Blessed Are the Bridge-Builders?

As the Trump regime moves to "dismantle" the "radical left," leaders of the civic renewal movement are struggling to build common ground. Maybe their "both sides equally bad" approach is out of date?

Saturday, I got a pressing email from Heidi and Guy Burgess of the “Beyond Intractability” newsletter. Titled “URGENT ANNOUNCEMENT” it urged me to attend a “very important” online event happening Sunday late afternoon called “Dignity Over Violence.” As the Burgesses wrote, the call was launched as a response to the Charlie Kirk assassination, by Braver Angels, a national nonprofit focused on depolarization, and was “intended to help all of us in (or interested in) the civic-renewal, democracy, bridge-building, conflict resolution, and peacebuilding communities begin the work of alignment and collective action around this U.S. crisis.”

Some 26 groups were cosponsors of the call, including Bridge USA, Civic Renaissance, Common Sense American, Civic Health Project, Disagree Better, Dignity Index, FAIR, New Pluralists, Listen First Coalition, Living Room Conversations, Mediators Foundation, Mormon Women for Ethical Government, National Civic League, National Institute for Civil Discourse, Numbers USA, One America Movement, and Root Quarterly. The group names alone give you a good sense of what flavor of project they’re trying to build.

I was intrigued. The “bridge-building” sector has been around for a long time (MoveOn co-founder Joan Blades started Living Room Conversations fifteen years ago, for example) but since 2016 it has been gaining support from philanthropy for all kinds of obvious reasons.* Lots of people are desperate to find ways to tone down the partisan intensity of American politics. Plenty of useful research has been done on how humans process emotionally charged information, how we form in- and out-groups around shared identities, how social media platforms and their algorithms intensify those feelings and identities, and how the “two-party doom loop” has turned ordinary partisan jousting into an existential war for power.

According to research done by the National Civic League, there are more than 10,000 organizations working positively to help strengthen democracy. Carolyn Lukensmeyer, co-director of the league’s Healthy Democracy Ecosystem Map, says that more than 1,500 of those are bridge-building organizations.** But can these bridge-building groups rise to the current moment? And what if the real problem right now isn’t that “extremes” on both sides are making us more fearful and polarized, but that one side has taken power and is drunk with rage and the possibility of stamping out their “enemies”?

I’ve Looked At Hate From Both Sides Now

Braver Angels, which originally had the name “Better Angels” (per Lincoln) but then changed it after a trademark infringement claim, was founded shortly after the 2016 election with seed funding from the Hewlett Foundation’s Madison Initiative. Its mission: to bring Americans together “to bridge the partisan divide and strengthen our democratic republic.” Utah governor Spencer Cox, who talked in the wake of Kirk’s assassination about the need for everyone in America to listen to their better angels and “find a way to stop hating their fellow Americans,” was a featured speaker at its 2023 convention.

Better Angels has positioned itself as the main convenor in the bridging space, putting on thousands of events and workshops on themes like “Being Blue in a Red Environment,” “Being Red in a Blue Environment,” “Skills for Disagreeing Better” and so on. Its website says more than 66,000 people have participated in these events and the group claims 15,100-plus members. Of the 1,400 people who attended Sunday’s urgent “Dignity Over Violence” online convening, slightly less than half identified themselves as coming via Braver Angels. Another fifth were randos like me. The remaining sponsoring organizations each drew a few dozen from their own networks, according to a snap online survey held during the call.

After a choir sang “Amazing Grace,” Braver Angels CEO Maury Giles opened the meeting saying that “we’ve come together to discuss the future of our movement” and recounting his own close connections to Utah and the Utah Valley University campus where Kirk was killed. Then, after noting the series of high-level political murders and attacks that have occurred in the last 18 months affecting both sides of the aisle, he laid down the meeting’s frame. “We have a choice,” he declared. “We can assign blame, excuse violence as something maybe someone had coming, or somehow it's acceptable. And we can really feed and fuel that fire, or we can take our own responsibility for this moment to act instead of react.” Then he contrasted the way Americans from different backgrounds tend to go about their lives without rancor with the “curated world of online and social media…[a] world [that] tells me that DC is locked down with troops and violence is everywhere, that people are angry and afraid. That world tells me that people hate each other and It's time to take out the other side.”

