Richard Harwood Talks with Heidi Burgess about his New Civic Path - Full Discussion

Heidi: Hi, this is Heidi Burgess with Beyond Intractability, and it is May 6, 2025. And I'm here with Rich Harwood, who is founder and president of the Harwood Institute, which he'll tell you more about shortly. But briefly, its goal is to help communities, especially really hard-hit and struggling communities, to deal collaboratively with their most pressing problems. And he's been at this for a very long time–decades. And I'm going to ask him to tell us a little bit about that. And then we will fast forward to what he's been doing recently.

First, I do want to say that he's written quite a few books, but the most recent one is called The New Civic Path, Restoring Our Belief in One Another and Our Nation.  I looked at the title and thought, "Wow, is this timely?" And got my hands on an early copy of the book—which you provided. Thank you very much. And I've read it, and it's fabulous. So by the time you're watching this, you will be able to go to Amazon or wherever you get books and buy it. And I greatly urge you to because it's just fantastic. [And, I will note, it is shockingly inexpensive -- $15.00 in paperback and $0.99 for kindle.  That's an amazing deal!]

But we'll give you a little taste of the book, I assume, today. So, Rich, I want to throw it to you now, and ask you to give us a little bit about your background and why you do what you do, and then tell us more about what you're doing. 

Rich: Yeah. First, thanks so much for having me. It's really great to be with you. And thanks so much for the positive reaction to the book. You're never quite sure when you write a book how people are going to react to it, and it's really nice to hear your reaction. 

You know, when people ask me, "Why do I do this?" I say there are four basic reasons. Just in brief. 

• One is I worked on 20 political campaigns by the time I was 23. On the last one, I was an aide to a presidential candidate. And those campaigns struck me. This was back in the '80s and '90s. It's even worse today than it was then. But back then, in particular, when I was young, they struck me as seeking to win at any cost and trying to divide people. They didn't reflect the values that I held dear and how I was raised. They didn't reflect what I thought we needed to do as a country. 
   
• Second, I worked for a couple of nonprofits, which I'm still in touch with, and I still admire. That said, I believe then, and I still believe today, that too many non-profits live off of soft money.  We're afraid to get dirt under our fingernails and do the messy work that needs to get done. And Heidi, I was just deeply frustrated by that. 
   
• Third, I'm a person of faith. And when I say that, I don't mean to wear it on my sleeve. I just mean to say that my faith informs me every day, every hour, every step of the way I turn to it. It's part and parcel of who I am and how I seek to live my life on a daily basis. And it instructs me to show up in a particular kind of way in life, and we can talk more about that if you want. 
   
• And then lastly, when I was born, I was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis. In 1960, that was a death sentence. My parents were told that I had three to five years to live. They went on a death watch. I saw them struggle. I saw them get overwhelmed.  I saw them hold me out of the hospital until 12:01 because I didn't have the money to pay for the extra day. I saw our family be overwhelmed by this. And for me, personally, I have vivid memories, to this day, of having doctors and nurses and specialists surrounding my hospital to bed all talking about me, but never talking to me. I have vivid memories of being repeatedly violated and manhandled and the shame and humiliation that created in me that still lives within me. I have a deep sense of what it feels like to not be seen and heard and to be invisible and to have one's dignity stripped from them. And these things, Heidi, as I said, live with me every day still.

And these four things conspired in a way to lead me to want to start this, to feel compelled  to do this work. So I started this when I was 27. Everyone I knew, including my parents and other mentors, told me I was nuts. I shouldn't do it. I didn't start with an idea of a program or a strategy or some initiative or process that I wanted to spread and share with the world. I started with \eight questions about, for instance, how one engenders hope in people? What are the kinds of leaders and organizations we need that can span boundaries and bring people together across dividing lines?  What does it mean for people to feel informed about their world and their lives and how we move forward? What does it mean to really understand what matters to people?

Everyone said to me, "Look, Rich, just pick one of these questions and go with that." And I said, "you know, I hear you. And what I'm interested in is the interplay and interdependence between and among these questions. Because I think that interplay and interdependence is what creates the dynamic that enables society and people's lives to work and gain meaning and progress and move forward.

And so those eight questions, much like my faith, still inform everything that the Institute does. We've obviously expanded those questions over nearly 40 years, but still, we're very much driven by questions and seeking insights and answers to questions, not simply promoting our work.

Heidi: And spreading the impetus, I guess, to get people working on the questions is one of the things I surmised from reading the book.  You don't see this as something that you're trying to do alone, but you're trying to bring a whole lot of people with you. Is that correct? 

