Newsletter # 472 - July 16, 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

How Do We Handle Difference?

The first installment of this three-part essay argued that practitioners often hold positions informed by genuinely different — and often unspoken — beliefs about citizens: whether to see them as recipients of democracy or its co-creators, and whether to read troubling behavior as malice, as incapacity, or as legitimately different priorities. We experience these beliefs as obvious, as simple common sense — which is exactly why colliding with someone whose positions rest on different core beliefs can feel less like disagreement than like bad faith or stupidity.

In this installment we’ll continue showing how those beliefs about the nature of citizens don’t stay abstract. We’ll see how decisions about who to include or exclude, and whose knowledge to trust or not often emerge from where you stand on these fault lines — and those decisions are where the collisions turn sharpest.

Who Belongs? Inclusion and Protection Collide

No fault line fractures coalitions faster than this one: who belongs in the civic spaces we build, who decides, and on what grounds?

For practitioners who prioritize inclusion, every citizen must be included in democratic dialogue and decision-making, period. Inclusionists differ on what this requires of any single space: a minority holds that every space should be open to all, while most distinguish between governmental activities and private activities — a state-sponsored civic assembly usually owes openness to every citizen, while a nonprofit workshop or other privately convened space may not. But collectively, they argue, the spaces must do what no single one can: ensure that every citizen’s voice is heard and that all can take part in the work of building our democracy. No one is left out. It is a demanding vision, and for those who hold it, boundaries around any particular space are tolerable only because the wider ecosystem is meant to catch everyone any given space cannot.

Those who prioritize protection see this differently, and coherently so. If some who seek entry come in bad faith — to dominate, to dehumanize, to exploit the legitimacy of the space — then a blanket guarantee that everyone belongs somewhere is not a floor to defend, but an opening to be used. They separate two things that a call for inclusiveness can run together: first, what a democracy owes everyone, regardless of their views — standing under law, equal protection, a vote — and the more contested questions of voice, representation, and a meaningful place in deliberations. Almost no one proposes stripping the first set of rights; the fight is over the second. Inclusion, in this view, is not the unquestioned goal; it is one value among several. Sometimes it yields to the safety of other citizens, or to the imperative to reject ideas dangerous to the democracy they see themselves as building.

Both orientations believe they are protecting the vulnerable. They collide because they are working from different maps of who the vulnerable are.

Two Maps of Vulnerability

One map locates power in demographic and structural terms. White Americans, men, the wealthy, straight and cisgender people hold systemic advantages. People of color, women, the poor, LGBTQ individuals and others face unfairness born of structural disadvantage and of individual and systemic prejudice — enduring victimization and harm that civic spaces can either mitigate or reproduce. “Inclusion” that ignores these asymmetries forces vulnerable people to engage on unequal terms with those who benefit from their marginalization. On this map, protection means designing spaces that don’t sustain or foster such harm.

Another map locates power in cultural and institutional terms. Coastal elites, credentialed professionals, prestige media, and universities hold enormous influence over what counts as legitimate discourse — and routinely demean, dehumanize, and “cancel” those outside these institutions. They exclude the voices and dismiss the needs of the working class, the religious, the rural, those without college degrees. The people seeking to protect the vulnerable, as defined on the first map, are often exercising cultural dominance over — and harming — the people seen as vulnerable on the second map. And they are misusing the language of protection to do it.

Practitioners using one map may genuinely not see the power imbalances that the other map reveals — and they may instinctively reject them when named. Each tends to experience the other as acting in bad faith, either ignoring structural harm or weaponizing the language of harm to silence dissent.

Often, beneath the conflict between these two orientations lies the fault line we set up earlier: how a practitioner reads citizens who act in ways they find dangerous or undemocratic. The incapacity frame says “bring them in and inform them.” The legitimate-priorities frame “says “bring them in and understand them.” The malice frame says “keep them out — they enter in bad faith, and their inclusion does harm.”

This is the fault line driving friction over “who belongs”: those who read certain citizens as bad-faith actors will move to exclude them; those who don’t, won’t. And the stakes of that move are large — to those who see democracy as built through relationship, writing someone out is a relational severing that damages the civic fabric, whatever the justification.

But defining someone as a bad-faith actor doesn’t settle the matter — it only raises the next question: whether to act on that reading by excluding them. And here, even those who share the malice frame divide. Most do exclude. Others override their misgivings and include anyway. Some of these trust that bad faith can often be contained through careful methods and guardrails without shutting people out — they call it containment. Others refuse to hand anyone the authority to decide who gets written out at all. So the fault line runs in two stages: how we read the actor, and then whether — and by what right — we act on that reading. This surfaces the question that the loudest voices rarely reach: it is not whether some people act in bad faith, but who decides, and by what authority, which citizens carry that label.

