Newsletter #401 — November 19, 2025

"If It Exists, It Must Be Possible" — Kenneth Boulding's First Law 

Guy's mentor in graduate school was Kenneth Boulding, a renowned economist and peace scholar. Kenneth was fond of citing what he called his "First Law" — "If it exists (or if it has been done), it must be possible."  For years, we've been sharing stories about people who have been successfully doing things that most people thought were impossible. That's relevant here because many people seem to think that we need to engage in partisan politics — in other words, that the key to saving democracy is to to decisively defeat "the other side."  Nonpartisan efforts to save democracy are presumed to be unworkable. But they are not. There are many examples of successful nonpartisan efforts to strengthen democracy. These efforts demonstrate that there are viable alternatives to a hyper-polarized political struggle. We just need many more people to take responsibility for implementing these ideas in contexts where they can make a difference. 

Utah's Fair Campaign Practices — Voluntary Pledge

For more than 20 years, Utah has had something very similar to our "Democracy-For-All Pledge — something they call the "Fair Campaign Practices - Voluntary Pledge."

The pledge is to be provided to each candidate seeking public office.  It reads:

There are basic principles of decency, honesty, and fair play which every candidate for public office in the State of Utah has a moral obligation to observe and uphold, in order that, after vigorously contested but fairly conducted campaigns, our citizens may exercise their right to a free election, and that the will of the people may be fully and clearly expressed on the issues.

Candidates are asked to:

• Conduct their campaigns openly and publicly, without using or permitting others to use "scurrilous attacks on any candidate or the candidate's immediate family" or stating anything about the candidate or the candidate's family that is not "truthful, provable, and relevant to the campaign."
• Abstain from any practice that tends to "corrupt or undermine our American system of free elections, or that hinders or prevents the free expression of the will of the voters."
• Defend every qualified American voter's right to enjoy the "full and equal participation in the electoral process."   

While the pledge is voluntary, since Utah is a heavily Mormon state, the call for upholding one's "moral obligation" has considerable weight.

The Cox-Spencer Gubernatorial Race

In 2020, the opposing candidates for governor of Utah, Spencer Cox and Chris Peterson, made a joint campaign ad, talking about their shared values and committing to accept the results of the presidential election, no matter who won. According to a story in Utah's Deseret News, "Although Cox said a few people he told about the ad called it a bad idea, the “reaction was just overwhelmingly positive.” The ad was later submitted to Stanford University's Strengthening Democracy Challenge, and was found to be one of the most effective submissions (out of 252) for reducing support for partisan violence and "reducing support for undemocratic practices, including overthrowing an election, gerrymandering and trying to withhold votes from people."

Disagree Better

After Cox won the election, he became chair of the National Governor's Association, from which he started the Disagree Better Campaign. Cox was distressed by the increasing political polarization in the country and urged his co-governors to "show that there was a better way" to do politics.  As described on the Disagree Better Website,

The idea was beautifully simple: When leaders from both parties engage one another with respect and genuine curiosity, they reflect the best of who we are and remind us what’s possible when we do the same.

Twenty-three governors from both parties joined in, and Governor Jared Polis, a Democrat from Colorado, continued the initiative when he succeeded Cox as National Governor's Association Chair.  The campaign is now an independent nonprofit. It has events, offers resources, and shows us all how we can "disagree better." The new website reports that:

We're working with celebrities, athletes, musicians, public figures, influencers, and political leaders to show what respectful disagreement looks like in action.

Because when people see their leaders treating each other with dignity, even in heated debates, it gives all of us permission to do the same.

Disagree Better isn't about being lukewarm, acting nice, or giving up your beliefs. It's about standing strong, having passion, and still seeing the humanity in those who disagree.

That's what we are talking about. You can call it "Disagree Better," "Democracy-for-All" or something else.  The key idea is that we need to change the way we are seeing and responding to each other.

