It’s the kind of observation that sounds obvious until you pause long enough to understand what he’s implying. Even though it may seem everything is splitting apart, the world is held together every day by people coordinating with strangers they will never meet.

Michael has spent twenty years helping people work together across divides that look, at least from a distance, impossible. And here he is, amazed by everyday collaboration.

Yet, if cooperation is everywhere, why does it feel so scarce? And what would it take, not to resolve our differences once and for all, but to stay in the room long enough to collaborate with people we’re convinced are our adversaries?

The word that opens a door

Michael told me about a phrase his Nigerian colleague had introduced: perceived adversaries. He’d adopted it because of what the word “perceived” does to the whole category of “enemy.”

The origin was practical. Search for Common Ground had been using the word “adversaries” in their training sessions, talking about transforming adversarial approaches, but the framing wasn’t landing. Some participants pushed back and argued that they weren’t their adversaries. Others dug in and said they really were. The word was either too strong or not strong enough, depending on who was in the room. Then his colleague Emmanuella Rita Atsen reframed it. She pointed out to Michael that they should talk about perceived adversaries, because a person or group could be an adversary in your mind, but not in reality.

The shift works in both directions. For those who insist the other side isn’t their adversary, it invites reflection. Maybe you’re still treating them that way, even subtly. For those certain they’re facing a real enemy, it opens a door. Maybe the adversary status isn’t as fixed as it feels.

We can’t escape us vs. them. It’s how we’re wired. We will always draw lines, so the question becomes, can we still work across them?

This reframing opens an important door. If something is perception, it can be transformed. Of course, there are real harms that occur. But there are also gaps—between how things feel and how they are; between the stories our information ecosystem rewards and the quieter reality on the ground. This is what I keep bumping into across this series: we’re living inside a misreading problem. It’s subtler than misinformation. And maybe more corrosive. We overestimate how extreme “the other side” is, and then we respond to the caricature. We brace for enemies, and our nervous systems start supplying the evidence. Over time, we make the misreading real. It echoes something Emily Chamlee-Wright and I talked about earlier in this series: perception gaps aren’t just errors in judgment. They become a kind of social force, shaping what we think is possible with the people across from us.

Who are my perceived adversaries? Who are yours? And what might become possible if we loosened our grip on the identity of “adversary” long enough to do something together?

Dialogue isn’t enough

When I suggested to Michael that the key is “getting the right people in the room,” he agreed—and then finished the sentence: “Right people… Right process. Right question. Right framing.”

It’s a good corrective. Dialogue matters, but it’s often insufficient. Search for Common Ground’s philosophy starts with something more demanding: finding a shared interest strong enough to carry the relationship into action.

Michael described what he calls “higher-order common ground.” Not the thinnest overlap (”we’re all human beings”), but something specific enough to justify the hard work of collaboration. A good example of this is criminal justice. Some might disagree on how the system is built, but a particular community or group of people can all agree that they want safety and security, so they start there. This is where I think a lot of well-meaning efforts fall apart. We reach for what we share, but if it’s too abstract, it can’t hold weight.

The approach has a name: the Common Ground Approach. Central to it is what Michael calls a trust cycle. “We don’t just build trust through dialogue,” Michael explained. “We build trust through collaboration that creates real wins… concrete wins that people then are like, oh wow, we can actually accomplish something together.”

He calls it a center of gravity. Something that pulls people in and holds them there. “They try to spin out,” he told me, “but then they realize… if I’m not part of this process, I might actually lose out.”

The question that gave people back their future

Michael told me about a colleague named Nawaz Mohammed, someone he’s worked with for years at Search for Common Ground. Nawaz is from eastern Sri Lanka. He’s Muslim—in a country where a long civil war was fought primarily between Tamils and Sinhalese, with Muslims targeted by both sides.

When the brutal war ended, Nawaz had lost his brother, who had disappeared – taken, they believe, by state security forces - from his dorm room in Colombo during anti-communist sweeps. His sister was killed in a massacre. He lost uncles too. For his country there was no negotiated settlement and no peace process. A victor consolidated power and established a narrative. There was little space for people to grieve or imagine what might come next. Reconciliation, if it happened at all, would be defined from above.

Remarkably, Nawaz walked away from the war with a different approach. In his work for Search for Common Ground after the war, he traveled to Jaffna, considered to be the capital of Tamil nationalism which was at the heart of the conflict, and asked, simply: What does reconciliation mean to you?

Most people were forward looking while some were still seeking justice or retribution. Many talked about future hopes for their livelihoods and their families. They talked about wanting to rebuild their future. The question gave them agency to define what mattered. It couldn’t be imposed; it had to be owned. That work eventually grew into the Memory Map, an archive of hundreds of village histories and life stories from across Sri Lanka’s conflict-affected communities.

Nawaz’s mother was the one who helped him reframe these horrifying tragedies. His mother believed that it wasn’t the people who committed these crimes. It was the war itself—the spiral of violence and the systems that perpetuated it—that caused the suffering. She had no place in her heart for blame.

