Newsletter #461 — June 11, 2026

by Heidi Burgess 

We have written about More in Common and the Perception Gap and Hidden Tribes reports quite a bit in this newsletter, but since not everyone watching or reading this video would have seen those references, I started by asking Daniel to explain what More in Common does, and what those reports were about. It turns out More in Common was started in the UK in 2016, in response to the assassination of a British member of Parliament, Jo Cox. Initially, it hosted events that brought people together over dinner and other gatherings to help people have better conversations and resolve differences. Soon, chapters were formed in other countries, including the U.S., Poland, Spain, Brazil, France, and Germany. Daniel joined More in Common in 2017 in the U.S.  Here they started out doing social psychological research on political polarization, hoping to use those insights to help resolve conflicts and heal divisions.  

Their first major report was Hidden Tribes, which 

tackled the question of whether America is a 50/50 country, as we are commonly led to believe. Is it really red versus blue, liberals versus conservatives, Democrat versus Republican?

We did a survey of 8,000 Americans. We asked them a range of questions about what we call their "core beliefs" — their underlying views and values, how they think about group identity, what their moral values are, their parenting philosophy, their views about agency and personal responsibility, and other questions. We used a statistical technique called hierarchical clustering to identify groups of people in the American population who hold similar core beliefs. This approach yielded seven different groups — what we call "tribes" — ranging from progressive activists on the far left, about 8% of the population, to devoted conservatives on the far right, also about 6% to 8% of the population, and a number of different groups in between: traditional liberals, moderates, the politically disengaged, traditional conservatives, and so on.

What the report did was break open this notion that we're such a divided country, and really began to shed light on the different kinds of perspectives that Americans hold — perspectives that don't necessarily adhere to the traditional stereotypical view of either side.

In addition, we discovered a group that we call the "exhausted majority." The exhausted majority is about two-thirds of the American population. They experience politics a little bit differently from the people on the political wings. They are less likely to get involved in political arguments and post political content online. They're more flexible in their views, and they're more frustrated with political division. They want politicians to work together to solve shared problems.

The overall picture that emerged is that the American political landscape is far more nuanced and complex than we're typically led to believe by the traditional narrative. We have a lot of Americans who hold more nuanced and complex perspectives and beliefs than you might think based on their party affiliation, where they live, their racial identity, or anything else.

I asked Daniel whether they were finding similar tribes outside the U.S., and he replied "no."

 I think the United States is a unique situation. We are more polarized than the vast majority of other democracies in the Western world. You also have more extreme views being held on the wings — the wings are farther apart from each other than in other countries.

There are more extreme or wing-identified groups in other country settings, but their differences are tame compared to the differences we have in the United States. It's a complex story, because on one hand we want to say that Americans often do have more in common than they typically believe. But that is really true mostly for the people in the middle. Whereas the active and vocal, very convinced members of the political wings really do have considerable differences.

The Beacon Project was a spin-off of the Hidden Tribes report. That report showed that the Exhausted Majority 

feel as though their views and values are not reflected in political discourse. They feel as though the wings don't speak their language, don't resonate with their actual views.

The question then emerges: if the prevailing narratives don't speak to the exhausted majority, what is a narrative that can speak to this group? What is a story, a framework, a set of values that resonates with this group of Americans? That is the question the Beacon Project was set up to investigate and try to solve.

Daniel and his colleagues on the Beacon Project are using a variety of tools to answer this question. 

We conduct surveys and polls, We also engage with political science research, social psychology, political philosophy, and history to identify trends and narratives over the course of American history that have resonated and are deep in our founding mythology. Sometimes these are stories just below the surface of people's awareness — things that people take for granted but don't always explicitly acknowledge.

We also have conversations with ordinary Americans as well as with experts and scholars, and we bring people together to make progress on this question: what is a defining vision for America's exhausted majority?

One of the projects under the Beacon Project Umbrella is entitled Agency, Justice, and the American Potential.  I (Heidi) was particularly interested in this one because it found that most people believe that they do have agency—that their success is driven more by their own hard work than by luck.  That runs counter to Guy's and my (and many others') observation that people do not feel they have agency when it comes to influencing politics or political decisions. So I asked about that discrepancy. Daniel replied:

This is a major report that we wrote over many years. We kept finding this very basic, pervasive, pattern in our survey responses over the course of almost a decade. When you ask Americans how much control they feel they have over the way their life turns out — and what plays a bigger role, luck or hard work — Americans across all demographic groups, all generations, all races, all political parties really have this cherished belief in the power of the individual to transcend difficult circumstances and make the most of their situation. This is a pervasive and ubiquitous trend, and it relates very much to the mythology of the American dream. ...

[But] when you ask people, "Do you feel like politicians care about people like you?" — [people answer] “no." "Do you think you have a voice in the political system?" — "no." "Does your vote matter?" — "no." You've really hit the nail on the head with this distinction: when it comes to making a successful life, people believe in individual agency. When it comes to affecting the political system, they don't have that same confidence.

I think it must have to do with personal experience. When it comes to the American Dream or personal agency, people see the successful people in their lives as people who worked hard and applied their skills and aptitudes in particular ways. That gives them evidence to support the belief that people have control over the way their lives turn out. But it's very easy to be fatalistic about the state of politics. And so, I can definitely see a tension between these two forms of agency.

