. Most importantly, we are helping “our team to win!”

But how, exactly, is this helping things? Are we changing anyone’s minds? Are we doing anything to build the kind of broadly-based political movement needed to diffuse the hyper-polarized political pendulum (with its narrowly decided elections, radical policy shifts, and sense that everything we care about is continually in jeopardy)? Are we convincing Trump that he is wrong in what he is doing and should change policies? Are Democrats learning that they were wrong to not do more to address the plight of the “left behind” voters who became Trump supporters?

We don’t think so. The signs at the NO Kings marches we have seen are so in-your-face that it seems very unlikely that they will convince any Trump voters or Trump himself to change their minds. They are much more likely to double down, look at pictures of the marchers in the news and think, “See? They are really crazy!” (or deluded, or evil, or some other invective.) “We really have to do all we can to oppose them.” Democrats, of course, respond in similar ways to the inflammatory pictures that inevitably come out of Trump rallies.

So, all we are doing is convincing ourselves that we are right, and they are wrong, and we are convincing them of that too, but in the opposite way. We aren’t being challenged to open our minds or hearts to new ideas, to consider if, or how, we might be wrong, or if there might be any way to collaborate with them to advance our goals (which we may even share with them, though we’d never think to ask). Our recent series of common ground posts suggests that we are walking away from a lot of collaborative opportunities. All we are doing is walking down the street with friends who agree with us. There is not much courageous about that!

Courageous Citizens Embrace the Great Reframing

As an alternative to being a citizen hobbyist, we believe that we all need to become courageous citizens, even if we don’t belong to Braver Angels. Courageous citizens reframe our problem. They realize that “the enemy” is not “the other side,” but rather, the destructive way we engage with one another. And they work to change that. (In Newsletter 385 we called this “The Great Reframing.”) Courageous citizens open their minds and their hearts to people who think differently than they do. They try to find out why they think differently, and consider honestly whether there is any merit in the other person’s views. If they find that there is some merit to the arguments of the other side, courageous citizens are willing to change their own minds. If there is an overlap of interests, they are willing to work together to pursue shared goals.

Courageous citizens also recognize that citizens don’t have to agree on everything to be valued and respected members of society. So, they treat everyone with respect, even those who get so caught up in the hyper-polarization spiral that they act in inappropriate ways. Courageous citizens “focus on the problem, not the people” (to paraphrase Fisher, Ury, and Patton in Getting to Yes.) When their fellow citizens engage in dishonest, disrespectful or other bad behaviors, courageous citizens challenge those behaviors. But they still treat the people with respect, and they don’t dismiss them, thinking that they are irredeemably evil.

Further, we would argue, courageous citizens think for themselves. They consider news and opinions from a wide variety of sources — sources that represent a full range of perspectives. They take the time to really learn about the issues they care about, not just assume, without examination, that their social media feeds are are correctly reporting the whole story. They only advocate for issues or policies when they know what they are advocating for and why, not just because that’s what their friends are doing or “their side” tells them to do. And, they do all of this with a sense of humility that recognizes that their understanding of any particular issue is inevitably limited.

Further, courageous citizens should be willing to go against the flow to stand up for their country and democracy first, and their party (if they have one) second. If they see their party doing something that isn’t fair, they don’t accept it as necessary “because the other side does the same thing.” Rather, they speak out against such anti-democratic actions. Many Democrats we know got tired of Michelle Obama’s advice: “When they go low, we go high.” But if both sides “go low,” how long is it going to take before democracy is lost? (Not long!) Far better to “go high,” and work for the trust of people on the other side, so, perhaps, they will begin to call out their own side for going low, or failing that, might come over to your side because you have made it more comfortable there.

This is, unfortunately, easier said than done. If one side employs unscrupulous, but effective, tactics for which there are no readily available “high ground” countermeasures, the other side is likely to respond in kind. This is, of course, what has been happening in the ongoing battle to see which side can gerrymander most effectively. But whenever possible, courageous citizens will try hard to “go high.”

Courageous citizens do advocate for the issues that they care about. However, they do so in ways that rely upon constructive confrontation strategies — strategies that firmly oppose the use of unscrupulous and anti-democratic tactics by both political opponents and allies. They also rely on a more constructive power strategy mix that minimizes the use of coercive force, while emphasizing mutually beneficial trade-offs and persuasive appeals that explain why the things that they are advocating for are in everyone’s best interest. This is what we have, in other contexts, referred to as power-with, rather than power-over, approaches to democracy.

This may sound naive, but it has been done and has worked before. We’ll talk about that in the next newsletter.

__________

Lead Graphic: Dorothy Cotton teaches a student cursive in a Southern Christian Leadership Conference Citizenship Education Program class, Alabama, 1960s. This mattered because literacy tests were used to block Black citizens from registering to vote. Photo by Bob Fitch, Bob Fitch Photography Archive, Department of Special Collections, © Stanford University Libraries. Licensed CC BY-NC 4.0. https://therockwalltimes.com/2020/01/news/the-civil-rights-activist-so-close-to-martin-luther-king-jr-she-was-thought-of-as-his-other-wife/

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About the MBI Newsletters

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

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

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Highlighted Links

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

• Social / Economic Complexity
  In Conversation with George F. Will — Niall Ferguson’s talk at the George Will award ceremony -- an exceptionally thoughtful and well-grounded analysis of the contemporary polycrisis.

• Interstate War
  I Played Putin in a War Game. The Most Dangerous Period May Be Coming. — Sophisticated (and as realistic as possible) war games can provide us with one of the best available assessments of an adversary’s likely reaction to particular strategic choices.

• Interstate War
  The Right Way to Talk About War — An essay highlighting the fact that, in the past, US Presidents have devoted considerable effort to explaining and justifying any military actions that they might undertake -- something that President Trump has not done.

• Artificial Intelligence
  The Social Edge of Intelligence — AI doesn’t really “think.” Rather, it remembers how we thought together. And we’re about to stop giving it anything worth remembering.

• Peacebuilding
  Political Campaigns Have No Idea What’s About to Hit Them — A review of some of the latest research into the many ways in which AI technology is being applied to electoral politics.

• Psychological Complexity
  When Rationalization Turns Deadly — An argument that the creative rationalization that goes into finding excuses for our bad behavior can amplify the threat posed by that behavior.

• Terror
  Terrorism is working, and that should terrify all of us. — For those who may have forgotten just how much of our recent history has been dominated by the fear of terrorism (and the war against terrorism) -- a reminder that the threat is ongoing.

Reader Suggested Links

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

• Social / Economic Complexity
  Why Socialism Cannot Work. Ever. Mathematically. — For supporters of socialism, a simple, well-argued, and highly persuasive critique.

• Artificial Intelligence
  What AI changes about ‘Viewpoint Diversity’ — An assessment of an intriguing idea -- the possibility that AI may expose students to a broader viewpoint diversity than they commonly receive in tightly structured educational settings.

• Artificial Intelligence
  Silicon Valley Is Bracing for a Permanent Underclass — Thoughts about what is, from a conflict perspective, a terrifying possibility -- that technological advance will create large numbers of unneeded, superfluous people.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  The Ethnic Cleansing No One Mentions When Talking About Israel — A big part of the history of the Middle East that nobody talks about -- the systematic expulsion of virtually all Jews from Middle Eastern countries that their families had lived in for centuries.

• Class Inequity
  When Populism Can Be Good — Populism can be a positive force when focused on building a pluralistic society that works and a negative force when it embodies hostility toward both minorities and pluralism.

• Hate Mongering
  The Southern Poverty Law Center Is a Fundraising Front & Everyone Knows It — Regardless of whether the SPLC is ultimately convicted, its recent indictment offers an example of the ways in which bad-faith interest groups can drive the hyper-polarization spiral.

• Developing a Unifying Vision
  My Vision For A Post-Trump America — From Francis Fukuyama, thoughts about the things that we could do to build a better post-Trump America.

  

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
  How to Change the World — Erica Chenoweth and Ranjay Gulati answer questions based on their extensive study of revolutions and insurrections.

• Civil Society
  Heather Gerken is Flipping the Script at the Ford Foundation — Welcome news from Daniel Stid about his conversation with the Ford Foundation’s new president Heaather Gerken, who is committed to scrupulous nonpartisanship in supporting democracy, elections, and the rule of law.

• Violence
  The Security Map — The Security Map by the Impact Project is one of the most comprehensive datasets on violent threats to America’s public servants.

• Developing a Unifying Vision
  The Forest of Enough — A story of what becomes possible when we receive what we need.

• Civil Society
  How to Build a Civic Renaissance, Starting with Yourself — Alexandra Hudson reflects on what she has learned from two communities that rejected political division and tried to rebuild civic life.

• Social / Economic Complexity
  Which U.S. regions are bowling alone?: The regional geography of social capital — This map, compiled by Nationhood Lab, calculates a county’s social capital based on the density of ten types of associational institutions – including bowling leagues, churches, sports clubs, civic organizations, and labor unions, among others.

• Theories of Change
  Faster Than Authoritarianism: Rapid Response as a Frontline Strategy for Democracy Defense — Authoritarianism relies on speed, confusion, and exhaustion. Faced with this reality, rapid response has become the most necessary and obvious frontline response for democracy defense.

• Bridge Building
  Impact Story: At first I struggled with bridging, then it gave me new energy — This is the fourth story in a series about the Othering & Belonging Institute’s Bridging for Democracy project. What they are finding is an antidote to authoritarianism.

• Non-Violence
  Eight Million Protestors and No Kings: The Case for Showing Up — Thoughts on the likely effectiveness of the “No Kings” protests.

• Theories of Change
  Block and Build: Philanthropy’s Fight Club — How a coalition of American grant makers decided to stop funding the status quo and start funding the barricades and why Europe is still stuck writing polite grant applications while Rome burns.

• Civil Society
  Faith as a Civic Counterweight in the Southeast: A Philanthropic Case for Investing in Faith‑Based Civic Formation — Faith-based organizing is a driver of civic action in the Southeast. So foundations should use faith-based organizations to enhance pro-democracy efforts in the region.

• Constructive Communication
  Narrowing the ‘Perception Gap’ through Civic Education — Georgetown’s Civic Education Research Lab found dramatically positive results from using More Like US’s perception gap materials to reduce partisan hostility and anxiety around civil discourse, among other positive outcomes.

• Social / Economic Complexity
  Think Tanks Have Defeated Democracy — An argument that “think tanks” undermine democracy by relying upon opinion polling and the technocratic social sciences instead of the voices of ordinary people to make decisions.

• Violence
  Learning from the WHCD Assassination Attempt — Look to alienation, not just partisanship, and beware inflated measures of support for violence.

• Non-Violence
  Nonviolent Action Against Democratic Erosion: The United States in Comparative Perspective — This report examines the effectiveness of nonviolent action movements in supporting democratic resilience globally, offering key takeaways for combating accelerating democratic erosion in the US and abroad.

• Civil Society
  Terms of Engagement – American Birthright: The Constitution, Citizenship, and Immigration — Penn University Professor Emeritus Rogers Smith joins Terms of Engagement hosts Archon Fung and Stephen Richer to discusses birthright citizenship.

• Artificial Intelligence
  AI for Democracy Movements: Toward a New Agenda — A new report summarizes key insights from the Nonviolent Action Lab’s December 2025 convening on how artificial intelligence can empower pro-democracy movements.

  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.)

• Nihilists
  Why shoplifting is bad — For a time in which shoplifting is increasingly seen as just an innocent form of political protest, a well-reasoned counterargument.

• Social / Economic Complexity
  Ben Shapiro: This Is What Happens When Institutions Fail — There is general agreement that pretty much every US institution is failing to deliver on its mandate. This article offers ideas for remedying the situation.

• Race / Anti-Racism
  Anti-racism isn’t morality. It’s a power play. — A thought-provoking critique of antiracism programs that looks at the ways in which these programs alter societal power relationships (and the distribution of resources that goes with those relationships).

• Artificial Intelligence
  Sam Altman Wants to Know Whether You’re Human — A possible solution for those worried about the fact that the Internet has become populated with fake, politically motivated mobs working to advance the interests of their secret creator.

• US Politics
  In Arizona, Democrats and Republicans are banding together for one reason — An exploration into the type of opposition that efforts to establish an independent, third-party in the United States must overcome.

• Education
  Universities have a new mantra. Democrats, take note. — An assessment of the political implications of higher education’s efforts to recover its lost public trust.

• Family / Gender / LBGTQ+
  To Save the West, Build and Uphold Families — From Restoring the West, a project devoted to helping Western Civilization live up to its ideals, a reminder of the critical importance of strong families.

• US Politics
  The Supreme Court’s not-so-sinister ‘shadow docket’ — Answers, for those who wondered what the SCOTUS’ “Shadow Docket” controversy is all about and whether it’s as serious as many people claim.

• Psychological Complexity
  The moderately easy problem of consciousness — A surprisingly confident look at one of the great mysteries of life -- the nature and origins of our existence as conscious beings.

• Left / Right Conflict
  Lawmakers want to force Californians to take anti-hate speech training — News that there are still powerful champions of “woke” efforts to combat hate.

• Class Inequity
  Inside the Democratic Civil War Over Billionaire Power — An exploration of the battle between Democrats who what to exploit billionaires as a source of revenue that doesn’t anger significant numbers of voters, and those who want to cultivate billionaires as a source of political revenue and support.

• Artificial Intelligence
  Reading is magic — A reminder that mass literacy is what enabled humanity to escape the servitude that characterized peasant life, and a warning about what will happen if we let AI do our reading for us.

• Family / Gender / LBGTQ+
  How American Dads Became the Parents Their Fathers Never Were — Amid all of the worry about deteriorating family structures, good and surprising news, young men are becoming better fathers.

• Artificial Intelligence
  AI Is Cannibalizing Human Intelligence. Here’s How to Stop It. — From a neuroscientist, who conducted research into artificial versus human intelligence -- a surprising argument that we’ve been worrying over the wrong things.

• Social / Economic Complexity
  The Tyranny of the Complainers — A short essay about a simple and very important idea -- the notion that the course of conflict is largely driven by a few very active and motivated “squeaky wheels.”

• Freedom of Speech
  Why Substack Is Right Not to Ban Andrew Tate — A story about how Substack (the platform that hosts this newsletter) is struggling with free speech issues.

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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On March 16, 2026, Guy Burgess and I (Heidi Burgess) talked to Gideon Lichfield. Gideon is a journalist and expert in tech and democracy. Currently, he is with the Harvard Ash Center for Democratic Governance, but in the past he was the Editor- in-Chief of Wired and MIT Technology Review. He also has a fascinating Substack, Futurepolis.

We started our conversation with Gideon, as we often do, by asking him to tell us his story — what he is doing now, and how he got there. He started work as a science writer at The Economist, during which time he traveled from one foreign bureau to another, first Mexico City to Moscow to Jerusalem, and then to the U.S. Then he went to MIT Technology Review and then to Wired.

I had this career that sort of started out in science and tech, went into international affairs and foreign policy, and then gradually came back to tech.

When I look back on that time that I spent as a foreign correspondent, it is important to keep in mind that I grew up in the ‘70s and ‘80s. I was 18 when the Berlin Wall came down. And so I’m very much of that generation that grew up on the notion that after the Soviet Union fell, democracy had won. Everything was going to be great from now on.

And so I’m also a generation that was disappointed when that turned out not to be the case. [As a foreign correspondent] I was asking the question, “All right. Democracy has won, but how long is it going to take to actually appear? What’s holding it back in all of these different countries?” Which, in retrospect, is maybe kind of a naive way to approach those jobs. But I think, in some way, that was my underlying animating question.

And then I got to the US. After a few years in the US, I started to realize that, like we all did, that democracy here was not in such great shape either. And so I became very interested in the question of what is wrong with democracy as a system? Why is it dysfunctional everywhere? What are its shortcomings? ... So I started asking myself the question, “If you were to design something that had the goals of being democratic today, what would that look like?” So that led me down this path of trying to investigate what it would look like to reinvent democracy.

In a part of our conversation that I didn’t quote, Gideon used the term “so-called democracy,” and I asked him why he referred to it in that way. He had two reasons. First, he said,

We should remember that the systems that we have today in which there is universal suffrage and many safeguards of liberal democracy, and checks and balances, and all these institutions were very, very gradually cobbled together over a very, very long time.

When the US was founded, the founders did not like the term “democracy.” They associated the word “democracy” with Athenian democracy, which in their view had been a terrible disaster, and lent itself to mob rule. The very idea of the “republic” that they created was meant to temper the passions of the mob and create these institutions that moved slowly and allowed deliberation and allowed the intelligent people to make their decisions. And, of course, voting in those days was extremely restricted.

So when we talk about democracy today, and how we have democracy, we tend to forget that history. We tend to forget the fact that the system that we have wasn’t designed to be a democracy in the first place. It was designed to create a reasonable, deliberative process among a certain elite of people who were judged to be capable of the kind of decision-making that was required to run a democracy. So everything that we have now was bolted onto that, in kind of a Rube Goldberg style.