This conviction allowed Nawaz to stay in the room with pretty much everyone: government officials, military personnel, former combatants. It was his “center of gravity”. These were not people who “voted differently” from him; they were associated with the forces that had killed his family. And still he created space for them to speak.

Where does responsibility go?

Part of me hears Nawaz’s story and thinks: this is the only way a human being survives the unimaginable. A way of refusing to let the conflict own you forever.

But another part of me hesitates. If we shift blame from people to “the war,” where does responsibility go? Of course systems can shape behavior, but how do we balance that truth with the reality that humans can choose to walk away from the system and choose their own path? How do we hold the truth that systems shape behavior without letting that become an excuse?

I don’t have clean answers. But I do think this is where the phrase “perceived adversaries” does its important work. It doesn’t ask us to deny harm, or to baptize anyone as good. It asks something narrower: to stop treating “enemy” as a permanent category. To find one shared interest worth the effort of collaboration.

“If you can transform that perceived adversary to ally,” Michael told me, “that’s the power.”

Where this shows up at home

The Nawaz story is an extreme. The real test is what we do with it in lower-temperature life.

There’s a spectrum here. At one end, the supply chain: cooperation at a distance, mediated by systems that don’t require thick relationship. At the other end, what Nawaz does: staying in the room with people associated with your family’s killers.

But most of us live somewhere in between. Voting, for instance, is still impersonal, but more reverent. You show up, you accept the outcome even when you lose. It’s a practice of commitment to a process, a civic muscle. Workplaces, neighborhoods, and families—these are thicker still, places where association runs deep, and trust has to be built and rebuilt. The messy middle. That’s what our conversation kept circling back to.

So what holds people there? I call it the container. Michael calls it a center of gravity. We’re talking about the same thing: the shared space, the norms of reciprocity and humility, and the commitment to keep showing up because there’s a shared problem worth solving together. We stay, not because we agree, but because we agree to stay.

That takes more than willpower. It requires structures: internal spaces where disagreement is expected with explicit values that people can hold each other to. At Search for Common Ground, that means involving people from all sides of a conflict, from across the very divides driving the conflict itself. They call it multipartiality. At R Street, we work with anyone who shares our goals, left, right, or center. That’s only possible because we’ve built the capacity for hard internal conversations before the pressure arrives.

But it also works at a smaller scale. I think about this whenever I’m tempted to turn a disagreement into a story about someone else’s character, when it would be easier to reduce someone to a type than to stay curious about how they got there. The discipline is the same: resist the urge to flatten someone into an identity.

And that, I think, is the bridge between conflict zones and our daily lives: the discipline of keeping our perceived adversaries psychologically complex enough that collaboration remains imaginable.

Michael is betting on this. He’s now building a global leadership network to equip leaders to work collaboratively across divides. It’s the same approach Search for Common Ground has refined over twenty years, now available to leaders everywhere. The public launch of the new global leadership network is this spring.

We already know how

Near the end of our conversation, Michael returned to where we started—with cooperation hiding in plain sight.

“Most of what’s good comes from collaboration,” he told me. “We already know how to do this. We just need to unleash it.”

That line landed for me as both a comfort and a challenge.

It’s a comfort because it suggests we aren’t starting from zero. Even now, especially now, people are cooperating all the time. And I’ve come to think this might be the kind of optimism worth trusting: the earned kind. The kind that notices what’s still working and refuses to let cynicism have the last word.

It’s a challenge because unleashing what we already know requires giving up something many of our institutions quietly reward: the certainty that we have adversaries and they are fixed.

Maybe the divide isn’t as deep as it feels. The wager is that the enemy category is doing unnecessary work, making disagreement feel permanent.

Michael put it simply: “Naming something ‘perceived’ doesn’t erase pain; it creates the possibility of movement.”

Michael Shipler is Vice President of Leadership Development and Partnerships at Search for Common Ground. Connect with Michael on LinkedIn. This conversation is part of the Real Insights series exploring democratic resilience and the leaders building it.

The hosts of The Fifth Column sat down with Senator Rand Paul, and if you haven’t listened to them before, irreverent doesn’t begin to cover it. They’re also sharp, evidence-driven, and reliably honest about what they think, even when it’s inconvenient. The full interview is available to their paying subscribers, and it’s worth your time.

“I’m lonely.”

That’s Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.). By his own accounting, he’s virtually the only Republican in the Senate still advocating for free trade and constitutional limits on executive power.

What does it actually take to hold your commitments when you find yourself alone in them? And is it really just about individual willpower, or does consistency require something more structural. Something we’ve lost and could rebuild?