Rich: Yes. As I say in the book, I believe we're meant to go together. And I really believe that. I don't think any of us can go it alone on our own. I learned that firsthand in a hospital bed throughout my youth. That has stuck with me and informs me. And I know that the people who saved me were three men who didn't know each other, from different walks of life, who never knew each other, by the way, but who, in their own ways, lifted me up and made sure I didn't fall through the cracks. And at a very young age, I learned that community is a common enterprise. We need each other.

I learned that from watching my parents work on mental health issues in our community or help revitalize the NAACP or start the first halfway transition home for people leaving institutionalized mental health settings coming back into community life and society. And over and over and over again, the lesson that I have learned is that we need each other. We have to go together, and we have to sort out a hell of a lot of stuff that keeps us apart, and particularly in this day and age. 

Heidi: That's great. It really resonates. But tell me a little bit more about what you've been doing over the last year or so that led up to the book. 

Rich: You know, when we came out of COVID, we realized when we were doing our work in communities. We were trying to figure out how we could bring people together, to understand what matters to them, to act on it collectively. And I think, Heidi, most importantly about our work, is our desire to strengthen the civic culture of communities. It's not just good enough to solve problems. I've found in our work over 40 years, the biggest predictor of whether or not communities and society can move forward is the underlying civic culture that is often hidden from us. And yet, what we've learned over these 40 years is that we can actually create it or recreate it and strengthen it. And our work is very much about enabling people to learn a practice that we've developed over these years to shape their own futures in communities and now around the world.

So in the last year, to answer your question, coming out of COVID, we were doing work in our communities and, as things became increasingly heated in this country, what we found is that more and more community leaders and active citizens and others, as you know well, and your listeners know, were retreating from public life. We were retreating from one another. And those who weren't retreating were moving to the edges of public life because they believed it was safer there to do their work. They could raise more money. They could hit their metrics more easily. And so what we found is that there was a vacuum that we all know about now, but a number of years ago, when we started the last campaign (which was called Enough Time to Build), it was still really unspoken in many ways. But we were all moving towards the edge or retreating altogether. And we produced a report called Civic Virus, which documented this larger dynamic that was happening in society that hopefully we'll get a chance to talk about.

And the other thing that we found is that, as people were lifting their heads up from COVID, they initially breathed a sigh of relief. Oh, God. Thank God. We're out of that." But then they realized, actually, that their work was just beginning, that we had so much to do, that inequities and disparities didn't diminish. They grew over this time, our divisions grew over this time, the hatred that was being expressed grew over that time, all of these different things were getting worse, and there was much more work to be done.

But yet, people were so tired and exhausted and fatigued. And so our campaign, Enough Time to Build, grew out of the notion that we wanted to go on the road during the presidential campaign. Everyone said, again, "don't do it. Do wait till after the election." And I was like, "No, we actually need to do this to demonstrate that there is a different message that can be articulated during this time." And we expressly wanted to articulate a civic message and say, "We don't need more divisive politics. We need a new way forward civically in our communities." And we wanted to send signals to people that you don't need to retreat. Amid your fatigue, amid your exhaustion, just take one step forward and find others to come with you. And as you do, your sense of possibility will grow. Your sense of civic confidence will grow. You'll see that we can achieve things together. Not necessarily big things, but small things we can believe in that give us hope and possibility. And that was the origin of the campaign.

I'll just say one other thing. When we began, we knew it would be an uphill climb. But I think we were the only national campaign that was invited to such disparate places as Matt Gaetz's congressional district in Pensacola, Florida, Lauren Boebert's congressional district, a new congressional district in Colorado, Jim Jordan's congressional district, (Jordan was the co-founder of the Freedom Caucus), where we were doing deep work in two separate counties in Ohio, Flint, Michigan, Jackson, Mississippi, Fresno, California. So deeply red places, deeply blue places, deeply purple places. 

And here's the thing. We got the same response everywhere we went. "Thank God someone is saying this. Thank God there's a way out of this mess. Thank God I don't have to take on the world. "You're just saying to me, Just take a step and let's get moving.' " And so we got invited to more places than we could go to.

Our social media numbers were off the charts. We had virtual convenings. We ran ads on YouTube, like political ads, but they had a different flavor. We had hundreds of thousands of views. And we realized coming out of it that there was this enormous, deep— I want to say hunger, but I think it's more than a hunger—a yearning.  A yearning is a little different than a hunger, a yearning for something different. And that's where we are today.

Heidi: I've got so many different directions I want to go. I think I'm going to go to the most basic and then move into some of the other stuff. When, three minutes ago, you used the term "civic culture" for the first time, I wanted to say, flesh that out for us.  What is civic culture? How do we get it?

Rich: I'm really delighted you asked that because I think it's so critical to where we are, right? It's been so critical for the time that we've been doing our work, but it's even more critical today. 

