Continuing Pearce Godwin's and Kristin Hansen's comments on the "Fiddling While Rome Burns" Conversation
Newsletter #440 — March 30, 2026
Heidi Burgess and Guy Burgess
This is the second part of our 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
We promised to follow up with just one more post, but it turns out between Kristin, Pearce, and us, we had more to say than fit in one more newsletter. So here are Pearce and Kristin's responses to David's second post, and on Wednesday, we will follow with our (Heidi and Guy's) responses to all of this.
Pearce's Second Response
First of all, I'm deeply humbled and grateful to be in all of your company. David, your grace, thoughtfulness, and framing in this discussion are extraordinary. Thank you! This has been extremely edifying and clarifying for me. I'm so glad I stopped the task train Thursday to engage more deeply with everyone's perspective on this.
A few reflections on David's wonderful response. Posted as comment on his post and pasted below. Also see Kristin's comments on David's response.
You write, "This highlights what I might call a Resistance Trap. It suggests that “publicly naming and confronting problems” is a form of partisan combat that disqualifies you from being a peacemaker. In this view, if you point out an asymmetric threat, you’ve “picked a side” and lost your ability to heal... We must distinguish between Partisan Opposition and Principled Accountability."
While I appreciate the distinction you're making here, my concern is that when it comes to maintaining the trust and earning the engagement of the widest possible spectrum of fellow Americans, perception matters more than our intentions. Sadly, I observe that those of us most actively engaged in politics (and thus most responsible for driving up the heat that must come down) are rarely perceiving principle in anything that challenges our own positions. Increasingly, we perceive the political landscape and our fellow Americans in binary, us-versus-them terms: if you don't agree with me and my team, you're clearly on the other team and must be defeated to preserve what I hold sacred. In that environment, I don't know how to act out of "principled accountability" and be seen as anything other than a partisan actor.
I find your referee analogy very helpful. But I'm afraid it doesn't apply as well as we'd like. In the United States today, we don't have teams that agree on any set of rules, let alone subject themselves to them. I'm seeing many Americans feel an existential threat from the other team. When the stakes feel existential, anything goes, rules are out the window, any means justify the ends of avoiding dire threats and defeating the enemy.
I also find your arena analogy very helpful. I applaud other patriotic Americans, such as yourself, who are most concerned about the arena and name what they see as asymmetric threats. That’s important work. As individuals and organizations, we can’t all play every role. My personal conviction is that my particular role, or lane, is maximally effective (perhaps only effective) if I steer clear of the referee / naming / resistance / advocacy role. That doesn’t mean I don’t believe those roles should be played. They should, and I’m grateful others are following their own convictions and highest priorities in doing so.
(Side note related to naming asymmetric threats: I think it's easy for all of us to overweight the threats from the other team and underweight threats from our own team. All threats or offenses are certainly not symmetrical, but a hard and honest look in the mirror at our own team can make us more accurate, more credible, and harder to dismiss as partisan.)
You ask me, "What is the endgame of a bridge that lands in an autocracy?" That outcome would be ugly and devastating, a terrible failure of the American experiment, which I've described in recent speeches as "a bet that a collection of people from a wide variety of backgrounds and beliefs would be able to work through their differences enough to live peaceably and govern themselves. That out of many, we could be one — E Pluribus Unum.”
This is where I see my highest priority complementing yours. The distrust, demonization, and dysfunction of toxic polarization enables and accelerates a descent into autocracy. We become all too willing to deprecate our democratic principles and values of decency to support a strongman (or woman) when the threat from the other team seems so existential. I believe one way — if not the best way, at least the path I’ve chosen — to avoid autocracy or any other destruction of the great democratic experiment that is America is to turn down the heat of toxic polarization by pursuing trust, understanding, relationships, and solutions across divides. If we diminish the fear of our fellow Americans, we undermine the conditions for autocracy and build a more resilient arena for society and governance.
Kristin's Response to David's Second Post:
David - thanks for keeping this conversation going. This latest entry from you is helpful and clarifying for me. I have two follow-up reflections to offer:
(1) Do we need to think about sequencing, as another dimension of the discussion about the "Peace-First" view vs the "Democracy-First" view? Here's what I mean: From where we are at this moment in the U.S, is it even possible to build the "Democracy-First" supermajority we seek, without first repairing our social fabric through increased trust, understanding, and goodwill towards each other? Or does leapfrogging to "democracy-first" risk alienating too many of the people that we need on the democracy train?
My own conclusion, and it sounds like yours too, is that we should / must pursue both tracks simultaneously — with some groups pursuing "peace-first" and others "democracy-first." We can't afford to sequence the work in either order, when both peace and democracy are simultaneously under pressure. Tensions emerge, however, when one track is seen as undermining or setting back the other. For example, the "peace-first" track can feel impeded when the "democracy-first" track seems to accuse one side, or the other, of embracing authoritarianism. And the "democracy-first" track can feel impeded when bridge-building work accommodates / elevates individuals or organizations seen as being anti-democratic.
FWIW, many healthy back-channel conversations about these tensions are happening all the time; the bridge-building and democracy folks know each other well and grapple with these tensions together, in multiple forums.
(2) I find myself thinking a lot lately about Argentina and Brazil, both of which emerged from brutal military dictatorships to democracies that — while certainly imperfect — might offer some hopeful insights and lessons to the U.S. today. I've resolved to study both countries' histories and current conditions more deeply, to better understand what blend of social and structural factors helped lead them from the depths of repression, violence, and autocracy to being more tolerant, pluralistic, and democratic countries today.
We will finish this string up on Wednesday, with our (Guy and Heidi's) thoughts on all of this.
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Two or three times a week, Guy and Heidi Burgess, the BI Directors, share some of our thoughts on political hyper-polarization and related topics. We also share essays from our colleagues and other contributors, and every week or so, we devote one newsletter to annotated links to outside readings that we found particularly useful relating to U.S. hyper-polarization, threats to peace (and actual violence) in other countries, and related topics of interest. Each Newsletter is posted on BI, and sent out by email through Substack to subscribers. You can sign up to receive your copy here and find the latest newsletter here or on our BI Newsletter page, which also provides access to all the past newsletters, going back to 2017.
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