Newsletter #387 — September 27, 2025
 

by Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess

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Highlighted Links

A few suggestions about links that we think are especially interesting.

• Rule of Law
  The Constitution Can’t Save Us. Only We Can. — An important reminder that the viability of constitutional democracies depends upon populations that understand and support constitutional principles.
• Authoritarianism
  Against Strong Gods — A timely review of Karl Popper's insightful analysis of what separates democratic societies from totalitarian fascist and communist regimes -- an analysis that has stood the test of time.
• US Politics
  Trump Might Be Losing His Race Against Time — An examination of the factors that are motivating Trump subordinates to do legally questionable things (and speculation about what might lead them to change their minds).
• Developing a Unifying Vision
  How Democrats Lost Obama’s Vision of American Identity — A retrospective look at how US politics has moved so sharply away from Obama's once popular vision for America.
• Social / Economic Complexity
  Rage of the Falling Elite — An examination of one of the major sources of social tension -- a society that has been unable to deliver on the promises it made to young people who worked hard to get a good education.
• Psychological Complexity
  The Era of Dark Passions — From David Brooks, an attempt to understand the psychological and cultural factors that have transformed the United States' traditional brand of partisan, hardball politics into today's much darker reality.
• Political Dysfunction
  Americans Agree on One Thing—We Are Our Own Worst Enemy — The good news / bad news story about the bipartisan recognition that the United States' dysfunctional politics is its own worst enemy. Unfortunately, there is no consensus about what to do about it.

Reader Suggested Links

Highlighting links suggested by our readers. Please send us links to things that you find useful.

• Constructive Communication
  Enlightened Disagreement — Two leading scholars of conflict and polarization want to help us have more productive conversations.
• Conflict Advice
  Politics Almost Ruined Our Friendship. Here’s How We Saved It. — An important essay exploring a critical skill that people need to have before they can be expected to seriously start thinking about today's complex issues.
• Freedom of Speech 
  Censorship makes you dumber* — Another in the welcome flurry of articles highlighting the often disregarded reasons why protecting free speech is in the interests of both the left and the right.
• Bridge Building
  Bridge Grades — A non-partisan report card for Congress to sort legislative “bridgers” from “dividers” in both parties.
• Israel / Hamas War
  Schrödinger's Palestine: The State That Is and Isn’t — A review of the long and tortured history of efforts to create a Palestinian state living in peace alongside Israel -- important background as we think about the United Kingdom's decision to recognize a Palestinian state.
• Developing a Unifying Vision
  Selma, Beacon of Hope - a Studio Films Documentary — In a moment where it can feel hard to be hopeful, this film—in just 15 minutes—is meant to remind you that “hope starts with us.”
• Climate / Environment / Health
  UN Climate Week reveals elites’ scorn for the world’s poor — For UN Climate Week, an argument that the benefits of climate-related projects often don't justify their costs (and that the money might be better spent elsewhere).

Colleague Activities

Highlighting things that our conflict and peacebuilding colleagues are doing that contribute to efforts to address the hyper-polarization problem.