Quick story. Back in 1989, I was asked to do a study of two communities in Mississippi, one that had successful education, and the other that did not. All their metrics were going in the other direction. The foundation that funded it assumed that it was because one community had different education policies than the other. And they did. 

But actually, what we found out was that they had a fundamentally different operating system as a community. Their norms were different. The ways in which people interacted were different. The ways in which leaders led was different. The types of organizations they had were different. The spaces they had where people came together to solve problems were different. Their civic conversations were fundamentally different. Their sense of shared purpose was different. I'm describing civic culture. All of these factors, which we came to better understand over many years of work and testing in different communities and more formal research constituted what we call "civic culture."

So we describe civic culture as having nine factors. What's important about these nine factors is that in communities that are not working, when we first study them before we start to do work with them, we find that they're missing all these factors. Not only are they missing them, Heidi, they tend to be negative. They have negative norms. They have leaders who are dividing people. They have spaces that erupt into polarized discussions, which I know you're interested in. They don't have a sense of shared purpose. They have division and acrimony in its place, and siloed and fragmented organizations. And what we find is, when we work with them, and they learn our approach, and they put the approach into place, they can actually grow these nine factors. They're instrumental. They're not what would be called terminal. You can create them. 

And here's the beauty of that. You can create them while you're actually doing work on specific challenges, like education or the environment or safety or senior care or mental health, which is what the folks we work with do. So there's kind of a sweet spot. You can address what matters to people and strengthen their civic culture at the same time, so long as you work with intentionality, and you're clear about what it really takes to create these factors. And that's being done all across the country right now. I think that's part of the good news in the country.

Heidi: It is. I still find myself wondering, though, how do you create the will to do that among people who are disconnected, disheartened, fearful, distrusting, individualistic — because America's always been individualistic — but we're way worse now that we're spending all our time on our phones, and we're not even talking to our neighbors. I just saw the other day —I live right near a middle school, and I saw these three middle schoolers walking home together. But they weren't talking. They were on their phones, each one of them. And I wanted to yell at them. And then I saw two other girls who were walking side by side who were chatting and laughing, and they caught me staring at them. And I was embarrassed, of course, but I wanted to say I'm staring at you because I'm so happy to see you guys interacting when those other guys were on their phones. But I didn't. But how do you get people who are so disconnected to change course? 

Rich: First, let me just say you've just described every community that we're working with in America. And you're describing, as far as the best I can tell, pretty much every community in America. You're describing American society writ large.  And so the challenge, I think, what's really important to say upfront, is that those things are happening. They're real. They're not imagined. They weren't made up by researchers or naysayers or anything like that. And we can't pretend this isn't happening.  We can't stick our heads in the sand. We can't be Pollyanna-ish about this. We can't just believe, as you say on your website. We can't just believe that more civility is going to get us over the hump here. It's not.  So let's get real about this. That's point number one. 

Point number two, you're asking how do we get over that hump? And I could tell you about our work in depth, or I could just tell you four quick mantras we use in our work, which demonstrate it really quickly. 

First, before I do that, let me explain that we always start with small groups of people in communities, like 50, not 100, not 5,000, but 50 people who believe that we can do better. They don't often know how. They feel very much the way you just described, but they want to step forward and do something. So we have kind of a coalition of the willing, yeah right? 

Now, here are the four mantras, and, then I'll tell you one other quick thing. 

One mantra is that we need to get people to turn outward. But you can't demand people to do that. What you can do, is help them discover that we all have aspirations for our lives and communities and things that matter to us. And we help them engage people in their community to understand what those things, — their "aspirations" are. Because everyone has aspirations. When you hear different people from different walks of life talk about their aspirations, do we agree on everything? No. Do we agree on most things? Probably not. But we can usually identify some things we do agree on that we can actually start to work on together. That's where we start. When people hear that, they start to turn outward because they realize we have to face each other in order to get this work done and in order to move forward.

Second, we have to get in motion. We have to get in motion. I hope I don't offend anyone when I say this, though I a lot of people are offended when I do say it. They take umbrage by it, as my father would say. More conversations, more talk alone is not going to get us where we need to go. I'm sorry. We need to get in motion and start to build things together. Because by building things together, we begin to realize that we each have innate capabilities and gifts and resources that we didn't see before. We begin to see that we can actually create things and be producers again. We begin to see our shared humanity together. And we begin to develop confidence that we can start to move together. It rebuilds our sense of belief. You said the subtitle of my book is belief. This is one of the ways in which you build belief.

So we say to folks, "We're not going to go into planning. We're not going to talk forever. We're going to talk long enough to discover what we can work on together. And then we're going to move. We're going to start moving. That doesn't mean we're done talking, but we have got to get in motion. 