Sen. Paul told the hosts of The Fifth Column something more diagnostic than the usual story about political hypocrisy. When asked what his colleagues really believe behind closed doors, he said it’s a mix. Some quietly disagree with tariffs and protectionism. But others have genuinely adopted these positions. The intellectual infrastructure is so thin now that many can no longer articulate why free markets matter, why executive power should be constrained. “Have any of them ever heard of Henry Hazlitt or von Mises?” he asked. “They’ve heard of Friedman. They just have forgotten what Friedman stood for.”

Sen. Paul’s picture of his own party is bleak: tariffs, executive overreach, federal agents shooting citizens in Minneapolis — and hardly anyone can remember why that should bother them.

What Changed

What’s gutting the limited government movement, Sen. Paul said, is “fidelity to a person, not ideas.”

He remembers Ruby Ridge and Waco. Conservatives instinctively recoiled from federal agents using force against citizens. That instinct has reversed. Administration officials have now argued that citizens can’t carry a firearm at a protest. A decade ago, that position would have been unthinkable at any Tea Party rally Paul attended.

Emily Chamlee-Wright, president and CEO of the Institute for Humane Studies, calls this a permission structure: the way each side quietly builds justifications for abandoning its own rules. What’s striking about Paul’s version is that loyalty itself becomes the permission structure.

The Practice of Staying

So what keeps one person in the room when the room has changed around them?

Sen. Paul would say it starts with having decided things in advance. He built a decision-making framework early and has applied it regardless of who holds the White House. “It’s pretty easy for me to make up my mind,” he said, because his own framework is settled. When you’ve already decided that executive power should be constrained, you don’t re-decide it every time your party’s president wants more of it.

But he also draws on deep institutional memory. The Brandenburg case, where Eleanor Holmes Norton, a young African American civil rights attorney, and her Jewish co-counsel helped defend a Klansman who was saying nothing but terrible things about both their communities, because the First Amendment demanded it. When your argument connects to a tradition like that, it’s harder to walk away from.

And he stays in relationship. He votes for the nominees he can support and works his committee. He recently helped to broker a diplomatic channel between the Colombian ambassador and the White House that led to a presidential meeting, because he’d maintained the relationship while maintaining his disagreements.

Sen. Paul hasn’t just held his positions. He’s stayed in the room with colleagues he disagrees with. The principles matter, but so does the commitment to showing up with people who don’t share them and doing the work anyway.

Why is he the only senator who seems to be holding his commitments this way?

What’s Really Missing

You don’t have to agree with Sen. Rand Paul on trade or tariffs or executive power to hear what his loneliness is telling us. The disagreements aren’t grounded in principle any longer.

When “fidelity to a person” replaces “fidelity to ideas,” what’s left is positional and performative. A senator who can’t find a colleague willing to make a serious, grounded case for or against his positions, is operating in an institution that has lost the capacity for the kind of argument democracy requires.

This is something I keep coming back to in these Real Insights conversations. Greg Lukianoff talks about structured friction: the way ideas get tested against real opposition. Jonah Goldberg makes the case that democracy depends on argument, not agreement. Emily describes the four corners of liberalism as a productive tension between competing commitments. The thread is the same every time: disagreement is the engine, not the obstacle. Think tanks, universities, courts, legislatures. These all depend on genuine disagreement to function.

Where the Rebuilding Happens

The structure of the United States Senate, in principle, gives its members the standing and the time to hold positions and work through their disagreements. Six-year terms, staggered elections, individual committee authority and floor privileges all create space for that work.

That structure didn’t help much when Sen. Paul forced a vote on enforcing pay-as-you-go after the 2017 tax cuts, a principle Republicans had championed for decades. By his telling, he lost 96 to 4. Almost every Democrat and almost every Republican voted him down.

The pattern holds on trade. Sen. Paul’s colleagues from the farm states will tell you privately they oppose the administration’s tariffs. But private agreement doesn’t become collective action on its own. It needs spaces where members can deliberate and negotiate together beyond hallway conversations. R Street’s Governance Program has long argued that Congress’s dysfunction comes down to internal organization. When decision-making is centralized in party leadership, rank-and-file members lose the tools to organize and act. The infrastructure that once gave members those spaces has been stripped away: conference committees, regular committee markups, open amendment processes, and a full work week in Washington.

When Sen. Paul publicly opposes tariffs, he is making an argument that was once common with his party. In 2000, forty-six Republican senators voted for permanent normal trade relations with China. In April 2025, only four voted to challenge the president’s tariffs on Canada. Instead, he’s doing what he can do alone: making visible what many privately believe. But visibility alone doesn’t produce negotiation.

For that, Congress needs what I’ve been calling enduring deliberative publics: sustained communities, inside and outside its walls, where people practice the work of association over time. I mean “publics” deliberately here: not just the external communities that hold institutions accountable, but the internal ones — caucuses and working groups — that give members space to negotiate before they ever reach the floor.

What makes them enduring is that they negotiate continuously, internally among their own members and externally with the institutions they engage. People stay even when they lose, accept the outcome, come back, and argue again. Outside Congress, those publics live in civic organizations, local party committees, community foundations, and think tanks where people still show up to disagree.

