Debilyn Molineaux Talks about Bridging, Visioning, The Bridge Alliance and JEDI Futures

Heidi: Hi, I'm Heidi Burgess with Beyond Intractability, and I'm talking today, June 15, 2026, with Debilyn Molineaux, who I've known for several years. She's been in the bridging, democracy, civic-renewal—whatever you want to call it—field for over 20 years now. She started out co-founding Living Room Conversations and also co-founding the Bridge Alliance, and in there she was involved with the National Week of Conversation. She stayed at the Bridge Alliance for quite a while and then left to start another endeavor, which started out being called America's Future and is now called JEDI Futures. I'll ask in a few minutes why the name change and what all of those things do.

But I always start these conversations by asking people to tell me a little bit more about their background. So dig in a little bit from the highlights that I just gave, and talk about what the image was for Living Room Conversations and the Bridge Alliance at the beginning, and to the extent that you're still involved with them and know what's going on, has that changed? Let's spend a few minutes talking about the past, and then we'll get into talking about the present and JEDI Futures.

Debilyn: Yeah. Well, I think I want to start with my origin story. A few colleagues I've worked with for a long time know this already. But in May of 2003, I was attending a conference at the Omega Center in upstate New York titled “Women in Power.” And it was during a yoga session that I received a calling to go work in politics. It was a mystical, spiritual experience. In that, I saw this vision of what a healthy political culture could be, and was asked if I wanted to help bring it about. And I said yes. And fast forward, here we are 23 years later, and I'm still working on that mission to help create a healthy political culture in the United States.

That led me to running for office and getting involved with women's political groups. And then I found this group of what we called "transpartisan" people at the time. We were hosting leadership retreats where Grover Norquist would sit down and talk to Joan Blades from MoveOn—so Grover from Americans for Tax Reform, very libertarian, conservative-ish, and Joan from MoveOn, very progressive. We were helping these leaders have very meaningful conversations and understand each other better.

As the funding for that wound down and that work went fallow for a while, I still had relationships with the people who attended the retreats. And Joan called me a couple of years later and said, “Hey, I have this idea—what if people could do something in their living room and have a conversation that leads somewhere and helps them understand each other better?” Her concern at the time was, why don't people believe in climate change? She just could not understand it. This was 2010. And out of that bloomed Living Room Conversations.

Then, fast forward a few years, we decided that conversing was not enough. We actually needed a coalition, because there were so many people who were not only doing dialogue work, but there was structural reform that needed to be added, and there was policymaking and think tanks that needed to be engaged, and then media came along. 

So the Bridge Alliance was actually trying to help people who were ensconced in their silos—civic engagement, or structural reform, or policy writing, or media—connect with each other for the sake of a better democracy. So the bridge was across the silos, not between the people. And then the dialogue people, a few years later, came along and said, “You know what? We like this term ‘bridging’ better, so we're going to use it instead of ‘dialogue.’” So there's a lot of confusion that happens around that.

So that's a little bit of—as I saw the next new thing being needed, I would help go and co-found something, start that, and move along. This latest one was JEDI Futures. Where it came from was, I saw that we were doing all of this mental, systems-thinking work, and it wasn't helping people understand how democracy impacted their everyday life. For Joe Smith in the Midwest, or for somebody in the Northeast or in Arizona, democracy is so assumed in our culture that we don't understand its impact in our day-to-day life. And therefore, we also can't imagine what our life would be like if we didn't have it, or if we had a better system, a healthy political system. So this idea of having a personal stake in democracy is where it came from.

Initially it was American Futures, and then I realized it really shouldn't just be limited to the United States, so I shifted over to JEDI Futures. JEDI is an acronym for justice, equity, dignity, and inclusion. It's a free tool online. Anybody can start imagining their future and then share it with their friends and family and neighbors, and start building out the future vision of what we want to live into. And that'll, in turn, help us build a better democracy.

Heidi: So does it focus on a personal vision about what you want to do with your own life? Or does it focus on community, or the nation, or the world?

Debilyn: Thank you for asking that, Heidi, because it does focus on “what is my personal vision for my life.” So many times, if we say, “Well, what do you want your community to be like?” we say, “Well, I want those people to change in the community so I can have what I want,” instead of envisioning, “What is it that I want for myself? What do they want for themselves? And then where's there some overlap that we can build together?” That's been what's missing for me in all of this: we get so tied up in focusing on what we don't want—“I don't want that; I don't want those people causing harm”—that we don't imagine anymore what we actually want for our own lives, what would make a happy life for ourselves. That pursuit-of-happiness piece comes from focusing on what we want.

Heidi: And do people feed what they want back to you, or does it stay with them?

Debilyn: It depends on the process they choose. There's an online visioning tool that they could fill out, and then it gets housed in a database that only I can access right now. I aggregate it to create “what do we all want.” And I've written about that a little bit. There are three-and-a-half things that we all want.

Heidi: What are those three and a half? 

Debilyn: Yes, that was such a tease! In every interview I've ever conducted, people want to have a deep connection with the people in their lives, so they feel like they belong. They want to have a community around them that supports them being themselves and accepts them for who they are. And they want to contribute back to others and to their community. I call it the three C's to make it easy to remember: deep connection, a community of belonging, and a way to contribute back.

