What Bridge-Building Owes Democracy

Pushing back against treating asymmetric threats as symmetric for the sake of appearing balanced.

After the latest shooting of an observer in Minneapolis by federal agents, Ilana Redstone captured the interpretive chasm: “The left says we're watching fascism unfold. The right says we're watching law enforcement do its job.” That gap has brought me back to a question that I began asking just about one year ago in “A Message to the Outrage Overload Family”: is bridge-building just fiddling while Rome burns?

At that time, Guy and Heidi Burgess offered me a way through it that I found stabilizing at the time. They argued that as grim as polarization looks, there is still a broad public appetite for health, safety, functioning institutions, and something like prosperity. Trump supporters wouldn’t become progressive, they suggested, but they might eventually want to co-author a future that works better than the present. Bridge-builders could help create “islands” in the political middle—places where people can cooperate, learn, and rebuild democratic norms while the mainland is lashed by storms.

I don’t dismiss that vision. It’s humane, in the best sense of the word. It recognizes that holding a free, diverse country together is hard work and that democracy is a participatory craft, not just a consumer product. It insists that the civic basics—rule of law, accountability, shared truth, mutual obligation—are teachable and salvageable.

I want that to be true.

But revisiting it now, after Minneapolis, after a year of accelerating norm-breaking, disinformation, and institutional capture, I’m not sure I believe all the underlying truisms anymore.

The first truism is that most Americans still see a functioning pluralistic democracy as a shared ideal. I’m increasingly skeptical. I’ve written elsewhere that we may be entering a period where large portions of the electorate are prepared to abandon Madisonian democracy altogether—not because people suddenly hate democracy in the abstract, but because more of us now seem willing to bend the rules or sideline our neighbors if that’s what it takes to win.

The second truism is that civic education can rescue us. Civic education presumes an epistemic environment in which people believe facts exist, legitimacy matters, and institutions deserve continuity. But those suppositions are precisely what’s under contest. When political actors can demand loyalty to untruths as a test of belonging, the issue isn’t that citizens don’t know how a bill becomes a law. The issue is whether truth is even allowed to constrain power.

The third truism is that both sides are still operating within democratic rules but trapped in misperception and mistrust. That has been the dominant theory of polarization for a decade or more: if we could fix media diets, reduce affective hatred, increase empathy, and encourage contact, the system would revert to pluralistic equilibrium. But I don’t think we’re in that world anymore. We’re in a live authoritarian contest, where one faction is actively degrading checks and balances, politicizing institutions, normalizing disinformation, and quashing dissent.

This isn't hyperbole. Legal scholars including conservative figures like retired federal judge J. Michael Luttig have warned of specific constitutional concerns such as election subversion efforts and threats to judicial independence. Former officials from both parties have cited examples like the elimination of independent review by inspectors general, explicit attacks on political rivals through DOJ directives, and the firing or reassignment of career prosecutors seen as disloyal.

The diversity of these warning sources—from international monitors and conservative judges to career officials—is crucial: it shows the concerns transcend partisanship, focusing on measurable erosions in checks, norms, and electoral integrity rather than ideology alone.

Bridging frameworks not only struggle to address this; many were designed not to acknowledge it.

Some will point to left-coded illiberalism: campus speech restrictions, corporate ideology enforcement, and administrative overreach. These deserve critique—and many bridge-builders, myself included, have offered it. But there's a category difference between actions that are bad policy within democratic rules and actions that dismantle the rules themselves. The first we can vote out, protest, reform. The second eliminates the mechanisms by which we do those things. Not all threats are equal.

Jonathan Stray has argued that bridging must explicitly engage questions of power and democratic norms, rather than imagining itself as above politics. I think he’s right. The central problem is perhaps no longer that we disagree too intensely, but that some actors are undermining the conditions for fair disagreement entirely. If the civic arena collapses—rigged elections, normalized political violence, total information warfare—then bridge-building becomes performative at best. At worst, it becomes cover.

This brings me to a recent piece by Ilana Redstone, who I very much admire and respect. Redstone argues that both the left and right abandoned the democratic project: the left by closing deliberation through moral diagnosis, the right by closing it through imposition. It’s a symmetrical account of how we lost the category of “good person who disagrees with me.”

Redstone’s analysis is sharp on mechanisms. But her framing does two things I find troubling.