The second reason I say “so called” is that ... the American Republic was created in a world before we had the railway or the telegraph. Information moved no faster than a horse. The world was not globalized in the way it is today. Technology did not move at the rapid pace it does today. And so the systems that were created for people to have a say in governance were either town hall meetings or voting. Town hall meetings were for the local level, and voting was for the national level and the state level.

Town hall meetings are a very effective way for people at the local level to debate when the community is small and when people are able to have a say. And de Tocqueville, when he visited America, observed how vibrant American society was. People were very active in local life, in their communities. They were joiners. They took part in things. That was effective when you had a small country, small communities, and an ability for people to really be involved in the civic life. And voting worked as a system when information traveled so slowly that an election was really the only feasible way for citizens as a whole to have a say in the country and in the national governance of the country. ...

But if you were doing that today, if you were trying to create a system today that gave people a say in affairs of governance, there would be many more ways of doing it. Some of them would be more technologically enabled than what we have now. We’re still using the system that is rooted in that horse and cart technology.

Using technology, we could upgrade from horse-and-cart democracy to computer-based, AI-assisted democracy. For instance, he said, you could use technology to enhance citizens’ assemblies, which right now are very time-intensive and expensive.

You could maybe have a smaller group of people that is doing the in-person deliberations, but then giving a wider group of people the opportunity to weigh in on those deliberations online and for their opinions to be counted and contribute, or maybe influence the people who are doing the in-person deliberation.

Similarly, you could use technology for a much more enhanced version of what we now have as the public comment period on a law. Right now, Congress proposes a law or somebody’s proposes a law or regulation. It’s posted. There’s a 60-day period for public comments. It’s really hard for lawmakers or policymakers to meaningfully read those comments, especially if there are a lot of them, and for those to actually have a meaningful input on the process. But with AI, with large language models, we can now scan and analyze millions of comments from people, and figure out what are the main opinion groupings in those comments.

We could create sort of AI avatars where a politician could speak to a virtual person who represents each of those opinion groupings and can talk about their reasoning and can also share individual anecdotes that people have provided. That would be a way to create interaction with public opinion that is much more detailed and granular than an opinion poll. And that gives people’s individual opinions much more of a chance to be expressed, to have much more impact. Of course, there’s the whole problem of how do you deal with fake comments? How do you deal with people polluting the system with AI-generated spam? So there are a lot of technical questions there. But that’s an example of how you could better involve people’s voices.

And there are also ways of using AI to make people better-informed citizens. Again, there’s a problem of how do you ensure that people are actually seeking out information or being delivered information that makes them better informed, as opposed to being pushed further into their echo chambers. None of these is a solved problem.

But the general gist here is that there are ways to both inform people better and solicit their opinions and their viewpoints on things in a more ongoing way in between elections that allows them to participate but doesn’t require them to spend hours in a town hall meeting arguing with people. And I think that’s the critical thing. As I said earlier, we still primarily have two extremes. You can either vote or you can spend hours in a town hall meeting. There aren’t many meaningful ways to participate democratically in between those two. And I think that technology gives us the opportunity to create some of those ways, where you can have a contribution, but it doesn’t have to take up all your time.

For a short video explaining some of these possibilities more, see Gideon’s talk Democracy 2040: A vision of the future. (Spoiler: it’s wonderful!)

We also talked about how many people aren’t receptive to the idea that we need to “save democracy,” because they don’t see it as a system that works for them.

So much of the Democratic Party’s messaging around Trump was, “He’s a threat to democracy.” And there was a kind of finger wagging about it, I think, a kind of, “You’ll miss democracy when it’s gone.” But nobody tried to explain why.

Or they tried to say, “Authoritarianism is bad.” But the reason that that didn’t work, I think, is that people understood that authoritarianism is bad, but nobody was convinced that what we have, what we call “democracy,” is significantly better.This goes back to what I was saying earlier. First of all, it’s a “so-called democracy.” People don’t feel like it really is representative of them. A lot of people have been left behind, and that’s what Trump tapped into. Manufacturing was offshore, and rural communities were abandoned, and social safety nets were weakened. And all of these factors meant that a large part of America’s population was left behind. You could say that that wasn’t because of democracy. It was because of bad policies. It was because of the neo-liberal consensus. And all of that is true.

But what it meant was that people thought, “Well, okay, the supposedly democratic process is supposed to lead to better outcomes, because it allows the most competitive or most valuable ideas to surface. But it hasn’t worked for us. It hasn’t achieved the social benefits that it should have. It hasn’t achieved widespread prosperity.”

And then people obviously got worked up about other issues like immigration that Trump tapped into very well. And so democracy, as a concept, had no value. And the people who were promoting democracy, like those funders or like the Democratic Party, just forgot and lost sight of that. They didn’t understand that. They took it for granted that people thought democracy was a good thing.

So, how do you convince people democracy is a good thing?” I don’t think it helps to say, “You’ll be sorry when democracy is gone.” And it’s not fixed by giving people a civics class and trying to explain to them why it matters. So what is it? That’s a little harder to answer.

I think what the pro-democracy forces... need to form a grand narrative, a meta-narrative, about democracy, not as a kind of a bulwark against authoritarianism, but as something positive that actually brings you benefits. And they need to make the case for how it can do that. And I think that narrative has to tie in somewhat to what kinds of values we want to have as a society, what prosperity means, what freedom means. ... They have to tell the smaller stories that give people a sense of belief in democracy, not by talking explicitly about “this is democracy and it’s good,” but by showing examples of democratic practice. They need to show examples of local communities coming together to solve difficult problems, show examples of people fighting against an unfair system, overturning power and giving the people more of a say and that coming out better for people. So stories that turn this abstract idea into felt, lived personal, concrete experiences.

Since Gideon is a journalist, we also talked about journalism. I asked him, “But how do you do journalism when a) people don’t trust the media, and b) people don’t think there are such things as facts. Gideon reworded my question.

I think the question is, “how do you create demand for journalism that is based on facts?” ... I think that there is a case to be made that when you bring local communities together around a shared problem, and that could be a zoning question, or it could be problems of water quality or homelessness or some other issue that affects the local community. If you can create the forum where people from across the community from different political backgrounds come together, recognize the problem that they have to solve together, are given tools for solving it together, then they also are going to need sources of information that everyone in that group can agree to trust. And local media can play that role.

And so the question is, how do you pull all this together? How do you create those local forms of shared deliberation, that sense of shared problems, and then shared information sources? And there are some projects around the country that are trying to do that. I’m going to visit one later this month called Civic Lakes in Lexington, Kentucky, where they have done a bunch of work where they are simultaneously holding community events. They’re holding a local civic assembly. They provide local journalism and reporting on city council. They provide explainers. They fund block parties. They fund art events. They kind of do all of these different kinds of stitching together the local community in different ways and adding a layer of local journalism. So that there is a trusted information source that everyone can share in. That’s what I mean by creating demand. You have to make people want a source of information they can all trust in order for you to be able to then produce that source and then do it in such a way that they can trust it. ...

So that problem of trust is based, in some sense, in the media catering to the audiences it was serving and those audiences having a certain political leaning. ...The business model requires them to serve the audiences that they have. And so in part, you could say it’s not their fault, because it is a function, a product of the way that urban and rural communities have shifted politically. But the media also, I think, were unaware of this. The mainstream media were very bought into this idea that they do objective journalism and that they just report the facts. And it’s part of the mythos of how American journalism works. And it lost sight of the extent to which what they chose to cover is shaped by who they’re reporting to, who they’re reporting for. So, I really struggle with this idea of journalistic objectivity. I don’t think objectivity exists. You can do journalism in a very fair and fact-based way. You can go and seek the information and track down the sources and balance the information and try and give the fairest account that you can. But what you choose to cover, what you consider important, what you privilege, what you ignore, that is very much a function of your biases or the preferences of the population that you’re serving. And so it can be very easy for that coverage to skew, not in terms of its factuality, but in terms of what it considers important. And I think that is what produces the sensation that the media has a liberal bias.

As always happens with our interviews, we are out of space here. We talked more about how to create a compelling story to drive support for democracy, the role of journalism in crafting and spreading such messages, how journalists need to relate to, work with, or even in a sense, become “influencers,” because those are the people who do actually have influence, and what the role of AI is in all of this. And more. It is a great discussion, so we hope you will read or watch it!

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This is Part 3 of our Claude/Common Ground Series. On April 9, we published we published a newsletter entitled “ Are Our Intractable Conflicts Really So Intractable? Claude (AI) Doesn’t Think So.” There we reported on Claude’s response to an inquiry about how “a truly representative group of Americans” might answer the six questions in our Common Ground Exercise, as it applied to three highly contentious topics: climate, DEI, and immigration in the United States. As we explained in that newsletter, Claude pointed out that Americans agree on many more aspects of these conflicts than is generally recognized, while acknowledging that deep differences on all three topics remain. We reported on those differences, and more interestingly, on what Claude thinks we can do to address those differences constructively, in a second newsletter.

Now we want to share a letter sent to us by

Girish Sastry, an independent AI researcher, who wrote that he pasted the same prompt that we used in our climate, DEI, and immigration queries (drawn from our Common Ground Exercise) into Claude, this time asking it about frontier AI policy. He shared Claude’s response, noting that “it seems like a good start to me.”

When we wrote him back, asking if we could share his letter, he added that he “only skimmed it [Claude’s response] and there are a few things that were a bit “shallow” and it definitely stereotyped the various stakeholders.” But, still, he gave us permission to share it.

It seems to us that it would be impossible to do this exercise without stereotyping to some degree this topic (like the others we investigated) is so complex that the answers to these questions are necessarily highly nuanced; nuance that can be lost in general descriptions such as this. However, particularly for those of us who are not experts in AI, but who are worried or confused about it, this seems to us to be a useful overview of the leading disputes and possible ways to address them. And we thought it was a useful illustration of how our common ground exercise and Claude’s version of it is adaptable to many different topics. So, we think Claude’s answers on frontier AI policy are worth sharing. We also think that Claude’s answers offer a better place to start than the apocalyptic (or occasionally utopian) rhetoric that generally characterizes AI articles. If we want to solve problems, rather than just complain about them, this worth looking at.

Common Ground Exercise: Frontier AI Policy

1. Where is there broad agreement?

Despite loud disagreements, there’s more consensus across the spectrum than the discourse suggests:

• AI is consequential. Almost no one across the spectrum thinks frontier AI is hype that will fizzle. Skeptics, boosters, doomers, and accelerationists all agree the technology matters and that decisions made now will shape the next few decades.

• Some uses should be off-limits. Child sexual abuse material, bioweapon synthesis assistance, and non-consensual intimate imagery generation are nearly universally condemned. Disagreement is about how to prevent these, not whether to.

• Transparency about AI-generated content has broad support. Labeling synthetic media, disclosing when people are talking to bots in certain contexts, and watermarking are popular across coalitions, even if implementation details divide people.

• Children deserve special protection. Across the spectrum, people support stronger guardrails around minors’ interactions with AI systems, whether the concern is mental health, sexual content, manipulation, or developmental harm.

• The U.S. should not simply cede the frontier to China. Even most people who want strong regulation agree they don’t want a world where the most capable systems are built exclusively under the Chinese Communist Party. Disagreement is about what “competing” requires.

• Concentrated power is a risk worth taking seriously. Left, right, and libertarian critics all worry, in different vocabularies, about a small number of actors — whether labs, governments, or both fused together — wielding disproportionate control over a transformative technology.

• Workers will be affected and deserve some response. Whether the answer is retraining, redistribution, slowing deployment, or something else, almost no one openly argues that displaced workers should simply be left to fend for themselves.
  

2. Where is there clear disagreement?

• How dangerous are frontier models, really? Estimates of catastrophic and existential risk range from “negligible, this is sci-fi” to “the most likely cause of human extinction this century.”

• Who should regulate, and how much? Positions range from “no new regulation, existing law suffices” to “international treaty with hard compute caps and licensing of training runs.”

• Open weights: liberation or proliferation? Some see open-weight models as essential for competition, research, and resisting corporate/government capture. Others see them as handing dangerous capabilities to anyone, irreversibly. [Open-weight models are AI systems (particularly large language models—LLMs) that share their trained paramaters (called “weights”) publically.]

• Is the China race real or manufactured? Some treat U.S.–China competition as the central fact organizing all AI policy. Others see it as a narrative leveraged by labs to escape oversight.

• Should AI labs be trusted as partners or treated as adversaries? Some view leading labs as the most safety-conscious actors and natural collaborators with government. Others view them as conflicted parties whose safety claims should be treated like tobacco companies’ health claims.

• What about jobs and economic disruption? Disagreements run from “AI will create more jobs than it destroys, as past tech did” to “this time really is different and we need UBI [universal basic income] or worse.” [Not sure what “worse” means.]

• Bias, fairness, and content moderation. What counts as a biased model, whose values it should reflect, and whether refusals are safety or censorship — all fiercely contested.

• AI consciousness and moral status. A small but growing fringe on multiple sides takes seriously that advanced models might warrant moral consideration; most dismiss this.

3 & 4. Factual disagreements and joint fact-finding

Several disagreements are at least partly empirical and could, in principle, be narrowed by shared investigation:

• Capability trajectories. How fast are models actually improving on tasks that matter? Shared benchmarks, pre-registered forecasts, and independent evaluations (rather than lab self-reports) could narrow this. The catch: evaluations themselves are contested, and some dangerous capabilities are hard to measure without risking harm.

• Marginal uplift from models for bioweapons, cyberattacks, etc. This is genuinely studiable through controlled red-teaming with appropriate safeguards. Some such studies exist; more independent ones with agreed-upon methodology would help.

• Labor market effects. Economists can and do study this. Joint fact-finding here is feasible, though lagging indicators mean we’ll often be debating projections, rather than data.

• Open-weight risks vs. benefits. Both sides make empirical claims (e.g., “anything in an open model is already in a search engine” vs. “fine-tuning unlocks meaningful new capabilities”) that are testable.

• Compute and energy demands. The physical footprint of frontier AI is measurable. Disagreements here are mostly about projection and significance, not current facts.

• Election and information-environment effects. Whether AI-generated content meaningfully shifted recent elections is studiable, and early evidence has surprised some on both sides (effects so far appear smaller than feared, though this could change).

A serious joint fact-finding effort would probably need: independent evaluators with model access, pre-registered methodology, participation from researchers trusted by different camps, and a willingness on all sides to update. The track record here is mixed but not hopeless.

5. Value disagreements within the range of legitimate disagreement

• Many disputes aren’t really about facts — they’re about values that reasonable people weigh differently:

• Risk tolerance for transformative technology. How much potential downside is acceptable in exchange for potential upside? Reasonable people who agree on the facts can disagree here based on temperament, philosophy, and what they think is at stake.

• Precaution vs. permissionless innovation. Whether the burden of proof should fall on those deploying powerful new systems or those wanting to restrict them is a longstanding values question, not unique to AI.

• Centralization vs. decentralization. Whether it’s better to have a few well-resourced, accountable actors or a diffuse, hard-to-control ecosystem reflects deep priors about power, trust, and resilience.

• National vs. cosmopolitan framing. Whether “winning” against China is the right frame, or whether AI governance should be global from the start, reflects values about nationalism, international cooperation, and moral circles.

• Whose values should models reflect? Reasonable people disagree about whether models should aim for neutrality, reflect majority views, reflect the values of their developers, or be customizable. None of these is obviously correct.

• Acceptable concentrations of economic power. How much market dominance by AI companies is tolerable is a values question that long predates AI.

• How much weight to give speculative future harms vs. concrete present ones? Both matter; how to trade them off is contested and not purely factual.

These disagreements can coexist in a pluralistic society. People can and should argue them out without treating opponents as enemies.

6. Disagreements some consider morally intolerable

Here the exercise gets harder. Different participants will name different things as beyond the pale:

• From safety-focused participants: Knowingly building or deploying systems that pose meaningful extinction or mass-casualty risk; treating such risks as an acceptable cost of competition or profit.

• From civil liberties participants: Building systems designed for mass surveillance, social scoring, or political repression; participating in such systems for any government.

• From accelerationist participants: Restrictions that would, in their view, lock in incumbent power, prevent life-saving applications, or cede the future to authoritarian regimes — these are sometimes framed as morally intolerable too.

• From labor and equity-focused participants: Deploying systems that knowingly displace workers without any social response, or that systematically disadvantage already-marginalized groups.

• From democracy-focused participants: Deploying systems that meaningfully degrade the information environment around elections or enable targeted manipulation at scale.

• From religious and humanist participants: Building systems that claim or simulate personhood in ways that degrade human dignity, or that are used to replace human relationships in domains (care, education, intimacy) where that feels like a category error.