The Hardest Case: Do They Belong?

The contradictions between these maps become the most fraught at the edges – especially when those who represent or protect the demographically vulnerable encounter those who argue to include people who embrace perspectives or behavior consider prejudiced or hateful.

This is where the belonging fault line stops being abstract, and where the two grounds for restraint we named earlier — containment and authority — do their hardest work. What should we think about organizations that engage people whose views most of us find repugnant — the practitioner who sits in dialogue with Klan members, the organizer who builds relationships inside Antifa, engagement with groups whose ideologies seem flatly opposed to democratic pluralism?

Here I step out of my diagnostic stance to say plainly what much of the field currently resists: no one gets written out of pluralistic democracy.

From my perspective, this is not a claim about how far any one organization should go, or whether extreme views deserve respect. It is a claim about authority — the second of our two grounds, now carrying the full weight. The question isn’t whether we’re better off including people who hold views we find abhorrent; there are strong arguments on both sides. Rather, the question is: even if we could agree on whether someone does or doesn’t deserve inclusion -- who gets to decide who belongs? This is the question almost no one in the field addresses — including those most confident about which extremists should be excluded: who should hold the power to draw that line at all?

My answer is: no one. Not because exclusion is never warranted in a given room, but because the power to exclude from democracy itself is the power to tyrannize. Once any faction — however well-intentioned — holds the authority to declare certain citizens outside democratic life, that authority will be abused. History offers no exceptions: McCarthyism, loyalty oaths, ideological litmus tests, the machinery of voter suppression. Each time, the power to define who belongs was captured by those who used it to entrench themselves and silence dissent. This is why the floor — standing in the democratic community — cannot be anyone’s to revoke, however dangerous the citizen. What remains contested is only the ceiling: which rooms engage them, and how.

Which is exactly where containment — the first ground — comes back in. To say no one can be written out of democracy is not to say every space must admit everyone. The two are different questions. Conflating them is the error underneath much of this fault line’s heat. Just because one believes that each citizen who lives in a democracy should be included in shaping it, does not necessarily mean that each dialogue-generating initiative must include each citizen.

Whether a given organization should engage that citizen is a question of mission and capacity — and, whether potential harm to others in the group can be contained through method and guardrails, rather than exclusion. Most organizations should not try to engage everyone. The vast majority are built to serve populations closer to the center, and that is exactly what they should do. An organization convening the wary middle isn’t doing lesser work than one engaging members of the Klan. It is doing different work, appropriate to its design — and both are legitimate precisely because the ecosystem needs the full range.

The implication for fellow practitioners is direct. If my organization lacks the capacity — or the willingness — to engage a particular person or group, that is fine; we should do what we do well. But, here’s the point I am  building to: the organization that does engage them isn’t betraying the cause of civic renewal. It is a specialized vehicle reaching terrain ours can’t reach. Criticizing others for engaging a population we wouldn’t is friendly fire the field cannot afford — and it mistakes a boundary around our room for a verdict on who belongs in anyone’s room – that is, in the democracy itself.

When Facts Aren’t Enough

The question of belonging leads directly into a second question that generates its own heat: what is true? Who hasn’t felt the frustration of others simply refusing to acknowledge a “fact” we hold to be both obviously true and decisive for where one should stand? Sea levels rose half a foot or more over the past century. Border crossings tripled over four years. COVID may have originated in a lab. The national debt grew under presidents of both parties. Most House seats are safe, their winners chosen in low-turnout primaries. Each sounds like the kind of claim that could be settled by checking — yet each becomes contested, reinterpreted, or waved away, depending on what it seems to imply and who is listening. The question of whose fact should be trusted in democratic deliberation sounds abstract. It stops feeling abstract the moment someone refuses to grant what you consider a plain, verifiable fact — or insists on a “fact” you believe is false.

The frames assuming, alternately, incapacity, legitimate-priorities, and malice as the reason for what we consider bad action also shapes how we perceive what citizens know and believe is legitimate information. The polarity here comes in opposing perspectives about whether knowledge is made legitimate based on what we can call "institutional-authority" or "earned-legitimacy."

The institutional-authority frame grounds trust in method and credential. The scientific method, peer review, credentialed expertise, and institutional vetting exist precisely to separate reliable knowledge from speculation, anecdote, and motivated reasoning. When experts converge, that consensus deserves deference — not because experts are infallible, but because the alternative is chaos, every opinion counting equally, regardless of evidence or training. What this frame fears is the erosion of shared epistemic ground: if expertise can be dismissed whenever it’s inconvenient, deliberation loses its footing in reality. Manipulation gets easy, and the loudest or most cynical voices win.