Structures for Disagreement

If I’ve learned anything from these conversations, it’s that principled consistency requires structures. And those structures operate at every level.

Start with the individual. Sen. Paul has his settled framework, his deep memory of what the movement stood for. That’s a habit, the kind you build before you need it. But habit alone has left him isolated.

At R Street, we put out a statement condemning the attack on the Capitol in January 2021 before we knew what it would cost us. But we could only do that because we’d already built the internal culture for hard conversations, before the external pressure arrived. That’s the organizational level: making disagreement expected.

Inside Congress, it’s the deliberative infrastructure I described above. It’s largely gone, and in need of the most rebuilding.

And then there’s the level where I see renewal actually taking root: the civic level. Jonah’s macrocosm/microcosm insight keeps coming back to me here: liberal democracy was built to work from the ground up. The macrocosm provides the rules. The microcosm, the more local places where people actually know each other, is where the capacity for self-governance gets practiced.

Emily calls the norms that sustain all of this, “sacred obligations”: the sense of duty that judges, journalists, and citizens feel toward something beyond themselves. “If we lose that,” she told me, “that is toothpaste that’s going to be really hard to shove back into the tube.”

Some of it is already out. But the structures and norms that were lost were built by design. New ones can be built too.

Sen. Paul is doing his part inside the Senate. He shouldn’t have to do it alone. Wherever you stand: hold your commitments — and stay in the room with people who don’t share them. That’s the work.

The full Fifth Column conversation with Senator Paul is available to paying subscribers. Previous Real Insights referenced here: Jonah Goldberg, Emily Chamlee-Wright, and Greg Lukianoff.

On November 19th, Michael joins us at R Street for “The Fragile Republic: Lessons on Political Violence from the Founding to Today.” After historians examine America’s past and analysts diagnose today’s rage, the conversation turns to what comes next: How do we move forward when the divisions feel this deep?

Michael brings 20 years of peacebuilding experience across 25 countries. As VP of Strategy at Search for Common Ground, he’s gotten people across impossible divides to work together in Sri Lanka, Nepal, Myanmar, and right here in the U.S. Starting in January, he’s building a global leadership community to transform how we think about power.

But first, one insight from our conversation.

Perceived Adversaries

Michael learned this phrase from a Nigerian colleague: “perceived adversaries.”

This single modifier changes everything. “Who are your adversaries?” assumes certainty. “Who are your perceived adversaries?” opens up a world of possibility. Maybe the divide isn’t as deep as it feels. Maybe you can collaborate on shared interests that matter deeply, with human dignity at the heart.

Walk into a Search for Common Ground office in Bishkek and you’ll find a senior official from the muftiate and a police official working together on human rights training. In Sri Lanka, it’s poets and playwrights writing drama as a tool for peacebuilding.

Michael sees this same dynamic on his own street in DC. On Halloween, 30 or 40 families from the local school converge. Hundreds of kids. Neighbors sitting on porches. Some building elaborate haunted houses. Others, like Michael, keep it simple with pumpkins and gravestones. It’s the unglamorous work of community that can’t wait for political resolution.

“Most of what’s good comes from collaboration,” Michael told me. “Every supply chain is a product of collaboration. We already know how to do this. We just need to unleash it.”

Michael’s optimism comes from practice. Twenty years watching diverse teams tackle root causes of conflict in the world’s hardest places. He believes we can transform our divisions by recognizing that many of our adversaries are more perceived than real.

Join us tomorrow (November 19th) to hear from Michael and our panel as we explore what it takes to strengthen democratic life for America’s next 250 years.

Register for webinar

I’ll release a full Real Insights conversation with Michael in the coming weeks. For now: Who are your perceived adversaries? What becomes possible if they’re something else entirely?

This is the latest in our Real Insights series, where R Street Executive Director Erica Schoder explores democratic resilience through conversations with practitioners, scholars, and leaders. Subscribe to stay updated on upcoming conversations.

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Last month, Greg Lukianoff stood in front of students at Utah Valley University and talked about free speech. The title of his talk: “Free Speech: The Antidote to Violence.”

Just weeks before, Charlie Kirk was assassinated there—part of the mounting political violence that has Americans asking fundamental questions about the civic norms and self-governance that underpin our democracy. Kirk had gone to campus to engage in argument, not violence. That someone would meet speech with murder shows how catastrophically we’ve lost the plot.

“I’m going to a school and I’m a little scared,” Greg told me during our conversation in October. “This is a place where someone was just murdered last month. And that’s insane.”

It is insane. But Greg Lukianoff, president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), has spent 26 years defending free speech on college campuses. So of course he went to Utah Valley University. He’s watched a rhetorical flourish–”words are violence”--become accepted truth. And now he’s watching those words justify violence.

The Collapse of the Bright Line

Greg is deeply concerned with epistemology—how we know what we know, how we create reliable knowledge. When I asked him about “words are violence,” he immediately connected it to knowledge creation itself.

