Newsletter # 474 - July 23, 2026

Citizenship Under Friendly Fire Part 3

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

by David Eisner

This final installment turns from mapping the fault lines to living with them: how a field divided by contrasting worldviews which it cannot see can still pursue its shared purpose without defeating itself. The first two installments traced those fault lines beneath our collisions – and left us at exactly this question.

Virtually everyone working in civic renewal agrees on the destination: a democracy that is inclusive, fair, functional, and peaceful – sustained by thriving, engaged citizens, unafraid to speak their minds and able to work across difference, and by institutions worthy of their participation.

That shared commitment is real. It survives every fault line this essay has mapped – even though we would argue endlessly about what "inclusive" or "fair" or "thriving" really means, and even though our strategies for getting there collide. The destination holds.

What doesn't hold is the assumption that we can reach it without reckoning with the fault lines — because for most of this field, they have never been visible at all. That is what makes them dangerous. The disagreements this series has traced are genuine, and they have bite: they cause practitioners to see each other's approaches not as alternatives, but as threats – to safety, to legitimacy, to democracy itself. But the collisions arrive without explanation – felt as betrayal, or seen as bad faith – because the beliefs producing them run underground, beneath the level of strategy, where none of us thinks to look. There is a purpose to this long act of excavation: what stays buried keeps causing collisions no one can explain. Nothing in what follows asks anyone to un-see what it surfaces. But it does call on us to confront the underlying issues at least as directly as we manage their consequences.

Something else has bite too, and more of it. Every tension inside this field is dwarfed by the pressures outside it: democratic norms disintegrating; political processes failing the people they exist to serve; institutions and citizens locked in spirals of distrust and dysfunction. Whole groups are being victimized and dehumanized and gridlock is throttling the country's capacity to meet its greatest challenges. All of this compounds collapsing trust and spiraling contempt, and the window for renewal narrows daily. 

No one in this field looks at that inventory and shrugs. Each views the emergency through their own lens, and every lens brings a different element into focus, for the crisis is not one consistent thing. It is a tangle of failures, some of them pulling in opposite directions: facts dismissed and facts weaponized, spaces that exclude too much and spaces that admit too much, malice unseen where it works and malice alleged where it doesn't. In such a threat-rich environment, finding appropriate focus requires its own discipline – and the discipline is proportion: the fights within the field are real, and they are smaller – categorically smaller – than the fight the field exists to wage.

The civic renewal ecosystem is practiced at helping polarized citizens navigate mistrust and moralized conflict. Bridge-builders, facilitators, and dialogue practitioners have developed robust approaches for de-escalation, for finding shared concerns beneath surface disagreement, for creating conditions under which collaboration becomes possible.

Yet when similarly deep disagreements arise among the organizations, practitioners, funders, and advocates trying to help citizens, those same capacities are rarely applied inward. Internal conflicts are treated as evidence of moral failure, rather than as navigation challenges in their own right. It is a strange gap – a field fluent in the very conflict-management strategies it cannot – and often doesn't even try to – apply to its own conflicts. The rest of this installment discusses how we can close that gap.

Most importantly, the fault lines themselves provide the diagnostic that makes managing the collisions that they create possible. When friction arises, practitioners can locate it: which fault line is active? What differences in values and perspectives underlie the dispute – the role and needs of citizens, the reason for their perceived "bad actions," the role of institutions, the trustworthiness of "facts," or the priorities for change? Simply knowing where the collision comes from – that it has a source on the map, rather than a source in the other party's character – reduces unnecessary escalation before any further question is asked.

The Pattern Beneath the Collisions

Readers may have noticed a pattern running through the fault lines. Positions cluster. Practitioners who see citizenship as bounded and episodic tend to emphasize what citizens receive, tend toward protection and institutional authority, and tend to prioritize structural reform. Those who see citizenship as expansive and relational tend to emphasize what citizens create, tend toward inclusion and earned legitimacy, and tend to prioritize cultural repair. (The malice frame stands apart – it sits off this axis entirely, answering a prior question about whether people can be trusted at all.)

That clustering is less mechanical than it may appear – practitioners hold complex combinations of perspectives, some in tension with others, and almost always more nuanced and individual than any generalization can capture. Still, the pattern illuminates why disagreements can feel so deep and existential. Practitioners aren't just debating tactics. They're operating from different beliefs about what citizenship is and what it requires.