And the half: the half is about their relationship with nature, because not everybody mentions nature. But people who do mention nature want to have access to green things, a way to interact with a park, a hiking trail. They want to live on a farm. There's something about nature that about half the people mention in their future.

Heidi: This is irrelevant—I'm just curious—have you been able to trace whether that has any geographic distribution? My theory being that people who live outside of cities would be more likely to seek that connection.

Debilyn: Yeah. When I did the initial research, there were some people who were living in urban areas, or who imagined their future in an urban area, and they definitely wanted access to green space and parks. If they mentioned nature, it was included no matter where they lived.

Heidi: Interesting. Okay. I want to go back into that, but I cut you off.

Debilyn: So part of where I was headed with that was: in the visioning tool, there is a connection to community. Once you're visioning your own life—what you're proud of, how you're going to feel, how you spend your time—these are really important questions to build out what you want for your own future life. I do what I call the “me to we” flip in the questions. I ask people, “Okay, so we've built out this beautiful vision. What is the community that supports you in that?” And this is why I love it when people fill out the online visioning tool and share their information with me. But even better is when they download the PDF and do it with people in their life. Because then, especially if they interview each other, or do the visioning tool together, they start to build community just by using the tool.

Heidi: Okay, that sounds cool. So you're hinting at and what I'm curious about -- how does what you want for yourself project into better democracy if, as you say—and I totally believe and agree with—people don't focus on what democracy means for us? My image is that a lot of folks younger than me—I grew up in the Cold War, when we were in elementary school diving under our desks for nuclear bomb drills. The theory was that if the Soviets, shot a nuclear bomb, somehow we'd be better off under our little wooden desks. I never did understand that one.

Debilyn: I was also a desk diver. And I lived right under NORAD. There's no way I was going to survive it, so why I had to crawl under my desk, I don't know.

Heidi: For people today—from that life, we know the significant differences between communism and democracy. But younger folks, especially folks who grew up when we weren't teaching civics anymore because it was too contentious—so it was easier not to teach it than to argue about it—young folks, I don't think, have much of an idea of what democracy is or why it matters whatsoever. So how do these personal visions help that develop? Or don't they? Are they totally independent?

Debilyn: Well, it might be independent. And I don't want to dodge your question, but I want to go back to this idea of “communism is bad and democracy is good.” We confuse governance and economic system as the same thing, often. We think capitalism and democracy always go together, and communism and socialism always go together. But they're economic and governance models. Part of what we're experiencing today is that democracy and capitalism is broken. Those of us who grew up in a time when it worked well—when the markets worked, and we had a hope that we could get ahead, own a home, actually live the life we wanted—we see democracy and capitalism as the solution, as the path for that. And what kills any governance structure or economic system is corruption and greed. Because in their purest form, they all work. I prefer capitalism and democracy. So knowing what I want will help me identify what will support me to have the life I want. And most people in the United States are going to choose democracy and capitalism, because that's the system.

Heidi: Well, it's the system that rewards individual effort.

Debilyn: At the same time, we can choose to have some socialistic tendencies for the safety net, to help the widows and orphans, if you will. I'm using that in the biblical sense—that's what Jesus said for us to do, to help the widows and orphans. So we need to have some compassion about it, and not let greed determine the policy. Anytime capitalist greed makes governance policy, we the people lose.

Heidi: Right. So corruption is, I think—

Debilyn: It's corruption. It's a really big part of that.

Heidi: I've never been a student of corruption. I have colleagues who have been. But it certainly is my image that it's a much bigger part of our system now than it was back in the '50s or '60s.

Debilyn: Absolutely. And think about coming out of World War II—they had prosecuted war profiteers. So profiteering was a social faux pas. Profiteering was punished by law, and now we reward it.

Heidi: Well, America, even back in the '70s when I was going to graduate school, was well known for funding both sides of lots of foreign wars.

Debilyn: Yeah. I'm just thinking about it within our own culture. Our foreign policy has disrupted lots of other countries, and we've been profiteers for a very long time.

Heidi: Anyway, we're getting off topic. What's your image of—maybe I should jump ahead to the blog post, because it relates to the question I'm about to ask.

Debilyn: Well, can I just make sure that I fully answered your question about how a personal visioning tool, and me knowing what I want for my life, connects to democracy?

Heidi: Yes.

Debilyn: Okay. Thank you.

Heidi: And I think we'll get back to that. For all of our watchers and listeners and readers: I was spurred to ask Debilyn to come and talk to me because I was really intrigued with a blog post that she wrote. I didn't mention in the introduction that she has a blog on Substack -- DebilynMolineaux.substack.com.  I've recently subscribed, and you've posted a lot of interesting things. But one that I was particularly interested in had the title, “Bridging Is Not Sufficient to the Task of Fighting Authoritarianism.” I was intrigued with the title, and with the content of the blog post, and saw it really as relating to a series of newsletters that we've been sending out over the last year or so. Those were started, I think, by David Beckemeyer, who wrote me a personal email asking, is bridging essentially fiddling while Rome burns? I picked up the “fiddling while Rome burns” line, and I think we've had seven newsletters, now, revisiting that. It struck me that your statement that bridging wasn't sufficient to the task of fighting authoritarianism was, in one sense, saying, yes, it is fiddling while Rome burns. So my question is: am I right? Is that what you're saying? And if so, why? And what do we do—do we do something instead, or do we do something in addition?