The third mantra is start small to go big. I want big change. I got into this because I believe there's a lot of things in our society that do not work and a lot of systemic things that are broken. And I believe we've got to do something about them. But here's what I also have learned—not what I believe, but what I've learned. Too much comprehensive change has gotten us in trouble because we raise people's expectations, we create false hope, and then nothing happens. So we looked at all the change that was created with our work over 30 years, and then I wrote a book about it called Unleashed. What we found is everyone started small. And in starting small, they catalyzed and unleashed a chain reaction of actions and ripple effects that took root and grew and spread over time. We teach people how to do this in our practice. And in doing that, not only does the chain reaction grow, but it typically jumps to another area in the community and spreads. And it ultimately spreads like a positive contagion. So, yes, I want big change, but I believe we need to start small to go big.

The fourth mantra is that we have to create a new trajectory of hope. You mentioned hope earlier.  If people ask me, "What really are you in the business of doing?" I say "engendering authentic hope. "That's the bottom line. And when I actually engage folks across the country, regardless of their walk of life, how much money they have, their education level, no one that I've encountered believes we're going to solve our problems overnight. No one. And they're sick and tired of hearing it, of promises made. What they want to know is that we're moving in a better direction, that we're taking on the tough issues, that we're not afraid of the tough issues, that we're gaining confidence over time. As they were describing this, I was like, "Oh, you're describing a trajectory." It's a trajectory of hope. So we teach people how you create a new trajectory of hope, which means you have to have a different notion of time. 

Time's our ally here, not our enemy. You have to have a sense of urgency, but also patience. You have to realize that you're going to try things that are not going to work. You have to get back up, dust yourself off, and try again. So you need perseverance and grit. All these things are part of the things we teach people and help them rediscover in themselves. So that's my quick answer.

Heidi: All right. Sounds good. Let's dissect it a little bit more. You start with 50 people, but you want to bring about change in at least the whole community, if not broader than that. Yep And one of the things we write about a lot is scale. we point out that a typical mediator works at a table with two disputants and the mediator. You're working at several tables with 50 people.

Rich: Initially. Yes. 

Heidi:  How do you move from 50 to 5,000 to 50,000 —if we're talking a decent metropolitan area to 500,000. 

Rich: Well, let's take Reading, Pennsylvania. 10 years ago, 12 years ago now, it was declared the poorest community in America. It was once predominantly all white. Now it's 70% Latino. Still a lot of poverty. 

Heidi: Was it a coal mining area? 

Rich: No, it was a manufacturing area. . And much of that manufacturing, not all, but much of that manufacturing, as you know, throughout Pennsylvania, has left. And they've tried every initiative you can imagine. When we started this, the funder looked at me and said, "What makes you think this is going to be any different than anything else we've done?" 

And so to your question, we did start with 50 people there. They decided they were interested in education. So the community created a community-led, community-driven education agenda with nine agenda items. Through our process, we discovered that there was real energy around three of them. So three teams formed, one around early childhood education, one around English as a second language, one around after-school programs.

The reason why this is important is you've got to focus on something to make it real, because people have to care. That's something that matters to everybody.  As we would say in our work, "there has to be currency." Otherwise, it is just an exercise —a futile exercise. So these 50 people divided up to form these teams. And other people joined the teams. So immediately, we had more than 50 people. Immediately. They began to do work, starting small. I won't take you through all this. We have a  report on our website. People can download it for free. It's called called Reading's Ripples of Change.  And as they began their work, let's say, on English as a second language, people in the community began to see it. Because we work with the teams to make their work visible, which is a key element to this. You've got to make the work visible.

We have a tool called "Making the Invisible Visible" that people use, which creates civic parables because parables travel. They're shareable about the work. So as the work became more noticeable and visible, more people started to say, "Oh, I can do something around this." And they began to see that they could contribute in different ways to this work. So the team that started with 15 people grew to 20 people, to 30 people, grew to 50 people, and it's still growing.

Now we have left, but the work's still going. And the question that you're asking is, how does this keep growing in a community? Well, remember, we had three teams. So the work of all the teams kept growing out and spread to other things in the community. So the mayor had a task force on youth violence. Our approach spread to that. There's an economic development effort in a certain part of town. The work spread to that. Many of the people,  not all, a lot of the people on our teams are just  residents, but a lot of the people are also heads of organizations or worked in different organizations. They took the work and embedded it in their organizations. So, if you had 20 different organizations represented on a single team, you now have a multiplier effect through all those organizations beyond the team. So it just keeps spreading and spreading. 