The earned-legitimacy frame grounds trust in track record and context. Knowledge claims are always embedded in social contexts, and the institutions that produce “authoritative” knowledge are themselves shaped by power, funding, ideology, and blind spots. Expertise deserves respect, but not automatic deference. The question is not only “what do the experts say?” but “why should I trust these experts?” — especially where their record is mixed, their interests entangled, and their errors fall on others. What the earned-legitimacy frame fears is capture and overreach: when expertise becomes a trump card that ends debate, or when questioning consensus is treated as ignorance or bad faith. This turns knowledge turns into a tool of domination, rather than a resource for shared understanding.

The citizenship continuum shapes which frame a practitioner leans toward. Those who see citizens as recipients of democracy tend to see them as recipients of authoritative knowledge — their task is to receive correct information and act on it. Those who see citizens as co-creators tend to see knowledge as something citizens help produce and evaluate, bringing lived experience, local context, and prioritized values that institutions lack. As before, this mapping is a tendency, not a rule.

The “Follow the Science” Earthquake

The pandemic exposed this fault line with unusual clarity, and the phrase “follow the science” became the flashpoint. In hindsight, both the institutional-authority and earned-legitimacy frames were partly right. Those grounding trust in institutional authority were right that public-health guidance had to be taken seriously and that politically motivated rejection of expertise cost lives. Those grounding trust in earned legitimacy were also right that institutions projected certainty they didn’t have — about masks, transmission, the virus’s origins — and that “follow the science” often functioned as rhetoric to end debate, rather than as a description of an evolving evidence base. Each time guidance shifted, it confirmed skeptics’ suspicion that authority was being wielded as a cudgel. And both failed: one side projecting false confidence, the other giving cover to conspiracy.

The language of “disinformation” and “misinformation” became part of this dynamic — and the terms themselves turned into contested ground. There is a real phenomenon that earns the label: state actors, particularly Russia, China, and Iran, deliberately inject divisive content into American discourse to destabilize the country. That is information warfare, and naming it precisely matters. But those who ground trust in earned legitimacy point out that the same terms got applied to something entirely different — American citizens voicing views at odds with institutional consensus. On their account, when a citizen who questions vaccine policy or disputes an official narrative is labeled a source of “misinformation,” domestic dissent is treated as functionally equivalent to foreign interference. That conflation, they say, is itself delegitimizing — and it deepens the very distrust it means to cure.

For many, the hardest part is this: some skeptics were right. The lab-leak hypothesis, once derided, became a legitimate subject of investigation; concerns about school closures, once dismissed, proved well-founded. And yet institutional guidance on the core questions — vaccine efficacy against severe illness and death, the reality of transmission — was largely vindicated, its failures ones of overreach, rather than of the underlying science.

What neither side did well was reckon with their own intransigence. Institutions rarely faced their own failure — not only getting things wrong, but prioritizing compliance over honesty, defending credibility, rather than earning it. And many skeptics rarely faced theirs — treating institutional overreach as proof that the underlying science was false, when even the guidance that overclaimed and bullied usually rested on something real. Each side found it easier to indict the other than to reckon with the uncomfortable complexity of its own position.

The composition of my own field, I’ll say plainly, made this harder to see. Bridge-builders — and civic-renewal practitioners generally — are drawn overwhelmingly from institutions: our organizations are themselves nonprofits, think tanks or university centers, and we are nearly always highly educated. That double pull made the institutional-authority frame feel like common sense, even to those with the strongest bridging perspective, rather than one position among two. And for bridge-building specifically, the cost was steep. Aligning with institutional authority on contested questions signaled which side we believed needed correcting — quietly moving us into the camp of those “fixing” the very citizens we claimed to engage as equals.

I was not immune to this challenge: early in the pandemic I set out to engage vaccine-hesitant citizens. I approached it, without quite admitting it to myself, as a problem of information — they had the wrong facts, and good engagement would fix that. Then, in one conversation, I heard myself — the tone I was taking, the way I'd already sorted them into people who needed better information. I realized I hadn't come to understand them; I'd come to correct them. The discovery wasn't that they were right. It was that I'd quietly dropped my own humility the moment I decided that the version of the facts I believed simply had to be the right one. I'd stopped treating them as equals.

Navigating Who Counts — and Whose Facts Count

These tensions matter. Design choices about who belongs have real consequences for real people. Epistemic commitments shape what deliberation can even attempt. And practitioners hold genuinely different views, often forged by different experiences of harm. The point is not to resolve the two fault lines, but to hold them with enough clarity that disagreement stays navigable.

