Newsletter #426 — February 20, 2026

Heidi Burgess and Guy Burgess

It has been quite awhile since we published an episode of our Big Picture Series, so we suspect even our most faithful followers may have forgotten where we left off. In the last episode of that series, Newsletter 407, we wrote, 

As we argued in our articles on the Great Reframing and Power-With democracy, the key to escaping the dystopias of political dysfunction, authoritarianism, and political violence is the mobilization of a "massively parallel" movement to build a 21st-century democracy that truly lives up to its ideals. Such a democracy, we argued, rests on a Grand democratic Bargain – one in which we agree to work together to resist the forces of tyranny, chaos and violence, in exchange for the freedom to live life as we choose, provided that we help guarantee those same rights to others.

The viability of such a Grand Bargain, of course, depends upon the details. What, exactly, are the rights it grants to citizens and what obligations accompany those rights? For democracy to succeed, the terms of this bargain must be broadly accepted across society's many divides. It cannot be seen as lofty rhetoric that merely sugarcoats the efforts of one political coalition to impose its will on another.  

...What is desperately needed is a broadly-based effort to refine and articulate a vision for a revitalized 21st-century democracy that most everyone would be willing to support. 

We then posed a set of questions that any such vision would need to answer. Stated briefly, those were: 

1. How does one determine what is "fair"?
2. How much cultural freedom should people have? When does one group's exercise of cultural freedom start infringing on the ability of other groups to enjoy those same freedoms?

3. How much economic freedom should people have? When does the pursuit of economic opportunities for some start to infringe on the rights of others to pursue comparable opportunities?

4. How can we ensure that government is effective, efficient, and fair?
5. How can we best defend against internal and external threats? And finally,
6. How do we get from where we are now to where we hope to be?

Before we share our thoughts on those questions (which we plan to do in a series of coming newsletters), we thought it would be an interesting exercise to ask ChatGPT to summarize what it surmises to be consensus answers to these questions — ideas that it thinks that those on both the American Right and Left would agree on. Our reasoning was (as we explained in Newsletter 108) ChatGPT and other AI engines have the ability to "listen to" and "digest" a far greater amount and variety of information than any one person or organization. These systems read pretty much everything that is published by pretty much every reasonably responsible information source. (There are, of course, still unresolved questions about how to separate this information from the large volume of misinformation and junk currently circulating around the Internet.) These systems are then able to condense of all that information into summaries of key ideas almost instantaneously. After giving ChatGPT some preliminary readings to illustrate the kinds of ideas we were looking for (not Right, nor Left, but living up to The Grand democratic Bargain and pursuing Power-With Democracy, instead of Power-Over Approaches, we asked it our core questions.

Chat GPT 5.2 "Thinking" came up with twenty-eight single-spaced pages of text, elucidating ten fundamental principles for each of our five questions, along with "scoring mechanisms" to determine whether any particular policy, action, or project would meet those principles.  If any of our readers are interested in the nitty gritty details, we have posted them here. We share some highlights below.

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Better vs. Darker Angels

What we found so encouraging about ChatGPT's response was that it revealed that the principles necessary for the success of the Grand democratic Bargain remain deeply ingrained in US and, to varying degrees, the cultures of other Western democracies. It is clear that, as a society, we still understand what we need to do to make democracy work. Unfortunately, the preponderance of social interactions are moving away from, rather than toward, these principles. This raises the question of how can these two things be true at the same time.

The answer, to us, revolves around something we learned decades ago as undergraduates in Howard Higman's class on Lasswell's theory of propaganda and political thought. According to Higman and Lasswell, people have lots of contradictory attitudes about the full range of political and social issues. Some of these attitudes reflect the better angels of their nature, while others arise from their darker angels. The specific attitudes that people express (and use to guide their behavior) vary according to how they perceive the situation in which they find themselves. Unfortunately, in our hyper-polarized times, when people are so afraid of one another, the darker angels tend to dominate. 