I wondered what it would take to broaden the notion of personal agency into political agency and Daniel responded by talking about how they are trying to do just that.

Over the past several years, we've done an enormous amount of work — hundreds of conversations, thousands of data points. Our research has led us toward a particular framework or idea that we think holds promise for offering a vision for the exhausted majority. It begins with a really simple premise: everyone has something to offer. Everyone has a gift. When we share our gifts, it helps other people, and it also gives our lives a sense of meaning and purpose.

The story we're exploring is this: if we take as a basic assumption that everyone has something to offer — that everyone has a gift — what does that mean for how we think about the social contract, about what we owe each other?

The first thing you might say is that you want a society where everyone has an opportunity to develop and share their gifts. This means implementing various policies that ensure a basic threshold of fairness for everybody, so that no one is unfairly deprived of the opportunity to develop and share their unique gifts because of circumstances outside of their control.

But if sharing and developing our gifts is something that gives meaning to our own lives and also helps the people around us, we should think of it, not just as a right, but also as a responsibility. So, what this looks like is a renewed understanding of the active role that we each play in enhancing and improving our own lives and the lives of the people in our country and community. 

The really simple framework that comes out of this is: everyone has a gift, and a right and responsibility to develop and share that gift. Because this is a framework that speaks to fundamental questions of how we structure our society — what our rights and responsibilities are, what the social contract is — you can think of it as a political philosophy. And we actually give this framework a name—we call it potentialism.

Potentialism is a political philosophy that says: everyone has a gift, and a right and responsibility to develop and share that gift. When we have conversations with people, it often strikes them as fairly intuitive. The idea that everyone has something to contribute — that contributing is an important part of living a meaningful and directed life — resonates. And we should see it as an obligation, because it is something we can do to improve our communities.

Potentialism differs in important ways from other prevailing political philosophies. In its commitment to securing people's right to contribute, it actually has a higher floor of social support than, for example, libertarian philosophy, which says the government needs to leave people alone. But in emphasizing the notion of responsibility, it goes beyond much thinking in liberal and progressive circles, which are typically reluctant to say that people have duties or responsibilities aside from pursuing their own good in their own way.

So, it differs from other philosophies, but it is intuitive. Because of this, we think it holds promise as potentially offering a new way of understanding what our rights and responsibilities are as citizens — a stronger social contract in which we expect more of ourselves and ask more of each other.

Daniel went on to explain how this speaks to my question about broadening the sense of personal agency into the political realm.

Potentialism explicitly acknowledges the ways in which our personal flourishing is wrapped up in the well-being of the community. We all have gifts that we have a responsibility to develop not just for our own sake, but for the sake of the collective and to share with other people. That is an element of our civic identity — seeing ourselves as integral members of a civic community who have an obligation to show up and contribute.

... When we're truly manifesting our personal agency — truly being our best selves — it has civic implications, because it allows us to show up in our communities in the fullest possible way. Through that mechanism, we come to see ourselves as having the ability to impact other people's lives, and that becomes a cyclical, positive flywheel. 

Playing the devil's advocate for a moment, I asked Daniel what happens if a person's gift is being an accomplished con man, one who is very good at swindling others. Daniel replied that liberalism has a good solution for this.

The basic idea of liberalism is: you should pursue your own ends as long as they don't interfere with other people's ability to pursue their own ends. We can adopt the same idea. Your gifts should be manifested only to the extent that they don't interfere with other people's ability to do the same. And societies can impose rules that say: you might think that's a gift, but that's not the kind of gift we support. We mean the gifts that are helpful and that increase other people's ability to develop and share their gifts. If the consequence of you developing yours is that it makes it more difficult for other people to do that, that's not a gift.

I then asked David how people might be convinced to adopt potentialism. As he said at the beginning of the interview, people's core beliefs don't change much.  So then, I wondered, why would they change to believing in potentialism? He replied that potentialsim is not a new core belief, but rather an old one.

For many, many people, "everyone has something to offer" would strike them as deeply intuitive. In fact, the idea of contribution and the "virtuous life" is deeply embedded in our founding documents. Jefferson and the founders were really influenced by classical thought and Aristotelian ideas of virtue. For them, the pursuit of happiness is not just a feeling — it's an activity, the activity of living a virtuous life. That's what Aristotle thought: that happiness and living a virtuous life were basically identical. That has been somewhat lost in the way we think about the pursuit of happiness, but it's implicit in a lot of these founding documents.

So I don't actually think the basic ideas around potentialism are new. I think they are old ideas that have been forgotten. One bet we're taking is that this is actually a recovery — that when you say things in this way or explain it to people, it strikes them as so intuitive that it doesn't really require a change in their core beliefs. It's just a naming and a formalization of a set of beliefs that people already hold.

Daniel also explained how they are working to get people to adopt this "core belief," even though he admits getting it widely adopted is "comically ambitious." But he hopes they can achieve that the same way that other social movements have succeeded: "very slowly, and then all at once."

For more information about Hidden Tribes, Potentialism, and more, please read/watch the full interview.

Go to the Transcript and Video of this Interview

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

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