“It’s more of a rhetorical flourish that people like,” he explained. “A lot of things I think we’ve seen on campus—it began as a rhetorical flourish, and then people actually just started believing it was true.”

This matters because when you erase the distinction between speech and action, you fundamentally alter the calculus around political violence. If words are violence, then violence becomes self-defense.

To be clear: no serious free speech advocate claims words are harmless. Words can wound deeply. They can contribute to harm. But as Nadine Strossen points out in her work with Greg, words “at most can potentially contribute to harm.” Violence, by contrast, “directly causes harm through its own force.” There’s an intermediary between words and harm—the person and their agency. That intermediary is where resilience and human dignity live.

Greg and Nadine Strossen make the case for a “bright line” between words and actions explicitly in their new book, The War on Words: 10 Arguments Against Free Speech and Why They Fail. Yes, you can argue that a bright line distinction between words and actions is a social construct—”a societal decision,” as Greg puts it. “But it’s one of the best societal decisions we’ve ever come up with because it’s a great tool for peace, for innovation, for artistic expression.”

When we mess with this bright line, “all sorts of horrible things develop.” Because free speech isn’t just a legal principle—it’s the alternative to violence.

Free Speech Makes Us Safer

Greg argues, “You are not safer for knowing less about what people really think.”

In our conversation, Greg connects this directly to truth-seeking itself. He cited people who claim not to believe in truth. “So do you believe in falsity? Do you believe anything is definitely false? And everyone has to say yes. Well, then you believe in truth.”

His point is that knowledge is subtractive. “Truth exists in a kind of cloud of probability...You don’t really exactly learn what is true. You learn the following hundred million things that aren’t true.”

But you can only eliminate falsehoods if you know what people actually think. Censorship doesn’t make bad ideas go away. It just makes them harder to identify and refute.

Structured Friction and Truth-Seeking

Greg connects free speech to knowledge creation through what he calls “structured friction”—systems that can create reliable provisional knowledge.

“The only way you can do it is by having what we call structured friction, where essentially it runs up against something that’s actually really going to test it.” It’s free speech as infrastructure for truth-seeking. And that infrastructure is breaking down in ways that go beyond campus speech codes.

“I don’t think that’s working very well in higher ed at the moment,” Greg said. Then he paused. “It’s not working in democracy either.”

He’s right. The deliberative function of democracy—putting ideas into venues where they can be tested through disagreement, making commitments, coming back to do it again—feels absent. I call it deliberative capacity. Greg calls it structured friction. Whatever we name it, we’re missing it.

Free Speech Protects the Powerless

About 15 years ago, Greg started noticing something troubling: people showing up “who seemed to have been taught that free speech is a cynical tool of the three Bs: the bully, the bigot, and the robber baron.”

“This is just bad history,” Greg says.

Historically, the wealthy and powerful haven’t needed special free speech protections—they already have power. “You only need a special protection for freedom of speech, like the First Amendment, for people who are either unpopular with power or unpopular with the majority.”

This is why Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela all championed freedom of speech. Greg met John Lewis, who “would often say that without freedom of speech, the civil rights movement would have been a bird without wings.”

“They understood that free speech was not the weapon of the powerful. It is the best check on power ever invented.”

Permission Structures for Rage

Emily Chamlee-Wright used a term in our last conversation that keeps coming back to me: “permission structures.” She described what she calls the “rage industrial complex”—how each side creates justifications that say the stakes are too high to follow normal rules, to maintain civil discourse, to uphold democratic norms.

“I get the question, ‘Well, who started it?’” Emily told me. “It doesn’t matter.”

Greg’s data makes the permission structure concrete. FIRE’s research shows that about half of Americans believe that words can be violence—and “it’s actually much worse on American college campuses.” Significant percentages of students say violence is acceptable to prevent speech they find objectionable.

Research from More in Common documents what they call “perception gaps“—Americans overestimate how extreme the other side is by nearly double. This misperception itself becomes a permission structure: if you believe the other side is twice as extreme as they actually are, you’re more likely to justify abandoning normal rules of engagement. We’ve misread the room entirely, but we’re acting on those misperceptions. And when you combine misperception with permission structures for violence, you get what happened at Utah Valley University.

The Next Frontier: AI and the Same Playbook

If you think this is just about campus politics, Greg has bad news.

“I see kind of the same thing, the same playbook happening with artificial intelligence,” he told me. The mechanism is identical: anti-discrimination rationales that start with good intentions get turned into all-purpose weapons against dissenting speech.

Now Greg sees the same pattern with AI regulation. “Algorithmic discrimination laws would hold legally accountable LLM companies if their knowledge creating or knowledge producing or knowledge relaying technology arguably created knowledge or relayed knowledge that led someone to engage in discriminatory behavior.”