And the pattern reveals something else – something the heat of the collisions often obscures. Every one of these fault-line beliefs sits on a continuum; the binaries are rare. Our inclination is to treat them as either/or: inclusion or protection, institutional authority or earned legitimacy, structure first or culture first. But almost no one lives at a pole. The fiercest advocate of positions based on inclusion virtually always accepts some modification of an every-person-included-every-time approach. The fiercest protector includes far more people than she excludes. The staunchest institutionalist knows expertise sometimes fails and sharp institutional skeptics, nevertheless, board airplanes and take antibiotics. The structural reformer concedes meaningful power of change to citizens, while the culture-repairer understands that institutional shortcomings can poison relationships. Press any practitioner honestly and you will find them somewhere in the interior – holding an imperfect position between the poles, arriving there through experience, constituency, and judgment about which risk matters more.

The binaries, in other words, are artifacts of argument, not accurate descriptions of anyone's stance. When we fight, we describe our opponents as occupying the pole – and ourselves as defending sanity against it. But the pole is nearly always vacant. What exists instead – what practitioners actually occupy – is a distribution spread along each continuum, each optimizing differently, each carrying a different read of the terrain. That is not a field at war over irreconcilable absolutes. It is a field disagreeing – genuinely, consequentially – about where along a shared line to stand.

This reframe matters because it changes the nature of our disagreements. A fight between poles is zero-sum: one side must be wrong. A distribution along a gradient is something else – a set of judgment calls under uncertainty, where different positions cover different risks. The disagreements remain real. Nothing here suggests every position is equally sound, and the essay has argued throughout that some collisions carry real stakes. But a gradient admits something a binary cannot: the possibility that the field needs its distribution – that the approaches arrayed at different points along each continuum cover terrain the others cannot see from where they stand.

Naming this pattern enables something harder than diagnosing others: locating ourselves. These positions are hard to see from the inside. A view held long enough stops feeling like a view at all – it feels like how things are: obvious, neutral, the ground itself, rather than a place to stand on it. Nothing in the daily press of the work announces that one's own orientation is one location among several; the fault lines run underground, and our own location on that fault line runs beneath our feet, but too often out of view. What the pattern offers is a map. It allows practitioners to find themselves on it – to recognize assumptions as assumptions and a position as a position – and to see that those standing elsewhere along the line may be neither naive nor dangerous, but stationed differently.

Two Shifts That Change Everything

The fault lines won't disappear. They're part of the terrain. But once visible, they become navigable. We can choose different routes. We can slow down at the danger points. We can stop treating certain collisions as evidence that others in our field are enemies, rather than as a signal that we've hit a fault line that was opaque or invisible to us.

Two shifts – in how we read each other, and what we do about it – can reduce the damage of our collisions enough that parallel efforts accumulate and build upon, rather than undermine, each other. These shifts require no coordination infrastructure, no shared measurement, no common agenda – but they do require seeing colleagues and what they are doing differently.

A note on who these shifts are for. The fault lines generally run between approaches – bridging, structural reforms, leverage of "facts," who is invited to join. But approaches don't act; organizations and the people in them do. It is organizations that fund, publish, convene, and criticize; organizations through which the conviction that one approach is right becomes conduct. So, while the collisions are between ideas, the fire is always delivered by actors —which is why the shifts are addressed to them. The ask is not a nonaggression pact between institutions. It is that organizational and individual actors stop discharging arguments between approaches as if they represent sides of a war.

The First Shift: the Loyal Opposition

Start with the encounter as it actually feels. Somewhere in this field is an approach we believe is doing damage – not merely inefficient, not merely misguided, but harmful to the very destination we serve. The structural reformer watches bridge-builders convene dialogue while democratic architecture burns, and sees cover being provided – legitimacy lent to people and movements that would end the democratic experiment. The bridge-builder watches many "pro-democracy" advocates brand half the country as the enemy, and sees the next generation of contempt being manufactured under a banner of virtue. The protector sees spaces that admit everyone and calls them unsafe by design; the includer sees boundaries drawn for safety and calls them the quiet death of pluralism. None of this registers as difference of opinion. It registers as threat – often existential threat.

The shift begins in exactly that moment, and it is an interpretive discipline built on two questions:

1. What threat is this approach trying to prevent? And

2. Does this disagreement reflect genuine bad faith or incompetence – or a position at a different point on the continua bridging the fault lines this series has mapped?