And we don't have a theory of change. We have a notion of how change happens because it's based in reality, not some theory on a whiteboard that somebody did in a conference room. What we've found out, which is not unique to our work, is kind of how people write about diffusion of innovation, is that ideas spread, different ways of working, spread. As they spread, people pull them in. You don't have to push them out. You're not convincing anyone. They pull them in. And as they pull them in, not only do they do the work in a particular space, but then they take it and use it in other places in their lives and in their work and in the community. And that's how this spreads like a positive contagion in the community. Do we hit all 100,000-plus people in running? No. Do you need to do that in order to create change in a community? No. What you need is enough people doing the work that starts to send signals that things are changing, which shifts norms, a sense of possibility, a sense of shared purpose, and the ways ultimately the community works together.

Heidi: I'm sure that you have run into conflicts in these groups in terms of what they should be doing and how and who should be paying for it.  How do you deal with that? 

Rich: It's hard. We deal with different types of conflicts. So, in one community, one type of conflict that I encounter a lot, both from the right and the left. We get attacked a lot from the far right and the far left. People say, "We don't like this approach because it's not demanding change," or, "It's not rooted in resistance," or, "You're not political enough." So we get all that. And what I say is we're pitching an open tent. In the Bible, Abraham had a tent. And the tent was open on all four sides. It didn't just have a door, a flap. It was opened on all four sides.  And interestingly enough, Abraham stationed himself at the edge of the tent, not in the middle, at the edge. And why? Because he was always scouting for the stranger, for the person who didn't agree with him, for the person who wasn't always ready to come into the tent, but ultimately maybe was. So the metaphor we use in our work with folks in communities is that we have to pitch a tent with all four sides open. And the folks who attack us initially, we have to keep reaching out to.

In one of our communities, the folks on the left attacked us, and that group still doesn't like the work. But half their members have joined the work. Half of them. That's one thing that happens. But there are other conflicts that are real, that are different. I just want to mention one. 

We have a team in Alamance County, North Carolina, one of the most divided communities I've worked in 40 years. And the team is called the Bridging Team, of all things. And it's made of a very diverse group of people. And the idea of the work was that they needed to bridge urban/rural divides. There's a growing Latino population there. There are divides between East Burlington and West Burlington. There are divides everywhere you look—it has more divides than I've ever seen. And the team couldn't get off the dime. They couldn't get in motion because they were so divided. There were conflicts on the team about what constitutes equity, on what were the nature of the divisions that  they were going to deal with? Whose divisions were they going to deal with? How were they going to deal with the conflicts between and among themselves? Whose grievances were more important? (That, as you know, is a big issue in communities today.) There are a lot of legitimate grievances, and there's competition about whose grievance gets to go first, right? So all of these things, these tensions, these conflicts were present on this little team of I don't know, 10, 15, 20 people. It took them a year to be able to work through enough of those to be able to say, "Okay, we're ready to get to work in the community." But to their credit, they stuck at it instead of throwing up their hands and leaving.

And when we worked in Clark County, Kentucky, there was a team that initially called themselves race and class, that ultimately called themselves Better Together Winchester. And they evolved. But they spent a year. So you remember I said, "time is your ally?" For our funders, this is hard. Because they are saying, "I thought you told me this was going to be different. I thought you told me you're going to get folks in motion. I thought you told me you were going to create progress. I thought you told me you're going to create hope. These folks are still in the back room having this conversation. What the hell's going on here?" 

And I reply, "Look, I can tell you roughly the timetable for this work, based on 40 years of how long it takes to get this new trajectory of hope going. But not everyone's on the same timetable within that timetable. Some things go fast, some things go slower. Some things just simply fall apart, which happens all the time."

The question I think those of us who do this work have to ask ourselves is, are we willing to deal with reality or do we want to pretend? Are we willing to take people where they're at, or do we only want to take people where we want them to be? Are we willing to deal with the real tensions that exist in our society? Or do we want to smooth over them with some therapeutic approach, which is important in parts of our lives, but can't be applied to a lot of other things. We've got to work through these things as a community, which is different from, as you said, two people working through things, let's say, in marriage counseling or an individual in therapy themselves. It's different. Each is important, but we've got to recognize that there are differences.

And so I have to say this to funders all the time. They don't often like it. Their boards don't often like it. But look, it's the world we're living in. I'd rather work in the world we're living in than pretend we're in some other world. 

Heidi: Very much agree. But what I wonder is how you keep people in that world with you. 

Rich: Yes. That's a really pivotal question. And the way in which we do it is by starting small and getting things in motion because people need motion. I wrote a different book that came out in March called The Little Field Guide on Igniting Community Led Change. And one of the things in that book that I talk about is that we need to make down payments all along the line. These down payments are really pivotal. And these down payments are typically small steps that we're taking that get larger over time. But particularly initially, as you're suggesting, at critical points in the work, these down payments say to people, "It's possible. We can make some progress." 