• Bridge Building
  From Bridging to Building: Braver Angels’ New Chapter Begins with Citizen-Led Solutions (CLS) — A new direction for Braver Angels, CLS aims to help people find agency and meaning by equipping everyday people to solve real problems together.
• Violence
  How Many People Actually Approve of Kirk's Murder? — Jonathan Stray collected data from social media to see what the REAL responses were to the Kirk assassination. It is not as bad as some people suggest, but there are some, on both the left and the right, who are calling for more violence.
• The Hyper-Polarization Threat
  A polarized nation is volatile, at risk of being destabilized by rare acts of violence — Our team-based score keeping and desire to prove that the other side is more violent leads us to overreact and drive fear and hatred further.
• Freedom of Speech 
  How Americans View Free Speech — The killing of Charlie Kirk, public reactions to the assassination, and reactions-to-reactions have reignited longstanding debates about Americans’ right to freedom of expression
• Constructively Addressing Complex Issues
  Weekend Extra: The Next Stage for Truth — Free societies don’t silence satire. When political pressure shapes what can or cannot be said, we lose a foundational element of the open exchange of ideas. Decentralized podcasts is one answer.
• Non-Violence
  Jimmy Kimmel’s reinstatement shows the power of noncooperation — Disney’s reversal on Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension wasn’t an act of corporate consciousness — it was a strategic retreat forced by coordinated pressure.
• Artificial Intelligence
  Building tech that's relational, place-based, participatory, and ~weird~ — The Cofounders of the Relational Tech Project explain that relational tech “reconnects us with the people around us in the places where we live,” helping people “care for each other, collaborate, and build trust.”
• De-Escalation Strategies
  How to Avoid Fueling Political Violence—Even When You’re Angry — What we say and do in response to violence can either add to that violence or cool things down. No matter one's politics, we must be sure we don’t become part of the cycle of dehumanization and violence ourselves.
• De-Escalation Strategies
  Contempt got us here; only dignity can get us out — Once you put a dehumanizing label on someone, it can become not only okay to kill him, but also virtuous. We must turn away from this attitude and, instead, treat others with dignity.
• Interstate War
  Drone Technology and the Future of Nuclear Weapons — While the proliferation of autonomous drone systems significantly enhances nuclear weapon delivery, precision targeting, and deterrence capabilities, it also introduces critical strategic and ethical challenges.
• Interstate War
  The Ultimate Deterrent: Modern Strategic Conventional Weapons — Nuclear weapons may no longer be credible deterrents in an era of hypersonic missiles and AI-driven warfare. Modern conventional weapons could ultimately replace nuclear arsenals, reshaping global security without risking nuclear annihilation.
• Violence
  A Vicious Spiral: Political Violence in Fragile Democracies — Charlie Kirk's killing forms part of a broader pattern of political violence that transcends borders and increasingly shapes the political landscape of both established and emerging democracies.
• Developing a Unifying Vision
  Building the democracy we’ve never had — This moment of crisis is also a moment of unprecedented possibility.
• Leadership
  Five Ways to Be a Good Elder in Civic Life — If the bottom-up civic renewal we are working toward will take decades to achieve, then those of us of a certain age need to get much better at passing on our batons.
• US Politics
  The Fight to Make Online Spaces Civil Again – Yevgeny Simkin — Is there a way to build new social media platforms that actually serve people instead of manipulating them? In this video, Yevgeny Simkin, creator of Sez Us (sez.us), talks about his bold effort to rethink how we connect online.
• Violence
  Attitudes towards political violence in the United States — More in Common shares data showing that Americans want unity, constructive dialogue, and respect for freedom of speech, not violence. Yet social media discourse skews discourse towards the extremes.
• Civil Society
  Civic Exchange — This is a collaborative umbrella platform built by and for the civic ecosystem. If you care about a government that is accountable to the people, trusted news, strong communities, and reimagining our constitutional democracy, you’ve found the right place!
• Non-Violence
  The 6 superpowers that faith communities bring to nonviolent struggle — While religion has far too often been a tool of authoritarianism, faith institutions and communities have also been the life force of many freedom movements.
• De-Escalation Strategies
  Discussion Paper: Understanding How the Community Safety and De-Escalation Ecosystem Is Responding to Political Violence Risk — Based on interviews with 30+ practitioners, this paper finds that community safety and de-escalation approaches to countering political violence are a fast-evolving specialization within the peacebuilding field.
• Networking
  Networks Are Our Greatest Asset — In a time when scarcity and fear are fueling authoritarianism, sharing our collective wisdom is a form of everyday resistance. Networks allow us to "pollinate trust" and "build strength through weak ties."

• De-Escalation Strategies
  Elevating Community Safety and De-Escalation Approaches — An interactive map from the Bridging Divides Initiative showing where to get community safety and de-escalation training in every U.S. state.

   

News and Opinion

From around the web, more insight into the nature of our conflict problems, limits of business-as-usual thinking, and things people are doing to try to make things better. (Formerly, Beyond Intractability in Context.)