Debilyn: It is fiddling while Rome burns. That is my assessment today, June 15th, 2026. Because getting along with our neighbors—understanding our neighbors and their motivations—doesn't change our behavior enough to fight authoritarianism. What we need to protect democracy in the United States is to act like the citizens our country needs us to be. And that goes beyond bridging.

One of the things that I found in the bridging community, when I was a deep part of it and a leader in it, was that so many of the people who are doing bridging are doing it because they're trying to avoid conflict. And as we are seeing our system of democracy fail, our institutions fail, we have to address the conflict in order to set up the new structure—because we're all going to want different things. How we argue and debate and decide what is next is going to be conflictual. And I would rather have straight-up conflict that's honest and in good faith than a “let's smooth it over and keep the waters calm” effort. Not everyone in my bridging community is like that, but there are some people who are conflict avoiders, and they're not helpful right now.

Heidi: I long ago made the statement that most mediators were conflict avoiders.

Debilyn: Guilty as charged.

Heidi: —because they didn't like conflicts, so their job was to fix it. Whereas we scholars have been writing for 40 years—Guy's line is that "conflict is the engine of social learning." So if you get rid of conflict, you get rid of social learning.

Debilyn: Totally in your camp now.

Heidi: That's the scholarly approach. The mediation approach doesn't necessarily see it that way. But here's my question that I still don't understand: if we agree that conflict is necessary, does that mean that traditional bridging is destructive?

Debilyn: It's, of course, not destructive. I think it needs to be thought of, though, as a skill set, or a tool that we use to keep our relationships alive—so that, as we're having conflict, they're strong enough to survive.

Because the other reason that bridging is insufficient right now is that there's a group of people out there that I call "conflict profiteers." I didn't like Amanda Ripley calling them “entrepreneurs,” because I'm an entrepreneur. So I wanted to put some negative connotation on it—actually, a friend suggested it. These conflict profiteers have figured out how to hijack our neural pathways and put us in survival mode—fear and anger—and live there. When that happens, we don't have access to our prefrontal cortex to do the critical thinking to get out of it. And bridging requires a prefrontal cortex. So the bridging community is at a complete disadvantage already. And then you provide profit incentives for these people who sow division for the sake of sowing division, and they make money off of it. So we have all these perverse incentives that keep that going. That's the other reason that bridging is hard right now, and insufficient.

Heidi: One thing you said in that article—and I went “Yay”—was that people will go to bridging events, which I still call dialogues, and they'll take a before survey and an after survey, and it will show that their attitudes changed 5%. And as you said, that lasts about two weeks, and then it's gone. I've been saying that about dialogue for a long, long time, and getting into a lot of trouble for it. So I was glad to see you say it. I was also disappointed to find out that you didn't get “conflict profiteers” from us, because we, too, have been using that term for about 20 or 30 years.

Debilyn: Have you really?

Heidi: We have. And I actually was just revisiting our essay on that this morning, thinking to myself, “Hmm, maybe we should change the title to ‘conflict entrepreneurs,’ because that's what everybody else calls it.” But given what you said, I won't.

Debilyn: Thank you. And I will then credit you and Guy for “conflict profiteers.” It's not the path by which I got there, but it is more accurate.

Heidi: No need. But we both got to the same place, and it's nice to have a friend in the corner over there.

Debilyn: Yes. I missed going to an event where Amanda Ripley was speaking last week, because I wanted to tell her personally—I've written her to please change it to “conflict profiteers,” and she has not responded.

Heidi: Well, “conflict entrepreneur” is much more widespread.

Debilyn: In the bridging community, it is, yes. 

Heidi: And in the literature, it is.

Debilyn: Well, that's because Amanda did it. 

Heidi: People probably read more of her than they do of us. 

Debilyn: She is a brilliant journalist.

Heidi: So we can keep on working. So bridging isn't enough—I totally agree—and the results fall off right away. So what do we do instead? Or what do we do in addition?

Debilyn: This is where I go back to the personal visioning tool. Figure out what you want to build. Figure out what your neighbor wants to build. Figure out what your cousin, or your Uncle Bob, wants to build. And you build stuff together. The bridging skills come in really handy, because while you're building stuff together, the relational skills are going to be helpful for handling any conflict that comes up. But building things together, to me, is the answer. We need to build things together.

Heidi: So this sounds like you're thinking very much like, say, Better Together America—that you work locally, that you don't try to affect what's going on nationally.