The other thing we have to do is we have to send signals, because you were asking about not just the 50 people, but the 500 or 5,000 or the 50,000 or the 500,000, you said. We have to send signals to the rest of the community that something here is happening. But we have to send signals that are authentic. We can't sugarcoat stuff. We can't hype stuff. We can't sensationalize the progress we've made. We've got to be real about it. We got to tell them the good, the bad, and the ugly. That actually helps build trust. It says we're doing work a different way. So all of those things help build belief. And belief is what keeps people in the game. And that has to take place, not just in the beginning of this work, but over time. 

Heidi: What you're working against, the backdrop, is all these folks that we call "bad-faith actors" who are doing their darndest to peel people away from what you're doing. 

Rich: Absolutely. There's no question that there are bad-faith actors, whatever one wants to call folks, who are trying to peel people away, naysayers, cynics. This is what the book The New Civic Path is all about, right / It is about why I think we need to get on a new civic path because whether it's bad faith actors, cynics, skeptics, naysayers, folks who want to hold us hostage by culture wars— I believe they really do seek to hold us hostage. 

Heidi: Oh, I agree. 

Rich:  I think this is why I think we need to get real.  Because we have to say, "No, you're not holding us hostage." "No, you're not going to peel us off from one another."  "No, you don't get to simply say, 'Nothing works here.'"  There's stuff that works here. There was stuff that worked here before we got this particular work started. We're going to build on it. There's stuff that's working today. We're going to keep building. There's going to be stuff that works after we're done, that other folks will build on.  

I think we've got to be really clear about this and very firm, and we can do it with grace, but we have to be firm. You do not get to dictate the terms of this community because you want to hold us hostage. We do not accept just a handful of people dictating what we ought to be doing, what we ought to be teaching our kids, what books we ought to be reading, what faith we ought to be practicing, who we get to marry.  You do not get to hold us hostage. 

Heidi:  I'm going to be selfish. I've got this long list of questions, and we're already two-thirds into this talk. I'm going to be selfish and ask a question that affects me personally.  As you know, we've been focused on hyperpolarization. And there's lots of problems in the United States and the world, but we've decided that one of the biggest is hyperpolarization, because it's preventing us  fixing any of our other problems. You said that hyperpolarization—you didn't put the "hyper" in front of it —but you said that polarization was a misdiagnosis. And then you had some language after that, that I have written down here, but I'm not going to take the time to read it. But you seemed to indicate that the reason why polarization was a misdiagnosis were things that I took to be an affirmation that hyper-polarization is, indeed, going on. So, I want you to explain why you think it's a misdiagnosis and how you would diagnose, I would say, the behavior of bad-faith actors and what they're spreading differently. 

Rich: Oh, yeah. So thank you for adding the last part of that.  When I got the invitation to be on your podcast and to be with you, I was like, "Oh, huh.  I wonder what they're going to say about this misdiagnosis thing." 

Heidi: I'm not one to shy away from conflict. 

Rich: No, that's good. I was like, "Geez, I wonder if we're really just going to go around on this polarization thing," which would have been fine, by the way. I'm glad you asked it. And I'm glad you added the last part of it.  I won't take you through all of our analysis in the sense that I looked at a lot of academic definitions of polarization. And what I found was that, yes, they exist for sure, but it wasn't what I was hearing Americans talk about when we did this study. What I heard people talking about was something closer to "fight or flight or freeze," which was a belief that people either had to retreat or fight. Because they believed that they just couldn't talk about stuff anymore. It was too uncomfortable. And this was both in communities or even with their own family members. They were in a flight mode, or they were in a fight mode, which was just come out to fight. What we found in those conversations, much like we find in our work, is that if you help people [they can get out of this dilemma].  You write about this, too. I've read some of your materials. But if you reframe the discussion, like we do, around aspirations, and change the underlying conditions of the space, people are released from their fight or flight mode and they engage fine with people with different points of view. 

And so here's why I said that polarization is a misdiagnosis.  It's because what I have found was that the news media and politicians and a lot of civic groups were saying that we're so polarized, we can't come together. And it was almost becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. And so I was like, "Well, I want to see if we can break through the noise and say, well, actually, yes, there are some people polarized. And yes, there are many people who I write about, who are seeking to manufacture polarization, bad-faith actors, including politicians, the news media, stuff that's happening on social media, right? But when you actually engage with folks in the country, they're actually in a different space. And if we can wrap our heads around that and understand that and engage with it, there's actually more room for progress here than we know. So that's why we said it. 

Heidi: Okay. 

Rich: Does that help? 

Heidi: I think we're actually on the same page. 

Rich: Oh, good. 