Read that again. Under these laws, AI companies could be liable if their systems produce knowledge that someone uses in a way that’s deemed discriminatory. (R Street and FIRE have written together warning Congress of the dangers of chilling constitutionally protected free speech via AI regulation) “That creates a situation in which you are limiting the sort of epistemic, the world of knowledge of AI to that which will not get you sued, which is a disaster for the reliability of knowledge itself.”

Greg is working with the Cosmos Institute on what he calls “epistemically humble AI”—systems that can admit limitations, promoting autonomy rather than becoming “autocomplete for life.” It’s the same principle: preserve the structured friction that lets us find truth.

The Aphorisms We’ve Lost

In The Canceling of the American Mind, Greg writes about free speech culture—the informal norms and sayings that used to oil the gears of democratic life in the United States. Things like “it’s a free country,” “to each their own,” “everyone’s entitled to their opinion.”

These aren’t casual phrases. They’re what Greg calls “quick and easy bits of wisdom” that encode important values. When we lose them, we lose the recognition that disagreement is normal, that diversity of opinion is expected, and that we can live together without thinking alike.

I realized during our conversation that I still say these things to my daughter. She’s 10, lives in Madrid, and has never lived in America. She just thinks this is how Americans still talk—and thus, how we behave.

One saying I’ve repeated often is “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” So, when the idea that “words are violence” first entered my consciousness, I struggled with it. I didn’t throw it out immediately. Of course words can hurt. But are they actually violence?

I tend toward stoicism. Words only hurt if you let them. And the question I kept returning to was: Do I want to teach my daughter to be fragile in the face of the reality that people will sometimes be cruel? A quote often attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt said it best: “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

The more I thought about it, the more I realized: “Sticks and stones” isn’t just a saying. It’s aspirational. It’s a mantra. We’re teaching children that they have agency over their internal response to external cruelty. We’re building resilience, not denial. We’re saying: Don’t let words destroy you. You’re stronger than that.

When we collapse that distinction and teach children that hurtful words are the same as physical violence, we rob them of that agency. We tell them they’re fragile, that they need protection from speech rather than the capacity to withstand it.

It’s jarring for me to realize that my daughter is growing up with an American philosophy that America itself is forgetting.

But that’s what makes the stakes so clear. If we can’t even pass these principles to the next generation—if we lose the aphorisms that encode resilience and agency—we lose more than a culture of free speech. We lose the people capable of sustaining it.

What Comes Next

The erosion of the bright line between words and violence, the permission structures for rage, the polarization that makes us misread each other—they’re all connected. And they require the same response: rebuilding the infrastructure for disagreement.

That infrastructure includes legal protections for speech, yes. But it also includes culture, norms, and institutions willing to model difficult conversations. It includes people like Greg, willing to speak at a university where someone was just murdered, because democracy depends on spaces where we can test ideas against each other without resorting to violence.

Emily Chamlee-Wright asked in our last conversation: “What can we be doing today that fireproofs liberal principles?”

Greg’s answer is clear: Defend the bright line. Build structured friction. Sit with discomfort. Report the truth even when inconvenient. Remember that free speech makes us safer, protects the powerless, and is the best alternative to violence we’ve ever invented.

Later this month, R Street will bring together historians, journalists, and policy leaders to explore both how we arrived at this moment of political violence and how we find our way back. We’ll examine the roots of political rage and what it means to overcome polarization—to disagree better when the bright line has already been crossed.

These conversations matter because someone has to defend the distinction between words and violence. Someone has to model the kind of disagreement that democracy depends on.

Greg Lukianoff keeps showing up. And in his TED Talk, he ends with a reminder of why it matters:

“Young people used to be the great drivers of free speech, and they can be again. But for that to happen, we all must remember that to understand the world, it’s crucial to know what people really think. And that is only going to happen in a situation in which people feel like they can be their authentic selves. And for that, we need free speech.”

Join us on November 19, 2025, at 3:00 PM EST for “The Fragile Republic: Lessons on Political Violence from the Founding to Today.“ Greg Lukianoff will explore the roots of political rage alongside historians, journalists, and experts on overcoming polarization. Register at rstreet.org/events.

I’ve been thinking about Emily Chamlee-Wright’s phrase since our conversation: “the great forgetting.” It perfectly captures this sense that we’ve grown so comfortable with freedom’s benefits that we’ve stopped practicing the habits that sustain them.

I’m not suggesting we need to restore everything we’ve lost. Some things were forgotten for good reason. But in letting go of what no longer served us, we may have also released practices we desperately need. The challenge is discernment—what do we recover, what do we reinvent, and what do we leave in the past where it belongs?

Let me share some interesting thinkers and practitioners who, in addition to Emily’s incredible work, can help us find a path forward.

The fundamental shift we need to recognize

Peter Levine at Tufts articulates something profound: the core civic question used to be “What should we do?”—plural, collective, forward-looking. Somewhere along the way, we replaced it with “What are my rights?” or “What can I get?” This shift from collective agency to individual entitlement sits at the heart of Emily’s great forgetting.