How to constructively oppose things one finds intolerable, without collapsing the conversation:

• Be specific about what is intolerable and why. “All AI development” is too broad to engage; “training runs above a certain capability threshold without third-party safety evaluation” is something one can argue about.

• Distinguish opposition to actions from opposition to people. Engineers at frontier labs include people deeply worried about the risks; treating them as the enemy forecloses coalitions that might actually shift behavior.

• Use the tools democracy provides. Legislation, litigation, shareholder action, journalism, whistleblower protection, professional norms, public pressure — these are legitimate even when the disagreement is fierce.

• Be honest about uncertainty. Almost everyone in this debate is operating with significant uncertainty about how the technology will develop. Acting with appropriate humility — including about one’s own moral certainty — keeps the conversation open to course correction.

• Preserve the ability to talk to people you think are wrong. This is the hardest one. The history of technology policy suggests that the people who ultimately shape outcomes are often those who maintained relationships across the divide.

A note on what this exercise reveals: frontier AI policy doesn’t divide cleanly along existing political lines. You find safety-focused people on the left and right; accelerationists on the left and right; civil-libertarian skeptics across the spectrum. That’s actually a hopeful feature — coalitions are still forming, positions are still movable, and the conversation hasn’t yet calcified into pure tribal signaling. The window for genuine common-ground work on this topic may be unusually open right now, even if it won’t stay that way forever.

Guy and Heidi’s Closing Note

While we think that there are many in the conflict field that could have produced a better list of suggestions for addressing this topic more constructively, Claude’s list is a pretty good start. We also like the fact that Claude (and other AI systems) make this kind of thinking much more accessible than it was in the past — all you need is an initial query (like our common ground exercise) that gets AI systems to start asking more constructive questions. Without such assistance, it would be prohibitively time-consuming for most people to get to this point.

We do particularly agree with Claude’s closing note. If, indeed, the issues don’t divide cleanly along existing left-right lines (which rings true to us), then that makes constructive engagement and even cooperation more likely than it would be if the conflict were divided along traditional party lines. At the same time, Claude listed a lot of factors that are “beyond the pale,” as it put it, for substantial numbers of people. So navigating these issues constructively, even with all the skills of our field utilized, is going to be very challenging. A first step, however, is understanding what the issues are, and this summary seems to help with that considerably.

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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.

• Social / Economic Complexity
  A Pillar of the Economics Establishment Admits That It Was Wrong — It’s news anytime a major institution decides and is willing to state publicly that its past policies were a mistake.

• Social / Economic Complexity
  The Peoples of America — An enlightening look at the long shadow cast by the differing environmental conditions in which societies and cultures evolve.

• Interstate War
  We’re Sleepwalking Into a Taiwan Disaster — Taiwan is one of the very few suppliers of high-end computer chips. This makes it a very tempting target for Chinese aggression and a place that the United States simply must defend.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  One of These Trump Threats Is Not Like the Others — Even when we try to look at Trump’s actions in Iran in the most sympathetic light possible, we find his threats to utterly destroy Iranian civilization incomprehensibly horrendous -- threats that deserve universal condemnation.

• Social / Economic Complexity
  History Is Running Backwards — An important challenge to those who believe that the arc of history will inevitably bend toward peace, justice, and the beliefs embedded in the democratic ideal.

• Interstate War
  Nuclear Powers, Conventional Wars — We used to think that nuclear weapons and the system of mutually assured destruction was enough to prevent war between major powers. This article explains why that view is proving incorrect.

• Disinformation
  Move 37 and the Coming Mindhack — An article about an especially big AI mega-worry -- the manipulative potential of AI-driven propaganda.

Reader Suggested Links

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

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  For Kushner and Witkoff, C.E.O. Diplomacy Is No Longer Working — An update on the successes and failures of Trump’s approach to diplomacy.

• Non-Violence
  Students’ Right to Protest Comes From the Civilization They Reject — The suggestion that those opposed to Western Civilization ought to take the time to understand its many contributions before engaging in efforts to destroy it

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  Debunking Seven Myths About the Iran War — For those who want to hear the other side of the story, a critique of what has, by many on the left and the right, become conventional wisdom regarding ongoing Mideast violence.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  Why the Iran negotiations went nowhere. For now. — A more culturally and politically nuanced look into the negotiations aimed at ending the war in Iran.

• Trust / Trust Earning
  Intellectuals are F*cking Idiots — An explanation of why so much of the world has lost faith in experts and expertise. Experts need to start re-earning that trust.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  Pope Leo Ignores Christian and Jewish Genocide in Algeria — A critical article highlighting the moral inconsistencies (and often hypocrisy) associated with the Pope’s comments on Iran and other issues.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  A KGB operative warned us about the Israel narrative. — A story about the way in which information warfare has been waged against Israel (with major implications for those trying to protect their societies from similar attacks).

  

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
  How to Argue in Outer Space — A perceptive article highlighting the critical role that conflict handling skills play in manned space exploration.

• Civil Society
  How the Just Citizens Experiment Will Begin—and How You Can Help Build It — This series marks the beginning of a live experiment. Not a commentary on politics or a newsletter of information, but an attempt to build something new: a citizen-led system for practicing self-government in a modern age.

• Non-Violence
  Gen Z Protests Around the World: Success or Epic Fail? — A quick review, with links to more information, of many of the world’s most significant, recent protests.

• US Politics
  The Far-Right Plot to Hijack the Constitution — and How to Stop It — A small, well-funded network is using the real $39 trillion debt as cover to rewrite our founding document. Here’s how the cross-partisan pro-democracy coalition must respond.

• Peacebuilding
  Mediators Beyond Borders International 2025 Impact Report — This report outlines MBBI’s efforts to address how peace intersects with economic, environmental, health, education, and social justice issues.

• Developing a Unifying Vision
  The Silence of the Cosmos and the Noise of the Moment — David Beckemeyer talks with Caleb Scharf about the profound cognitive shift astronauts experience when they look back at our planet from space and see a single, fragile system without borders. Can this be shared with those at home on our planet?

• Developing a Unifying Vision
  America Has More Common Ground Than You Think. It’s Blossoming! — Join the Nationwide Deliberation Campaign to define the People’s Agenda for Renewing American Democracy.

• US Politics
  Trump won with these voters. Now their support is shifting. — More In Common uses the Beyond MAGA dataset to explore how the President’s coalition is responding to the Iran war.

• Artificial Intelligence
  Putting AI in the Peacebuilding Loop — Whether AI tools advance peacebuilding depends less on the sophistication of the data or its handling than on the mindful choices practitioners make about its use.

• Artificial Intelligence
  Intersection of tech governance, peace & security — How can peacebuilders play a more active role in shaping the regulation of technology platforms so that they build trust and collaboration, rather than deepen polarization and conflict?

• Superpower Conflict
  The Role of Middle Powers in the Global Disorder — If governments do not want to submit to the dictates of the major powers, they will have to develop new forms of cooperation. (This is a process in which the “middle powers” will need to play an important role.)

• Peacebuilding
  Global Funding Cuts: What have they meant for local peacebuilders? — This Peace Direct article highlights the impact of the 2025 foreign assistance cuts on local peacebuilders and the communities whose lives and security they support.

• Violence
  Developing New Mechanisms for Disarmament: Concept for a “COP for Weapons”? — A TODA policy brief outlining proposals to revitalize UN and ad hoc disarmament and arms-control mechanisms in order to build mutual reassurance among states.

• Developing a Unifying Vision
  What Americans Really Want is an Opportunity to Make a Difference — The Beacon Project’s first report offers a major advance in our understanding of what can unite Americans.

• Developing a Unifying Vision
  The Work of Renewing Our Civil Contract (Part 2) — Terry Kyllo, from Paths to Understanding, reflects on the role of trust in civic renewal and how trust-building takes time and effort. It can’t be done quickly.

• Effective Problem-Solving
  Reframing in Mediation: What We Are Really Doing, and Why We Name It — This article argues that mediators can and should be more transparent about how and why they use reframing to help parties reach agreement.

  More Colleague Activity Listings

News and Opinion

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

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  How Trump Can Wrap Up the War — An explanation of the strategy that Trump seems to be following in Iran (and why it’s quite possible that it will succeed).

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  Trump Ditched Hearts and Minds in the Iran War — Reflections on the sharp strategic differences between Trump’s war on Iran and earlier efforts to use counterinsurgency tactics in an attempt to transform Iraq and Afghanistan into successful democracies.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  How geography powers Iran’s grip on the Strait of Hormuz, despite U.S. blockade — For those trying to understand the battlefield conditions that are shaping peace negotiations with Iran, a primer on what you need to know about the Strait of Hormuz.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  “Never Again” is starting to sound like a question. — A terrifying question for Jews and anyone also wishing to free the world from the scourge of demonization, dehumanization, and genocide.

• Authoritarianism
  The Post-Populist Dilemma — In the wake of Orbán’s defeat, a thought-provoking article on the future populism (and efforts to transform it into a more constructive political movement).

• Authoritarianism
  Illiberalism Is Not Inevitable — A hopeful essay for those who thought that liberal democracy was dead and the various flavors of illiberal authoritarianism were the future.

• Authoritarianism
  The Four Lessons Liberals Should Consider After Orban’s Defeat — Useful food for thought as we try to understand the far-reaching implications of the recent Hungarian elections.

• US Politics
  Why Aren’t the Kids Out Protesting Against Trump? — An in-depth look at a surprising phenomenon -- the fact that participation in anti-Trump demonstrations by protest-age young people is sharply declining.

• Social / Economic Complexity
  Evolution Explains the Human Condition — Evolution is one of the principal dynamics that determine the course of complex, large-scale, social systems. This article has much to teach us about this process.

• Social / Economic Complexity
  Six-Chart Sunday – Six Important Stories You May Have Missed — Another series of surprising and informative charts. Notice, especially, the map of mysterious drone activity in the US, the comparison of recent US droughts, the booming stock market, and the national security role of CEOs.

• Psychological Complexity
  You are what you consume — An interesting counterpoint to widely held beliefs about the centrality of work in social life. This article suggests that consumption patterns are a big and underappreciated factor.

• Class Inequity
  This tax would rain a wealth of unintended consequences — For those looking for ways to tax the wealth of the superrich, a cautionary article highlighting ways in which such efforts could become counterproductive.

• Peacebuilding
  The UN’s Historically Selective Denunciation of Human Bondage — A critical look at the way in which the UN focuses on some of history’s greatest violations of human rights while neglecting other similarly grotesque violations.

• Education
  The Weekly: Yale Takes A Long, Hard Look In The Mirror — Encouraging news that Yale (and hopefully other institutions) are trying to understand and correct the missteps responsible for the collapse of public trust in higher education.

• Artificial Intelligence
  Cyberwar’s New Frontier — From Foreign Affairs, a sober assessment of the far-reaching implications of revelations about just how vulnerable our computer systems are to AI-fueled cyberattack.

• Social / Economic Complexity
  Why the Stock Market Makes No Sense Right Now — An attempt to explain why the stock market seems to have concluded that none of the scary things happening on the global stage will affect their investment’s bottom line.

• Family / Gender / LBGTQ+
  The Medicalization of Adolescence — This is another one of those articles that offers an alternative view worth considering -- a view that challenges prevailing progressive orthodoxies.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  Israel vs. the Religion of De-Escalation — A provocative challenge to one of the central tenets of the peacemaking field -- the notion that de-escalation efforts always advance the cause of long-term peace and justice.

• Progressive Left
  Seattle has a severe case of the Ayatollah Itch — For those who have trouble understanding why many people think that DEI programs have gone too far, a story about Seattle.

• Authoritarianism
  The Rise of the Incel Global Order — An interesting essay highlighting the outsized role that sex and gender-related conflicts are playing in shaping the contemporary world order (and disorder).

More News and Opinion Links

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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On March 30, I (Heidi Burgess) talked with Caleb Christen and Jacob Bornstein about Better Together America. They, along with Vinay Orekondy are the three co-founders of BTA. Jacob is now the Executive Director, and Caleb is the Director of Hub Learning and Support. This was the second time I talked with each of them. I talked with Caleb (and Vinay) about 18 months ago when BTA was just getting started, and I talked to Jacob 11 months ago, but not so much about BTA as his collaborative problem-solving work, especially regarding water in Colorado. Caleb had recently sent out BTA's 2025 impact report, and I was really impressed with the progress that BTA has made since I last talked to Caleb, and since Guy and I attended their first "Civic Hub Accelerator Workshop" which took place in May of 2025.

Go to Full Interview

I started by asking Caleb and Jacob to give an overview of how BTA has grown since we last talked in September, 2024. Caleb noted that they had about nine civic hub builders at that time — “to call it a learning program,” he said, “would have been a huge stretch.” They then knew of several people who were doing “hub-like things” and they wanted to bring them together so they could learn from each other. By May 2025, they had closer to 50 people who were interested in the civic hub idea, and they got them all together in Denver for their first “Civic Hub Accelerator Workshop.“ Now, as Caleb explained, they have grown further.

In terms of communities, we now have roughly 40 in the network. In the first 9 to 12 months, it grew to around 29 communities, and now it’s continuing to grow toward 40. If you include the actual number of civic hub builders, the number is significantly higher. By my count, approximately 60 people have come through the training pipeline, either currently or in the past.

We’ve now really formalized the learning cohorts into an ongoing series of learning opportunities. That includes initial accelerator cohorts that meet for six months, and we’ve had quite a few people and communities come through those at this point. We’ve also started a rapid-onboarding version, a quarterly learning community call, and some more advanced focused cohorts. So we’ve really been able to grow the learning side of Better Together America into a fairly robust set of opportunities for civic hub builders across the country.

I asked them to explain what they meant by the terms “learning cohort” and “civic hub,” for those who aren’t familiar with those terms or BTA’s work. Jacob explained the learning cohort idea first:

A learning cohort, or community of practice, is a group of people working on something similar. In this case, civic hubs are working on community-building, collaborative problem-solving, and combined action. Those are the three main things in our framework.

A learning cohort is a way for people doing that work to come together and learn from one another, ideally with enough structure to help accelerate their progress. We see ourselves as supporting something that is of, by, and for civic hubs. The question is: how do we help each other spread innovations and best practices, and accelerate the development of “civic hubness” in each of these communities or states?

Caleb added onto that by saying that

civic hubs are nonpartisan local networks and infrastructure meant to enable ongoing collaboration and ultimately support the community in doing those things Jacob pointed to [community-building, collaborative problem-solving, and combined action].

That matters on multiple levels, including that it creates a sense of co-ownership within the community—not just of the civic hub itself, but of the actions taken. The community has primary agency over what happens.

So, in some ways it may be a new paradigm, but it’s built on a lot of good things that were already happening in communities across the country. And the learning cohorts Jacob described are the opportunity for people to share the different things they’re trying locally.

So BTA is not coming in and building civic hubs from scratch. They are playing a supporting and networking role, helping people who are interested in starting or improving or enlarging their civic-hub-type organization and activities to do so, with the support of others.

When I asked if and how they were interfacing with other organizations that were doing similar things, they explained that they were working closely with several. Braver Angels, for instance, has a new initiative called Citizen-Led Solutions, and under that rubric a number of the BA alliances have become civic hubs and have joined the BTA network. And BTA has sent people to Richard Harwood’s trainings for his New Civic Path, and they are starting to work together too. But alliances or other community organizations don’t have to change their name to say’ Better Together America Civic Hub” to be part of the BTA network. “We’re not very prescriptive about that,” Caleb said. But, he continued:

There are, however, a few basic tenets they ultimately need to adopt and move toward. One is being nonpartisan, which is a pretty low-hanging fruit. Another is being co-owned, so it’s not ultimately controlled by a single organization or person. Of course, somebody has to initiate it, so it often starts that way. And they need to be dedicated to pursuing the community-building and community-led solutions as Jacob has been describing.

When I asked them about their “north star” — what they ultimately wanted to accomplish, they talked about scaling up this movement so it can reach everyone in the United States.

From BTA’s perspective, local plus local plus local equals national impact. If we want everyone in the country to have the opportunity to thrive, we need a network in which communities don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time. They can learn from one another, and we can eventually overlay measurement so we can see what works in different places. So, what we’re trying to do is build the supportive network, along with the tools, resources, and measurement, to accelerate this work on the ground so that everyone can thrive.

Civic hubs, they explained, can vary greatly in size, ranging from some that are at the neighborhood level, to small rural towns, major metropolitan areas, county and multi-county regions, and all the way up to several states. One of the more advanced hubs is in a small town of about 3,000 people named Sisters in Oregon.

They had already formed a very community-building-oriented effort [before BTA connected with them], and that’s really the strength of what they do. If you look at Citizens for Community –their website--and the visioning exercise they went through, it’s an incredible amount of community-building activity for a town that small.

Recently, they had wildfires sweeping through the town, and because they already had those relationships and connections in place, they were able to rally nonprofits, community leaders, and residents to provide mutual aid to people who were affected. It’s a really strong example of how community-building and civic hubs can propel and support follow-on community action.

