Bridging is not sufficient to the task of fighting authoritarianism.

I have a new theory of change.

When I answered the call in 2003 to help our politics become healthy, I was woefully ignorant. As an entrepreneur, I approached the challenge like any other—find others who were involved (in politics) and become helpful to them. I learn best by diving in and doing the work. I ran for a local office (lost in the primary), joined political groups that supported women candidates, and was eventually introduced to a circle working in ‘transpartisan politics.’ Our theory of change was to build bonds of shared humanity that would influence better policy.

Within a few years, I was hired as a facilitator/consultant and spent the next two decades growing that ethos. The work expanded beyond dialogue and empathy: we gathered structural reformers championing non-party-affiliated voters, citizen-led redistricting, and ranked choice voting; we connected with think tanks writing policy for Congress and media outlets attempting cross-partisan coverage. We convened leaders across these four areas of pro-democracy work to plant the seed of a movement.

I’m proud of this work of organizing, creating and inspiring coalition building. Yet the work itself was insufficient to strengthen democracy in the United States. We’ve seen the continued erosion of respect, trust and healthy engagement across differences. The theory of change that if we just understood each other better, healing would happen organically has been debunked. Thoroughly. The most damning evidence comes from a 2022 study published in Nature Human Behaviour by Jan Voelkel and colleagues at Stanford. Across experiments with more than 12,000 participants, they successfully reduced affective polarization—the warm/cold feelings between partisans—by an amount equivalent to rewinding three decades of polarization. Then they tested whether that reduction translated to anything that mattered for democracy. It didn’t. Reductions in affective polarization, the authors concluded, “do not reliably reduce support for undemocratic practices, support for partisan violence, or biased evaluation of politicized facts.” [1] People liked the other side more and behaved no differently on the things that actually threaten democracy.

What we missed were the effects of toxic polarization that dialogue alone cannot fix. A workshop is not enough time to “correct” our misperceptions about others when we return to our in-group and social media feeds. A 2025 meta-analysis in PNAS by Sean Westwood and colleagues confirmed exactly this: the typical depolarization intervention produces a shift of about 5 points on a 101-point scale, decays within roughly two weeks, and does not improve with repeated exposure. Their conclusion was that the field needs to “shift its focus toward top-down solutions addressing elite behaviors and structural incentives that fuel partisan conflict.” [2]

Understanding our neighbor or family member better doesn’t change our behavior or lessen our belief the other person is “wrong.” I have felt this in myself. Engaging with my friends who support the current president, I’m always in a tug of war to persuade them. And they are trying to persuade me. It’s not a healthy dynamic.

What bridging alone lacks is the power to make systemic change. And we are in a time where our old system is failing and the new one is being debated or fought over. The cross-national work of political scientists Jennifer McCoy, Murat Somer, and Tahmina Rahman shows that severe polarization “is activated when major groups mobilize politically to achieve fundamental changes in structures, institutions, and power relations.” [3] In other words, the heat we are feeling is not a glitch in the system; it is what mobilization for structural change looks like. Treating that heat as the problem—rather than the conditions that produced it—mistakes a symptom for a cause. Bridging often seeks to smooth over that conflict instead of addressing it. It is the “negative peace” that Martin Luther King, Jr. warned us about during the Civil Rights Movement. In his 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail, King wrote: “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klansman, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.” [4]

The Civil Rights Movement was dedicated to peace, not bridging. Dedicated to bringing about change by marshalling collective power to demand better living conditions. That is the pattern of every major democratic gain—suffrage, civil rights, the fall of apartheid, Solidarity in Poland: organized mobilization with infrastructure, leadership, and discipline. Erica Chenoweth & Maria Stephan’s research on civil resistance points in the same direction—the trust that holds democratic movements together is the trust among organizers doing hard work together, not warmth toward the people defending the status quo. [5] Bridging may help raise the floor of public civility, but the building gets built by people doing structural work together.

My new theory of change has developed based on the last 20 years plus making friends with those who have worked around the world in post-conflict zones. It’s not unique to me. What is unique is how I want to contribute to the world.

I believe people are motivated by what is best for themselves, and that what we want, underneath everything, is a life of dignity—shelter, food, safety, and the freedom to imagine ourselves into a future worth living. That imagining is not a private exercise. When we picture our own lives of dignity, we picture them inside communities; the future we want for ourselves is the future we want for the people around us.

That is the conviction behind my current work at JEDI Futures—Justice, Equity, Dignity, Inclusion—a program built around a free personal visioning tool that helps people write their own future life story and begin to see how their vision overlaps with the people around them. I have come to believe this is where any honest theory of change has to start. We cannot organize toward a future we have not let ourselves imagine. Conflict profiteers are skilled at telling us what to fear; they are useless at telling us what to build. Imagination lays the tracks for the reality train to follow—and once those tracks are laid, the slower work of building communities where we can thrive together becomes possible.

In this version of my and our work, bridging is no longer the destination. It is a tool—dialogue in service to a shared future, and to the collective power required to actually build it. That, finally, feels right to me.

[1] Voelkel, J.G., Chu, J., Stagnaro, M.N., et al. “Interventions reducing affective polarization do not necessarily improve anti-democratic attitudes.” Nature Human Behaviour 7, 55–64 (2023). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01466-9

[2] Westwood, S.J., et al. “Why depolarization is hard: Evaluating attempts to decrease partisan animosity in America.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025). https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2508827122

[3] McCoy, J., Rahman, T., & Somer, M. “Polarization and the Global Crisis of Democracy: Common Patterns, Dynamics, and Pernicious Consequences for Democratic Polities.” American Behavioral Scientist 62(1), 16–42 (2018). https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0002764218759576

[4] King, Martin Luther, Jr. “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” April 16, 1963.

[5] Chenoweth, E., & Stephan, M.J. Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (Columbia University Press, 2011). See also Weipert-Fenner et al., “Trust and social movements: A new research agenda,” Current Sociology (2024).