At the most human scale: how we disagree

argues that our political divisions aren’t actually about politics—they’re about different types of conversations happening simultaneously. When one person is having a practical conversation (”What policies work?”) and another is having an emotional one (”Do you see my fear?”) or a social one (”Are we still part of the same tribe?”), we talk past each other. His research on “supercommunicators” shows that those who bridge divides don’t do it through clever arguments. They do it by recognizing which conversation is actually happening and meeting people there. They ask 10-20 times more questions than the rest of us. They listen for the conversation beneath the conversation.

takes this further with her distinction between healthy and toxic conflict. Her work on “high conflict” gives us off-ramps from our escalation cycles. And Monica Guzmán, writing with Braver Angels, shows what genuine curiosity looks like in practice—not the performative kind we see on social media, but the real thing that changes both people in a conversation.

Moving from conversation to civic practice

Liz Joyner’s Village Square work contains perhaps the simplest and most powerful insight: “People are hard to hate close-up.” She’s not theorizing about this—she’s been hosting civic conversations in bars, churches, and across hundred-foot tables in downtown Tallahassee. The model has spread to other communities because it works. You can literally start one next week.

’s reads like field notes from someone actually practicing pluralism, not just advocating for it. He shows how to build what he calls “confident pluralism”—holding your own beliefs while creating space for others to hold theirs.

At the institutional level: remembering why norms exist

The question becomes more complex here. While we need to understand why certain norms and structures matter, the path forward isn’t always about reforming the institutions themselves.

, having grown up under military dictatorships in Pakistan, recognizes early warning signs of institutional decay that others miss. Her recent writing on academic freedom isn’t partisan—she critiques threats from both left and right. What she offers is a framework for understanding why certain institutional norms evolved and what happens when we let them atrophy.

, an “unabashed pluralist,” explores what Tocqueville called “the art of association.” While our national politics spirals downward, Stid sees “green shoots of promise and pluralism” sprouting in communities nationwide. His insight: democracy’s health depends less on institutional reforms than on our capacity to associate across difference. Instead of asking “How do we get people to do a thing?” he asks “How do we equip people to become capable civic actors?” For Stid, renewal comes not through better rules but through rebuilding our associational muscles—the very thing Emily identifies as forgotten.

An unexpected coda

Let me close with something that might seem out of place. Nick Cave’s Red Hand Files—yes, the musician—offers something we desperately need: reminders that mercy and genuine curiosity remain available, even now. Sometimes the best civic education comes from outside the policy world entirely.

Here’s what I find hopeful: these aren’t grand solutions requiring federal legislation or constitutional amendments. They’re practices we can begin tomorrow. Host a dinner with someone you disagree with. Ask more questions. Join or start a Village Square. Sign up for a Braver Angels workshop or debate. Read one of these writers and discuss it with your team.

Emily’s right—the forgetting happened slowly, through countless small abdications. The remembering will happen the same way, through countless small practices.

In subsequent Real Insights, we’ll explore what organizations and institutions can do to create conditions for remembering at scale. But for now, I encourage you to continue the real work of self-governance. The ‘doing’ of democracy that happens in conversations, in community meetings, in the thousand small acts of citizenship that our republic depends on.

Until next time, Erica

P.S. - I’m new to Substack but already discovering the richness of conversation that happens in the comments and cross-posts. I’d love to hear from you: what other writers and thinkers on this platform are grappling with Emily’s “great forgetting”? Who else is mapping paths toward civic remembering?

This summer, a 1946 civics textbook sat alone on a side table in a vintage home store in Iowa. I wasn't even sure it was for sale. I'm the kind of person who calls old books 'friends,' and this one demanded immediate attention. I sat down and started reading right there—my family just sighed and went on shopping, knowing they'd lost me.

Pioneering in Democracy warns that democracy isn't self-sustaining. The timing of its publication is important: January 1946—just months after World War II ended—when the fragility of democracy was still raw in everyone's minds. The book’s foxed pages carry a warning from the editor: Democracy involves "understanding and managing human relationships" and must be learned through "active participation." The preface cautions that children watching adults constantly argue about democracy might conclude the system itself is broken instead of understanding it is an ongoing, living process of negotiation and compromise.

In 1946, the authors of Pioneering in Democracy saw clearly that democracy could be lost if not actively taught and practiced. Now, almost 80 years later, we seem to be grappling with this loss.

Emily Chamlee-Wright has a name for this phenomenon: the great forgetting.

"We've become so accustomed to the freedoms that we enjoy," Emily tells me from her office at the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS). "We cooperate rather than prey upon one another, not because there's a police officer watching us, but because we've internalized those norms. That auto-response is part of what makes society work." Her voice carries both wonder and worry. "The problem is when our defaults are always on autopilot... we can forget where all the benefits and bounty of our current circumstance comes from."