What would it look like to hold them well?

Practitioners who prioritize protection would acknowledge that exclusion carries costs — deepening alienation, foreclosing persuasion, confirming the grievances of the excluded. Designing for safety isn’t the same as silencing dissent, but the line between them takes constant vigilance to hold.

Practitioners who prioritize inclusion would acknowledge that some participants do cause real harm to others in civic spaces — and that designing for safety can be a legitimate approach, rather than just gatekeeping.

Practitioners who ground trust in institutional authority would acknowledge that credibility is earned, not assumed — and that defending expertise means reckoning honestly with its failures, not dismissing every challenge as ignorance.

Practitioners who ground trust in earned legitimacy would acknowledge that not all skepticism is equal — and that some institutional knowledge, however imperfect, is genuine collective learning that shouldn’t be cast aside because the institutions that produced it disappointed us.

None of this resolves the fault lines, and it isn’t meant to. The disagreements are real and worth having — sharply, in public, without apology. The journey to our destination can survive disagreement; what it cannot survive is contempt: practitioners treating those who work from the other framework as fools, sellouts, or enemies, rather than as colleagues who weigh the risks differently. Coalitions rarely fracture over the substance of these questions; they fracture when the substance curdles into mutual delegitimization — when “your view puts lives at risk” becomes “you’re a science-denying crank.” Or when “you over-trust institutions” becomes “you’re a credulous stooge.” The collision tax comes due not in the disagreement itself, but in the energy spent attacking each other rather than doing the work.

What Must Change First?

Even practitioners who agree on the destination face a brutal sequencing question: given limited resources and urgent timelines, what must change first — the structures that shape civic life, or the civic culture that animates them?

This is, in some ways, the strategic expression of the questions Parts I and II explored: what we need from citizens, and how we handle difference, ultimately shape whether we prioritize systemic or cultural change when we can’t do everything. Recall the bounded-to-expansive continuum from the first installment — the axis running from citizenship as episodic duty to citizenship as continuous practice. It surfaces here one last time, now as a question of sequence.

Structure or Culture?

Some practitioners believe structural reform must come first. Civic culture is largely downstream of the rules: how elections are conducted, how districts are drawn, how campaigns are financed, how votes are counted. When the structures are rigged, expecting citizens to behave well is asking them to flourish in poisoned soil. Fix the structures, and healthier civic culture becomes possible; leave them broken, and no amount of dialogue will matter.

Others believe civic repair must come first. Structures are downstream of culture — rules and formal systems reflect the civic health of the people who create and sustain them. When citizens are fragmented, distrustful, and unable to work across difference, even well-designed structures get captured or corrupted. Repair the relational substrate — rebuild trust, belonging, shared identity — and better structures become achievable; skip that work, and structural victories will be shallow and reversible.

The continuum shapes these positions, imperfectly as always. Those who see citizenship as bounded and episodic — centered on voting and institutional engagement — tend to prioritize the structures that shape those moments. Those who see it as expansive and continuous — centered on relational practice — tend to prioritize the soil in which relationships grow. Tendency, not destiny.

What Counts as “Rigged”?

The structural critique gains force from a claim about fairness: the game is rigged, so fixing the rules must come first. But what counts as “rigged” depends on who’s looking. One side points to gerrymandering, voter suppression, dark money. The other points to media gatekeeping, academic monoculture, professional environments where the wrong opinion invites reputational ruin. Cultural and institutional power rigs the game as surely as electoral rules do — and those calling loudest for structural reform are sometimes those who benefit most from cultural dominance. Practitioners who wave off one side’s experience of unfairness will struggle to reach the citizens who feel it most acutely.

The 2026 Collision

This fault line is not theoretical. It is playing out now, in funding decisions and organizational strategies, as the field struggles to help the country turn away from crisis and dysfunction.

Funders and organizations oriented toward structural reform are pouring resources into electoral defense. They see populist movements as authoritarian threats and frame the moment in existential terms: democracy itself is on the ballot, and every dollar not spent defending democratic architecture is wasted. They don’t experience this as partisan — they experience it as defending democracy against movements that would dismantle it.

Their critique of relational work cuts deep. Emphasizing understanding and inclusion, they argue, provides cover for movements actively dismantling democratic architecture. Insisting on “not demonizing” populist voters slides into not adequately opposing populist leaders. Dialogue risks legitimizing; symmetry risks laundering; inclusion risks demobilizing. The relational practitioner, in this view, isn’t neutral, but complicit — offering rhetorical cover to those who would end democracy, a useful innocent serving forces they’d never knowingly aid.