Debilyn: Well, to me the grassroots that swells up, which is Better Together America. That's where JEDI Futures is placed, where the personal visioning tool is placed, what Better Together America is doing. There are a lot of folks who are working ground-level to swell up. There are other groups of people who are working to do top-down, policy-level stuff. The challenge here is that Project 2025 was a top-down initiative. We are all living through the implementation right now of Project 2025. We don't have enough there there, in my opinion, to have an antidote for Project 2025. There's not enough money or time to put together a 50-year plan like the Heritage Foundation did. So if it can't come from the top down, because we don't have the resources to do that, it has to come bottom-up.

Heidi: Will that counteract authoritarianism, which is, by definition, top-down?

Debilyn: Maybe. Again, until we, the people, know what we want and act like the citizens our country deserves, and then we demand that from the government—the authoritarians have the advantage right now because they're in power. They have too much power. And it's corrupt power. They're trying to rig all of the systems to hold on to power forever, 

Heidi: And they're doing a pretty good job of that. 

Debilyn: They are doing an excellent job of taking control of the United States. And I have friends who support Trump who don't see it. They're like, “Oh, no, he's dismantling everything so we can be free.” That is the story in the president's camp.

Heidi: So one of the things that has always bothered me and astonished me is that the US is split pretty close to 50/50. There's 50% who are apparently leaning in that camp, and 50% that are more progressive—although I should point out that the polls now show, maybe it's not polls, maybe it's actually real numbers, that the majority of voters are now independent. They're not registered as Republican or Democrats. So there is this huge middle. But the two parties—and the Democrats are doing this as well as the Republicans—have done an amazing job of disenfranchising and disempowering and delegitimizing the middle: the bridge builders, the centrists, the Forward Party, and the other centrist parties whose names I can't remember. I really, really wanted to vote for the Forward Party in 2020. And they couldn't raise a candidate because, as I understand it, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party so threatened anybody who would run as a Forward Party candidate that we didn't get one. And my thought was, third parties never win—we know that historically. But if there was ever a time that a third party could have won, it was 2020, because nobody liked the choices we were given.

Debilyn: That's right. 

Heidi: It was a time when I think a third party could have won, but the two parties killed it. And we've got that dynamic going on—the two parties have such a hold, and centrists, people like you and me and Joan, bridge builders, despite what we're saying, we're getting our feet knocked out from under us. And I'm desperately looking for an answer to that.

Debilyn: Structural reform. We need structural reform in how we run our elections. And this is where—love it or hate it—ranked-choice voting...

Heidi: But it's also got the Democrats and the Republicans trying their darnedest—oh, they're trying to kill it.

Debilyn: They're trying to kill it. Absolutely. Just a reminder for folks who don't know: the reason that Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992 was because of a third-party candidate.

Debilyn: That's interesting. 

Heidi: Ross Perot, right? And if Ross hadn't run—this is terrible, I don't even remember who was running against Clinton.

Debilyn: It was George H.W. Bush. It was Bush One. And because Ross Perot was more kind of libertarian-leaning, even though he ran as an independent, Clinton won with 39% of the vote. And so we had a non-majority president because of an independent candidate. After that election, the two parties changed all the rules to make it harder for independents to get on the ballot, because they did not want to see their parties lose power because of independent voters.

And yet independent voters have consistently made up, I think, 42% to 44% of registered voters since 2010, at least. 

Heidi: In most states, there are partisan primaries, so independent voters can't vote in the primaries. And primaries drive, of course, the choices we get. So I think structural reform is needed, but I also don't think structural reform is working.

Debilyn: Well, we need open primaries combined with some sort of ranked voting—there are several ranked-voting systems out there. I like open primaries better: a combination of open primaries to get to the top, and then using the ranking system, whatever it is. Because that way, you get the actual top two candidates that are most acceptable to the most voters. And that prioritizes the moderate instead of the extreme. 

Heidi: However, so far, it's not working.

Debilyn: It's not. I said this one time, about six years ago or so—I was talking with some folks about how we get structural reform happening. And again, structural reform is one of those things that's too wonky. People don't understand how it impacts their day-to-day lives. They know there's a primary, and they're like, “Hey, if I have time, I'll go vote.” Whereas actually that's more important, the way everything's gerrymandered these days. We need something that people connect to their own life, to make sense for them to take action on. And then we need a general strike. We could shift so much of this policy by not going to work. If everybody stayed home for a week—let's take a national holiday, let's call it Citizens' Vacation Week. “Until you elected officials get your stuff together and do these three things, or six things, or whatever many things is on the list, we're staying home. Go do your job.”

Heidi: Interesting idea. I've been flabbergasted at the number of government shutdowns where most government employees aren't coming to work, and nobody seems to care. But if everybody didn't come to work… The sad thing about that is, it's a great idea except for the fact that poor people can't afford to do it.

Debilyn: Well, we would have to figure that piece out. We need to have that safety net to help, so that people who need food and rent and things like that get taken care of. This is part of the challenge in our country, of course. This is why we need to know what's in it for ourselves—because our self-interest, our selfish needs… there's self-needs and then there's selfishness. Our self-need needs to be met.

Heidi: Well, this is where I was really surprised with your three C's. I was expecting them to be a nice house, good food, physical safety—much more fundamental things, not the higher-level things. And maybe, luckily, most people have those physical needs. Which maybe gets me into looking at your second article that I was interested in, which is “Are We Safe?” My background is sociology and conflict resolution. One of the big theorists that I've known about and worked with for a long time was John Burton, who has a human needs theory that was built off of Maslow. 

