Kristin Hansen and Pearce Godwin on "Fiddling While Rome Burns"
Newsletter #439 — March 27, 2026
Heidi Burgess and Guy Burgess
with Kristin Hansen and Pearce Godwin
We recently posted three articles related to David Beckemeyer's blog post "What Bridge Building Owes Democracy." (Our three articles can be found here, here, and here.) Kristin Hansen (Executive Director of the Civic Health Project) and Pearce Godwin (Founder of the Listen First Project) then shared comments with us about David's post and our response to it. Then David responded with a follow-on post: The Bridge, the Arena, and the Referee: A Response to Guy and Heidi Burgess and Pearce Godwin to which Kristin and Pearce replied.
We have been traveling, so are slow to get back into the conversation. But we want to share all that has gone on since the first four posts, and at long last, add our thoughts to this excellent and critically important discussion. Again, this is running long, so we are dividing it into two posts, with Kristen's and Pearce's first comments here, and their follow-on comments, along with our comments, coming in a second newsletter.
Readers who are particularly interested in this topic, which has also been summarized as the question of whether to "bridge or fight," might also be interested in our earlier posts on this topic, responding to an earlier, similar inquiry from David about a year ago. These were Newsletter 329, which introduced the notion of the importance of "building islands," where people could meet in the middle, and Newsletters 332 and 333, which included comments on this topic from David Eisner and Bernie Mayer, and our responses to them.
Kristen Hansen's Response to David Beckemeyer's Original Essay
(Originally published February 1, 2026 as a comment on David's "What Bridge Building Owes Democracy Outrage Overload Post. )
Hi David, I listened to your latest podcast and then read this ["What Bridge Building Owes Democracy]. Your prompt is valuable for all of us in bridge-building. Many of us in bridging circle back to a basic question, "Fight, or bridge?" somewhat routinely, especially each time the U.S. undergoes a major rupture as we are right now around events unfolding in Minneapolis. But I usually come back to seeing this distinction as false.
Bridgers are also fighters ... we are fighting for a future in which the vast majority of Americans embrace peace, pluralism, and representative / constitutional democracy. To win this "fight," we have to embrace, model, and convey a renewed vision, anchored firmly in America's founding principles, that an American supermajority can trust, believe in, and see themselves in.
Many data points are offered for how big this supermajority needs to be. I offer two suggestions: First, minority factions can do a lot of damage, so it's in all of our interests to win over as many Americans as we can, to see and join efforts to protect and renew the American experiment.
Second, partisan paths are unlikely to build the supermajority power we need; the Democrats might win back the House, but they aren't capable of building a sufficiently broad coalition on behalf of constitutional democracy. Only cross-partisan, trust-building approaches — inviting in right-leaners, left-leaners, independents, and the "exhausted majority" — can build this coalition.
This is a battle of persuasion, a battle for hearts and minds, and, as such, it depends heavily on building trust between people who have different degrees of comfort and discomfort with the current administration's actions. Many of us intuitively understand that America's "center right" and other right leaners (libertarians, faith and family conservatives, etc.) hold a lot of the cards right now. Our midterm and presidential contests will be close, as they always are, despite everything happening around us. Many of our local and state governments, too, are vulnerable to tilting away from representative, secular democratic principles.
To help hold the line on behalf of democracy, right-leaning voters across the country will need to see America's left-leaning "moralizers" as less threatening to their values and beliefs than the current administration's many challenges to our founding principles. It helps when left-leaning Americans show up in their lives as friends, colleagues, and listeners ... not just as the godless, baby-killing, "woke police" caricatures splayed across their screens.
Finally, today, despite events unfolding in Minneapolis and elsewhere, most Americans do not perceive that we are in a contest between authoritarianism and democracy (and among those who do perceive this, proponents are predictably arrayed on both sides). Most Americans have not read — or nodded their heads to — Jonathan Rauch's bracing article in The Atlantic, "Yes, It's Fascism." Case in point: I have not convinced a single Trump voter I know, including family members and very close friends, to revisit their support for Trump. Not one. Would sending Rauch's article to them do any good? Nope.
So we can shake our fists all we want, but what we need to do even more is to keep building the broadest coalition of Americans, of all political leanings, who are proactively committed to preserving the American experiment. Do all of these Americans have to believe Trump is a fascist? Do they have to be viscerally outraged by what happened to Renee and Alex, as so many of us are? We might want the answer to be "yes," but I think it has to be "no." Perhaps "truth and reconciliation" can come, sometime in the future. But for now, I think the most important and strategic work bridge-builders can do is to keep creating spaces for listening, curiosity, trust, and relationship-building between Americans of different political and ideological leanings ... creating the conditions from which an American supermajority for constitutional democracy can emerge.