And they were able to learn from a much larger civic hub outside of Los Angeles which had earlier dealt with a devastating wildfire.

So Kellen in Sisters was able to call Scott in Topanga and ask, “How did that work? What worked? What didn’t? What can I learn?”

So there was an immediate exchange of information from Scott to Kellen, which let them put those lessons to work locally. Their response was more effective because they didn’t have to learn everything from scratch. That’s one of our favorite examples of how innovations can spread through a resilient network.

At the other end of the spectrum, Jacob described North Carolina’s statewide hub. This hub was started by Leslie Garvin, who runs an organization called North Carolina Campus Engagement.

She still has her regular role, but she’s able to incorporate statewide hub-building into her job description, which is exciting. They started with an assessment at the statewide level, essentially asking, “What is our civic health?” The answer was, “Oh my gosh—it’s near the bottom everywhere.” So they created three strategy groups: one around community-building and engagement, one around collaborative problem-solving capacity, and one around how to move toward action.

When we met Leslie, all of that was already happening, even though they didn’t yet have the language of “civic hubs.” Then she said, “Oh my gosh, this maps perfectly onto what we’re trying to do.”

They recently held what I believe was their second statewide summit, and they’re really advancing the conversation about how to improve civic health across the state. They’ve involved a lot of partners, and Leslie has now also begun supporting, I think, three local civic hubs in North Carolina.

So for us, statewide groups tend to have two primary missions. One is to host a statewide collaborative table for advancing civic health and thinking through the state’s needs. The other is to help support or initiate local civic hubs throughout the state.

They also talked about civic hubs in large metropolitan areas: Los Angeles, Oakland, and the Washington DC area. But then Caleb talked about Montrose, Colorado.

It represents a different demographic—something like 25,000 people—and because many of the other examples are especially strong in community-building. Montrose is a good example of how there are different on-ramps into forming a civic hub.

In their case, they had support from a national network, and they started with a series of citizen assemblies that identified important issues in their community—issues that people were energized to work on together. After the national organization’s support had run its course, some local community members came together and said, “We want to keep this going and keep finding solutions.”

Since then, they’ve followed up on and successfully implemented solutions around things like insufficient homeless shelter capacity. They’ve also addressed some education-related and childcare needs. What’s especially interesting, though, is that things like citizen assemblies can be expensive and time-consuming. So they’ve been very innovative in asking: how can we design deliberative processes that are shorter, less expensive, and something we can train local facilitators to run? They’ve been doing some cutting-edge work in figuring out how to help a community find solutions more affordably and sustainably.

Jacob further explained:

The childcare project was the initial one, and Unify America paid for that. So that was more like a full-scale civic assembly or citizens’ assembly, which cost a lot of money.

But the later efforts—on parking on Main Street and on the winter homeless shelter situation—have been much lower-cost. The same is true of the LA civic assembly work. They’re finding donated spaces, working to get affordable food, lowering the rates they pay participants, and still finding that people show up. They’re also still getting a diverse cross-section of the community.

Those kinds of innovations are really important not just for civic hubs, but for the field as a whole. What does it take? Can volunteers serve as facilitators? How much training do they need? Or do we need paid facilitators? These are the kinds of questions civic hubs are grappling with.

We’re there to support that work, but we’re not taking credit for what’s happening in North Carolina, Montrose, or LA. Some version of this work would be happening anyway, but fewer people would know about it, and fewer would be connected through a network, without Better Together America.

So we want to be clear: we’re not taking credit for the work of the civic hubs. They’re doing amazing work. We’re providing a supportive environment where they can share what they’re doing, accelerate it, and get some coaching. But they really own what’s happening on the ground, and we’re cheering them on and saying, “Did you hear what they did in Montrose? Did you hear what they did in LA or North Carolina?” We’re helping make those connections so people can learn from one another.

I asked where they see this all going, and they said they were hoping to continue to grow, especially with the process that they call “rapid onboarding” for people who are already doing this kind of work. They are planning to do a state-level cohort for all the states that are already in the network.

That also allows us to bring in new states like Minnesota, which has been doing great work for years, fairly quickly, and help define the state-level model while letting those states learn from one another about what’s possible. That’s exciting because it lets us deepen the work while also bringing new people into the network. At the same time, we’re continuing the accelerator workshops and recruiting more groups into those, expanding our partnerships as we go.

We are also really working on building relationships with national networks that can support hubs or become part of hubs. That includes facilitator networks, performing artist networks, veterans networks, business networks, faith networks—existing groups on the ground that may not think of themselves as civic hubs, but might absolutely see themselves as part of a civic hub. That expands the reach and impact of the work in those communities.

And they provide one-on-one coaching to all BTA members who need advice.

The other big piece is shared measurement. We have a strong shared-measurement framework, but we’re still figuring out how to help people participate in it effectively. Some hubs are amazing at it, but it’s hard work, and the technology we have right now is still clunky. So we’re working on that too. ... We’re also trying to incorporate measurement into the learning cohorts so that more hubs participate, and making sure we’re linking to other measurement efforts happening in the field.

Caleb added:

Since a lot of the hubs are still in the early stages, we’re also thinking hard about how to meet them where they are. We talk about measuring impact, but at the beginning, that may just mean measuring whether they’re taking the right steps and moving in the right direction.

We want measurement to be easy enough that it doesn’t distract them from actually building the hub and taking action. So we’re also exploring credentialing or badging systems—not just to make it more fun or create incentives, but to help them identify the things they ideally should be measuring and how we can support them in doing that.

So yes, that’s definitely still a work in progress. But we think hub formation itself is pretty predictive of eventually getting to outcomes. So there are measures around that too: number of partners, whether the hub coordination team has formed, whether it’s meeting, whether it’s choosing topics, and so on.

One of the things that I find so compelling about BTA’s model — and we talked about that was that participation in a civic hub can get people out of the depression so many of us are suffering from. Far too many Americans (on all political sides) don’t like what they see happening in America, yet they feel powerless to change it. And we’ve all read that loneliness is at epidemic levels in America. BTA hubs can address both problems — and more. They give people a sense of agency, a sense that they CAN make their own lives and their community better, and they can gain friendships in the process. “What’s not to like?” as one of my friends often says.

Jacob agreed:

Some of what I’m about to say comes from my BTA Executive Director hat, some from my Mediators Foundation President hat, and some from my consulting hat, because I’ve been working for decades at the local and state levels in liberal places, conservative places, and mixed places.

What I’ve seen is that people are shocked when they discover they can actually reach consensus—not just across left and right, but across many kinds of differences. Oil and gas advocates and bike advocates. Housing developers and homeless shelter operators. These are very different perspectives.

And when people reach consensus, and then that consensus is translated into policy or collective-impact work on the ground, and you begin to see movement on real outcomes, that’s incredibly powerful.

At the national level, it’s very hard to know how I as an individual—or my neighborhood, or my community, or even my state—is supposed to affect national politics. But one way it can happen is by demonstrating the power of collaborative action. When people from different perspectives work together and examine a problem from all sides, the solutions are usually more durable, stronger, and have more political will behind them than they would if the “smartest people in the room” just designed the ideal answer by themselves.

So for me, this isn’t really about “bridge-building” as an end in itself. Bridging is a skill. You can use it for community-building, collaborative problem-solving, and helping people implement solutions across many partners. If you think of bridging only as shared understanding, then no, that’s not enough. But when you combine it with these other pieces that help a community actually thrive, then it becomes very powerful.

All of this is expanded upon, with other examples, in the full discussion, which you can watch, listen to, or read here.

Read/Watch Full Interview

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About the MBI Newsletters

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

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Last week we published Newsletter 444 entitled “ Are Our Intractable Conflicts Really So Intractable? Claude (AI) Doesn’t Think So.” There we reported on Claude’s response to an inquiry about how “a truly representative group of Americans” might answer the six questions in our Common Ground Exercise, as it applies to three highly contentious topics: climate, DEI, and immigration in the United States.

As we explained in that newsletter, Claude showed that Americans agree on many more aspects of these conflicts than is generally recognized, while acknowledging that deep differences on all three topics remain. It then went through the other questions in the Common Ground Exercise to explore how much of the disagreements were facts-based, how much were values-based, and how to deal most effectively with both kinds of disagreements. Here, it found that even our disagreements might be more manageable than is commonly believed. Many factual disputes are, at least theoretically, resolvable through joint fact-finding. And, many moral disputes can be tolerated in a spirit of coexistence (especially if people periodically get the opportunity to try to persuade society to adjust policies in ways that favor their point of view). We can even find better ways of addressing intolerable differences by focusing on constructive moral arguments and limiting destructive interactions that draw attention away from those arguments.

In that first post, we only had room to cover the areas of agreement that Claude identified for all three topics. Here we look at the remaining areas of disagreement, and what Claude suggests we might be able to do about them. Given length limitations, we are only including Claude’s suggestions about immigration here. You can read its suggestions about climate and DEI in the full Claude report.

Claude’s Answers to Questions 2-6 on Immigration: What Are the Disagreements, and How Can They Best Be Addressed?

Note: Question 1 asked “on what issues, sub-issues, and facts is there broad agreement?” Claude’s answer to that was shared in Newsletter 444.

Question 2: On what issues, sub-issues, and facts is there clear and strong disagreement?

Immigration disagreements are both factual and deep, touching fundamental questions about national identity, sovereignty, economic justice, and humanitarian obligation.

The sharpest disagreements:

• What the right level of legal immigration should be. The far right favors sharp reductions; much of the right favors some reductions and a shift in composition; the center generally favors maintaining or modestly adjusting current levels; the left and far left often favor expansion. These reflect fundamentally different views of what immigration policy should accomplish.

• How to prioritize among immigration categories: family reunification, skills- and employment-based immigration, diversity visas, and humanitarian admissions. Each reflects different values — family loyalty, economic self-interest, pluralism, and humanitarian obligation.

• What to do with the estimated ten to twelve million undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States. Options range from mass deportation to a path to citizenship, with various intermediate positions. This is probably the most consequential specific policy disagreement in the immigration debate.

• Whether sanctuary city and county policies are appropriate or represent dangerous defiance of federal law. This disagreement reflects both different views on federalism and different empirical assessments of whether cooperation between local police and immigration enforcement makes communities safer or less safe.

• The role of physical barriers at the southern border. Whether border walls and barriers are effective, worth their cost, and the right symbolic statement about American values is deeply contested.

• How to reform the asylum system. Nearly everyone agrees the current system is badly broken. But the proposed reforms differ sharply: some emphasize adding resources and legal pathways; others emphasize raising the evidentiary bar for claims and accelerating removal.

• The actual economic impacts of immigration. Does immigration at current levels raise or lower wages for low-skill native-born workers? What are the net fiscal impacts of undocumented immigration? These are empirical questions with contested answers in the economics literature.

• Whether current levels of immigration are changing American culture in ways that warrant policy response. This is the most culturally sensitive disagreement: whether concerns about the pace of cultural change and the preservation of national identity are legitimate policy considerations or thinly veiled ethnic prejudice.

• What obligations the US has to address the root causes of migration — poverty, violence, climate disruption, and failed governance in sending countries. The left tends to see this as essential to a humane immigration policy; the right generally prefers to focus on border enforcement and legal pathway management.

Question 3: Which disagreements are about facts, and which are about values?

Immigration debates combine empirical disputes — about economic impacts, crime rates, and integration outcomes — with deeply held value conflicts about national identity, sovereignty, and humanitarian obligation. Both dimensions are real, and conflating them makes the conversation worse.

Disagreements with significant factual content:

• The net fiscal impact of different categories of immigration. The fiscal calculus differs significantly depending on whether immigrants are high-skilled or low-skilled, legal or undocumented, and how long the time horizon used. This is resolvable through better and more transparent economic modeling.

• The effect of low-skill immigration on wages of native-born low-skill workers. This is genuinely contested in labor economics. Some studies find modest wage suppression in affected occupations; others find minimal effects or even complementarities. The answer matters a great deal for evaluating the fairness of current immigration levels to low-income Americans.

• Crime rates among immigrant populations. The preponderance of evidence shows that immigrants — both documented and undocumented — commit crimes at lower rates than native-born citizens. But specific high-profile cases generate intense political attention, and the question of whether specific enforcement gaps have allowed specific crimes is partly answerable with data.

• The administrative capacity of immigration courts and border processing facilities. How much capacity is required to manage the current volume of asylum claims fairly and promptly is an operational question with empirical answers.

• Whether specific border security measures actually reduce illegal crossings. What effect did various enforcement measures in various periods have on crossing rates? This is an empirical question that can be studied.

Disagreements that are fundamentally about values:

• What obligations the United States owes to non-citizens seeking entry. Some believe national citizenship creates near-exclusive moral priority; others believe shared humanity creates significant obligations regardless of national boundaries. Data cannot settle this.

• Whether national sovereignty gives the government essentially unlimited discretion in who it admits. Some hold that a nation’s right to control its borders is nearly absolute. Others hold that this right is constrained by humanitarian obligations under international law and basic moral requirements.

• How much weight to give to cultural continuity and national cohesion as immigration policy considerations. Is it legitimate to consider the pace of cultural change in setting immigration levels? Reasonable people deeply disagree about this as a matter of values.

• Whether people who violated immigration law by entering illegally should be treated differently from those who followed legal processes. This involves genuine questions about the moral significance of legal status when people have built lives and raised children in the US.

• What balance to strike between the interests of potential immigrants and the interests of current low-wage American workers. When these interests conflict, whose interests should take priority is a question of distributive justice, not economics.

Question 4: For factual disagreements — what joint fact-finding process might help?

Several of the most consequential immigration disagreements have significant factual dimensions that better shared inquiry could address — if the process is designed to be genuinely credible across the political spectrum.

Productive areas for joint fact-finding:

• Comprehensive, transparent economic modeling of immigration’s fiscal and labor market impacts. A cross-ideological economic commission — including economists with different priors about immigration’s effects — could agree on shared methods for calculating costs and benefits of different immigrant categories, with explicit assumptions stated and results broken out by category, time horizon, and geography. The goal would be not a single definitive number but a shared framework for evaluating competing claims.

• Systematic evaluation of what border security measures actually work. A rigorous, cross-partisan review of the evidence on the effectiveness of various border security investments — physical barriers, technology, personnel, legal pathway expansion — in different geographic and policy contexts would help move beyond symbolic debates about walls to evidence-based discussion.

• Transparent data on asylum claim outcomes by nationality, claim type, and adjudicator. More systematic and publicly available data on what happens to asylum claims — how long they take, what the approval rates are, and what happens to people whose claims are denied — would inform both reform proposals and public debate.

• Longitudinal research on integration outcomes for different immigrant populations. How do immigrants and their children fare economically, civically, and socially over time? What factors predict successful integration? This is empirically researchable and policy-relevant.

• Crime data disaggregated by immigration status, collected with consistent methodology across jurisdictions. This would reduce the ability of specific high-profile cases to distort the broader picture in either direction.

A note on credibility: Immigration research faces a credibility problem on the right: many of the institutions that produce it are seen as having a stake in the answers. Joint fact-finding processes in this area will need to explicitly include researchers and institutions credible to skeptics of current immigration levels, not just advocates for them.

Question 5: For value disagreements — which differences fall within the limits of mutual tolerance, and which need to be actively opposed?

Immigration is an area where genuine value disagreements — about sovereignty, obligation, national identity, and fairness — coexist with rhetoric and conduct that crosses clear moral lines. Distinguishing between them is essential.

Differences that fall within the limits of mutual tolerance:

• Disagreements about the appropriate level of legal immigration — more, less, or the same. This is a legitimate policy debate in which good-faith people with genuine values reach different conclusions. Wanting fewer immigrants does not make someone a bigot; wanting more does not make someone naïve about national interest.

• Debates over whether family reunification or skills-based criteria should receive priority. Both positions reflect genuine values — family loyalty and social capital versus economic dynamism and labor market needs — and neither is morally disqualifying.

• Disagreements about what to do with long-established undocumented residents, including whether and what kind of path to legal status is appropriate. The moral considerations on multiple sides are genuine.

• The appropriate level of border enforcement and what enforcement measures are cost-effective and appropriate.

• Sanctuary city policies. Reasonable people disagree, in good faith, about both the empirical effects and the appropriate relationship between local and federal authority in immigration enforcement.

• The weight to give to cultural cohesion and pace of demographic change in setting immigration levels — as long as the concern is genuinely about social cohesion and not a proxy for ethnic exclusion.

Positions that need to be actively opposed:

• Dehumanizing rhetoric about immigrants — describing them collectively as animals, vermin, an infestation, or invaders. This is not a policy position but a denial of the basic humanity of a category of people, and it has historically been a precursor to violence.

• Policies designed to cause cruelty as a deterrent. The deliberate separation of children from parents without adequate systems for reunification crossed a line that most Americans — including many supporters of strict enforcement — recognized as morally unacceptable. Using human suffering instrumentally as a tool of policy warrants active opposition.