His notion was that everybody has fundamental human needs, and the three related to conflict that he pulled out were identity, security, and recognition. He argued that if people didn't have those three needs, they would go to war until those three needs were satisfied. He studied intractable conflicts the same way we do—he called them protracted conflicts—and argued that protracted conflicts would occur as long as people's fundamental human needs weren't met. When he first went to George Mason University, which is where he was, at what's now called the Carter School, he was putting this forth and writing to all the other scholars at the time, saying, “Do you want to join in this movement with me?” And my reaction at the time, and Guy's, was, “Nah, that's too narrow.” As the years have gone by, I've decided, “No, John was really right—human needs are fundamental,” particularly identity and security. I don't buy into recognition so much, because I think it's covered with identity and security: if people are recognized, they're recognized because of their identity, and therefore they feel secure. And it seems to me that security—translated into your language of “safety”—is just so core. That's what I was expecting people to answer when you ask, “What do you want?” I was expecting, “I want to feel safe. I want to be respected for who I am.” It's interesting to me that that's not what you're getting.

Debilyn: Well, it is and it isn't. Let me break it down. I'm trained as a life coach, and the visioning tool is actually a coaching interview. The way the questions are framed is, “Okay, how many years do we want to go into the future?” We'd go 5, 10, 20 years into the future. And I'd say, “Okay, we're going to go and observe your older self.” So I'm setting up their imagination. The first question is, “Okay, we have arrived on the platform. Where are we? Describe your surroundings.” And then, “As you're observing your older self, what are you most proud of?” So I'm already putting them in a mind-frame where they've already done what they wanted to do, and they've got what they want. All of those survival needs are already met. Asking those survival questions would imply that they don't have it, and therefore I want it. So I started from a different place. But I find it interesting that I could almost match up the community of belonging, the deep connections, and the contribution with identity, security, and recognition. I certainly see the sense of belonging linking up. And wanting to contribute, that's great.

Heidi: I love it. I'm surprised by it, because I look around and I don't see that so much. Maybe people are either afraid to contribute, or—more likely, I'm thinking—don't know how to contribute. 

Debilyn: Or the things that they want to contribute, there's no one who will receive them. There's a lot of that in the world right now. A lot of times, people just want to tell me their stories. So my contribution is being an active listener when they're sharing something important to them with me.

Heidi: That makes sense. Years and years ago, we did extensive interviews with mediators with the Community Relations Service, which was an organization within the US Department of Justice—until Trump ended it—that dealt with very deep, and often violent, racial conflicts, and it got to be religious and gender conflicts. One of the things that one of the CRS mediators told me really stuck with me, and other ones echoed the same thing: sometimes all we do is listen. Sometimes what people really need is to be heard. Silke Hansen was one of those mediators, who spent a long time in LA after Rodney King. She was working with the Korean shopkeepers whose shops were destroyed during the riots after the Rodney King police beating. It wasn't the Koreans' fight—this was a thing about African Americans—but the Koreans got caught up in it and had their shops destroyed. And Silke really wasn't able to do much for them. But they gave her this huge party when she was leaving, and everybody hugged her and thanked her. And she said, “Why are you thanking me? I didn't do anything.” And their answer was, “You listened. You're the first person who ever listened to us.” So listening is huge.

Debilyn: Well, it's a huge part of healing. Being witnessed—this is part of the recognition piece that you were pointing out. It's not recognition like, “Oh, look at me.” It's more like recognition of me as a human being who has pain and sorrow, and being witnessed in the fullness of my humanity. To me, the role of the witness is so important in healing, because until we feel fully seen, the healing process is stymied. It's truncated; it's not complete until we've been fully witnessed in all of the hurt and trauma and sorrow and regrowth and renewal. That, to me, is recognition.

Heidi: I would agree. Can people get to that through your JEDI tool, or is it more internal?

Debilyn: I think the JEDI visioning tool is a start. One of the things that I found in conducting these interviews across the country was that I became like the dream-holder for these people—of what their ideal future was going to be, of what they were planning for their own life. Obviously, I didn't have the capacity to stay in touch with everyone I talked to, so I don't know how it turned out, or how it changed, because sometimes plans change. That's why I think if people do the visioning tool and share it with others in their life, they start to build those deeper bonds and share future visions that build the communities they want to be in in the future.

Heidi: Makes sense. One of the things that interests me about you doing this is that, nine months or a year ago, I was in an InterMovement Impact Project meeting. For folks who don't know, the InterMovement Impact Project is a group, or coalition—I'm not sure what you call it—that was first organized by Walt Roberts and Caleb Christian, who were trying to—sort of like the Bridge Alliance was doing—build connections between all these people in different silos who were working in structural reform and bridging and activism and all these different things, trying to bring us all together. Basically, what it does is have Zoom meetings about twice a month where everybody talks and gets to hear about what everybody else is doing. And I raised the notion that there really wasn't much consensus about what democracy is, or what we want out of it, and that we really need to do a visioning process. And that comment fell with a thud. I can't remember what was said in response, but it was basically, “We don't need that. We don't want to do that.” I was really taken aback, and I retreated to my hole with my tail between my legs. And suddenly, everybody's talking about visioning. There are a lot of people in IMIP who are now talking about visioning, and you're talking about visioning. I'm saying, “Glory be.” I don't know if you've noticed, but it's been a real change.