Mormon Women for Ethical Government

Another relevant example is the Mormon Women For Ethical Government's Principles of Ethical Government.  These three principles set the boundaries for their advocacy work, and seem like principles we all should follow.  They are:

• The Rule of Law: Every government official and institution has a duty to respect the rule of law, including accepted processes for how the law is to be established, executed, and interpreted.
• Rights: Every human being is endowed with rights that governments are obligated to protect and not violate. These include both universal human rights such as the rights to life and liberty, as well as civil rights such as the rights to equitable political representation and equal protection under the law.
• Responsibilities: All human beings are mutually accountable to their fellow human beings in their local communities, their countries, and the world.

The House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress

Another especially ambitious effort to decouple partisanship from the strengthening of democracy was the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress which was established on January 4, 2019, as part of the 116th Congress.  It was so successful that it was continued in the 117th Congress. Representative Derek Kilmer (D-WA) was chair both times; Tom Graves (R-GA) was Vice Chair in the 116th Congress; William Timmons (R-SC) was chair during the 117th Congress. 

On December 3, 2024, we talked with Rep. Kilmer about the Select Committee and what lessons he learned from chairing it. When we asked him what lessons he had gained from his work that others could use to decrease polarization, he replied, "If you want things to work differently, sometimes you have to do things differently." The Select Committee did things differently from the start.

As an example, when Speaker Nancy Pelosi asked him to chair this committee, she asked him how many people he wanted on it. He replied:

"I think it should be an equal number, six Democrats and six Republicans. And in fact, I think that we should require a supermajority vote for passing any recommendations." And she said, "Well, you know you're in the majority, right? You don't have to do it that way." And I said, "Well, I'm just of the belief that if we want to have durable change and systemic change within the institution, it needs to be bipartisan. Because otherwise, we'll make a change. And then when Republicans are in charge, they'll make a change back. And we'll just swing back and forth, rather than doing something that's durable." And to her credit, she said, "Great. Okay. Go for it."

That wasn't the only thing they did differently. Instead of having separate staffs for Republicans and Democrats, they shared one staff, with Rep. Kilmer and his Republican counterpart Tom Graves (a very conservative Georgian) making all the hiring decisions together.  They all sat in a circle around a conference table, alternating Republican and Democrat. The witnesses sat at the same table too — no one was above the other.  Also, at the beginning of their work, they had a bipartisan planning retreat to develop relationships, to determine what each member wanted to get out of their service on the committee, and how they would define success.  They also set rules of engagement.

...so that when we came to our committee, we all acknowledged that maybe we didn't have all of the answers. So we engaged one another through a lens of respect. And setting those ground rules at the front end — that's just good hygiene, but it seldom happens. It almost never happens in Congress.

Over its four years, the Committee passed over 200 recommendations (all with a supermajority). Many of them have been implemented and others were still in process when we talked in December, 2024.

I asked Rep. Kilmer why all the other House Committees didn't follow their procedural leads. He said it was both a matter of "skill" and "will."

The will issues are all of those things that make negotiation and compromise difficult. People being worried about a primary or gerrymandering that has made their district so blue or so red that it makes compromise politically perilous. And campaign finance is a challenge. Those are "will issues" that lead folks in Congress to often look at this more like a game to be won, rather than as problems to be solved.

Skill issues, he said, involved the ability to listen, learn, negotiate, and resolve conflict. Many of the Congressional Representatives don't have those skills and there is no professional development to speak of.  That's one of the things that the House Select Committee was working to change.

Though Congress clearly has become more dysfunctional since we talked with Rep. Kilmer, the House Select Committee existed and did amazing bipartisan work when the rest of Congress was mired in hyper-polarized squabbles. Kilmer and his Co-Chairs Tom Graves and William Timmons proved effective bi-partisan governing, even in Congress, is possible.

Civic Hub Building 

Another decoupling strategy is being pursued by several programs that are working to develop "civic hubs" for better consensus-based local decision-making.  The two we are most familiar with are Better Together America (BTA), which we talked about with Caleb Christen and Vinay Orekondy in Newsletter 281, and Braver Angel's new Citizen-Led Solutions (CLS) Initiative. Both these initiatives (and there are others we know less about) bring people together at the local level to address problems of local concern. Both BTA and CLS try to recruit participants from a wide variety of backgrounds, including not only progressives and conservatives, but also young and old, professionals and blue-collar workers, etc. Basically, they try to involve anyone who is likely to be concerned about an issue in the conversation.  