• Violence or intimidation targeting immigrant communities. Whether by individuals or institutions, conduct that uses fear and physical threat to enforce immigration preferences is not political speech but a violation of persons.

• Ethnic scapegoating — attributing crime, economic problems, or cultural decline to immigrants as a group without evidentiary support. This is distinct from a policy argument about specific enforcement gaps; it is a collective attribution of blame that assigns guilt by national origin or ethnicity.

• Exploitation of undocumented workers by employers. Knowingly employing people in conditions that exploit their legal vulnerability — wage theft, dangerous conditions, intimidation using immigration status — is a serious violation of persons that warrants active opposition regardless of one’s overall immigration views.

Question 6: For beliefs that need to be actively opposed — how can opposition be most constructive?

• Legal challenges to policies that violate constitutional rights, statutory law, or international obligations. Immigration enforcement operates within a legal framework, and policies that violate that framework can be challenged in court. Legal defense organizations, civil liberties groups, and international human rights mechanisms all provide legitimate avenues for opposing specific unlawful practices.

• Consistent, specific, and carefully documented reporting. Dehumanizing rhetoric and inhumane policy are most effectively opposed not through counter-rhetoric but through specific, humanizing, carefully reported accounts of what is actually happening to actual people. Journalism that puts faces and stories to the abstract debate has historically been among the most effective tools for changing public opinion.

• Cross-partisan coalition building around enforcement of labor law. The exploitation of undocumented workers is an issue on which immigration advocates and labor rights advocates — including those who favor more restrictive immigration levels — can find genuine common cause.

• Elevating voices from within conservative and religious communities that oppose dehumanization. The most effective opposition to dehumanizing rhetoric within communities that are receptive to restriction arguments is not from outside those communities but from within them — from faith leaders, veterans, farmers, and others who share cultural identity with their audiences but draw a firm moral line at treating human beings as less than human.

• Political and electoral engagement. Immigration policy is ultimately set through democratic processes, and political advocacy, voter registration, and electoral engagement by affected communities and their allies are fundamental democratic tools.

• Community accompaniment and direct support. Whatever the legal and political battles, people currently navigating a broken system without legal help benefit from direct community support — legal representation, community accompaniment programs, know-your-rights training — that is not contingent on winning the larger political argument.

• Addressing the economic anxieties that make scapegoating effective. The most durable counter to ethnic scapegoating of immigrants is not moral instruction but economic conditions: when working-class Americans feel their economic situation is secure and improving, they are less susceptible to arguments that attribute their struggles to immigrants. Economic policies that genuinely address wage and economic security concerns reduce the audience for scapegoating arguments more effectively than direct counter-messaging.

Heidi and Guy’s Concluding Thoughts

While the areas of commonality that Claude identified were to some degree surprising, the areas of disagreement were less so — meaning that they seemed accurate to us. We also agree with Claude’s assertion that it is important to separate out the factual issues from the value issues, although that is a distinction that is often ignored. (It is often tempting, for instance, to bolster one’s moral arguments by cherry-picking supportive data and disregarding data that supports the other side.)

Claude noted for all three topics that factual issues and value issues tend to be intertwined, sometimes making the distinction difficult. But in all three cases, it was able to suggest topics that could be investigated and potentially resolved with some kind of joint fact-finding initiative. And, for cases where that’s not feasible, it was also able to suggest areas where disagreements might be accommodated in the spirit of coexistence. It also identified a few cases in which it thought that active opposition was indicated and how to constructively do that.

Joint Fact-Finding

The key to effective joint fact-finding is to do the investigation in a way that constituents on all sides of the debate will trust. If the fact-finding process is seen as biased, it will do nothing to turn down the heat. If it is trusted, while it won’t solve all the contested issues, one or two of those issues might become less contested, making finding a policy agreement on the other issues a bit more feasible. Yet, Claude was certainly correct when it said that “Immigration research faces a credibility problem on the right: many of the institutions that produce it are seen as having a stake in the answers. Joint fact-finding processes in this area will need to explicitly include researchers and institutions credible to skeptics of current immigration levels, not just advocates for them.”

Joint fact-finding efforts were much more common in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. For example, early in our careers, we helped staff a major (and we think largely successful) effort to resolve questions about the risks associated with the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons plant just south of Boulder, Colorado, as well as a number of other similar efforts related to energy and water facilities siting which were extremely controversial at the time.

To give you a bit more of an idea of the potential of this way of approaching factual disputes, we asked Claude to generate this report on successful joint fact-finding efforts.

Value Disagreements

As we looked at Claude’s answers to the question, “For value disagreements — which differences fall within the limits of mutual tolerance, and which need to be actively opposed?” we realized that we should have asked how the differences that fall within limits of mutual tolerance might best be addressed.

Here, we think that it would be useful to make a distinction between personal moral beliefs and public policies based on those moral issues — a distinction that we didn’t make in the exercise, but should add.

At the personal level, Claude’s assessment suggests that there is broad support for giving people the freedom to advocate for or against particular immigration policies and, by implication, the inclusion of particular groups within US society. It was also clear that this freedom did not extend to dehumanizing rhetoric, ethnic scapegoating, intimidation, violence, or exploitation.

At the level of public policy, there was an implicit recognition that the government must use a rule-of-law-based process to make decisions regarding controversial issues and that, in a democracy, we agree to abide by those decisions. This, of course, comes with the proviso that, in future elections and policy-making processes, we have the opportunity to petition the government to reverse those decisions.

This way of thinking about things obviously raises difficult questions in cases where individual communities, such as sanctuary cities, attempt to prevent the enforcement of controversial federal government policies. Here we enter into one of the most powerful and constructive forms of social disagreement — nonviolent protest and civil disobedience.

Democracy Should Be an Effective Dispute-Handling System

As we observed in earlier writing, a well-functioning democracy is a dispute-handling system. Our legislative system should, if it were working well, be able to weigh the input it gets from the various interest and constituency groups, and balance out those interests in ways that are seen as wise, equitable, and legitimate by most everyone. This process is not working right now at the federal level, but a variety of models are being developed and tested at the local and state levels, such as citizen’s assemblies and other deliberative forums. (And others, such as joint fact-finding, can be rediscovered from earlier eras when the United States’ civil society was more functional.)

We need to create and participate in more and more of such processes, and demand that they — or similar processes — be tested for use at the federal level on societal-level conflicts (such as immigration) as well. Here we are not suggesting that citizens’ assemblies replace Congress, but rather be used as an advisory bodies, much as special commissions have been used in the past. If, for instance, all fifty states held citizen’s assemblies on immigration, and then representatives of each of those assemblies came together for one or more national assemblies, such groups could likely come up with a credible set of recommendations about how to move forward on immigration that would have wide legitimacy, and, hopefully, be more likely to be enacted by Congress.

Looking at the suggestions Claude came up with for handling disagreements that are beyond the level of tolerance — things that need to be actively opposed — Claude is essentially saying “utilize the system” to fight these battles: legal challenges, carefully documented reporting, coalition building, political and electoral engagement. This is good advice — to the extent that it works. As suggested above, we would add using nonviolent direct action, such as the kind that occurred in Minneapolis in January 2026 in response to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operation there. When “the system” is broken, as ours now is in so many ways, it is necessary to create new, more effective systems for handling both “tolerable differences” and “intolerable differences.” We will be discussing possible processes and systems a lot more in future newsletters — that is beyond the scope of what we can do here.

A Way Out

What we think is particularly interesting about Claude’s take on both the commonalities and the differences is that it shows that there really are constructive things that can be done to address issues as controversial as these. As Bill Zartman wrote years ago, in reference to “ripeness,“ that in order to promote ripeness (i.e., a good time to negotiate a solution to a long-running conflict), the parties must realize first, that they are in a hurting stalemate. In other words, they must agree that all parties are getting hurt more than they are benefiting from a situation, yet they cannot win the conflict outright. But that, in itself, is not enough to make a conflict ripe for resolution. The parties must also be able to see a “way out.” Clearly, immigration is at the hurting stalemate stage, and has been there for quite some time. Claude’s observations suggest a scaffolding of a variety of ways out. It hardly offers “an answer” or “the answer,” but it does give us a good list of things that need to be addressed. In our minds, it was weaker on the “how,” but that’s our job for coming days.

Again, to read Claude’s answers to the same questions, but focused on climate and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs,

Read Claude's Full Response

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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
  Mutually Automated Destruction: The Escalating Global A.I. Arms Race — An exploration of the parallels between the ongoing race for AI supremacy and the earlier nuclear arms race.

• Interstate War
  A New Era of World War Has Arrived — Reason to believe that we have entered into a period where violent conflict and war has become one of the first, rather than one of the last, strategies used to advance the interests of nations (and their leaders).

• Interstate War
  Trump Is Tearing at the Soul of the American Military — Important reflections on the deeply disturbing and far-reaching implications of President Trump’s threat to erase a civilization (including the everyday people that we were supposedly trying to help).

• Developing a Unifying Vision
  What Do Americans Think They Owe Each Other? — An important reminder of the shared obligations that we have to one another -- obligations that our ever-present partisan struggles have caused us to forget.

• Civil Society
  Ayaan Answers: You Cannot Restore the West Without Restoring Citizenship — In conjunction with her campaign to restore the best parts of Western Civilization, important reflections on the role of citizenship.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  This Post Won’t Save the World — In the context of reflections on the Iranian war, an example of a sensible and complexity-oriented way of thinking about chaotic social events.

• Interstate War
  How do you win a war in 2026? — Amid all of the efforts to put a positive (or negative) spin on military campaigns, a primer on what it takes to actually win (or lose) a war.

Reader Suggested Links

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

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  The War in Iran Is Not Over — Perceptive food for thought for those trying to anticipate the future of ongoing Mideast violence.

• Networking
  Introducing ProDemStack: An Interactive Network Map of Pro-Democracy Substacks — Micah Sifry explores the tilt and the dynamics of the pro-democracy Substack eco-system.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  How Pakistan Secretly Forced America and Iran Into a Ceasefire Washington Never Wanted — From a negotiation perspective, a look at Pakistan’s efforts to convene talks aimed at ending the Iranian war.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  The Iranian Opposition’s Urgent Task — For Iranian victims of last January’s brutal repression, thoughts on what they need to do to escape the clutches of their country’s murderous regime.

• Authoritarianism
  Trump as Alexander the Great: A Theory That Explains Iran (And Everything Else) — An argument that President Trump represents just the latest manifestation of leadership problems dating back at least to Alexander the Great.

• Climate / Environment / Health
  The Legacy of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” 20 Years Later — A look at the long shadow cast by one of history’s most consequential PowerPoint slide shows.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  Defending Israel in an Age of Madness — An especially good overview of how Israel sees its ongoing wars and the many threats that it faces -- an overview that helps us understand Israel’s actions.

  

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
  Decency is about to make a comeback. — A hopeful argument that our politics is passing through the period of “peak disrespect.”

• Peacebuilding
  Peacecrafting: Turning conflict into collaboration — Peaceful coexistence isn’t idealistic -- it’s practical. Dr. Paul Zeitz draws on deliberative democracy and neuroscience to show how communities can move from division to collaboration.

• Theories of Change
  How Small Innovations Shift Systems — Systemic change rarely announces itself with a single dramatic shift. More often, it spreads gradually, through relationships, practice, and persistence.

• Bridge Building
  Conflict Profiteers are Wrong: Revealing Common Ground, the Conditions for Dialogue, and the Opportunities Ahead for Bridging Differences Between Citizens — A Living Room Conversations report showing that the U.S. is far less polarized than imagined, and that there is still considerable trust in the election system -- a report with big implications for the bridging movement.

• Developing a Unifying Vision
  Stories from a Liberated Future — A series of group writings considering different ways to describe shared liberation. These are creative explorations meant to be understood as a portal to our shared liberated culture.

• Theories of Change
  The Lexington Experiment, Part II — Richard Young of CivicLex on why local democracy efforts are hard to scale because “scaling” is the wrong goal.

• De-Escalation Strategies
  “When I first saw your work, I rolled my eyes.” On skepticism about reducing us-vs-them thinking. — Zach Elwood notes that serious conflict inevitably leads to a widespread instinct to scoff at conflict-reduction efforts. To escape the toxic conflict spiral, we must see that instinct as part of our problem. Zach quotes a reader who does that.

• Civic Education
  The Center for Civic Education’s FY 2025 Annual Report — The Center for Civic Education helps students gain an increased understanding of the institutions of constitutional democracy and the fundamental principles and values upon which those institutions were founded.

• Developing a Unifying Vision
  Using Civic Imagination to Shape Our Next 250 Years — A virtual conversation with three leaders on building a fair, inclusive future for our democracy. You’ll gain inspiration for local civic action, practical steps to practice democracy in everyday life, and a network of people doing just that.

• Psychological Complexity
  Dignity in America — Dignity is not agreement. It is the discipline of how we show up when disagreement is real. In a self-governing society like ours, that responsibility sits with each of us.

• Media Reform
  What Are the Politics of a Platform? Users on X/Twitter — Jonathan Stray investigates how Elon Musk’s interventions, or lack thereof, have favored one set of politics over another on X.

• Media Reform
  A Search Engine That Wants You to Disagree Smarter: The FreeSpoke Mission — FreeSpoke founder Kristin Jackson claims their search engine ends polarization by balancing left/right views and protecting privacy -- an exploration of its design and core challenges.

• Developing a Unifying Vision
  Beyond MAGA: The Emergent New Traditionalism that could Reshape American Politics — A new traditionalism is emerging, particularly among younger Trump voters, driven by dissatisfaction with the economy and the cultural status quo.

• Saving Democracy
  Terms of Engagement – Behind a Bipartisan Bid to Protect Election Integrity — A video about a bipartisan initiative to oppose efforts by the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress to impose new rules on election administration.

  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.)

• Developing a Unifying Vision
  The Solution to the Liberal Conundrum is Hiding in Plain Sight — In what ways has liberalism failed us? This article helps us answer this question by giving us a richer understanding of human nature -- one that centers our need to contribute, not just consume.

• Saving Democracy
  In 1990, a bipartisan Congress passed historic bills. Then it cracked apart. — A retrospective look at that critical time in the 1990s when Congress’s ability to actually get things done collapsed.

• Disinformation
  How Fake People Became Real Influencers — An explanation of how much more influential and accomplished synthetic social media personalities have become.

• Social / Economic Complexity
  The Trump Administration Is in a Psychotic State — A perceptive and terrifying argument that, under Trump, the US government has developed a “personality” that is, in many ways, genuinely psychotic.

• Interstate War
  Victor Davis Hanson: The War—and the War on the War — Reflections on what happens when political differences within the United States transform the political unity that usually surrounds military operations into just another opportunity for partisan gain.

• Interstate War
  Elon Musk’s Starship Heavy Could Revolutionize Warfare — The really surprising story about the dramatic way in which Musk is lowering the cost of putting massive payloads into orbit -- a technology with astonishing military implications.

• Artificial Intelligence
  Worried About A.I. Taking Your Job? That’s Not Very ‘Agentic’ of You. — In the context of AI, an essay on an interesting new word “agentic” -- a cross between the rejection of victimhood and aggressive, personal aggrandizement.

• Social / Economic Complexity
  The Intellectual Right Is Mad at the Mess It’s Made — From a right-leaning perspective, an exploration of the way in which carefully considered political critiques are transformed as they move into popular political discourse.

• Communication Complexity
  Forget the A.I. Apocalypse. Memes Have Already Nuked Our Culture. — More thinking about the complex way in which smart phones are altering the way we think -- both individually and as a society.

• Communication Complexity
  Against the Smartphone Theory of Everything — A useful effort to get us to re-examine a big part of today’s conventional wisdom -- the notion that smart phones are the principal reason why we increasingly do dumb things.

• Effective Problem-Solving
  A broken system is costing America trillions. I see it in Wyoming. — From the “Red Tape” newsletter, an explanation of one of the big reasons why US society has so much trouble building much of anything (or solving pretty much any problem).

• Education
  How Humanists Helped Wreck the Humanities — From the Chronicle of Higher Education, an example of the kind of introspection that efforts to restore the public’s trust will require.

• Saving Democracy
  An unpardonable abuse of presidential power with only one solution — An overview of the new book, “The Presidential Pardon: The Short Clause with a Long, Troubled History,” that provides important insights into one of the Trump administration’s most worrisome practices.

• Culture and Religion
  Scientific Inquiry Is a Keystone of Western Civilization — An analysis of the critical role that science has played in the astonishing rise and the many successes of Western Civilization.

• Left / Right Conflict
  Do the Democrats Know What Time It Is? — Thoughts about what happens should Trump become so unpopular that Democrats can win without ever having to articulate a governing agenda.

• Left / Right Conflict
  How to Understand the Well-Being Gap between Liberals and Conservatives — Yet another perspective on the all important question of how liberals and conservatives differ from one another.

