Newsletter #431 — March 5, 2026

Heidi Burgess and Guy Burgess

3. Misperception and Mistrust - Continued

At the end of Part One, we were beginning to discuss David's third "truism," or what, out of context, might better be thought of as one of the "key assumptions" upon which bridge-building efforts are based — assumptions that David no longer believes are valid.  His third assumption is that 

both sides are still operating within democratic rules but [are] trapped in misperception and mistrust. That has been the dominant theory of polarization for a decade or more: if we could fix media diets, reduce affective hatred, increase empathy, and encourage contact, the system would revert to pluralistic equilibrium. But I don’t think we’re in that world anymore. We’re in a live authoritarian contest, where one faction is actively degrading checks and balances, politicizing institutions, normalizing disinformation, and quashing dissent. 

We observed that things were actually worse than that, because both sides have been doing those things, although we agreed that in many respects, Trump has done more damage than the Democrats have. We ended by saying, however, that the assumption that autocracy is solely the domain of Trump, and if we just get rid of Trump and put the Democrats back in power, democracy will be "fixed," is not true. Democracy will simply be "backsliding" in different ways. 

Two posts we wrote earlier relate to the point.  The first one was the one we referenced in Part One, "The Grand democratic Bargain — Humanity's Best Defense Against "I'll Fight You for It" Rules. The second one was Partisan, Power-Over Democracy vs. a Power-With Democracy for All.  Both Trump and the Democrats are engaged in, at best, hyper-partisan, power-over democracy that depends entirely on "I'll Fight You For It (Might-Makes-Right) rules" to dominate those with whom they disagree. While President Trump's tactics are arguably more severe, Democrats also have their own brand of hardball politics.

If we are to avoid sliding even further down the slippery slope toward a society in which one party totally dominates and disempowers the other, we must recognize both sides' contributions to this power-over struggle, and start using power-with (integrative and collaborative) power approaches to try to fix our democratic system.  

Focusing on Contribution, Not Blame

As we've said many times, when people are caught in a highly-escalated, deep-rooted conflict, they tend to simplify the narrative about what is going on into an us-versus-them story in which we are right, and they are wrong.  The left says that Trump, personally, and the right by association, is destroying democracy. They accuse the right of being lawless, racist, sexist, trans-phobic, greedy, uncaring, clueless, or whatever. Do people on the right say, "oh, yes, you are right!  I will change!" No, of course not. Rather, they get angry and they support leaders who promise to "own the libs" — in other words, do and say things that make liberals furious. They loved Trump's promise of being "their retribution," and many don't seem to object when he tries to carry out that promise.

The right does the same thing.  They accuse the left of being self-congratulatory, elitist, hateful, anti-American, and pro-crime. Does the left agree? Again, of course not.  Do they change their policies? No. Do they soften their rhetoric? No. They turn it around and accuse the right of hate.

Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen have written a book called Difficult Conversations. This book focuses entirely on interpersonal conflicts and ways to engage in them more constructively. But the ideas presented apply to higher levels of conflict too. Most important in this context is their distinction between contribution and blame.

Blame is what we just talked about — it’s judgment. It’s the assertion that the other person (or group, or party, or even country) is wrong. Blame looks backwards at what happened and who was at fault. Contribution, on the other hand, seeks understanding — understanding how both (or all) sides contributed to the situation. It does look backwards, but it looks forwards as well. How did we each contribute to getting into the mess that we are in? And what can we do to change the way we interact so that this sort of thing doesn’t happen over and over again?

The cost of playing the "blame game" that Stone, Patton and Heen point out is that understanding gets missed. You never figure out, really, what went wrong or how to make things right. You just get caught in an escalating battle of finger pointing.  Focusing on contribution, instead, allows you to figure out what happened, and then you can problem- solve together to figure out how to avoid it in the future. 

Bridging conversations can do that.  People can find out why the other side thinks so differently than they do, and why they are afraid of the other side (you). And it is almost never because they are all those bad things we expect them to be.  Instead, people almost always have legitimate reasons for thinking the things they think, caring about what they care about, and even voting the way they did. If we understand this reasoning, we are in a much stronger position to work together to mutually solve problems. While many bridging efforts are just dialogues without any attendant action, they do teach people the communication skills needed to work collaboratively in other settings. They also help build trust and relationships between people that often deeply distrusted and had no relationship with people on "the other side" before. 

As an example of how powerful this can be, I remember talking to Laura Chasin years ago about the abortion dialogues she ran as one of the founders of the Public Conversations Project (now Essential Partners). While the dialogue participants seldom changed their minds about abortion after participating in PCP dialogues, Laura explained, they almost always had newfound respect for the other side. One participant phoned Laura long after participating in a dialogue to report that she had gotten pregnant at an unexpected time, and was trying to decide what to do about it.  The first people she called for advice, she reported, were the people on "the other side" that she met in the PCP dialogue. 