Heidi: I would argue that it's not a misdiagnosis if it is seen as a problem to be solved.  If it's seen as an immutable state. Yeah. I think that that in itself is part of the polarization. We've been told by some people that polarization is normal. It's the way democracy works. And they think the opposite of polarization is everybody believing the same thing. 

Rich: That's right. 

Heidi:  The opposite of polarization is listening and engaging with people who appear to think differently than you. And then when you do that, or look at, for instance, the stuff that More in Common is doing is finding, just like you're saying, that we have more in common than we think we do. We don't agree on everything. But we do have a lot more in common than it appears. But people act on the appearances, which means they're acting on fear. And they're reacting to a stereotype that isn't even accurate. 

Rich: Correct. I agree with all that. Here's the other challenge, though, that I have encountered in the last few years, which is because people have diagnosed this as polarization, they believe that's the problem to solve.   I've found that many times their solutions are rooted in a notion that  we have to bridge our divides because we're polarized. (This isn't true for the entire bridging community, but it's true for parts of it.)

What I find is, actually, in the work that we're doing in all these different communities, we're in places that voted 75% for Donald Trump and others that voted 70% for Harris, and we are in a lot of mixed places too. And what we find is that we don't have to bridge divides. It's more like the More in Common research. It's that there is something to work with there that doesn't have to be negotiated. It has to be discovered. 

Heidi: Ah, nice. 

Rich: Right. And that's another part of this that, for me, is really, really important. 

Heidi: So the divides aren't as big or as real as we think they are. 

Rich: Yes. And I say that knowing that people think that's kind of Pollyannish right now to say, and I get that. And I don't mean to suggest that there aren't divides because there are real divides. 

But at the same time, when I look at all the communities that we've been working with, one of the things that is really clear, and this is in The New Civic Path book, is that there are things that can bring people together. 

One of the things that I have wanted to see if we could discover is whether there are particular types of issues that people are more amenable to coming around and working on, amid all this noise and confusion and uncertainty? And what we've discovered is, yes, there are. There are about seven or eight or ten of them. And I think if we could start our work on some of those issues, we can make a heck of a lot more progress in our society than banging our heads against the walls on some other things where it's going to take us longer to figure out. They're really important, but it's going to take us longer. 

Heidi: Yes.  I've got guesses about a few. But what are your eight?

Rich: It's things like youth, education, seniors, mental health, safety. 

Heidi: That's an interesting one. Safety involves crime? Does it involve policing? Because that would make it harder, I would think. 

Rich: Yeah. There are usually things that come before those things. Crime is a factor. Policing is a factor. But what people are looking for, come before those things. For instance, I'm afraid to walk down my street at night. I'm afraid to go to the parking lot at any time of the day.  I don't feel safe where I live, in, let's say, East Burlington, in Alamance County. So that's one part of safety. There is another part of safety, which you know well. It is about whether people feel safe being able to say certain things?  So it's a safety in being with others. It may be that I don't feel safe because of my sexual orientation. I don't feel safe because I'm a black or brown person. I don't feel safe because I'm a person of faith, or I'm not a person of faith.  It could be any of these things and all of them. 

Heidi:  I'm surprised that's not in your hard category, rather than your easy one, but I cut you off in the middle. 

Rich: No, no, that's okay.  So all of these things that I've mentioned are part of the eight, and they're listed in the book in one of the sections. And as I'm doing this work more and more, the list is growing.  So, actually, when people tell me that we can't make progress in this country, I say to them, you're welcome to your view, but that simply hasn't been my experience.  And it hasn't been my experience in some of the hardest places to work in this country. We can make progress. People want to make progress. People care about their lives and the lives of those around them. We need to focus on things, as you said earlier, about what matters to people and quit being hyper-focused on all those things that divide us. 

Yes, there are things that divide us. We live in a chaotic time. People are afraid. They're fearful. Let's figure out what we can work on. Let's get going. 

Heidi: So you have found, and other folks that I'm working with have also found this— you're familiar with the Better Together America folks.  I just went to their conference last week. And what they're doing and what you're doing is fabulous, and it's all at the local level. And what I say to people (and I'm not sure if I believe it, but I say it anyway.) Eventually, this could scale up. And if we can demonstrate that it works at the local level, there will get to be demand for these sorts of processes at the national level.

 I've seen one little example of that, the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress. And the folks that led that. I got to do an interview like this with Derek Kilmer, who's one of my great heroes. And I just think what he was able to do in Congress was amazing. And he's left Congress now, which is very sad.  Is there hope for the national level any time, or should I just give up that pipe dream and stop talking about it? 