• Psychological Complexity
  Why Politics Makes Us Bend Our Own Values — A psychological explanation of how conflict dynamics lead us to change our moral beliefs.

• Social / Economic Complexity
  See How the Average U.S. Worker Has Changed Over 250 Years — As we look at the prospect of massive AI-induced changes in the nature of work, helpful perspective from past periods of radical change.

• Interstate War
  Niall Ferguson: How Great Powers Lose Wars They’re Winning — Thought-provoking reflections on the many ways in which societies have figured out how to snatch defeat from the jaws of military victory.

• Interstate War
  Three Times the Mossad Did the Impossible — Astonishing real-world spy stories that explain how the actions of a few unsung individuals can dramatically change the course of history.

• Saving Democracy
  Voting in California: All in Favor, Say ‘Arf’ — An article that explains why reasonable people on the right can have concerns about the fairness of elections in states controlled by Democrats.

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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Are We Really As Divided As We Think We Are?

Our hyper-polarized U.S. society is engaged in a number of very high-stakes conflicts in which it is widely believed that a victory by the other side would be absolutely intolerable — something to be fought by pretty much any means necessary (hovering, for the moment, just short of violence). There are also a great many people who believe that these conflicts are uncompromisable — they determine whether the arc of history will bend toward justice or away from it.

Are things really this bleak?

More in Common argues that they are not. While there are certainly people on both the right and the left who hold extreme views, More in Common’s Hidden Tribes and Perception Gap projects both illustrate that the views of people closer to the center are not nearly as divergent as people tend to think they are. We find this to be true in our experience as well.

When we were still teaching, we developed an exercise that helps people explore the nature of our differences, our areas of common ground, and how we might work through our differences constructively to come up with agreed-upon solutions or policies. Whenever we ran this Common Ground Exercise, participants usually found out that their divisions were not as intractable as they thought they were. We used this exercise for years with students and other non-student groups that were interested in exploring difficult conflicts more deeply, to find areas of difference and agreement and how we might be able to address these differences more constructively.

How the Common Ground Exercise Works

The exercise is done in small groups, ideally with participants on both the left and the right. (When we did it with students who tended to mostly lean left, we chose topics on which there was still considerable disagreement, which we determined by polling students in advance. If that proved impossible, we had students read arguments (or watch videos) on both sides of the issue, and then asked some students to role-play the other side. This isn’t as good, of course, as having people represent themselves, but it is still instructive.)

The exercise, which we continued to refine over the years, asks participants to consider six questions as they relate to some especially intractable conflict.

1. On what issues, sub-issues, and facts do you think there is broad agreement among members of contending groups?

2. On what issues, sub-issues, and facts do you think there is clear and strong disagreement among members of contending groups?

3. To what extent is each disagreement attributable to different images of objective facts? And, to what extent is each disagreement attributable to differing values or moral beliefs?

4. For differences attributable to differing images of objective facts, can participants imagine some sort of joint fact-finding process that would resolve each disagreement in ways in which all could have confidence?

5. ​​For differences attributable to differing values or moral beliefs, which differences fall within the limits of socially acceptable differences of opinion — differences that, in a free society, can be accepted in the spirit of mutual tolerance and respect, coexistence, and a general willingness to “live and let live”? And which are so morally reprehensible that they need to be actively and vigorously opposed?

6. For beliefs that people feel need to be actively opposed, how do people think that that can be most constructively done?

Our full description of the exercise discusses each of these questions in detail, and suggests prompts that teachers/facilitators can use if people get stuck. With a little help, participants almost always find that there are areas of broad agreement between even the most seemingly opposed people — for instance, even between pro-choice and pro-life advocates, everyone agrees that abortion should not be used as a form of birth control.

An Experiment: We Asked Claude to Do the Exercise on Behalf of “Typical Americans.”

As our frequent readers know, over the last few months we have been thinking about ways in which our field might be able to benefit from AI’s ability to listen to very large numbers of people and summarize what they collectively have to say about particular topics. So, we thought it would be interesting and perhaps useful to see what we could learn by asking Claude to work through our common ground exercise as it applies to three different high-profile and particularly contentious topics. We chose climate change, DEI, and immigration. (This is an extension of our earlier and reasonably successful effort to see how well AI might be able to synthesize a collective vision for what a democracy in which we would all like to live might look like).

We have been having good luck with Claude lately, so we gave Claude the detailed directions for our common ground exercise, and then asked it to compile, based on all that it has read, a report on how it thinks that a truly a representative group of Americans might answer our six questions. We first asked it to do that for climate change, then immigration, then DEI programs. Its original answer was 32 pages long. For those who are interested, we are including its full answers for all three topics in a separate document: Claude Does The Burgess’s Common Ground Exercise on Climate, DEI, and Immigration.

Here we are sharing its answers to the first question about commonalities, which we find particularly interesting because it says there are more than most of us assume there are. It is worth noting, that as I read some of these, my thought was sometimes, “no, that’s not right! I don’t agree with that! Or, “I know a spokesperson for the other side that doesn’t agree with that.” But before Claude gave its answers, it explained its method by saying:

The exercise imagines a room containing Americans from across the full political spectrum — far right, right, center, left, far left — attempting an honest, structured conversation. It does not pretend that all positions are equally well-supported by evidence. But it does attempt to represent each position fairly, to understand the genuine moral seriousness behind disagreements, and to find whatever real common ground exists.

The answers below are synthetic — they represent what a careful observer, familiar with the full range of American political opinion, believes each camp actually holds, not what any single individual or organization has said. The goal is honest representation, not flattery or false equivalence.

Given how much more widely read Claude is than I am, maybe it is right. It is certainly worth considering that possibility. At the same time, we all know, AI makes mistakes. It can “hallucinate.” Is it hallucinating these areas of common ground? Maybe. But isn’t it worth considering the possibility that they are real and trying to get people together to explore them more and perhaps start acting on them might be useful?

Every time we ran this exercise with face-to-face groups, the answers that people came up with were very different. Given different backgrounds and interests and the limited time available for the exercise, this is hardly surprising. It is also clear that there is no way that, with a reasonable amount of time and effort, face-to-face dialogues could ever be able to deeply listen to and synthesize the diverse array of voices that Claude is able to consider. Such conversations just don’t have the bandwidth necessary to exchange that volume of information.

This technology also has big advantages over survey research and polling — the primary strategy that social and political scientists and the media generally use to understand what large groups of people think. AI Projects like this one allow us to see our conflicts with a tremendous amount of nuance — nuance that is missing from opinion polls that usually reduce complex issues to a few simple Likert Scale questions, where the possible answers range from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree.”

For those who are trying to promote a better understanding of what our society collectively thinks, this is a revolutionary technology. The challenge is to figure out how to integrate this tool with the kind of face-to-face efforts that are still essential for bridge-building and trust building — prerequisites for consensus-building and collaborative action, processes that many consider to be “fixes” to our current hyper-polarization. One next step is for each of us to think about what the information revealed in these reports suggests about how we might be able to approach our conflicts more constructively.

Common Ground

In this newsletter, we will summarize Claude’s assessment of areas of common ground that it thinks exist with respect to climate, DEI, and immigration. In a coming newsletter or two we will turn our attention to the areas of disagreement that Claude identifies and strategies for working through those disagreements.

Claude’s Common Ground Findings on Climate:

Climate change is one of the most politically polarized topics in American life, and the polarization is real. But it obscures a more substantial area of shared ground than most partisan debate acknowledges.

Areas of genuine cross-spectrum agreement:

• The climate has always changed, and the recent decades have brought measurably more extreme and costly weather events. Even those who dispute the dominant account of human causation generally acknowledge that floods, wildfires, droughts, and hurricanes are more frequent and more damaging. The costs are visible and undeniable.
  

• Clean air and clean water are almost universally valued. Whether the frame is environmental stewardship, Christian dominion theology that emphasizes care for creation, public health, or progressive environmentalism, virtually everyone agrees that polluted air and water are bad and worth preventing.
  

• Energy security and independence are national priorities. Across the spectrum, Americans broadly agree that dependence on foreign energy sources — particularly from adversarial nations — creates strategic vulnerability. This point connects energy policy to national security in ways that generate cross-partisan support.
  

• Energy costs matter enormously for working families, rural communities, and American industry. No political faction wants expensive, unreliable energy. Disagreements are about how to achieve affordable and reliable energy, not about whether those goals matter.
  

• Technology and innovation will play a central role in any energy future. From conservatives who favor market-driven technological development to progressives who support public investment in clean energy R&D, there is broad consensus that the energy challenges ahead require technological solutions.
  

• The costs of inaction are real. Even among those skeptical of the worst-case projections, there is wide acknowledgment that extreme weather events impose enormous economic costs — on property, insurance, agriculture, and infrastructure — and that some level of adaptation investment is prudent regardless of the debate about causes.
  

• Future generations have a legitimate claim on current decisions. Even the most economically focused conservatives generally acknowledge that decisions with long-term environmental consequences should take some account of the world we leave to our children and grandchildren.
  

• Energy transition communities deserve support. There is broad agreement, though disagreement about specifics, that workers and communities economically dependent on fossil fuels should not simply be left behind if the energy economy shifts. This commitment is shared across party lines, even when the policies proposed to fulfill it differ sharply.

Claude’s Common Ground Findings on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)

DEI is perhaps the most semantically and emotionally loaded topic in contemporary American life, in part because the same words mean very different things to different people. Beneath the terminological conflict, there is more shared ground than the loudest voices suggest — though it is sometimes expressed in very different language.

Areas of genuine cross-spectrum agreement:

• Discrimination based on race, religion, gender, or national origin is wrong and should be illegal. This is close to a universal commitment across the American political spectrum, though disagreements about what constitutes discrimination are sharp.
  

• Equal opportunity — the idea that people should be judged on their abilities, character, and effort rather than on inherited characteristics — is almost universally endorsed as an aspiration. The left and right differ profoundly on whether current institutions actually deliver equal opportunity; they disagree much less on whether equal opportunity is the right goal.
  

• Historical discrimination in the United States was serious and real. Slavery, Jim Crow laws, exclusion from the GI Bill, redlining, employment discrimination — these are historical facts that are not seriously contested across the political spectrum. What is contested is their relevance to present-day policy.
  

• Historical discrimination had lasting effects that did not simply vanish with civil rights legislation. Even on the right, there is general acknowledgment that generations of exclusion from wealth-building opportunities, quality education, and full civic participation have had lasting consequences. The disagreements are about magnitude and policy implication, not about whether any lasting effects exist.
  

• Every person deserves basic dignity and respect regardless of their race, ethnicity, gender, or background. This commitment is stated across all political camps.
  

• Diversity of perspective and experience can add value in institutions and teams. Even among critics of formal DEI programs, there is general acknowledgment that diverse teams often think better and avoid the blind spots that homogeneous groups can develop.
  

• Discrimination on the basis of race remains legally prohibited and should remain so. This commitment is broadly shared even among those who argue that some DEI programs themselves constitute impermissible racial discrimination.
  

• There are still real barriers that disadvantage some groups. Even among those who reject the framing of systemic racism, there is acknowledgment that discrimination — individual, institutional, and cultural — has not been eliminated, and that specific instances of unfair treatment deserve redress.

Claude’s Common Ground Findings on Immigration

Immigration is among the most emotionally charged issues in American politics. But when people across the political spectrum are asked what they actually believe — rather than which side they are on — a surprising amount of common ground emerges.

Areas of genuine cross-spectrum agreement:

• The current immigration system is broken and needs reform. This may be the single most widely shared statement in American immigration politics. From the far right to the far left, there is broad consensus that the current system — characterized by enormous backlogs, inadequate legal pathways, inconsistent enforcement, and a broken asylum process — does not serve anyone well. The disagreements are about what reform should look like, not about whether reform is needed.
  

• The United States has historically been a nation of immigrants and has benefited enormously from immigration. This is acknowledged across the political spectrum, including by those who favor sharp reductions in current immigration levels.
  

• People who immigrate legally and follow the rules deserve respect, welcome, and full civic participation. The commitment to lawful immigration as a legitimate and valued path is broadly shared.
  

• Border security is a legitimate function of government. There is broad agreement that the federal government has both the right and the responsibility to maintain some control over who enters the country. Disagreements are about methods, priorities, and the appropriate relationship between enforcement and humanitarian obligations.
  

• Human trafficking and drug smuggling are serious problems that deserve vigorous response. Across the spectrum, there is strong condemnation of the criminal networks that profit from illegal immigration and engage in exploitation, trafficking, and violence.
  

• Employers who knowingly hire undocumented workers and exploit them should face meaningful consequences. The argument that unscrupulous employers undermine both the rule of law and the labor market cuts across conventional left-right lines.
  

• Children brought to the United States at a young age deserve special consideration. The situation of DREAMers generates sympathy across party lines. Polling consistently shows majority support for some form of legal protection for this population even among those who favor overall restriction.
  

• Refugees fleeing genuine persecution deserve humanitarian consideration. The principle of non-refoulement has broad, if not universal, support. Disagreements are about scope and administrative capacity, not about whether the underlying humanitarian obligation exists.
  

• Immigration enforcement should be conducted with basic human dignity. Even among strong supporters of vigorous enforcement, there is broad acknowledgment that enforcement operations should be conducted humanely and that immigration detainees retain basic rights.

Next: Claude’s Assessment of Our Differences

We find Claude’s analysis of areas of common ground to be quite hopeful. It demonstrates a sound basis for the kind of collective vision that, if adequately cultivated, could help us reverse the hyper-polarization spiral and restore conflict’s role as an engine of social learning. Still, the real challenge is figuring out how to overcome the obstacles posed by our differences. Here too, Claude’s analysis offers hope. It’s strategies for using joint fact-finding processes to work through factual disagreements offer real promise, as do its strategies for more constructively addressing the deep moral disagreements that remain.

Given how long this newsletter is already, we will defer a summary of these ideas to a future newsletter or two. In the meantime, you can find these answers by reading ahead and looking at Claude’s full response.

Read Claude's Full Response

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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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by Heidi Burgess

I talked with Terry Kyllo, the Executive Director of Paths to Understanding: Gathering Neighbors, Growing Trust. located in Lynnwood, Washington, on March 18, 2026. Terry is passionate about renewing civil society and democracy by helping communities build trust across deep divides—because he believes we are living too divided, and we do not have to live this way. A Lutheran pastor, Terry works with local groups (faith-based and otherwise), media, and public leadership to bring neighbors back into relationship, to help them build a world where everyone belongs and everyone can thrive.

I started the conversation with Terry, as I often do, asking how he got into this work. He had a moving story.

One of the most important things that happened in my life was that my mother was diagnosed with MS when I was a little kid — when I was about three and a half. And I watched how the community responded to my mother’s illness and also to my family’s loss of a farm because mechanization was having a huge impact on farming communities and still is, just like it has had in the manufacturing communities across the country. And I watched the status-keeping of our family and kind of change and how people were afraid to hang out with us because they weren’t sure if multiple sclerosis was contagious or not. And the loss of the farming family was hard too. ... That sort of set me off when I left home — I was a little bit attuned to the way status-keeping systems work. ... I just began to notice, more and more, how our nation sort of has two visions about how we believe that all people are created equal. And the way I talk about it today is that “we believe that some people aren’t people.”

Terry went to Pacific Lutheran University and to Lutheran Seminary in Chicago, and then did parish ministry in the Lutheran Church and also in the Episcopal Church for many years. But his life began to change twelve years ago, when the treasurer of his congregation in Washington State invited him to lunch at a restaurant owned and run by Muslims.

I struck up a wonderful relationship with these Muslims and got to know them more. We started to do some interfaith conversations about the environment and about the economy with some other Muslim leaders and a Buddhist.

And then one day I got a call from Oak Harbor, Washington, where there’s a Navy base. Some of the people there had been hearing about my work with this interfaith conversation, and they were constantly aware how folk who had experienced the conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq felt about American Muslims and how dehumanizing their language was. And so they invited me and a Muslim to go to Oak Harbor.

About 90 people showed up at the event. I didn’t really know what I was doing, but my Muslim friend was very good at it. But what I saw from that stage really scared me. I saw about 40% of that crowd really angry and scared of my Muslim friend, without knowing anything about him personally.

As he was watching that dynamic, Terry said, his mind flashed back to his Lutheran history course in seminary, when he learned about the role Lutherans played in the Holocaust.

The Lutheran clergy did not know their Jewish neighbors, didn’t hang out with them, didn’t mix the communities together, and often were in denial about what was happening to their Jewish neighbors. And while some resisted and were killed immediately by the Nazis, many just did nothing. And that was really powerful for me.

So, as we went downstairs to the cafeteria that day, after the class in seminary in Chicago, I remember saying to my classmates that if I saw something like that happening in my day, I didn’t want to be one of the quiet ones. And there I was sitting on a little stage in a library with about 90 people and seeing that exact thing happening.