Thus stated, this theme dominated the comments that followed. Braver Angels national ambassador John Wood talked of his regret that he didn’t try to talk to Kirk the one time their paths crossed at a conference because “I let my agitation and disagreement get the better of me.” Jim Robb of NumbersUSA, which says it advocates for “lower immigration,” shared his belief that “in the last few years we’ve had too much self-regard and not enough love for our enemies.” Keith Allred of the National Institute for Civil Discourse said “we need more of everyday Americans raising their voices and engaging, less ceding of the stage to extremists.” Kristin Hansen of the Civic Health Project said, “Each of us has to decide in their own heart, I want to be a bridger, not a divider.” Citing again the artificial effects of social media, she urged the audience to “resist the temptation to succumb to the whirlwind forces, the algorithms, the provocateurs, who want to whip us into a frenzy, who benefit most when we’re divided from one another.” Heather Blakesee of Root Quarterly and FAIR said, “Sometimes I think that our political chasm isn't a parallel line. It's like a zipper, right? Things up at the top end, they're too wide to try to stitch together immediately. So we need to start where we are, in our communities, in our neighborhoods, and that's what will eventually bring us back.”

I listened carefully to all the speakers, hoping to hear someone say something about the rising danger of authoritarianism under Trump. But everyone stayed in their imaginary middle, where both sides in our polarized country supposedly have equal amounts of power to do damage to the civic fabric. No one mentioned the many ways the Trump administration has broken the norms of democratic governance, from pardoning all the January 6 insurrectionists to using the massive power of the Justice Department as well as the federal purse to coerce universities, law firms, media organization, and faith institutions to bend to its ideological agenda. Indeed, other than noting the assassination attempts on Trump last year, no one ever mentioned his name or that of other flame-throwing policymakers like his chief adviser Stephen Miller or chief scold Vice President J.D Vance—now both leading the charge to “dismantle” “radical left” institutions like the Ford Foundation.

In fact, when it came to offering any kind of political critique of either side, the one thing I did hear was a jibe at the left. Jim Robb of Numbers USA asserted that “The biggest problem that the left has had leading to this is this idea that words are violence.” He suggested that this mantra could be misinterpreted by people with mental illness to decide that if words were violently hurting their tribe, they could then conclude “‘I'm gonna stop them with my violence,’ which is a rifle.” Robb shook his head. “I think we've gotta get into the real here. Violence is violence. Rifles are violence, grenades are violence, Molotov cocktails are violence. Words are not violence. Words could lead to violence, but I think when we blend these things together, what we're really saying is, shut up, sit down. We're not going to talk anymore, because your words maybe I may feel so threatened by your words that I may I'm delicately injured, I may get a gun and kill you. No, we've got to say we need more talk, not less talk both sides.”

Since the mantra of the meeting was dialogue and uplift, no one challenged Robb’s implication. Indeed, some if not many of the people in the bridge-building orbit have made much of the claim that leftwing cancel culture is hurting America as much as anything on the right. Indeed FAIR, which stands for “Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism” describes its primary mission as “overcoming identity politics.” Sigh.

To be honest, the nonpartisan bridge-building world reminds me a lot of the nonpartisan govtech world. Yes, of course we all have to get along with each other. Yes, we need government at all levels to work for everyone impartially. But efforts to fix our broken and hyper-polarized democracy can’t avoid politics. Especially when the party in power is choosing the break the most basic rules of democracy—like the ones that say when you lose an election you accept the results, and that you don’t use the powers of the executive branch to go after political opponents and force independent civil society institutions to adopt the administration’s political ideology. This isn’t like solving a math problem where all you have to do is sum up the demands on each side, divide by two and voila, you’ve found the happy middle.

This shouldn’t be that hard. Take what former President Barack Obama just said at an event in Pennsylvania. “The central premise of our political system is that we have to be able to disagree without resort to violence,” he declared. And then he made a critical distinction between how he and his predecessors from the other side of the aisle have viewed their role and used their power, and how the current occupant of the White House is behaving.

Citing the massacre of Black parishioners in Charleston that occurred during his presidency, he recalled, “As president of the United States, my response was not [to ask] who may have influenced this troubled young man to engage in that kind of violence and now let me go after my political opponents.” He noted that President George W. Bush had behaved similarly after 9-11, saying, “I thought most commendable things that he did after 9-11—the most horrific thing to happen to the United States during the course of my lifetime… in the aftermath of this terrible tragedy he made a point [to say] we are going to go after the people who perpetrated this, but he explicitly went out of his way to say we are not at war against Islam. And [he] systematically and repeatedly talked about how we can't use this as a way to divide and target fellow Americans.” He continued:

When I hear not just our current president, but his aides, who have a history of calling political opponents ‘vermin,’ [and] ‘enemies’ who need to be targeted—that speaks to a broader problem that we have right now and and something that we're going to have to grapple with. all of us, whether we're Democrats, Republicans, independents. We have to recognize that on both sides, undoubtedly there are people who are extremists and who say things that are contrary to what I believe are America's core values. But I will say that those extreme views were not in my White House. I wasn't embracing them. I wasn't empowering them. I wasn't putting the weight of the United States government behind extremist views. And that is when when we when we have the weight of the United States government behind extremist views, we've got a problem.” [Emphasis added.]