Funders and organizations oriented toward civic repair see it differently. They watch “pro-democracy” mobilization with alarm, hearing in it a framing that effectively means “anti-half-the-country.” And they wonder: if we win this election by further dividing the country, what exactly have we won?

Their critique of structural work cuts equally deep. When “pro-democracy” forces declare over and over that “democracy is on the ballot,” they argue, the message constructs a binary — you are with us, or you are against democracy itself. For millions who support populist candidates for reasons that feel legitimate to them — economic grievance, cultural displacement, distrust of elites — the message received is: you are outside the democratic community. And here, the relational practitioner argues, is the corrosive mechanism: tell people often enough that they don’t support democracy, and some begin to believe it — the label meant to isolate and shame grants permission instead, releasing people from obligation to a system they feel has already expelled them. On this account, structural strategies aren’t merely failing to solve the problem; they are constructing the very opposition they fear.

Each side experiences the other as making the crisis worse.

What If Both Critiques Are Right?

Here is what makes the structure-versus-culture fault line so hard: both critiques are at least partly right.

The structural critique of relational work is sometimes right — inclusion and dialogue can provide cover for anti-democratic forces; bridge-building can demobilize opposition when mobilization is what the moment demands.

The relational critique of structural work is also sometimes  right — electoral combat can construct the opposition it claims to fear; “pro-democracy” framing might can expel millions from the democratic community and accelerate the very authoritarianism it opposes.

Both are true – at times.  And understanding that changes everything. If I might be wrong, I need the other orientation in the field: not as an ally, but as the possible corrective to my own blind spot. The practitioner I find most misguided might be the one seeing what I can’t.

Navigating Civic Change — Structure and Culture

What would it look like to hold this fault line well?

Practitioners who emphasize structural reform would acknowledge that their victories are shallow without a civic substrate to sustain them — that winning elections while further fragmenting the citizenry may not be winning at all — and that citizens who experience “pro-democracy” framing as an attack on their legitimacy are not simply confused about what democracy means, but are feeling real harm.

Practitioners who emphasize civic repair would acknowledge that trust-building happens within structural constraints — that some conditions make healthy citizenship nearly impossible, and that even the most effective bridge-building cannot stop structural capture on its own — and that their work, however necessary, may not be sufficient to the moment.

Both would recognize that democratic renewal requires what each provides: structural integrity and citizens with trust, belonging, and agency. Neither alone suffices. Practitioners who dismiss the other’s contribution aren’t merely being ungenerous — they are undermining the shared project they both claim to serve.

This is the collision problem at its most acute — vehicles bound for the same destination, crashing because they can’t see the fault line beneath them. The parallel efforts that Massively Parallel Effort depends on don’t just fail to reinforce each other here; they actively undermine each other’s legitimacy, competing for finite resources while impugning each other’s motives. The collision tax in this case isn’t only inefficiency. It is escalation, fragmentation, and the very polarization both sides oppose.

Coming in Installment III: Taking Common Aim

And that is where this installment has to leave things — at the collision, unresolved. We have now mapped all the fault lines: what we need from citizens, how we handle those we find dangerous or wrong, and what we believe must change first. What we have not yet done is say how to travel terrain this fractured without the collisions themselves becoming the thing that defeats us.

That is the work of the final installment — not a call to set differences aside, and not a resolution of the fault lines, which don’t resolve. It is something harder, and more useful: a discipline for engaging with these disagreements constructively, not destructively, so that we can use these disagreements to make us stronger, more effective, and all moving with more speed toward our shared destination.

Subscribe to the Newsletter

Please Contribute Your Ideas To This Discussion!

In order to prevent bots, spammers, and other malicious content, we are asking contributors to send their contributions to us directly. If your idea is short, with simple formatting, you can put it directly in the contact box. However, the contact form does not allow attachments.  So if you are contributing a longer article, with formatting beyond simple paragraphs, just send us a note using the contact box, and we'll respond via an email to which you can reply with your attachment.  This is a bit of a hassle, we know, but it has kept our site (and our inbox) clean. And if you are wondering, we do publish essays that disagree with or are critical of us. We want a robust exchange of views.

Contact Us

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.

NOTE! If you signed up for this Newsletter and don't see it in your inbox, it might be going to one of your other emails folder (such as promotions, social, or spam).  Check there or search for beyondintractability@substack.com and if you still can't find it, first go to our Substack help page, and if that doesn't help, please contact us. 

If you like what you read here, please ....

Subscribe to the Newsletter