And of course, it was happening. It’s been happening since our country was founded, right? Our indigenous neighbors and African-Americans and many other groups have experienced this kind of dehumanization. But what I learned was that American Muslims were the target of about a $40 million-a-year hate industry. Systematically dehumanizing them.

Terry started doing more and more events, designed to give Muslim voices the opportunity to speak and to counter some of the dehumanization with relationships and knowledge. One event in 2015 was in Lynnwood, Washington, north of Seattle.

In between announcing it and it happening, two things happened. The San Bernardino, California attack happened, a terrorist event [with two Muslim perpetrators]. And then candidate for president, Donald Trump, held up a piece of paper from the Center for Security Policy, which is an anti-Muslim hate group, claiming that most Muslims were in favor of violence, when exactly the opposite is true. And so, instead of having 100 nice Lutherans and Methodists and Presbyterians and Unitarians and a few other folks show up to our event, we had 450 people come. We had police there to help provide security, and we had news media.

The next morning, I got about five or six emails from clergy, from Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Episcopalian, and other traditions saying, “Would you hold an event like that at our church because we want to do our part?” And I got so busy doing that work, I couldn’t keep up with my health, my family, and the church anymore.

So, in the summer of 2016, Terry decided he had to quit full-time ministry to do this kind of work instead.

I’ve spoken to about 300 organizations around the state — all kinds of different organizations. I also did trainings for clergy with the Shoulder-to Shoulder Project. ... I was having conversations with all kinds of people: atheists to Zoroastrian, quite literally. I was having conversations with Antifa folks that were gravitating to that movement. Proud Boys and Three Percenters, and suburban, urban, and rural people.

The more Terry did this work, the more he became convinced that it was essential.

What I felt in my gut at that time, and I can say it better now, but I felt it very much at the time, that our country was coming apart. And the purpose of that kind of dehumanization was to create violence against the community, morally. And that kind of dehumanization doesn’t just stay with one group, obviously. It continues to pick new targets, continues to pick up steam, and it creates a societal dynamic that can lead to a society’s dissolution.

And I really felt like the church could play a role in preventing that. I wanted to lead within the faith communities to try to do something about that, to try to act early enough, unlike what happened in Germany in the 1930s, to act early enough and comprehensively enough to shift the outcome and to see that we don’t end up in that same place.

Terry points out that Muslims are extremely diverse, but Americans tend to lump them all together in their minds, assigning guilt by association.

We try to help people understand that there are 49 majority Muslim countries which have at least four or five major traditions among them and have probably hundreds of subcultures of Muslims. And we like to point out that we wouldn’t like it if we’re part of a group and some member of our group does some terrible thing. We wouldn’t want collective blame for ourselves. And so let’s not apply that to each other. However, it is true that this dynamic of dehumanization, is not just toward Muslims and Jews. I would say today that we have a 360-degree dehumanization taking place.

All groups, he has found, feel alone, vulnerable, slandered and dehumanized. And everybody thinks that everybody else “is abandoning the social contract of love and respect for your neighbor. “ He tries to reverse such feelings in his events.

I asked him to describe what he does in these events. At the beginning, he explained that he and a Muslim speaker would be on the stage, they would each do a little talk and then do “Q&A with the hard questions.”

The narrative we would use is that we’re divided, we’re lonely, we’re isolated, but we are better together. My Muslim partner and I are very, very conscious of the kind of public narrative that we’re speaking about, kind of trying to draw a choice between several different futures. One is where we’re more suspicious of each other and where the dynamics of suspicion and dehumanization lead to more violence between communities. The other is the kind of future where we get to know each other, where we respect each other’s human rights, we stand up for each other, and in which we build a future in which we build a stronger union together. ...

But over time, we began to realize that as helpful as those speeches were, and as carefully constructed as they were, to offer a positive vision together, we needed more. ... So we began to lean in more toward conversation around tables.

But then COVID happened.

So I sat here on Zoom, and spoke to people in person, as well. And I began to ask six questions. What’s happening to our society? Why does that happen to people? What’s the human nature underneath it? And then what do we do? What’s your tradition offer as a response when societies get to this place? Do you have a treasure that you can offer the rest of society? And what I heard there really began to shape the work that Paths to Understanding is now doing.

The best answer to his “”what can we do?” question, Terry said, came from a Zen Buddhist from Seattle, Genjo Marinello, who said

Terry, I think we need to sit around tables, maybe eat some food, look into each other’s eyes, and recognize the human being there. Number two, we need to do something positive for the community together.” So we can see that the other groups actually are willing to spend a day and spend their energy for the larger community. And then third, we need to build events where we can honor each other in public.

So during COVID, we began to develop a program called Let’s Go Together, where we bring people of different cultures, traditions, life circumstances, economic situations, identities, ages, and locations like suburban, urban, rural, together to do these three events, to eat and share stories, do a service project, and then to do a public event where participants share why from their tradition or their experience, they’re committed to our common humanity. We’ve now had about 220 people come together over three years from 40-plus communities.

While many of these are faith or interfaith communities, others are not. They did one with an organization of formerly incarcerated people, another with clients who are Spanish speaking.

We end up with a really interesting group of people who normally would not come together. And then what begins to happen is they start hanging out with each other because, of course, they get to know each other over these three events, and they’ve shared phone numbers, and they go out to coffee and tea.

This last weekend, we saw the first interfaith Iftar in Skagit County’s history. [Iftar is the evening meal eaten by Muslims to break their daily fast at sunset during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.] And who showed up at that event? We had indigenous elders show up. We had Christians show up. We even had some conservative Christians show up. We had formerly incarcerated people show up. We had people from the Spanish-speaking community show up. We had Catholics and Mormons. It was incredible. The people that came to that thing because the Muslims got to know a ton of people in this process. And in fact, the Muslim leader, a young man named Laith, who is an incredible human being, he went across the street to an evangelical church that had told us “no, they don’t want to participate.” And he went to pray with them on a Sunday morning. And they were so impressed by his courage to come across the street and pray with them, that they are now sending a few people tentatively to Let’s Go Together. So we’re doing that process, and it’s really powerful, but that also takes a ton of work.

So now they are trying to develop events that do not take so much work. One approach they are using now is called the Potluck Project. They have created a toolkit with seven different sets of questions that helps people just gather neighbors together over human questions. One, for example is,

“What was your favorite food growing up? Who made it? And why is that important to you?” And we have seen people go from not liking each other around the table or being very hesitant to that food question, among others, it just opens people up and they get to see into the family. They get to see that little grin on someone’s face when they talk about their grandma making whatever their grandma made. And we’ve seen people make these deep connections and then start actually living that out in the broader community.

We talked about the problem that people who engage in such bridge-building work often go back to their home community and get scolded for “being a traitor.” Terry, himself, reports that he’s been called a “traitor to God, Jesus, and the country, a ton of times.” To avoid this, they only work with groups that have agreed to come together.

So when the individuals go back, they can tell the story because their community has authorized it. And then in-group, and the out-group boundaries tend to come down. And then these random things happen, where people reach out to folks, and you create this dynamic where people are starting to come in who initially didn’t want to. ... And so these kind of events create a dynamic where people begin to tell their stories, and they see that we can thrive together, that we can be in community with each other, and that the other folk in our area haven’t given up on the social contract. They just haven’t given up on it. And it’s such a relief for people to see that. It generates a lot of emotion, but it also generates a lot of energy.

I asked Terry how this can scale up and he observed that there are already people doing this kind of work all over the country (he cited, as we often do, all the folk in the Intermovement Impact Project.) But, he also added

But there is a tremendous amount of untapped potential. There are, in my estimation, about 400,000 meeting spaces in the country. About 280,000 of those are churches, mosques, temples, philosophy clubs, that sort of thing. And within all those traditions, there are teachings about knowing and loving your neighbors. ...

Part of what we’re trying to do with Paths to Understanding is to help people see that churches, mosques and temples, nonprofits, service clubs have the infrastructure we need to bring Americans together. And we also have the know-how that we need. We have visions, we have frameworks, we have tool kits, and we have learning communities nationally that can help local and regional leaders to begin to find the tools that they need to do their part of the work.

A key ingredient, though, Terry said, is that people have to see that healing is possible. He observed that Americans are

pretty good at ignoring problems until it’s almost right too late. But once we get our head wrapped around the fact that we’ve got a problem, we will get busy. And I am feeling, more and more, that people are getting busy. When we talk to the bishops about this bridge-block-build model that we talk about all the time [in the Intermovement Impact Project meetings], we have got to bring people together. We’ve got to stand up for each other’s rights. We’ve got to block [divisive, anti-democratic actions]. We also need to build a participatory democracy for the future. When I shared that with the bishops, they were excited. And one of them said, “If we’re not about this, then why are we here?” And they promised to get us connected to other bishops, to other leaders, and to national leaders within the faith communities. Because everybody wants to do their part.

This is just a sample of what Terry and Heidi talked about. To see (or read) our full talk with Terry, go to Full Terry Kyllo Interview.

Full Terry Kyllo Interview

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.

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Highlighted Links

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

• US Politics
  No Learning Please, We’re Democrats! — From Ruy Teixeira [one of the founders of the excellent (and recently closed) Substack, the Liberal Patriot], an argument that the left needs to stop suppressing friendly criticism.

• Artificial Intelligence
  ‘Surveil, Govern and Control’: What Could Go Wrong? — A compilation with links to what experts are thinking about the ways in which AI-based omniscience could accelerate the slide toward some new, high-tech type of authoritarianism.

• Class Inequity
  How Can America Be So Miserable When It’s So Rich? — An extremely perceptive explanation of why class resentments in the US run so deep (despite the relatively prosperous circumstances of most citizens).

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  Will Iran Turn to Terrorism? — After having spent decades fighting the long war on terrorism, it seems surprising that so little attention has been given to the possibility that terror will become a new front in the war with Iran.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  Iran’s War Is Not Only With the West — A refresher course on the way in which Iranian aggression has affected Middle Eastern countries besides Israel.

• Non-Violence
  You’re Not Protesting Like Dr. King — A compare-and-contrast article that highlights the many ways in which contemporary protests are failing to take advantage of the hard-learned lessons of Doctor King and the civil rights era.

• Social / Economic Complexity
  There isn’t always a “long arc” of morality — A sobering but helpful reminder that the arc of history does not automatically bend toward justice. If we want to avoid an unjust future, we have to be very careful about what we work for and how.

Reader Suggested Links

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

• The Nature of Complexity
  Six-Chart Sunday – Nobody Knows Nuthin’ (Spring 2026) — In case you needed convincing, a series of charts that demonstrate that the complex system in which we live is not very predictable.

• US Politics
  An Ally’s Guide to Understanding Trump — For those trying to understand President Trump’s negotiating style, a surprisingly persuasive argument that there is a pretty solid method to his apparent madness.

• Race / Anti-Racism
  Is Systemic Racism a Thing of the Past? — From the Journal of Free Black Thought, a thought-provoking (and controversial) argument that culture, not bias, drives today’s disparities.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  Stop asking how the war ends. — A thought-provoking essay highlighting the importance of thinking about war in complexity-oriented terms (as distinct from a complicated approach which gives people the illusion that they can engineer their preferred outcome.)

• Education
  Stop Meeting Students Where They Are — An argument that college teachers ought to rediscover the virtues of rigorous and demanding teaching (rather than the cultivation of happy customers).

• Education
  We Are Being Taught by Fools - Harvard University Proves It — A highly critical look at the ways in which elite universities have responded to the ever-changing social and political pressures of recent decades.

• Immigration
  An extract from the book they don’t want you to read - Suicide of a Nation — A quick peek at a controversial new book that tries to explain why so many are so alarmed by the dramatic changes that immigration is bringing to Western Europe.

• Interstate War
  The Corrupted Moral Logic of Modern War — An argument that the muddled way in which many, especially on the left, think about the morality of war is actually contributing to, rather than helping limit, its horrors.

  

Colleague Activities

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

• US Politics
  Beyond MAGA: A Profile of the Trump Coalition — From More in Common, a highly detailed analysis of Trump voters which identifies four categories, each with distinct values and motivations: MAGA Hardliners, Anti-Woke Conservatives, Mainline Republicans, and the Reluctant Right.

• US Politics
  Beyond MAGA: Perceptions of Trump’s Leadership — Another part of the multi-part series on Beyond MAGA, this one examines how the source of President Trump’s power is his ability to play different roles for different groups of supporters across his coalition.

• Communication Complexity
  The Bad News Echo-Chamber of Pro-Democracy Substack — An interesting effort to unpack the complex web of relationships that exist between key actors in the left-leaning sectors of the pro-democracy space.

• Hate Mongering
  Navigating the “Social Contagion” with Alison Sher — Are your media feeds reflecting reality or just manufacturing outrage? David Beckemeyer talks to Alison Sher about her new book on viral ideologies and the culture war.

• Effective Problem-Solving
  Logan County’s Story of Change: Building a Bright Future (2026) — A “story of change” report for Logan County, OH, prepared by The Harwood Institute for Public Innovation in partnership with the United Way of Logan County and Honda.

• Saving Democracy
  DEMOCRACY REPORT 2026 Unraveling The Democratic Era? — A report from Varieties of Democracy (V-DeM) which says that America is facing “autocratization” at an unprecedented pace, marked by executive overreach, intimidation of media and dissenting voices, and declining trust.

• Education
  Terms of Engagement – Can Ideological Diversity Improve Campus Culture? — Professor Eitan Hersh, the inaugural director for Tufts University’s new Center for Expanding Viewpoints in Higher Education, wants to create a new campus atmosphere of “robust intellectual life, where norms of curiosity and goodwill reign.”

• Peacebuilding
  Keeping Peace on the Agenda: Civil Society in Times of Global Instability - Annual Report 2025 — The Civil Society Platform for Peacebuilding and Statebuilding (CSPPS) has published its 2025 annual report, outlining the progress that it has made in strengthening collective action, amplifying local voices, and advancing policy influence.

• Theories of Change
  USA Needs a Government of National Unity — An intriguing proposal that the United States should do what many other countries have done when faced with serious threats and deep political divisions -- form governments of national unity.

• Social / Economic Complexity
  The Meshwork of Relational Infrastructure — A resource for those who want to invest in and nurture networks of constructive advocates.

• Constructive Communication
  A Tale of Two Stories — An exploration of the two competing grand stories that dominate our time -- one that focuses on highlighting differences and a second that focuses upon building bridges.

• Saving Democracy
  Resources for for the Pro-Democracy Community — Developed by a team of lawyers and advocates, Democracy Forward is now making available a collection of legal tools that can be used to defend pro-democracy groups from lawfare attacks.

• Peacebuilding
  Nonprofit Toolkit: Resources for organizations facing government investigations — This toolkit offers best practices for responding to politicized government investigations.

• Theories of Change
  Why Nothing Changes—Even When Everyone Agrees Something Is Broken — The report on the Just Citizens experiment in rebuilding self-government.

  More Colleague Activity Listings

News and Opinion

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

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  The War Is Going Better Than You Think — For those who live in anti-Trump media bubbles in which the President is never portrayed as doing anything right, a counterbalancing argument that the war is actually going pretty well.

• Leadership
  America Needs a Trimmer — A perceptive argument for a third kind of leadership -- something better than technocrats or bold visionaries.

• Class Inequity
  David Goodhart on Why the Educated Elite Lost Touch with Democracy — An interview with the author of a perceptive and important book about the vast cultural divide that has arisen between our society’s elites and the rest of the population.

• Culture and Religion
  TWAA: The West Is Worth Defending—and People Are Ready to Join — An update on the Restoring the West project and its attempt to defend “Western Civilization” in what it sees as a clash with other civilizations with other theories of governance.

• Media Reform
  Save us, Digital Cronkite! — Rare, extensive, and, hopefully, well-founded musings about the way in which AI might make it possible to create a new kind of media that rivals Walter Cronkite for trustworthiness.

• Interstate War
  America’s Best New Weapon in Iran Is a Drone Inspired by Iran — A truly surprising story. Years ago the Pentagon copied, improved upon, and started producing large numbers of its version of Iran’s low cost drones. (The Lucas is now playing a major role in the ongoing war).

• Artificial Intelligence
  How Quatum Computing Works — As we contemplate the far-reaching way in which AI will impact our lives, a primer on the next big thing -- something that promises even more dramatic changes in the power of machines.

• Social / Economic Complexity
  The Illusion of Strategy — A provocative essay that tries to apply complexity theory to the understanding of armed conflict.

• Interstate War
  Six-Chart Sunday – The Art of War in the 21st Century — As we quickly slide toward a world in which large-scale war becomes probable rather than “unthinkable,” a set of charts highlighting the rapid and dramatic changes occurring in the nature of war.