It seems to us that the ChatGPT exercise revealed that our better angels are still there — just largely dormant. While we may be being overly optimistic, we do think that this suggests that the values that it takes to make democracy work are still deeply embedded in our culture. We just need to cultivate situations in which more and more people rediscover wisdom that they knew already. In the U.S., we are in a vastly better place than those in societies that have never had such traditions. Solving our problems does not require embracing some new wisdom; it merely asks us to rediscover long-standing insights (and adapt it to the realities of the 21st century world).

This is in line with John Paul Lederach's elicitive approach to peacebuilding — the idea that peace does not come from the imposition of new, outside ways of thinking. Rather, it comes from the rediscovery of lost values that exist within a culture.

So, as you read the list below, focus on the fact that these are things our society already knows. We just need to celebrate these ideas in ways that enable them to better compete with our now dominant darker angels. 

Fundamental Principles

ChatGPT started out by saying that, to be useful for the Grand democratic Bargain, any "fairness principle" must meet four tests:

1. Reciprocity: People should be able to endorse it even when it constrains their own side in some foreseeable scenario.
2. Translation: It must be able to be expressed as a moral norm (in other words, things we owe each other), and as an institutional design (in other words, what rules and procedures should we put in place?)
3. Pluralism: It must allow for co-existence of different value frameworks (about such fundamental moral issues as abortion, gender, religion, etc.)
4. Non-weaponization: It should be hard to use as a cudgel (for example, "what we do is good, but what others do is bad," and it should be easy to apply symmetrically to all sides).

It then used those fundamental principles to come up with a more specific set of what it (and we) called "fairness principles." We found the names it gave to its principles to be rather esoteric and jargony, so I'm changing them to ones that we think are easier to understand.  But the ideas are the same.

Fairness Principles

1. Universal dignity: Everyone should be treated with dignity and respect, no matter who they are.
2. Reciprocity (rules apply equally to everyone): no one gets an "out," rules are transparent and predictable, and no one can "rig the system." 
3. Rights are paired with responsibilities: People should have the freedom to live as they choose, provided they help guarantee those rights to others.
4. Conflict should be engaged in constructively: Political disagreement must not be prosecuted via threats, harassment, or violence.
5. Good-faith truth-seeking and truth speaking: "Truth" and "facts" are increasingly hard to ascertain, but both leaders and citizens should make the strongest possible effort to seek and share facts that are accurate to the extent possible, and to base decisions on those facts. 
6. Local control with safeguards: Decisions should be made as locally as possible, so as to encourage citizen involvement in decision making and accurate reflection of local cultures and conditions.  However, fundamental rights (see numbers 1-3 above) should still be protected. 
7. Aid for the vulnerable: A fair society must maintain a basic floor of assistance (health, income, safety) so misfortune doesn't become catastrophic.

Cultural Fairness Principles

We then asked ChatGPT to unpack those principles and apply them to cultural conflicts, economic conflicts, and conflicts over the proper role of government in our society.  It came up with more interesting observations.  For instance, it fleshed out #3 above, pairing rights with responsibilities, by exploring what obligations citizens have to protect others' cultural freedoms. This is the mutual tolerance and respectful coexistence formula for dealing with cultural conflicts.  A workable Grand democratic Bargain, it answered, pairs rights with at least these five duties:

1. Forbearance: Do not use state (or personal) power to punish mere dissenting belief. (We added the "personal" here.)
2. Reciprocity: Accept the same constraints on your behavior that you demand of others; 
3. Civic Restraint (we'd call this "constructive confrontation"): treat people with respect, forsake the use of humiliating, threatening, intimidating, demonizing, and dehumanizing behaviors; 
4. Accept loss: If fair procedures were followed, and you lost, accept that loss gracefully and move forward.
5. Good-Faith Engagement: Another aspect of our constructive confrontation, ChatGPT says fairness requires people to engage with others truthfully, without spreading falsehoods or otherwise trying to manipulate other people or the process to enhance their own standing at the expense of others.