Rich: No. First of all, I would say you should give up the notion that it's a pipe dream. Let's start there. Where I get hope from in terms of this is not because I read it in a book, or I wrote a book, or someone told me. I take hope from our history. And I don't think this is about scaling what's going on locally. I think it's about spreading new norms, new ways of working. So it may be different, but the ways in which we think about ourselves begin to evolve. This is part of the civic path.

And as I write in the book, when this country was founded, the 13 colonies didn't agree on a whole lot, right? What we agreed on is we didn't want a tyrant running our country. We didn't want to be subject to a tyrant. And so people came off of farms and small towns, and they didn't know each other. They didn't have fax machines. No telephones. They didn't have the Internet. They didn't have stationery. They didn't have uniforms. They didn't have anything other than a common purpose.  There was no one orchestrating all this. It was a sense of common purpose that emerged. And I think when we fought, when we abolished slavery, that didn't start with the Emancipation Proclamation. It didn't get abolished with the Emancipation Proclamation or something out of Washington, D.C., or some state capitol.  It started by people coming together in local communities and churches and other places. People started to talk about it and work on it in small groups and it just kept spreading. Same thing with the civil rights movement. I was just in a church, the Tabernacle Baptist Church in Selma, Alabama, where we're doing work. And where Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy and others helped plan the Bloody Sunday, the march across the bridge that led to Bloody Sunday. They had to march three times across that bridge in order for something to happen, right? To get something positive to happen. And that helped pierce the consciousness of the country. And the civil rights movement, as we all know, grew out of church basements and little towns and other things. And Martin Luther King and others helped to amplify it and grow it and nurture it.  I could keep going. There are so many examples in our country of this. 

There are bad examples too. The Ku Klux Klan grew this way. Jim Crow laws grew this way. So they're not all positive examples by any stretch. So that suggests to me that we have a choice. A, we can help to start to grow this in our local communities and spread it. And ultimately, like the person you were just mentioning, the former congressperson, find courageous leaders at a state and national level, give them cover, support them, and help this grow over time. That's a choice we have. And I believe we need to make that choice.

I also believe we need to make another choice. We need to say to the modern Ku Klux Klan, we need to say to the modern purveyors of Jim Crow laws. We need to say to the modern segregationists, NO. Not during our time. NO. We've got a different thing in mind that's growing out of common aspirations, shared aspirations in our communities and across our country that are demanding a different type of country.  And you can say what you want, but we're going to keep moving, and we're going to have enough people coming with us to demonstrate that we can tap into our better nature. 

Heidi: That's great. I think you and I agree that one of the missing ingredients that we really need is hope. I think hope is a rare commodity these days, and we're trying in our way to spur it. You're trying very successfully, I think, in your way, to do that. And that seems like a really good place to end, since we're at an hour despite the fact that I have a long list of questions to ask. Is there something that I didn't ask that you're really burning to talk about, other than "get my book and read it," which I do hope people do. 

Rich: Yeah. No, I just want to say thank you for all the work that you and Guy do and have been doing and continue to do.One of the things I do want to say is that, when people come on these podcasts, they want to act like their work is the sole solution to the challenges. And I have never believed that. As I've gotten older, I've learned that that's simply never the case. We each make different contributions and all of our contributions from different angles and different perspectives with different notions of what's at issue and what we need to work on. We don't need a unified approach. I believe we need a varied approach. People are starting in different places, different desires, different types of communities. And I think we need  varied approaches. 

And so I think that's where I want to end. That everything that each of us does is important, so long as we're doing something that's meaningful, that has intention and purpose. And to end where you ended, that engenders not more false hope but authentic hope. We don't need more false hope. We need authentic hope that gives us a sense of belief that we can actually move forward together. 

Heidi: You described, very nicely, our notion of a massively parallel effort, which we started with massively parallel peacebuilding. And then we got into the democracy business, and we're talking about "massively parallel democracy building." And the notion is that there are all these different actors. And we point out that this is not something that Guy and I invented. We just put a name on something that was already happening. All of these different actors move in slightly different directions or in different ways, on different topics, without top-down direction, because that doesn't work in complex systems.

But everybody's generally moving in the same direction, which is what we call "democracy for all" or a "win-win democracy." You're calling it a" new civic path." It's the same thing, basically. But it's thousands of people and organizations all loosely working toward that larger goal, which we think can bring hope and can bring power and can change the way we deal with our problems in our communities and in our country, and hopefully our world, if you want to get grandiose about it. So I really enjoyed talking to you. This has been wonderful. Thank you so much for taking the time. I'm going to go back and look at those earlier books and give the new Civic Path a more careful read. I read it pretty quickly because there wasn't a whole lot of time. So I just think what you're doing sounds great, and I hope to intersect with it in the future. 

Rich: I hope so too. Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it. 

Heidi: All right. Thanks very much.