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?
Ben Droz
Ben Droz
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at Pinnacle Bank Expo Center on the Nebraska State Fairgrounds on October 05, 2026 in Grand Island, Nebraska.
The President Invited Iran to Bomb My Home
I was driving home to San Diego from Los Angeles on Monday night when I heard that the President of the United States had offered both cities up to Iran as bomb targets. At a rally in Nebraska, defending his war, Trump told the crowd, “let [Iran] take out Los Angeles, let ‘em take out San Diego.” It was, he said, “a very small price to pay.”
I was coming from a Bernie Sanders rally for Proposition 40, the one-time tax on California billionaires that would send 90% of its revenue to healthcare. We desperately need it to pass because, in order to give tax breaks to billionaires, Trump signed a law that will strip health coverage from 10 million Americans; this tax will make sure we can still cover Californians. Call me crazy, but I think taxing billionaires one time so we can make sure kids in California get to see a doctor is a very small price to pay. I also think that even if Trump were joking, it is indefensible to make jokes about the potential destruction of so many lives. Human life is never a small price to pay. Human life is priceless.
Plus, the reality is: here in San Diego, we’re already paying the price for Trump’s actions, and it’s not small at all. He has gutted FEMA, tried to kill climate resiliency programs, and destroyed public health standards, while his signature law is set to cut off health insurance and food support for hundreds of thousands of San Diegans. Like plenty of American cities, San Diego is already busy finding local solutions to respond to the problems this president has recklessly created.
Not to mention, at least 19 American service members have been killed in this war already. Human rights monitors have documented more than 3,600 dead in Iran by April alone. Here at home, gas is sitting just pennies below its all-time record. Taxpayers have already spent more than $45 billion on the war, while Trump’s oil and gas portfolio has grown by roughly $15.5 million this year alone. Of course anything is a “small price” to someone paying free.99 for this war, and profiting from it. Meanwhile, We the People are paying twice: first for the war, and then for the consequences of that war. But now he wants San Diego to pay a third time, flippantly offering us up to Iran.
It is worth noticing which cities he thought to name. Were San Diego and Los Angeles strategically chosen to signify something to his audience, or were they simply the first cities that came to mind as expendable places? Either way, the effect is to normalize—-and to gauge a crowd’s reaction to–the idea of massive violence in major California cities, suitable targets because of their perceived liberal lean. So what if Iran needs to bomb a little bit of America before the war can be over? Who cares, says Trump, if they target Los Angeles and San Diego?
By the way, why didn’t he offer up San Francisco, the free-love hippie-town MAGA loves to hate (and also my birthplace)? Could it be because that’s where the tech titans live? The same ones who joined Trump for Xi Jinping’s state dinner, a guest list worth a combined $2.4 trillion?
San Diego may have fewer billionaires, but it is home to more than 115,000 active-duty service members and 230,000 veterans. One in six active-duty sailors–in the entire Navy–is stationed here. So is one in four Marines. You cannot throw a rock in this county without hitting a military family: brats and spouses and veterans are among us. I got out of the Navy last year after ten years, and eight of those were here in San Diego. When Trump says “let ‘em take out San Diego,” he’s talking about the backbone of the United States military. He’s also talking about the people fighting his war.
San Diego has not been watching this war from the sidelines. Today, the USS Abraham Lincoln returns to North Island after an almost yearlong deployment to the Middle East that featured food shortages, broken toilets, and mold in the showers after 286 days at sea without a single port call. Eight sailors in the Lincoln’s strike group attempted suicide, but in August, when a reporter asked whether the deployment had gone on too long, Trump said “not nearly long enough.” Now he has told a crowd in Nebraska that we should let Iran take out the city those sailors call home. These are sociopathic sentiments.
Last week at Quantico, Pete Hegseth closed his address to the force by telling them, “President Trump has your back and so do I.” To the contrary, President Trump has put one of the biggest military towns in the country forward as a target for our adversaries. With friends like these, the “domestic” in “against all enemies, foreign and domestic” starts to sound a lot less hypothetical.
San Diego is home to Naval Air Station North Island, Naval Base San Diego, Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, the Point Loma submarine base, Camp Pendleton, and Miramar (and I have been permanently stationed at or trained at all of them). If Iran bombed San Diego and Los Angeles, aside from the devastating loss of life, it would cripple an immense share of our national security readiness.
And for what, exactly? Trump says the war is “essentially almost over with.” This is the same man who claimed in June 2025 that Iran’s nuclear program had been “obliterated,” then launched a war over it anyway on February 28. More than seven months later, he wants us to believe two things at once: that we’ve basically won, and that we might need to sacrifice an American city or two to finish winning. If the war is almost over, why does anybody need to take out San Diego?
I wonder if Trump’s endorsed candidate for California’s 48th District here in San Diego County will respond to these remarks. He recently said “no pain, no gain,” when referring to the gas prices San Diegans are paying. Jim Desmond, would you apply that same mindset if we were bombed? Or do you have the moral courage to stand up for the people you’re running to represent?
Last November, six Democratic members of Congress, all veterans, including Senator Mark Kelly, recorded a video reminding troops of their duty to disobey unlawful orders, restating the law that says so. Trump called it “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH,” and then his Justice Department went looking for an indictment, which a grand jury refused. The president treated reading the law out loud to the troops as a capital offense, but then he himself invited a foreign enemy to destroy two American cities, possibly as a punchline. Is anyone calling the latter sedition? Who is demanding accountability?
Calling our lives a small price to pay affirms a moral bankruptcy, as well as an obvious dereliction of duty to the office he holds. While we can’t impeach him or invoke the 25th Amendment ourselves, we must stop being so quiet about what we’re paying already. We can make our voices heard by calling our representatives, writing op-eds, knocking doors, phone banking, and voting in defiance of the man who threatens the safety of our city. Ballots are already arriving in mailboxes. Vote, and vote yes on 40 (and no on 41 and 42).
Trump has been harming our cities for a while, but now he is inviting our military adversaries to join him in the harm. If we have any self-respect as Americans, we must not tolerate our leaders disregarding the dignity of lives in this way. We must fight for our home.
Julie Roland was a Naval Officer for ten years, deploying to both the South China Sea and the Persian Gulf as a helicopter pilot before separating in June 2025 as a Lieutenant Commander. She has a law degree from the University of San Diego, a Master of Laws from Columbia University, and is a member of the Truman National Security Project.