The ironic thing about the Braver Angels movement is that when Lincoln, in his First Inaugural Address, was appealing to his fellow citizens, to “the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land,” and imagining that they “will yet swell the chorus of the Union” and urging us to not be enemies but friends, swayed by “the better angels of our nature,” he was fighting to hold the Union together and avoid a civil war. In that very same speech, he was denouncing the South’s secessionists and insisting that majority rule had to be “held in constraint by constitutional checks and limitations.” He was asking the side that was in the process of breaking the union over slavery to find its better angels and remember “our bonds of affection.” That’s not the same thing as saying “why can’t we all just get along.”

*No idea ever gets very far in America without money behind it, so it’s also worth noting a few things about who funds this work. Braver Angels is probably the biggest group in the sector, with an operating budget of $5 million. Its biggest donor appears to be The John Templeton Foundation, which gave it almost $1.4 million in 2023 and $1.3 million in 2022. It also has gotten money from more liberal-leaning foundations, like the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, which gave it $262,000 in general operating support in 2022 and the Carnegie Corporation, which gave it $350,000 in 2023.

**A not unimpressive number until you remember that there are at least 10,000 gun clubs and shooting ranges in America.

Defiance Updates

—Robert Kuttner has written a long survey article in The American Prospect looking at the state of anti-Trump organizing nationwide. I think he’s largely right about the overall picture, though I question his claim that “The biggest and most formidable citizen organizing of Trump’s second term is the 50501 movement.” In fact, 50501 is a disorganized mess overall with a few state groups that have their act together. Also missing from his report—efforts inside various religious associations to stand by immigrants and to resist demands that they give up support for DEI or other social justice causes in order to keep receiving federal funding.

—A recent focus group of Latino Trump voters conducted by The Bulwark found every single one of them saying they regretted their vote for the Orange Cheeto. And as Adrian Carrasquillo notes, this finding is reinforced by a new poll of 800 Hispanic voters that found his approval rating dropping 10 points, from 43 to 33%, among young Latino voters and 5% among all Hispanic men, between May and September.

—Department of Good Ideas: Win Without War has started buying billboards in places where Trump has deployed the National Guard and outside major military bases pointing service members to NotWhatYouSignedUpFor.org, a website that connects them to groups that provide advice on disobeying illegal orders.

In Other News

—I spent a long time toiling in the fields of campaign finance reform and then watched, after the Citizens United decision, as much of that work got demolished (other than a few states where systems providing public matching funds to small donors or public vouchers have taken root). It’s been a while since I’ve read anything fresh about how to deal with the problem of unlimited campaign spending by corporations. Well, go check out “The Corporate Power Reset That Makes Citizens United Irrelevant,” a new paper by Tom Moore for the Center for American Progress. He makes the argument that since corporations are chartered by states to have certain powers, including the ability to spend money on politics, state legislators can choose to not grant corporations that power.

This seems promising. (Moore’s essay is very long and I haven’t had the time to read it all, so I can’t say if he also addresses how to deal with wealthy individuals spending unlimited amounts of their own money on politics—which would presumably not be curbed by changing corporate charters.) Voters in Montana are already on the move working to test this proposition with a constitutional initiative aimed at the 2026 ballot. Stay tuned.

—Did Nepal’s rebellious “Gen Z” movement pick the country’s interim prime minister via an online poll on a community Discord channel? That’s what Samik Kharel reports for Al-Jazeera and what Rachin Kalakheti says on X. The New York Times says the conversation on the channel was “so consequential that it [was] being discussed on national television and live streamed on news sites.” Can someone go do their dissertation on this, fast?

—Speaking of no idea getting anywhere without money behind it, check out the new Searchlight Institute, which says it wants to minimize the influence of left-leaning groups over Democratic candidates. Its founder Adam Jentleson, a top political operative, blames the ACLU for Trump’s victory and says the Center for American Progress is “100 percent pure uncut resistance drivel.” It’s coming out of the gate with a cool $10 million annual budget, courtesy of a bunch of billionaire donors, as Reid Epstein reports for The New York Times (gift link). Gosh, why is hippie-punching so lucrative?

End Times

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