• US Politics
  Why Are So Many Democratic Politicians So Far Out of Touch? — A compilation of what political scientists are saying about the dynamics underlying the estrangement between Democratic Party leaders and so many of their hoped-for constituents.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  The Mideast pushed out the Muslim Brotherhood. Here’s where it landed. — A comparison of the contrasting fates of the Islamic extremist group, the Muslim brotherhood, in the Middle East and in Western Europe.

• Interstate War
  How Ukrainian drones paralyze the Russian invasion — An especially good article explaining how wars fought with drones are so different from other types of armed conflict.

• Interstate War
  The drone swarm in Louisiana is a warning about the future of war — A worrying article that makes it clear that the “drone wars” could quickly come to US soil.

• Class Inequity
  Elites and Democracy Part 1 — The first of a thought-provoking three-part essay series examining the troubled relationship between society’s elites and grassroots citizens.

• De-Escalation Strategies
  The Democratic Case Against the Term “Far-Right” — From a Democratic perspective, an explanation of why it is not a good idea to demonize and dehumanize your political opponents with pejorative phrases like the “far right.”

• Civic Education
  A Republic, If You Can Teach It — An important reminder that, before we can expect to “save our democracy,” we have to teach people what it is, why it’s important, and how it depends upon everyone’s civic participation.

• Freedom of Speech
  Don’t Cheer Too Hard for the Facebook Verdicts — A word of caution to those who think that big tobacco offers a promising precedent that we should apply to the harms associated with social media.

• Psychological Complexity
  Marc Andreessen’s Mistake — From David Brooks, an essay that argues that, “The ability to understand, recognize, and label your own emotions is a necessary part of living a fulfilling life.”

• Artificial Intelligence
  The Innovation Trap — An essay exploring the likelihood that AI will enable us to do things that we really shouldn’t do -- things that are so new that we haven’t had a chance to prohibit them yet.

• Crime / Policing / Guns
  What Happens When You Pay Ex–Gang Members to Stop Crime? Ask Chicago. — A sad story about the ways in which some prominent urban peacebuilding projects are failing.

More News and Opinion Links

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.

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 third and final response to David Beckemeyer, Kristin Hansen and Pearce Godwin's discussion of what we call "Fiddling While Rome Burns," and Kristin succinctly calls "fight or bridge"? In our first post, we included a link to David's original essay "What Bridge Building Owes Democracy" and our response to it, which took three newsletters this, this, and this.) We also included Kristin and Pearce's response to both David and us, and a link to David's second newsletter replying to all of us: The Bridge, the Arena, and the Referee: A Response to Guy and Heidi Burgess and Pearce Godwin. Pearce and Kristin both then responded to David's Bridge, Arena, and Referee post which we shared in Newsletter 440, and here, in the third post we add our own comments to all of this, along with thoughts from Harry Boyte, Marie Strӧm and Scott Vineberg. We appreciate your patience and hope you find the discussion valuable!,

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Guy and Heidi’s Response to Everybody

First, thanks to David for starting us off on this discussion, and to Kristin and Pearce for making it so rich, and allowing us to share it here, as well as on David’s Substack, Outrage Overload.

We will start by echoing David’s response to us: “we agree on far more than we disagree” — with David, Pearce, and Kristin.

We think some particularly useful ideas have come out of this conversation. First, we think we all agree that “peace” (meaning people of all different stripes living together without violence and with a modicum of mutual respect — Pearce’s notion that people have to be willing to accept others as “human” is very important. (And it is sadly astounding that we have to write that!) We also agree that fixing and building upon our system of liberal democracy is critically important. Like Kristin, we don’t see this as an either-or, or even a do-this-first-and-this-second situation. Both peace and democracy have to be pursued simultaneously. Hearkening back to what I learned in introductory biology, they are in a symbiotic relationship—each requires the other to succeed.

So then the question becomes how do we pursue both at once? Does it require different people playing different roles? Do we need referees (who are different from the bridge-builders) who focus on protecting the rules of the game, calling fouls as they see them, and imposing penalties for transgressions? Or, should, as David suggests, bridge-builders simultaneously act as referees?

We think the answer depends on the arena one is talking about. If one is facilitating a bridge-building dialogue about a contentious topic, for instance voting laws, the dialogue facilitator certainly should establish a set of ground rules for the discussion and enforce those. Those ground rules should ensure that all participants are treated with respect, that they are allowed to, indeed encouraged to, say what they think without fear of reprisal. Also, all participants should be encouraged to actively listen to and engage with all points of view expressed, including those which they find challenging, even painful, though they can certainly openly note their pain.

Should the facilitator also make a decision about what voting rules are “democratic” and which are not, and call out any participant who advocates for something that, by their definition, is not democratic — for instance, if someone says voters should required to show identification to vote, should the facilitator call them out on that? We think they should not. Supporting or opposing particular voting policies is a decision that individual participants and, perhaps, the group as a whole need to grapple with after hearing views on all sides. The purpose of the discussion is often to simply develop a better understanding of the issues at play, so that participants can later make better decisions about their own political preferences.

There are many arenas other than bridge-building dialogues in which citizens can advocate for particular policies. There is social media, town-hall meetings, city council and state-legislature hearings, citizen assemblies, political party meetings, and lots and lots of other places where advocacy for “democracy,” however one defines it, is completely appropriate. And bridge-builders can certainly attend such processes in those arenas and play an advocacy role there.

But they should be aware, we think, that if they do so in a very visible way, they are likely to be labeled as a “D” or an “R,” and hence, to most people, an “us” or a “them.” And that labeling might affect their ability to do a bridge-building work, even if they don’t want it to, and even if they are very skilled at keeping the dialogue open to all viewpoints. And that, unfortunately, is likely to limit the effectiveness of their work.

Such contagion has also likely contributed to the common complaint that it is very hard to get conservatives to participate in dialogues or other bridge-building activities. We do not think, as we have often heard, that conservatives are less willing to talk to the other side than progressives are. Rather, from what we read and have heard, the problem is that many conservatives have themselves participated, or have heard about others participating, in dialogues which were supposed to be neutral, but were not. Rather, they were used as an opportunity to convince the conservatives that their views were wrong, and that they should change them to more closely align with the progressive notions of “correct.” Most conservatives are, understandably, not interested in doing that.

So, if bridge-builders want to protect their ability to successfully build the broad coalition that all of us (David, Kristin, Pearce, Guy, and Heidi) seem to agree is needed to protect liberal democracy (which we all want to do), we think it is safer to leave the advocacy to others. In his Three R’s Statement that we quoted in Newsletter 434, Bill Doherty said that “If bridge-builders join the “Resistance,” they lose the cross-partisan trust required to bind the wounds of the nation later.” We think he is right. We need to remember that democracy is not a system for resolving societal disputes in accordance with one party’s definition of justice. It is a system for nonviolently managing competing definitions of justice. Doing this is, of course, the realm of referees who look at our conflicts from the perspective of the whole society, rather than just one small-group dialogue.

So bottom line, we think referees are critically important, as are bridge-builders. We should also point out that these roles are just two of the over 50 roles that we identified as being critical to the success of what we have long called a “massively parallel“ strategy for solving problems, strengthening democracy, and building peace (something that David Eisner has usefully reframed as “massively parallel action.”) While our list of massively parallel roles does not specifically include referees, it does identify a much larger array of roles that provide important refereeing functions. These include five types of “lookouts:” who warn us about threats to our democratic society: early warners, discrimination watchdogs, governmental watchdogs, geopolitical threat monitors, and canaries. There are also defenders who don’t just call out bad behavior, they try to defend society from those behaviors. Finally, there are the “democracy firsters“ who believe that defending democracy is a precondition for solving all of our other problems.

We were recently reminded by another reader that William Ury has “referee” as one of his “conflict containment” roles. Ideally, according to William’s Third Side rubric, one should prevent conflict with providers, teachers, and bridge-builders. If that fails, we should resolve conflict with mediators, arbiters, equalizers, and healers. And if that fails, we should contain it, with witnesses, referees and peacekeepers.

Sadly, we have reached the point where we desperately need people working at all of William’s levels and in all of his roles (or, in all of our massively parallel roles) simultaneously. Put another way, we need an all-of-the-above approach to our hyper-polarized political crisis.

Guy has a number of additional comments on various points made earlier:

1. We appreciate David’s clarification that bridge-builders should not become crusaders for the Democratic Party. He says that “My concern is not with which side ‘wins’ the next election, but with whether the democratic area itself survives the contest. We aren’t advocating for a team; we are advocating for the resilience of the system.” We agree with that totally. The problem is that the word “democracy” (and its many variants) have become so politicized that it’s hard to distinguish true efforts to protect democracy from efforts to use democratic rhetoric to advance a partisan agenda. I think we need to spend a lot more effort coming to a consensus about what democracy is and why it’s so important. (As our contribution to such a discussion, we tried to outline our thoughts in our post on the Grand democratic Bargain.)
   

2. David (like many others) also stresses that today’s threats to democracy are “asymmetric,” meaning that he thinks that the Republicans are a greater threat to democracy than are the Democrats. This is probably true at the moment, because the Republicans are in power, so they can do more damage to the democratic system than can Democrats at this time.

But, the assumption that all the threats to democracy are coming from the Republicans releases Democrats from the responsibility of noticing and correcting things that they have done to contribute to our current problems. (See our post on focusing on “contribution, not blame.“) This mindset prevents Democrats from seeing the weaknesses in their strategies that have led to their loss of support among traditional Democratic supporters, such as the working class and minority voters, who have increasingly voted Republican over the last several years. The Democrats would benefit considerably from learning why these voters left. Unfortunately, many Democrats still seem reluctant to consider such questions, and ignore or even quash voices that try to bring such topics to the fore. (See, as an example, the closing down of the very thoughtful blog that addressed such issues, the Liberal Patriot, which apparently was totally unable to find enough funding to continue to operate.)

A second problem with the asymmetric argument is that trying to decide who is worse takes the discussion about how to do better and how to strengthen democracy and changes it into another us versus them: we’re good, they are bad, so we need to vanquish them. It leaves us in the same hyper-polarized, fearful, and hateful state that we are in now.

3. In response to David’s assertion that “if the price of maintaining those [bridge-building] relationships becomes never naming authoritarian actions clearly, we risk building a coalition for keeping the peace rather than defending democracy,” we ask whether going to war (either figuratively or literally) would enable us to better defend democracy. We don’t think so. (If you’re having trouble imagining how bad things could get, look at this article about the civil war that is emerging in England.) It is hard to see how such a “war” could resolve the conflict in ways that both sides would accept. It is, however, easy to see how the dehumanizing hatred that inevitably accompanies such confrontations would produce a legacy of unrightable wrongs that it would take decades, if not centuries, to heal. (If the U.S. has yet to recover from its Civil War 150 years ago, how would a second civil war help?) We must, as we said earlier, defend democracy and peace at the same time.
   

4. We agree that it is important that we clearly define what we mean by “threats to democracy,” and we need to differentiate such threats from the business-as-usual hardball politics that have, unfortunately, been part of U.S. democracy for a very long time. (It would, of course be good to find ways of limiting the use of these tactics.) As a country, we have almost always practiced what we have called, in an earlier post, “power-over democracy,“ — a way of thinking about politics that makes use of techniques such as what Guy calls the “51% hammer strategy“ This strategy focuses on winning with the slimmest possible majority and then “hammering” the losing side to pay off one’s supporters. As a better alternative, we have been trying to highlight the benefits of building a true “power-with democracy“.
   

5. Still, we must acknowledge that the kind of hardball politics being practiced by President Trump is, in many ways, unprecedented. No one before Trump has encouraged rioters to march on the U.S. Capitol to disrupt the certification of the Electoral College vote, nor maintained for years afterward that the 2020 election was “stolen,” even as the Courts have unanimously rejected that claim. Similarly, no earlier President has called for “nationalizing” elections, or so overtly called for the prosecution of his real and perceived “enemies.” (Nixon’s enemies list is, of course, an obvious exception). Trump’s hostility toward our allies, and his staggering level of personal corruption are also, most likely, unmatched by any other U.S. President. These, we believe, are all true “threats to democracy” and should be vigorously opposed.
   

6. Having said all of this, it is important to remember that Democrats have played a major role in the ongoing process of democratic erosion. President Trump is, in many ways, a reactionary president who came to power in large part because of voter rejection of Democratic policies — policies which many, especially on the right, saw as threats to democracy that are comparable to the way in which the left sees Trump. For example, insisting that all government agencies, all universities that receive federal funds, and all businesses that do business with the federal government follow strict DEI policies that give preference to Democratic constituencies (defined according to race and gender identity) is seen by many as a clear example of anti-democratic machine politics. Another example involves the many ways in which “cancel culture” restraints on free speech are used to silence opposition. You can argue that these aren’t as serious as what Trump has done, but it doesn’t matter. They paved the way for Trump, and might well prevent Democrats from regaining power if they don’t promise to alter those policies.
   

7. So, as citizens of the United States, who are concerned about the strength and stability of our democracy, we should be concerned about all these things (and others) and we should seek the broadest possible coalition of people to oppose such anti-democratic actions. Building such a coalition requires decoupling partisan advocacy from the defense of democracy. It requires treating our political adversaries in the way that we would like them to treat us. It requires assuring that the rights of the losing side will be protected. We cannot do that by implying that Republicans are “worse” than Democrats, thereby alienating 50% of the electorate. We agree with Kristin, who said that we need to keep creating spaces for “listening, curiosity, trust, and relationship-building between Americans of different political and ideological leanings ... creating the conditions from which an American supermajority for constitutional democracy can emerge.”
   

8. We also need to be clear about what we mean by “peace.” Sociologists and peace studies scholars make the distinction between “negative peace,” which is simply the absence of war, and “positive peace,” which is a much broader concept including all of the conditions which allow humans to thrive together. Neither define “peace” as the absence of conflict. Conflict is inevitable in human societies, and is actually beneficial when it is carried out constructively. As we have argued elsewhere, democracy is, in essence, a conflict-management system that is far preferable to the alternative, coercion-based system of “I’ll-Fight-You-For-It” rules that inevitably demonstrates the validity of Lord Acton’s observation that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. So, we should all work together to build a healthy, peaceful democracy which contributes to positive peace, not just negative peace.
   

9. In order to do this, we also need to be clear about what the key components of democracy are which we have to protect. Coming up with such a vision is an important task for bridging conversations, because we will only succeed if we work towards goals that are shared by most, if not all, Americans. If our goals are only shared by half of the country, we will not only fail to achieve them, we will fail to defend democracy as well. (We proposed some things to think about in Newsletter 407, and again with ChatGPT’s help in Newsletter 426.) But this is a much longer conversation than we have room for here.
   

10. We very much like Pearce’s “6 Keys to Conversations That Bridge Divides. This is very similar to what we have called “Constructive Confrontation,” which we see as a more promising way to pursue de-polarization, citizen renewal, and democracy than calling people out, even when they are wrong.

The bottom line of all of this, it seems to us (and we think David, Pearce, and Kristen would likely all agree), is that we are living in a very dangerous, but very complex and dynamic situation. In order to build a more positive future, we need lots of people doing lots of different things, pursuing their own goals, in their own ways (what we call “massively parallel action). But they need to try, as best they can, to not impinge on others who are pursuing different goals, as long as those goals are roughly consistent with democracy and peace in the broadest sense of the words. (We can and should challenge those who are pursuing violence or, as Pearce says, clearly dehumanizing behavior.) But we do, also, need to be clear and transparent about what role we are playing, and not try to play two roles at the same time, when their goals are not compatible.

P.S. from Harry Boyte, Marie Strӧm and Scott Vineberg

Right before this was sent out, Harry Boyte and Marie Strӧm sent us a report on a Braver Angels meeting held in Minneapolis/St. Paul shortly after ICE had left, reflecting on motivations for bridge-building work in that climate. Harry and Marie wrote:

The meeting surfaced important questions: Has the immense outpouring of civic support for immigrants and others targeted by ICE agents led to new relationships across differences and made visible immigrant communities which were often unseen? Are we more fractured as a Twin Cities community along partisan lines than we were before ICE? Is resisting injustice and threats to democracy the first priority? Is “bridge-building” a distraction? Is it more important than ever? ...

Harry and Marie didn’t provide answers to those questions, but said it was an “honest, open, and many-voiced conversation. They did observe that:

Holding passionate beliefs and taking strong civic action while learning to love even our “enemies” is hard work. Many felt that putting resistance and bridge-building in opposition to each other is a false binary; they should be seen as complementary – both/and not either/or. Learning the skills and sensibilities of respecting and developing curiosity about those who think differently is key to becoming more effective civic agents of change. It is one of the six principles of nonviolence – learning to understand, not humiliate.

And Scott Vineberg sent a similar message:

Beyond ‘fight or bridge’: focus on surfacing common ground and acting on it. Model and propagate: local people setting priorities, developing solutions and taking action in and through consensus. That’s both real resistance to the status quo and the most effective form of bridge-building.”

Thanks, all, for an important discussion! We're moving on to other topics for awhile, but we are sure this topic will come up again.

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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.

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

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