Molineaux is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and president/CEO of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
Conflict resolution, mediation and peacebuilding are established communities of work steeped in and supported by research. Bridging divides, or “bridging” as it is being called today, is a younger cousin that developed from the dialogue and deliberation community. In the D&D world, it is largely practiced as multi-stakeholder engagement in local communities – although it is practiced at national and global levels, too.
Bridging conversations are beginning to have a bigger impact on the effort to decrease toxic polarization. But back In 2002, the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation formed and began to gather practitioners into a community to share best practices. NCDD is still thriving, and contributed to the beginnings of Bridge Alliance (an alliance of organizations devoted to improving healthy self-governance from local to federal levels) as well as contributing to the ethos behind the bridging community for cross-partisan conversations.
Bridging practitioners are planning a movement: to mainstream the demand for high-quality conversations and relationships via improved skill sets like open-mindedness, deep listening and better understanding of our differences to act on our commonalities. This in turn will support other movements to improve our ability to self-govern as citizens.
The hypothesis of the bridging divides community is that healthy relationships between everyday diverse people will build our resilience as a nation. In short, there is a strong belief that bridging conversations, where people discuss sensitive issues, some political, will help decrease toxic polarization and build demand for more reasonable people in elected and appointed offices. This has yet to be proven, and may rely on (re)establishing our faith and our collective choice to strengthen the democratic republic in which we live.
Within the bridging divides community, the underlying assumption in the hypothesis is that the United States’ democratic republic is stable, and better skills will help us navigate through conflict in a healthier way.
I’m more confident today than I was pre-midterm election that this assumption is correct. When democracy is threatened (and ours was rated “democracy in decline” in 2021 by a Swedish think tank, scoring 82/100 by Freedom House in 2022), it leads us to an interesting intersection of the bridging divides field and the authoritarian scholarship field.
While there has been nascent research around the effectiveness of bridging divides, there is a larger and growing body of research around authoritarian scholarship and efforts to promote democratic values around the world. In short, many people in the Bridge Alliance coalition are working on pro-democracy efforts to defend and protect our republic through electoral reforms and bipartisan policies. And other coalition members, like bridgers, are working to make self-governance more effective, supporting pro-democracy efforts through lowered resistance to reform.
Pro-democracy and anti-authoritarian efforts start with a different hypothesis: that democracy is fragile and must be strengthened through systemic change, socioeconomic policies and electoral reforms.
What does the research say? Anti-authoritarian/pro-democracy research shows that bridging divides is less effective or not effective for strengthening democracy itself; bridging divides may be effective for self-governance in a stable democracy – research is underway.
My colleague, Julia Roig, noted in an email recently:
I’ve learned that the focus on individual psychology is actually controversial in the field of authoritarian scholarship. Some would point to socio-economic-political factors as the most prominent underpinning of support for authoritarianism and they also point to the phenomena of inducing defections from the pillars that support an authoritarian system. This happens when so much economic and social pressure is exerted that it’s not in people’s self interest to support the authoritarian regime any more. So the idea is that people’s support for anti-democratic behavior is much more malleable than generally assumed. Another example, in post-Nazi Germany or post-Pinochet Chile previous supporters of a repressive regime will say afterwards that they were never real supporters and seem to shift to pro-democracy once the political winds changed.
This is the emphasis behind pro-democracy and anti-authoritarian work – to reform the system itself so that democracy provides better living standards and opportunities than authoritarian regimes.
Next column: How does the bridging divides work support pro-democracy efforts?
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivers a keynote speech at the 62nd Munich Security Conference on Saturday, Feb. 14, 2026, in Munich, Germany.
Marco Rubio is the only adult left in the room
Finally free from the demands of being chief archivist of the United States, secretary of state, national security adviser and unofficial viceroy of Venezuela, Marco Rubio made his way to the Munich Security Conference last weekend to deliver a major address.
I shouldn’t make fun. Rubio, unlike so many major figures in this administration, is a bona fide serious person. Indeed, that’s why President Trump keeps piling responsibilities on him. Rubio knows what he’s talking about and cares about policy. He is hardly a free agent; Trump is still president after all. But in an administration full of people willing to act like social media trolls, Rubio stands out for being serious. And I welcome that.
But just because Rubio made a serious argument, that doesn’t mean it was wholly persuasive. Part of his goal was to repair some of the damage done by his boss, who not long ago threatened to blow up the North Atlantic alliance by snatching Greenland away from Denmark. Rubio’s conciliatory language was welcome, but it hardly set things right.
Whether it was his intent or not, Rubio had more success in offering a contrast with Vice President JD Vance, who used the Munich conference last year as a platform to insult allies and provide fan service to his followers on X. Rubio’s speech was the one Vance should have given, if the goal was to offer a serious argument about Trump’s “vision” for the Western alliance. I put “vision” in scare quotes because it’s unclear to me that Trump actually has one, but the broader MAGA crowd is desperate to construct a coherent theory of their case.
So what’s that case? That Western Civilization is a real thing, America is not only part of it but also its leader, and it will do the hard things required to fix it.
In Rubio’s story, America and Europe embraced policies in the 1990s that amounted to the “managed decline” of the West. European governments were free riders on America’s military might and allowed their defense capabilities to atrophy as they funded bloated welfare states and inefficient regulatory regimes. Free trade, mass migration and an infatuation with “the rules-based global order” eroded national sovereignty, undermined the “cohesion of our societies” and fueled the “de-industrialization” of our economies. The remedy for these things? Reversing course on those policies and embracing the hard reality that strength and power drive events on the global stage.
“The fundamental question we must answer at the outset is what exactly are we defending,” Rubio said, “because armies do not fight for abstractions. Armies fight for a people; armies fight for a nation. Armies fight for a way of life.”
I agree with some of this — to a point. And, honestly, given how refreshing it is to hear a grown-up argument from this administration, it feels churlish to quibble.
But, for starters, the simple fact is that Western Civilization is an abstraction, and so are nations and peoples. And that’s fine. Abstractions — like love, patriotism, moral principles, justice — are really important. Our “way of life” is largely defined and understood through abstractions: freedom, the American dream, democracy, etc. What is the “Great” in Make America Great Again, if not an abstraction?
This is important because the administration’s defenders ridicule or dismiss any principled objection critics raise as fastidious gitchy-goo eggheadery. Trump tramples the rule of law, pardons cronies, tries to steal an election and violates free market principles willy-nilly. And if you complain, it’s because you’re a goody-goody fool.
As White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said not long ago, “we live in a world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.” Rubio said it better, but it’s the same idea.
There are other problems with Rubio’s story. At the start of the 1990s, the EU’s economy was 9% bigger than ours. In 2025 we were nearly twice as rich as Europe. If Europe was “ripping us off,” they have a funny way of showing it. America hasn’t “deindustrialized.” The manufacturing sector has grown during all of this decline, though not as much as the service sector, where we are a behemoth. We have shed manufacturing jobs, but that has more to do with automation than immigration. Moreover, the trends Rubio describes are not unique to America. Manufacturing tends to shrink as countries get richer.
That’s an important point because Rubio, like his boss, blames all of our economic problems on bad politicians and pretends that good politicians can fix them through sheer force of will.
I think Rubio is wrong, but I salute him for making his case seriously.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.