First, it casts the left as first mover and the right as reactor. This ‘the left broke norms first, so the right responded’ narrative treats authoritarian escalation as explained—if not justified—by progressive overreach. But this causality is more asserted than demonstrated. Authoritarian movements don’t typically arise because campus activists were sanctimonious. They arise from long-standing anxieties about demographic change, status loss, and the desire for hierarchical order.

Second, it treats both sides’ departures from democratic norms as morally symmetrical. Progressive moral overreach has damaged pluralism—that's real. But the distance from 'we find your speech offensive' to 'we'll deplatform you' is not the same as the distance from 'these agencies constrain us' to 'we'll purge every inspector general and career official who won't pledge loyalty.' One is a failure of liberal temperament. The other is systematic dismantling of accountability and rule of law.

Which brings me to my own crisis as a bridge-builder: I worry that our field has been so committed to neutrality that we failed to notice when neutrality became a side. Bridge-building was built for a world where the problem was misunderstanding. But we’re now in a world where the problem may be a contest over whether the democratic game continues at all.

There’s a rhetorical move at play here, where any claim of asymmetric threat gets dismissed as partisan exaggeration, which creates a catch-22:

• If you name authoritarian actions → “You’re being hysterical/partisan”

• If you don’t name them → They proceed unopposed

• The demand for “balance” becomes a shield against accountability

This is especially insidious when there’s broad expert consensus about what’s happening. When scholars of authoritarianism, former officials across party lines, constitutional lawyers, and democracy monitors are all sounding alarms, dismissing those concerns as “just another opinion” is indeed gaslighting.

What would change my mind? If the concerning patterns reversed: if independent oversight were restored, if election certification became routine again, if prosecutorial independence were respected, if dissent weren’t criminalized. I’m not arguing one side is inherently authoritarian—I’m arguing specific actions match authoritarian patterns, and those actions could stop tomorrow. The framework is the point, not the team.

So if not neutrality, then what?

One helpful frame comes from activist theory, which identifies four lanes: Helpers, Advocates, Organizers, and Rebels. Bridge-building actually already occupies all four, just implicitly:

• Helpers do relational depolarization—de-escalating conflict at the family or community level.

• Advocates work inside institutions, mediating between communities and bureaucracies.

• Organizers build coalitions and shared projects across divides.

• Rebels surface injustice and distortions that make genuine bridging impossible.

Under authoritarian conditions, these lanes become clearer and more necessary. You can’t build islands without Builders, but you also can’t build islands if no one is disrupting the forces eroding the coastline. Pressure and peacemaking are not opposites; they are different steps in the same process, sometimes one after the other, sometimes at the same time. Badly timed “bridging” can prematurely smooth over necessary conflict.

Which brings me to the hope, such as it is.

Authoritarian movements do not step down after a tough election, agree to disagree, or yield to better interpersonal understanding. They end by defeat, disintegration, or internal collapse — not by seasonal rotation.

This doesn’t make bridge-building irrelevant; it makes it strategic. The task isn’t merely to get Americans to like each other more. It’s to keep the arena for disagreement from being captured, shattered, or rigged. Without that arena, talk of “coming together” is theater. Without legitimate information, elections, institutions, and dissent, there is nothing left to bridge.

Hope still exists, but it can’t be the soft hope of “we’ll figure it out.” It has to be the hard hope of citizens who:

• Defend election integrity across all jurisdictions

• Protect independent institutions from political capture

• Maintain information ecosystems where facts constrain power

• Ensure dissent remains legal and safe

Bridge-building requires: legitimate elections, protection for dissent, accountability to facts, and institutional independence. When any actor undermines these—through election subversion, political violence, information warfare, or institutional capture—bridge-work must not be afraid to name it.

Currently, these violations cluster asymmetrically but this isn’t partisan work. It’s constitutional work. And it’s what bridge-builders must do when the bridge itself is under attack.

If we succeed, the story of this period won’t be about polarization at all. It will be about citizens who refused to give up on constitutional self-government, and who fought — sometimes gently, sometimes fiercely — to keep a country of many beliefs living under one shared rule of law.

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I know many bridge-builders will disagree with this analysis. Some will argue I've abandoned neutrality for partisanship. Others will say I haven't gone far enough. I want to hear from both. How do you navigate bridge-building when you believe one side poses asymmetric threats to democracy itself? What am I missing?