The approach that alarms us is not stationed at the pole our alarm assigns it. The people behind it are weighting a risk we also perceive – protection, inclusion, authority, legitimacy, structure, culture – just not identically, and not in the order we would. We already hold some version of their concern inside our own position; and they already hold some version of ours. What divides us is emphasis under conditions of uncertainty, not membership in different moral universes. This reading will not always survive scrutiny – bad faith exists. But the bar for finding it should be high, precisely because the finding matters so much. But as the default, differently-positioned-not-perverse is both more accurate and more useful than the alternative, because it keeps the disagreement inside the shared project, where it can still teach.

And the shared project genuinely needs each of these different perspectives. The destination – a renewed civic and political culture – is too complex, too multidimensional, too varied across contexts for any single approach to deliver. This goal needs portfolio logic, not politeness. A serious investor holds assets she is individually skeptical of, because the portfolio needs coverage against futures she cannot predict. Two serious investors will weight the same portfolio differently without either calling the other's allocation treason. Our approach is one of many. Essential, perhaps; superior for certain terrain, perhaps. Alone, insufficient. The disposition here isn't modesty about our importance. It's clarity about being part of, not the entire solution.

Democracies long ago developed a name for the perspectives that don't "win" the political contest, and for how we understand those seeking change in conflict with the perspectives we seek to protect: the loyal opposition – the recognition that those who oppose what we advocate are not enemies of the project, but participants in it, whose opposition is itself a form of service. The concept was never meant for mild disagreement. It was built for conviction – for oppositions each side believes, in earnest, to be leading the country astray. That is what makes the concept of loyal opposition load-bearing, rather than decorative. It extends the presumption of loyalty precisely where loyalty is the hardest to presume. It is part of what separates a democracy from an autocracy: the standing acknowledgment that the other side is devoted to the same constitutional order, that their resistance is not sabotage but contribution, and that the union is made more perfect by the contest between us – not by our victory in it. It does not require us to stop believing the opposition is wrong; opposition means each side believes exactly that. The shift is not from "wrong" to "different" – we may remain fully convinced that they are wrong.

What changes is the conclusion we draw. Within a Massively Parallel Effort, wrong cannot mean enemy to destroy; it means wrong and still ours to travel with. The model runs on approaches that doubt each other – approaches we would never fund, whose theories of change we may believe are dangerous. They are our loyal opposition – not obstacles the work must overcome or prevent, but constituents of it, covering ground we may not be able to see from where we stand. We need only stop mistaking the loyal opposition for the disloyal kind.

The Second Shift: Saving Our Fire For the Real Enemy.

The first shift governs how we read each other. The second governs what we do when the reading is done – when we've extended the generous interpretation, held our assumptions to the light, and still conclude that another approach is not just different but genuinely counterproductive. Conviction of that kind feels like a license. It isn't.

Not because our judgment must be wrong – it may be exactly right. But the cost of acting on it through attack exceeds any benefit the attack could win. When one organization publicly campaigns against an approach adopted by other organizations, the single critique is never the whole price. Every attack licenses the next. Retaliation follows; alliances are conscripted; funders take sides; and a field that runs on trust begins to run on grievance. The cost isn't the argument – arguments are healthy. The cost is the conflict culture, and conflict cultures, once normalized, consume fields for years.

And there is arithmetic beneath the culture. Competing civic-renewal approaches seek to address the same ills: the disintegration of norms, the failure of processes, the spirals of individual and institutional distrust, the dehumanization of whole groups, the gridlock, the collapsing trust, escalating contempt, and attendant increases in violence. The need to address these challenges dwarfs the need to win any quarrel among us. Fire spent on each other is fire that injures all of our work. Every hour consumed in intramural combat, every relationship burned, every coalition fractured over a fault-line difference is capacity lost to addressing the actual crisis. Saving our fire is not declining to fight. It is choosing our battles, and refusing optional fights against wrong-headed allies, so that we can be most effective fighting where we must.

This is why mutual non-interference isn't a favor among allies. It's an obligation among those bound for the same destination. We don't have to do each other's work. We don't have to praise it, fund it, or partner with it. We just have to stop making each other's work harder.

What These Shifts Do Not Require

It is worth being explicit about what these shifts are not asking – because each has a softer cousin it will be mistaken for, mostly in the vein of performative civility and politeness.

The shifts described here don't require anyone to stop advocating. We will continue to argue for our approach; make its case to funders, partners, the public – even against the alternatives. The line the shifts draw is between making our case and unmaking theirs: between claiming our approach reaches ground others miss, and campaigning to discredit the others as dangerous, illegitimate, or corrupt. Advocacy is the field working. Delegitimization is the field consuming itself.