Economic Fairness Principles

In applying its principles to economic fairness, it suggested an "invisible fist diagnostic" that can be used to judge projects.  When evaluating any "economic-democracy proposal," it suggests one ask:

1. Does the project reward genuine value creation and constrain rent-seeking/extraction?
2. Does it increase competition and choice, or entrench incumbents?
3. Does it broaden ownership, voice, and opportunity?
4. Does it protect dignity in disruption by helping people adjust to new realities (job-training for new careers when old ones go extinct, for example.)
5. Does it strengthen intergenerational fairness (debt, housing, infrastructure burdens)?

Projects that score well on these tend to contribute to a broadly acceptable “power-with” economic bargain; those that don’t often intensify cynicism and factional blame.

Government Efficiency, Effectiveness and Fairness Principles

We then asked ChatGPT to suggest ways that we can ensure that government is "efficient, effective, and fair." It listed five procedural design principles:

1. Legitimacy comes first: Procedures must be understandable and auditable. Independent bodies (election administration, inspectors general, courts) reduce partisan capture, but they must be transparent, reviewable, and constrained by clear mandates.
2. Symmetry: Rules must apply regardless of viewpoint/party and be enforced consistently. Selective enforcement is the fastest path to “lawfare” accusations and legitimacy collapse.
3. Contestability with finality: A healthy system provides meaningful avenues to challenge outcomes (appeals, audits, courts) but also achieves timely closure so governance can proceed.
4. Equity as equal standing and equal protection, not necessarily equal outcomes. Procedural equity is primarily about equal citizenship, equal access to due process, and equal protection under law. [Having recently interviewed Harry Boyte about "citizenship," we wonder if ChatGPT was thinking about civil or civic citizenship here.  We suspect it meant the narrower, legal term, civil citizenship, although undocumented immigrants deserve fair treatment as well.
5. Friction where it prevents abuse; speed where it enables service. Not all “efficiency” is good. Some friction is essential (due process, checks); some friction is corrosive (pointless bureaucracy that humiliates people and invites corruption).

How to Get From Here to There

For all of these ideas (and many more we skipped), ChatGPT provided a rubric for determining whether any particular program, project, or proposal clearly supports the principle across viewpoints, or not.  A "green score" indicates the proposal clearly supports the principle, a red score shows it clearly violates or weaponizes the principle, and a yellow score is mixed, unclear or implementation dependent.  It also suggested ways that projects can be moved from red to green on each of the criteria. This, to us, seems like an intriguing idea for moving beyond glowing generalities and getting down to the business of deciding, in specific cases, how to make things better.

What Does This Mean?

So what does all this mean?  We see its assessment as interesting and useful in several respects.  First, these guidelines make sense — it seems they should be supported by all those who claim to care about or want to "improve democracy."  They also illustrate that our simple "Golden Rule" guideline: "Do unto others as you would wish they would do unto you" can be fleshed out in myriad ways. And not surprisingly, fairness has an enormous number of ins and outs and judgment calls that need to be made for every issue.  It is not nearly as clear-cut as is often assumed.

Further, we agree, these suggested rules clearly don't provide benefits to one side over the other.  And therein, we fear, lies the rub. We suspect that many who believe that they really are trying to help "improve democracy" would be hesitant to endorse many of these principles.  As we explained in Newsletters 400 and 401 on "Decoupling the Defense of Democracy from Partisan Politics", far too many of us equate "defending democracy" as either defeating Trump and his MAGA supporters, or as thoroughly disenfranchising the culturally over-reaching Left. People who have been thinking for a long time that the other side really does constitute an existential threat are likely to be hesitant to endorse rules that say, for example, that everyone should be treated with dignity, or that equity is equal standing and equal protection, not equal outcomes. 

For such cases, what we need to do is to cultivate a series of confidence building measures that break down enemy images and create situations that bring our better angels forward, while diminishing the influence of the dark angels. We will be talking about ways to do this in coming newsletters, starting with a three-part series revisiting David Beckemeyer's question about whether we are "fiddling while Rome burns, coming soon."

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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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