Debilyn: Well, when everything they've tried has not worked, where do you go? You go back to visioning. And I want to give you credit, and myself credit, because we also planted seeds in that garden—that visioning was needed—before anyone else could realize it.

Heidi: It might have been—as I was thinking after I said it, it was probably more than nine months ago—but it wasn't that long ago.

Debilyn: Well, I have felt that thud of falling on deaf ears as many times on the IMIP calls, which is why I haven't been for a while. I'm like, “You guys are off doing your own thing and you're the greatest thing since sliced bread, more power to you. I'm still envisioning.”

Heidi: It really interests me, and I don't quite understand it, because every one of the conversations is like every one of the other conversations. It was really exciting when we were new, and it's getting to be an awful lot more of the same now that we've been around for a while. But people keep on coming. It's gotten bigger and bigger and bigger. So I've got to hand it to Walt—he's growing it. It's answering somebody's needs.

Debilyn: Well, as more and more people come into the field, decide to work on democracy, it's a great landing spot for people to get introduced to everyone else. I really appreciate what Walt has done with it, and to carry it on and provide that cadence so we know. But yeah, I just wasn't feeling the love for a little while.

Heidi: Yeah, I know the problem. So, going back to the question about bridging for a minute—

Debilyn: Sure.

Heidi: One of the things that strikes me as a problem in the field, and we've written a whole bunch about this lately too, is whether we need to be trying to reach across the aisle, or whether one half of the aisle is toxic. Those folks on the left who think that the other side is toxic obviously think that MAGA folks are toxic. But there are MAGA folks who think that progressives are toxic too. So we're not alone in that.

Debilyn: No, we're not.

Heidi: Can you fight authoritarianism when you define half of the country as toxic?

Debilyn: I don't like the question, so I'm going to shift it a little bit and answer the question of how do we best fight authoritarianism. To me, how we fight authoritarianism is to build deep relations with people, no matter their belief system right now. But we can agree that consolidated power in the hands of a dictator is bad, or in the hands of a few people is bad. 

Heidi: And my guess is that most MAGA folks would agree to that.

Debilyn: Yeah, they do. 

Heidi: I'm thinking that, just like you said earlier, they don't see what's happening the same way that the left sees what's happening.

Debilyn: you have to remember which echo chamber people are in. For people who are in the right-wing echo chamber, they don't hear about all of Trump's corruption. And for people who are in the left-wing echo chamber, we don't hear about all this screwed-up stuff the Democrats did; we only hear about Trump's corruption. That in and of itself doesn't make it true either way. It just means that we're living in different bubbles. So where is the common ground? 

Here's where I think the bridging skills come in and could be really helpful: defining terms. Sometimes it's language. I got into this Facebook thread of a friend, and I had said something—which word was it? It was really critical, because I was using the word with one meaning. By the time I finally said, “What do you mean by this word?”—I think it may have been “capitalism,” something like that—he had a completely different definition than I did. So we were fighting, so to speak, in these comments on Facebook, and we weren't even talking about the same thing. But we found out we actually had agreement if we used different language. So if we're fighting authoritarianism and consolidated power so we can all experience more freedom, that can get beyond the question.

Heidi: I maybe asked my question badly, but you answered it—which is that we need to bring anybody into this tent who will come. And we need to be open to bringing people into the tent who we wouldn't expect to come, and who we maybe don't agree with and don't entirely trust. But if they'll come into the tent and talk with us—

Debilyn: Yeah, it's the calling-in versus the call-out. The call-out culture repels people, and we need call-in culture to make this happen. People are not going to be perfect. They're going to bring their warts, and we've got to love them. If they're not causing harm to another person, love them.

Heidi: Yeah. And I would say, even if they are causing harm to another person, help them see how they are causing harm, and invite them to change—because I suspect a lot of folks don't see that they're causing harm.

Debilyn: I'm thinking specifically about language. Sometimes I don't want to change the words I use. I don't mean for people to take offense at it, but their interpretation and my interpretation are different. So who gets to win? That's a losing battle. How do we grow thick enough skin where, if it's their intention, we inform them, like, “Here's how other people hear this. What's your intention behind it?” But don't make that much of a deal of it. Sometimes it's easier to change than others.

Heidi: One of the things that Guy and I are struggling with—partly because we disagree, which happens a lot, so it leads to interesting conversations—

Debilyn: Are you humans?