Although such conversations can quickly polarize around the red-blue division when they happen online or at the national level, such polarization is much less common at the local level.  At that level, people share the same community and hence have many similar experiences; they tend to trust local governments and local news more than they trust the federal government or national news, and in general are more willing to work collaboratively to develop solutions to local problems. This is what good democratic governance looks like. It doesn't involve defeating one side or the other — it involves solving problems.

Bridging Programs

Yet another decoupling strategy is being pursued by the many projects and programs that use dialogue, deliberations, and other similar processes to bridge divides. (Examples include Living Room Conversations, Braver Angels, Essential Partners, Civity, and BridgeUSA and many others. (This is, perhaps, one of the most developed of the many decoupling efforts.)  The goal of these programs is to help people on different sides of a controversial topic to better understand where the other side "is coming from," and to develop more respect for people with differing views.  (And deliberation processes go farther to try to come up with consensus ideas for solving a particular problem.)

People who participate in dialogues seldom change their minds about the issues they are discussing, and they do not stop advocating for the things and candidates they believe in. But they do often change their minds about the way in which they advocate for those issues and candidates.  And they learn that people on "the other side" are not always the monsters they have been led to believe on social media, but are actually likable, relatable people. So they tend to move away from more hostile, contentious ways of advocating for their side, and replace such contention with more constructive approaches to both politics and conflict.  

This, however, has a caveat.  If the bridge-building is only being used to build a big enough coalition to overpower "the other," then, while useful in that way, it would not be what we would call a "decoupling" effort. Rather, it would be another polarizing effort. To really make a decoupling difference, it has to go beyond coalition building and focus on building bridges between people on both sides of the political divide.

Going Further

All of these examples illustrate what we are talking about.  They are focused on "fixing democracy" or "doing democracy right" without tying that to either the Republican or the Democratic agenda.  Rather, it is tied to an "American agenda." The strategies work, they just have to be implemented in sufficient numbers to counteract the forces driving us apart.

Thinking more broadly than we have thus far, we think another de-coupling project should convene a bi-partisan (or perhaps multi-partisan to include independents and third parties) effort to get all sides to agree on what the key elements of democracy are. As we explained in the first post of this series, Democrats and Republicans have very different images of what the threats to democracy are, or even whether democracy is threatened at all.  (Conservatives tend to think more in terms of "civic renewal," than "strengthening democracy.") But polls show that a vast majority of Americans think our "democracy is under serious threat," and believe that Congress is dysfunctional.  Large numbers of people also agree that expansive claims of executive authority are problematic, as is the continuing erosion of the system of checks and balances. 

We are guessing that a well-run committee — much like the House Select Committee on Modernization — could come to consensus about what the most important attributes of democracy are, and what the threat to those elements are. They could then work with others to devise solutions or at least responses to each of those threats. As Rep. Kilmer said to Speaker Pelosi, "If we want to have durable change and systemic change, ... it needs to be bipartisan. Because otherwise, we'll make a change. And then when Republicans are in charge, they'll make a change back. And we'll just swing back and forth, rather than doing something that's durable." 

That is what we are seeing now. Biden was trying to undo most everything that Trump did in his first term. However, his administration did so in such a partisan way that Trump came roaring back, bent on "retribution," which he is enacting in ways that are highly undemocratic. And many Democrats (though not all) are calling for even more partisan responses, hoping to wrest control of Congress in 2026 and of the Presidency in 2028.  Unless they then try to govern in a bi-partisan way (which seems unlikely at the moment), the partisan pendulum is just going to swing wider and wider, further eroding democracy with each wild swing.

So a key element of the de-coupling we are calling for is a bi-partisan or non-partisan assessment of the state of democracy, assessing not only what is threatened or going wrong now, but also how past procedures and policies failed to live up to the democratic ideal that we have been pursuing for almost 250 years.  Such an assessment would then consider how new (or reinvented) institutions and procedures could be built that would do a better job of upholding those values in the future.  Thus, the effort would be forward-looking at "how can we finally build a democracy in which we all like to live?" 

We know a lot about what needs to be done. We just need a lot more people to do the work. In our next post, we will talk about an even wider array of opportunities for joining the effort and making a difference.

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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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