Maintaining our belief in loyal opposition and in holding fire doesn't require collaboration. Non-interference is not partnership. Any of us can decline to work with an organization whose approach we doubt; we just don't impugn their motives or competence, or treat its existence as an obstacle.

We may remain convinced – after the generous reading – that an approach is counterproductive, even that some actors aren't acting in good faith or with competence. The discipline isn't pretending otherwise. It's declining, even then, to launch the attacks that normalize conflict across the ecosystem.

We don't sacrifice urgent work for comity. No one slows down. The shifts ask only that civic renewal be treated as a common imperative – not less important, or even co-equal, with attacking others in our space, however misguided.

And they don't require coordination, shared metrics, or a common agenda. This is the critical departure of this framework from those based on holistic strategies like Collective Impact or Systems Design. These shifts are internal to each actor – no meetings, no agreements, no shared measures unless we see opportunities for positive change. Each of us adjusts how we interpret difference; nothing else moves.

What Changes If We Make These Shifts

If practitioners, organizations, and funders internalized these two shifts, the collision problem would diminish – not because anyone coordinated, but because:

• Energy returns to the work. The hours and dollars now consumed by intramural conflict – the rebuttals, the whisper campaigns, the coalition triage – flow back toward citizens and impact.

• Impactful coalitions built to last. Partners who read their disagreements as fault-line differences rather than betrayals can hold together through strategic tension; a coalition that can metabolize disagreement is both stronger and more sustainable than one that never faced it.

• More learning. Practitioners out of defensive posture can absorb insight from approaches they don't share; a different threat model becomes a source of learning, rather than a target.

• Collaboration becomes possible – where it's chosen. Nothing here requires working together; that's Collective Impact's ask, not ours. But actors who have stopped attacking each other discover what hostility forecloses: coalitions that span fault lines, initiatives built smarter for having been built by approaches that once only collided.

• The field's doorways multiply. Citizens, funders and other stakeholders differ the way practitioners do. A field engaged in internal attacks forces them to pick a side before they can pick up the work; a field of many legitimate approaches lets each stakeholder across the continuum find the door that fits – and every constituency becomes, indirectly, everyone's.

• Natural role differentiation. If every actor accepts being one holding in the larger portfolio, the field's diversity begins to shape complementary roles – organizations find their niche by mission, rather than by fighting over whose approach should dominate.

• And preserved pluralism: The ecosystem keeps the full range of approaches that Massively Parallel Effort requires. No single orientation captures the field and drives out the alternatives – which, given real uncertainty about what will work, is not a courtesy to the losers. It is how the field hedges its one chance.

• None of this requires resolving the underlying fault lines. The disagreements remain. What changes is how we hold them.

The Craft We Already Own

The path available to step around or over the civic fault lines identified in this paper will be nothing new to civic renewal practitioners – and it has been hiding in plain sight since this series began.

We've identified the importance of extending the presumption of loyalty to those we believe are wrong; holding our fire even when conviction says the other side is doing harm; assuming difference of position before defect of character; and maintaining focus on the proportion between the quarrel in front of us and the crisis around us. None of this is new. It is certainly not invented in this paper – these are the answers we share with citizens to equip them to work together.

Every day central civic renewal approaches ask and equip citizens to engage across differences they experience as profound – to work alongside neighbors whose politics they believe are damaging the country, to disagree without dehumanizing, to build the trust that self-governance requires, even where agreement is out of reach. Although the bridging community delivers these asks of citizens with the greatest force within the civic renewal ecosystem, few, if any, other parts of the ecosystem reject the imperative of citizens finding ways to work together. The most protection-minded practitioner still works to build trust across difference; the most inclusion-minded practitioner still knows some differences are chasms. We do not ask citizens to bridge these gaps because it is nice. We ask it because it is the only thing that has ever worked – because decades of practice have shown that contempt hardens obstacles to engagement, and that the alternative to living with people we believe are wrong is a country no one can live in.

The field possesses, in other words, a proven technology for exactly the problem the field has. We built it. We refined it on the hardest cases in America – on red families and blue families, on climate activists and coal-country parents, on people who each believe the other is dismantling democracy. We have never pointed it at ourselves. And the collisions can feel like betrayal precisely because often neither side sees the fault line producing them – the too often unseen fissures between us which this series was written to make visible.