Heidi: Yes. It's over the word “democracy.” We do agree that that word means a lot of different things to different people—there's scholarly documentation that shows that's true. But what I've learned from David Eisner and other friends who are on the right is that “democracy” is largely heard on the right as being anti-Trump. And therefore we shouldn't use the term “pro-democracy,” because that just means anti-Trump, and it turns off all the MAGA folks. And I said to David, “Well, what should we use?” And he said, “Civic renewal.” So I said to Guy, “We ought to change our stuff to say civic renewal.” And Guy said, “No, democracy is too important a word to abandon.” And I do see his point. So now sometimes I'm writing “democracy slash civic renewal,” and that's cumbersome and annoying.

Debilyn: It is. It really is.

Heidi: So I haven't figured out where to come down on this. But there are a few words like “democracy” that are hot-button words and really important words. So I don't know.

Debilyn: That debate's been going on now for about 10 years, on whether or not to say “pro-democracy.” And I refuse to yield the word “democracy” as being anti-Trump. It's not. Here's the other question that I would throw back at David Eisner—hello, David: if pro-democracy equals anti-Trump, then what do the people who are pro-Trump think he's doing, that they think pro-democracy is against their guy?

Heidi: That would be an interesting question. 

Debilyn: If that's their interpretation of it, then what do they think Trump is doing? 

Heidi: That's why I think—I agree with you that if you said to people—I don't remember your language, it was way better than what I'm coming up with—that you want people to be free from being told the way they have to live, and from having all their money stolen… you said it much better than that. Everybody's going to say yes. I think probably they think that Trump is allowing them to live the way they want to live, because he's getting rid of regulations and getting rid of the cancel culture. That's probably why they think he is upholding democracy. But that's just my guess.

Debilyn: Yeah. I was talking with a Trump voter last week, and he was saying a lot of things that I vehemently disagreed with. Mostly. He lives in Texas, and he was here visiting the DC area. He was like, “Yeah, I just live in Texas. It's the Republic of Texas. I voted for him not because I like him—I think he's a jerk—but I think his policies are going to be easier for me to have the life I want. But I live in Texas anyway, and we don't have very many regulations in Texas.” So that was kind of the ethos. And then he goes, “Yeah, well, did you hear what they're doing in New York, that mayor of New York, Mamdani? He's taking people's property away from them.” 

And I was like, “Oh, really?” I haven't researched it, but I would suspect, based on his campaign promises—he was like, “He's taking their property and giving it to the tenants.” And I'm like, “Again, I still haven't researched it, I should go do this, but based on his campaign promises, I would expect that what he's doing is holding negligent property owners to account. And if they don't maintain their properties, he's going to give it to the tenants, because they obviously are not being good property owners.” And he was like, “Oh, well, if that's what he's doing, that's okay.” So I had to get to “What's the story below the headline?” And then I went on to say, “By the way, our Constitution is based on property rights.” That is the priority over everything in how we make decisions. When there's a conflict between human rights and property rights, property rights wins, because it's constitutional. Human rights, 250 years ago—we didn't know what it was, it wasn't a thing. But maybe now is the time for us to do some balancing between property rights and human rights in society. That would help it work for more people, so that our constitutional republic—representative democracy—can survive and thrive. And by the way, here's the kicker to that story: he's a Black man.

Heidi: Okay.

Debilyn: He lives in Texas—San Antonio. 

Heidi: On the other hand, one plug for Texas: they have more windmills than just about any state. Well, their bigger than any state, of course. But they have a lot of windmills.

Debilyn: They have a lot of wind.

Heidi: We've driven around California, and you'd think California would be covered with windmills. Texas has way more.

Debilyn: Wow.

Heidi: So it's not all the stereotypes you expect it to be.

Debilyn: Go Texas.

Heidi: So where are you taking JEDI Futures? What's your future image?

Debilyn: So it's been kind of on autopilot for a little while, because I have to go earn a living—I have a day job. And like many things in the bridging world these days, or in the pro-democracy sphere, it's been underfunded for a long time. So it's on autopilot for right now. I continue, though, to write three blogs a week, podcast on occasion, and try to do things like this to help people find the personal visioning tool. But I have fantasies—or plans, ideas—where a community, maybe through Better Together America, will take the personal visioning tool as their first meeting agenda and get people in that community all connected to their own vision for their own lives, and what kind of community could grow out of that. So that's where it's set up to spring into action right now.

Heidi: Cool. I actually did something somewhat similar years and years ago.

Debilyn: Really?

Heidi: Right out of graduate school, we had something called the Rapid Growth Communities Project. The situation in Colorado and Wyoming and Utah was—this was the 1980–81 energy crisis, when there was a war in the Middle East and OPEC stopped shipping oil to the United States. We had this huge energy crisis and long lines at gas pumps. And the goal was to start pumping oil and mining coal big-time—we didn't worry about it then. There were these little rural towns in Colorado and Wyoming and Utah that just grew like 500% overnight. So we were going into these towns and helping them vision what they wanted their town to be. We didn't include, as we should have, the bust story—because a few years later, this whole thing went away, and those poor towns went bust again. We weren't foreseeing that. They weren't foreseeing that. They were seeing the crisis of rapid growth. And we went in and talked to people about, “What's your image of the life you want to lead here?” One of the big conflicts was old-timers versus newcomers. The old-timers loved their rural community and their old-fashioned way of doing things, and all these newcomers were coming in who were from different cultures—

Debilyn: They wanted to change things.