• Authoritarianism
  Why Authoritarians Fear Common Knowledge — An excerpt from Steven Pinker’s new book “When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows…”
• Leadership
  America Is in Desperate Need of Moral Leadership — For those looking for direction in today's trying times, sensible advice -- look back at the lives of leaders who got us through similarly difficult times.
• Terror
  Left-Wing Terrorism Is on the Rise — Sobering news for those on the left that always assumed that political violence was something only practiced by those on the right.
• Social / Economic Complexity
  America’s Coming Crash — Successfully managing conflict requires an ability to anticipate and prepare contingency plans for future disruptions. This article asks us to think seriously about the increasing risk of a major economic crisis.
• Interstate War
  Wars of deception are coming for America. It isn’t ready. — More food for thought as we try to understand the rapidly evolving nature of war (and adapt our war prevention strategies to the new realities).
• Interstate War
  Ukraine’s Plan to Starve the Russian War Machine — Details on Ukraine's alarming, but promising, new strategy for winning the war by undermining the Russian economy through attacks on energy facilities deep inside the country.
• Interstate War
  Niall Ferguson: I’ve Seen the Future of War. Europe Isn’t Ready for It. — An important reminder for those not interested in war, war is interested in you! Now is not the time for complacency.
• Interstate War
  Why every country needs to master the Electric Tech Stack — In a world of continually shifting and unreliable alliances, an argument that self-sufficiency (with respect to today's high-tech weapons) is the key to an effective defense.
• Corruption
  When Strongmen Own the Store — An in-depth update on the degree to which President Trump is exerting his personal control over a very wide array of economic interactions (and the corrupting effects of that control).
• Artificial Intelligence
  The False Promise of “AI for Social Good” — A critical look at claims that AI technologies will advance the common good (and a set of challenges for those trying to guide the technology in more positive ways).
• Artificial Intelligence
  AI Is Grown, Not Built — An argument that AI is less of an engineered, "complicated" system and more of a complex, continually evolving, organic system.
• Rule of Law
  Constitution Day Calls Us to Honor Peaceful Disagreement — The viability of US democracy depends not only on the words of the Constitution, but on our individual and collective commitments to live by its principles.
• Non-Violence
  The Arab Spring Gets a Reboot in Asia — An update on the new wave of political uprisings that have been sweeping Asia (while we have been distracted by our own political difficulties).
• Communication Complexity
  There’s too many lumpers out there — An insightful and much-needed critique of the common journalistic tendency of lumping disparate social phenomena into simplistic, homogeneous categories.
• Inflammatory Media
  Why We’re Drowning in Conspiracy Theories — Reflections on what makes conspiracy theories so attractive -- their ability to explain complex and morally ambiguous events in simple ways that put us on the "right side of history."
• Psychological Complexity
  ‘Virtue Signalling’ May Annoy Us. But Civilisation Would Be Impossible Without It — A more balanced look at "virtue signaling" and the critical role it plays in organizing communities around the pursuit of the common good. And, like all virtues, it can be destructive if misapplied or taken too far.
• Social / Economic Complexity
  The Pandemic of Fake Jobs — An important argument that much of the work being done by white-collar professionals is unnecessary and adds very little real value to the economy. (We can't keep wasting all of that talent.)
• Inflammatory Media
  Rage Is Now the Machine — In a play on the old slogan "rage against the machine," this article documents how rage has become politics.
• Psychological Complexity
  Censorship Hurts Our Brains—Literally — A neuropsychological evaluation of the way in which monolithic information systems affect our thinking and our brains.
• US Politics
  How the DSA Became the Democrats’ Tea Party — Thoughts about the larger political implications of the way in which Zohran Mamdani (and the Democratic Socialists for America) Are reshaping the Democratic Party.
• Persuasion
  Mutual Persuasion, Not Violence, Is the Path to Follow — The key to building a better society is not forcing people to do things that they don't want to do. Instead, we need to persuade them that doing those things is in their best interest.
• Communication Complexity
  What We Lose When We Can't Talk to Each Other — The apparent benefits of stifling opposition and disagreement are easy to see. The far larger costs of proscribing disagreement and debate are, unfortunately, less obvious.

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About the MBI Newsletters

Two or three times a week, Guy and Heidi Burgess, the BI Directors, share some of our thoughts on political hyper-polarization and related topics. We also share essays from our colleagues and other contributors, and every week or so, we devote one newsletter to annotated links to outside readings that we found particularly useful relating to U.S. hyper-polarization, threats to peace (and actual violence) in other countries, and related topics of interest. Each Newsletter is posted on BI, and sent out by email through Substack to subscribers. You can sign up to receive your copy here and find the latest newsletter here or on our BI Newsletter page, which also provides access to all the past newsletters, going back to 2017.

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