Pearce Godwin's Response
(Originally published March 12, 2026 as a comment on David's "What Bridge Building Owes Democracy Outrage Overload Post. )
Hi David, Thank you for sharing your perspective and grappling openly with this pervasive challenge among and for bridge builders. I was pointed to your piece by Guy & Heidi’s three-part response.
On this and related questions about and challenges to our work, I still find myself firmly connected to a perspective grounded in pragmatism: What is the positive and realistic endgame for any approach that does not welcome and earn engagement from our fellow Americans of vastly different backgrounds and beliefs — a supermajority spectrum of views (political and otherwise) that necessarily includes the vast majority of voters/supporters of any major party presidential candidate in order to achieve sufficient scale to establish norms that provide a way forward together?
A key element of that question is the word “earn.” In our increasingly tribal, fearful, distrustful, and hyper-suspicious environment, I’ve seen the most genuinely welcoming and tactically careful efforts dismissed as a tool of “those people,” the enemy, by both sides of the chasm. I am therefore convinced that any effort staking out a position on a contentious political issue (such as the cross-fire charges of authoritarianism) is utterly doomed in its desire to earn the trust and participation of a broad enough coalition to transcend tribalism and meaningfully advance the mission of social cohesion and collaboration.
In your response to Kristin’s comment you said, “I think you're right that relationships and trust-building across that divide are crucial. My concern is that if the price of maintaining those relationships becomes never naming authoritarian actions clearly, we risk building a coalition for keeping the peace rather than defending democracy.”
I would broaden the lens to naming (opposing) any offensive or broadly contested (many for it, many against it) action by either/any side (this of course does not include physical violence). But more to the point… As I search my heart and mind on this, I find that I am willing to pay that “price” and accept that “risk.” Because to me, the even greater risk and danger than losing democracy (which I cherish), is losing the peace — descending into widespread sectarian violence. My primary goal is not defending democracy; it’s securing our ability to peaceably live and find a way forward together as human beings on shared land.
Finally, I’ll offer a few items for reference that capture my own North Star, the foundation for this work, and past argument along these lines. With a bit of commentary in parentheses.
The North Star of the Bridging Divides Movement, as developed years ago by the Bridging Movement Leadership Council and adopted by 100+ attendees at an annual movement gathering: We will thrive as a nation because of our ability and willingness to work together across differences.
(Note that the goals stated here are simply “ability” and “willingness,” not conditioned upon any agreement on anything beyond a willingness to work together across differences. Also note that the North Star focuses on the individual and interpersonal level, saying nothing of governing systems, norms, or institutions.)
My Six Keys to Conversations that Bridge Divides:
- See dignity across differences
- Listen with curiosity
- Suspend judgment and extend grace
- Assume good intentions
- Speak from your own experience
- Connect with respect
(If someone is willing to adopt these norms for an engagement across differences, I would welcome any perspective under the sun into the conversation. I believe we are drawing our circles far too narrowly. My only qualification for inclusion in a bridging endeavor is a willingness to see dignity across differences. Stated negatively: the belief that a fellow American is less than human is the only perspective I would exclude from a conversation or bridging advocacy. In addition, of course, to any threats or acts of physical violence.)
My first public articulation of the pragmatic sentiment I expressed above was published in USA TODAY in 2021:
“But to those who reject the idea of engaging across differences, I earnestly ask, what’s your endgame?
I’ve heard four answers, which I shorthand as delusion, doom, duck and dash.
Many of us behave as if one day, we’ll vanquish the other side into oblivion and not have to contend with them or their values any more (delusion).
Others have given up hope and think we’re irrevocably destined for another violent civil war (doom).
Some have forsaken civic engagement of any kind and secluded themselves with only family and closest friends (duck).
Finally, I keep running into people who tell me they have an exit plan from the United States (dash).
Instead, how about we lean in together on the only universally plausible, palatable and prosperous path forward?”
Back to my pragmatic convictions, on Doom, it’s a matter of numbers for me. The reality of how wonderfully vast and varied our citizenry and the perspectives therein are.)
Thank you for the provocation and opportunity to pressure test my own perspective and conviction on this mission. -- Pearce
David posted his response to Pearce and us in The Bridge, the Arena, and the Referee: A Response to Guy and Heidi Burgess and Pearce Godwin on March 13, and then Kristin and Pearce responded to that on March 14 and 15. We will include those responses and our comments on all of this in the next newsletter. Three other people also responded to David’s first post, who we are not including here. But they can be found at “What Bridge Building Owes Democracy” in the comments section.
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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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