Heidi: They wanted to change things, and they for sure wanted schools and housing and roads and all this stuff that wasn't there, because it was growing too fast. So there were all sorts of conflicts. We brought people together to do a visioning thing very much like what you're talking about. And over the short term, it was very successful. What nobody saw was the bust.

Debilyn: I know. I drove through some of those Colorado small mountain towns in the late '80s.

Heidi: Were you gone by that time? You weren't still in Colorado?

Debilyn: I was in Colorado until 1990. So it was in the '86 to '89, early '90—my husband and I would just get in the car and go drive around on a weekend. We went through so many of those mountain towns. 

Heidi: We drove up to the Parachute colony plant, didn't understand what we were doing, and ended up with our little green Subaru in between this giant dump truck—I call it a dump truck, but that wasn't what it was. It was one of those excavator things that was just—I mean, you could have put 200 of our little cars in it. We had one of those in front of us and one behind us, saying, “We don't think we're supposed to be here, but there's no way to turn around.” That was an experience.

Debilyn: Oh, how funny. 

Heidi: And that whole development turned off in a day. Exxon pulled out.  So it's amazing how fast small towns can change.

Debilyn: Yeah. 

Heidi: So the hope is that everything that we're seeing now will turn off in a day too. We should be so lucky. 

Debilyn: Well, yes and no. DOGE came in and basically turned off a lot of things in a day. And I don't mind if things turn off in a day, but I hope we have a better plan for how to take care of all the people that are going to be impacted. 

Heidi: And we can't do without government.

Debilyn: No, of course not. If we're going to bulldoze government, then we've got to have an image—and this is visioning too—we've got to have an image of what we're going to build in its place. And what do we want it to do? And how can it do so efficiently?  And what are our standards, or guardrails, to prevent corruption and self-dealing? Because corruption ruins everything. 

Heidi: The thing that amazes me is that that isn't a common word that everybody is talking about. I don't understand that. It strikes me as so blatant and so abhorrent that I don't understand why.

Debilyn: Well, again, if you're in a different news bubble, you don't hear about it at all, so it doesn't exist.

Heidi: That may be, but I think you've heard that the East Wing of the White House was bulldozed. I would have thought that would have bothered a few more people.

Debilyn: It did. It bothered a lot of people, even conservatives. And then the Iran war is another thing. The Epstein files is another. These are all little chinks in that.

Heidi: Yeah.

Debilyn: My little side project, yes, of trying to help us understand—it's a study in the system of power that exists globally.

Heidi: Yeah. So that's another one of your side gigs.

Debilyn: Yes. I study power. I study corruption, and try to help people vision the life they want that is free from corruption and has enough power that they can do what they want to do.

Heidi: Good for you. All right, so last question: what have I not asked that I should have asked, if you want to talk about it?

Debilyn: I just want to say I have a new kitten that is very cute. We didn't talk anything personal. I'm a pet mom extraordinaire, with three cats and two dogs and a husband named Sam.

Heidi: And if you go on Debilyn's Facebook page, you can see lots of pictures of the kitten.

Debilyn: Yes, that's true. And I live on a couple of acres here in Maryland, and I have wildlife menageries all the time.

Heidi: Oh, very good. Well, I have rabbits. 

Debilyn: You know what? I think the wild rabbits are eating the zucchini in my garden right now, and I'm mad at them.

Debilyn: I'm sorry.

Heidi: And I don't know—it's a fenced-in garden, so I don't know how they're getting in, but I have to figure it out.

Heidi: They are rabbits!  Rabbits get in everything. They burrow.

Debilyn: I've looked for burrows. I have looked for openings under the fence. Anyway, I have to go do more research, because I'm sure it's the bunnies. It could be the squirrels, but I'm pretty sure it's the bunnies.

Heidi: That's why I quit gardening—it was a total lost cause. With us, it was the deer. You'd have to build an eight-foot-tall fence.

Debilyn:  Ours is six right now.. All right, Heidi. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking the time.

Heidi: Thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking the time. I'm going to go look at this visioning tool. I'm curious about it. And I hope other people will too.

Debilyn: Well, I hope you and Guy fill it out together. Talk to each other.

Heidi: Unfortunately, I don't think we can use the 20-year timeline, but 10, I hope.

Debilyn: Yeah, 10, 5. I have some young people that can't imagine more than two years out, because they're just that uncertain about their future.

Heidi: I can see that. I do reflect—I got really annoyed with my dad, who lived to 95, when he was getting really old. He said, “I don't belong in this century. I want to die.” And I got very annoyed with him over that many, many times. And I do now find myself thinking, “I'm really glad I'm not a young person right now. This is a scary time to be a young person.” So I sympathize with that. And thank you for everything you've done—

Debilyn: Thank you, Heidi.

Heidi: Over the whole time that you've been working in this field, I think you've really contributed a great amount, and it's been noticed.

Debilyn: Thank you, Heidi. Thank you for letting me share today. I appreciate it.

Heidi: Well, you're welcome. And we'll talk soon.

Debilyn: Okay. Bye-bye.