Similarly, The Basement Talks Documentary is a movie made about the most high-profile abortion dialogue that PCP ran early on with leaders from both sides of the debate in Boston. The secret dialogues went on for almost six years, starting after an anti-abortion activist shot and killed two people and injured several others at two Boston-area clinics. As the movie's website says, "None of the participants would change their minds. But the dialogues would change their lives."  And, in the aftermath of the dialogues, the leaders also changed the character of the conflict in Boston, as all six were able to calm down their followers, and significantly de-escalate the conflict.

Coming back to today, in addition to an ever-growing number of dialogue programs, much more effort is going into actual collaborative endeavors at the local level — in the form of citizen's assemblies, deliberative forums, civic hubs, etc, by organizations such as Better Together America, Braver Angels' Citizen-Led Solutions, The Harwood Institute and others. Both polls and experience suggest that people are hungry for a new type of politics; they are tired of the hatred, the fear, and the resulting governmental stalemate, and they are eager to participate in and support efforts that will actually get things done.

This has even been done at the federal level in small doses. Consider the very successful Congressional Select Committee for the Modernization of Congress, which was a completely bipartisan committee that passed an astounding 200 resolutions by consensus. And while you might think "yeah, well, that was before Trump." It wasn't. The committee's first two-year term was during the first Trump administration and the committee was continued for another Congressional term right after January 6, 2021.  Co-Chairman Derek Kilmer (who we interviewed in December, 2024) told us:

I still remember walking away from one of those meetings and saying to my chief of staff, "Man, we're cooked. I don't really know how we're going to do anything."

So we took a risk. We brought in an expert, an outsider, to facilitate a discussion, someone with expertise in conflict resolution, to facilitate a conversation about the events of the 6th of January 2021, where the 12 members of our committee talked through it. To my knowledge, it's the only place in Congress where Democrats and Republicans actually had a conversation about the events of January 6th.

And that was hard; it was raw. And after that conversation, I had colleagues on the committee say things like, "Well, I still disagree with what happened that day, and I still disagree with my colleagues, but that was healing for me. I'm willing to work with them." And all of this is through the lens of that initial takeaway, which is, if you want things to work differently, you need to do things differently.

So, yes, we agree with David. Not all threats are equal. There are a great many people making very strong arguments that many of the actions taken by Trump and his closest allies represent extreme threats to democracy. But that does not mean that 1) all Trump supporters pose an equally dire threat, and hence should not be included in the "big tent" of potential collaborators, working on strengthening our governance systems. Nor does that mean that Democrats get a free pass for all their illiberal actions.  Everyone should be held to account for what they have actually done and plan to do, while not being unjustly accused (or suspected of) things that they have not done.

Focusing on contribution, not blame and bridging activities can help us sort through that.

How Does Bridging Relate to Power and Politics?

David addresses this question by first citing Jonathan Stray, the author of Better Conflict Bulletin. Quoting David,

Jonathan Stray has argued that bridging must explicitly engage questions of power and democratic norms, rather than imagining itself as above politics. I think he’s right. The central problem is perhaps no longer that we disagree too intensely, but that some actors are undermining the conditions for fair disagreement entirely. If the civic arena collapses—rigged elections, normalized political violence, total information warfare — then bridge-building becomes performative at best. At worst, it becomes cover.

This is interesting, because we don't interpret Jonathan's post in the same way David does.  We see Jonathan as illustrating that bridge-building is still very much needed. He is not saying, as we read him, that bridge-building is performative. Rather, he says the opposite. He particularly focuses in on the important role bridge-building can play in correcting misperceptions which, he explains is the "first best way" to reduce support for political violence.  After describing at some length the research done by More in Common about the "perception gap," Jonathan ends his post by saying:

There are many ways to correct misperceptions about people from the other side — who we have less and less casual contact with — but one of the best is simply to talk to them. Of course, not all talk is created equal. Communication across deeply felt divides requires facilitation to ensure a positive experience. This is exactly what the hundreds of bridge building organizations across the country do.

Going back to the notion of bridging, power, and democratic norms, mediators frequently say that in mediation "power is left at the door." We think that image is false. Mediators can try to empower the lower power group(s) by giving them training in negotiation, helping them do data collection or even prepare presentations, allowing them to speak first (or have the last word), and by setting ground rules that better enable them to stand up to the opposing side. But at the end of the day, the higher-powered party will still likely have better BATNAs, and hence, quite possibly, better negotiating options.  So yes, bridging — being a close cousin of mediation — must acknowledge and work with power, because power is generally not "left at the door." 

We also agree that bridging should "integrate questions of democratic norms," if by that David means norms of power-with democracy. Here different viewpoints are raised, heard, and considered; facts are carefully examined for accuracy, and decisions are made on the basis of all of that information for the betterment of all. That is what we were describing earlier, in terms of both dialogue and collaborative efforts. 

If, however, David means the more common form of power-over democracy, where all the effort is put into beating the "bad guys" in the next election, and then hammering them with policies you favor, but they abhor, then we'd say "no, bridge-building should not integrate those norms." 

We see bridging as an attempt to lower the heat of traditional adversarial politics. It is an alternative process to try to help politics become more power-with and less power-over.  Thus, we don't see it as "above politics," but rather as a tool to help change, perhaps, over the long term, how politics is viewed, and carried out.

We will continue this discussion in one more post, part 3, 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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