The field would do well to adopt an approach we can call strategic generosity: applying the relational insights that help citizens overcome divides to the divides in our own field that slow our progress and dampen our momentum. Strategic, because it is chosen on the evidence – the collision tax is real, the window is short, hostility costs more than tolerance, and the tools demonstrably work. Generosity, because that is what the tools are made of: good faith extended before it is earned, the harder reading chosen over the easier one, standing granted precisely where it is hardest to grant. Not a gift. A strategy – one whose entire track record says it succeeds where attack fails.

A field that is teaching a divided country to talk across its worst divide does not lack the capacity to talk across its own. It can often, however, lack the clarity around what the divides actually are and the intention to leverage our own technology on ourselves – and to ask our field to demonstrate the same courage we ask of citizens.

The Discipline Parallel Effort Requires

There is a lazy reading of Massively Parallel Effort – a thousand flowers blooming, everyone doing their own thing, no shape to any of it. That reading is wrong, and the word it misses is "parallel." Parallel is a discipline. A thousand efforts pointed every which way is not massively parallel effort. It is Brownian motion with a mission statement.

Parallel effort, sustained, behaves like a flywheel. The progress achieved by each approach adds momentum to a shared wheel – every citizen re-engaged, every community's trust rebuilt, every reform that holds compounds the energy available to all of us intent on civic renewal. That is how a field with no central engine accelerates. But the flywheel logic cuts both ways: efforts that veer out of parallel – that turn to impede each other – do not merely waste their own energy. They brake the wheel. Intramural combat is not a private cost between combatants; it bleeds momentum from the entire system, at precisely the moment the system needs to be gaining speed.

This is the discipline urgency demands – not the soft ask of comity, but the hard geometry of the model itself. Hold your line. Add your momentum. And do not put your energy into the wheel's brakes.

Conclusion

The civic renewal ecosystem has responded to democratic crisis with seriousness, urgency, and unprecedented ambition. Yet that response has not produced the cumulative impact one might expect. This essay has argued that much of the gap between effort and impact is not primarily about resources, strategy, or commitment. A significant contributor is self-inflicted damage: collision among practitioners who share the same destination, but hold different beliefs about what citizenship requires.

The fault lines are real. Practitioners hold different, deeply held beliefs about citizens – what we need from them, how to handle difference in democratic spaces, whether structural change or cultural change must come first. These differences will not be resolved. They reflect genuine and long-competing differences about how democracy works and what citizenship requires.

What can change is how we hold them. Two shifts – receiving those who oppose our approach as the loyal opposition, and saving our fire for the fight that warrants it – will not eliminate conflict. But every notch we reduce intramural hostility, we free resources for the actual work. Coalitions hold longer. Energy flows toward citizens and solutions. The ecosystem begins to function as Massively Parallel Effort envisions: many approaches, many vehicles, all moving toward a destination none can reach alone.

At Braver Angels, we say: "We believe all of us have blind spots and none of us are not worth talking to." What is true of citizens is true of practitioners. The approach we find most misguided may be seeing something we can't. The orientation we are most tempted to dismiss may be the corrective we most need.

There is a final irony worth naming: the same unspoken disagreements about what citizenship is and what citizens are capable of are not playing out only among civic renewal practitioners. These unseen fault lines are sending ongoing tremors across national politics itself. Much of the populist energy sweeping the country – on all sides – reflects citizens who feel they have been reduced to consumers of a democracy, managed by distant institutions, and who are demanding recognition as independent agents of their own governance. Other citizens seek to increase the legitimacy and responsiveness of key institutions, are discomfited by the inclusion of harmful voices, seek epistemological truth, and prioritize structural changes to the systems that perpetuate group-based inequities. The vehemence on both sides – those who see populism as democratic renewal and those who see it as democratic threat – reflects, in part, the same disagreements we've been reviewing.

Perhaps it is not surprising that a movement to renew democracy would get ensnared by the same tensions ensnaring democracy itself. We are inside the bigger problem – mirroring, and sometimes deepening, the very dynamics we seek to address. That recognition might be the most important fruit of making the fault lines visible. If we can learn to navigate these tensions among ourselves – holding our positions with conviction, while extending strategic generosity to those who hold citizenship differently – we might model something the country needs to see.

The destination is shared. The terrain is fractured. The work is to see the fault lines at all – and then to respond deliberately. The practitioners on different routes are our loyal opposition – not obstacles, and never the enemy. They are the rest of the effort.

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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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