Newsletter # 471 - July 13, 2026

Heidi Burgess and Guy Burgess

Citizenship Under Friendly Fire

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

by David Eisner

Installment One — The Aim of Citizenship

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

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

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

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

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

The tension I’m describing has deep roots in democratic theory. One tradition sees democracy as something citizens produce through active practice: association, deliberation, civic habit, relational trust. Running from Tocqueville through Dewey to Putnam, it anchors the field of civic studies, which takes citizens as democratic producers. Another — from Schumpeter and Lippmann through today’s institutionalists — sees democracy as something institutions deliver: citizens choose among elite-crafted options, and quality depends on getting institutional design right. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Do We Need From Citizens?

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

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

Bounded or Expansive?

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

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

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

Different Visions, Different Programs

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

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

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

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

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

When Citizens Get It “Wrong”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where the Collisions Happen

The collisions play out at multiple levels.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Hardest Question: What Change Do We Really Want?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Citizens’ Roles — Receiving and Shaping Democracy

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

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

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

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

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

Coming in Installment II: Who are Enemies?

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

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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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