As President and CEO of IHS, Emily works to counter this forgetting. IHS has built a community of over 7,000 scholars and policy experts who ensure classical liberal principles aren't just preserved as an intellectual tradition, but actively put to work in the world—exactly what that 1946 textbook called for.

Discovering the Four Corners

Eight and a half years into leading IHS, Emily still sounds delighted by her job. "It's like I get to be the provost of the best university in the world," she tells me, "but it's just a distributed university, and I only have to work with the scholars who want to work with us."

This joy makes sense when you understand Emily's path to these insights. She chose to attend George Mason University not for its economics program, but because it was close to her dance community in Washington, D.C., "I totally fell into a community that was committed to classical liberal principles," she laughs. A dancer stumbling into economic philosophy—it sounds like the setup to a joke only a policy wonk would appreciate.

"As someone who was a somewhat accomplished amateur in the arts, I had tremendous freedom," she explains. "The freedom to innovate and the freedom to participate in expressive behavior, I understood viscerally as an outcome of living within a liberal, democratic society."

This explains so much about Emily's approach. How many economists understand freedom first through their bodies, movement, and expression before they ever crack open Adam Smith?

As a young economist, Emily asked big questions: "What would the world look like if all women on the planet had economic freedom? What value would that open up not only for those women but also for their families?" She understood that women globally were "disproportionately responsible for providing care, education, nutrition, and health to the next generation." Economic freedom for women meant human flourishing for everyone.

"I've always been a kind of crunchy granola version of the classical liberal," Emily says. Not the "purely analytical, cut and dry" type. She's interested in the messier, more human bits.

From these experiences emerged what she calls the Four Corners Framework. "My way in was economic freedom," she explains. "And the close cousin there is political freedom." But there were pieces missing. "The lessons from Tocqueville, for example, are really, really important. Political culture matters as much as the formal rules of the game. It's also the informal norms that matter."

For Emily, economics isn't just transactional relationships—"it's a sphere in which we make real friendships where trust matters." She came to understand that civil society and intellectual openness are essential complements to the political and economic elements of liberal democracy.

"Political freedom, economic freedom, civic freedom, and intellectual freedom," she lists the four corners of liberalism. "None of them is a sufficient condition for the system as a whole. Each needs the others. Each pulls and tugs against the others."

What I love about Emily's approach is how she embraces this tension as essential. I believe the ability to hold a paradox—to resist collapsing complexity into false binaries—might be the most important skill for our times. Emily agrees: "It's not a bug in the system, it's a feature that they tug and pull against each other in ways that are in tension, but it's a productive tension."

Learning to Be Lovely

In talking with Emily, I bring up my conversation with Lenore Skenazy about trust and childhood autonomy. When we don't let kids practice decision-making, I wonder, how do they develop real virtue?

"Adam Smith had a lot to say about that," Emily says, then laughs. "That's the running joke in our family. Whenever somebody says something insightful, I'll say, 'Well, you know who had a lot to say about that?' And my kids go"—she adopts a long-suffering teenage voice—"'Adam Smith.'"

Emily tells me about a moment when her daughter, now grown, was young and failed to stand up for a friend being picked on. "She was totally beating herself up over not being a better person to a friend," Emily recalls. "And I kind of let her sit and stew in that."

Now this is my kind of parenting advice.

"I didn't want to make it okay for her immediately," Emily continues. "That was the training ground that was helping her to internalize what virtue looked like." Years later, her adult daughter told her: "I was so mad at you. I really wanted to be let off the moral hook, but thank you for not doing that because... I don't want to be that person as an adult."

This is what Emily, channeling Adam Smith, calls developing our "impartial spectator"—that voice in our head that judges our behavior from a distance. It's the difference between learning to avoid blame and learning to avoid being worthy of blame. The difference between being loved by others and “being lovely,” by which Smith meant, being worthy of that love.

I think about my conversation with Lenore Skenazy, how too often we don't let kids walk home alone anymore. Emily builds on this—we don't let them sit with moral discomfort either. We rush to reassure, to excuse, to make it all okay. And, in doing so, we rob them of the chance to develop that internal compass and to prepare them, as our founders would have considered, for public life.

But this isn't just about parenting. It's about all of us in this great American experiment, and what Emily calls the "sacred obligation" that holds liberal democracy together—journalists committed to truth, judges feeling transformed by their robes, civil servants serving something beyond themselves. However, these obligations can't be written into law.

"If we lose that," she says, "that’s the toothpaste that's going to be really hard to shove back into the tube."

The Rage Industrial Complex

So how did we get here? I ask about root causes, and Emily describes what she calls a "rage industrial complex." Each side creates a "permission structure"—her term—that says the stakes are too high to follow normal rules, to maintain civil discourse, to uphold democratic norms.

"I get the question, 'Well, who started it?'" she says. "It doesn't matter."

"This all sounds very much like parenting," I tell her, and we both laugh. But it's not funny, really. Especially right now. We're a democracy acting like children who have yet to develop a moral compass, each justifying increasingly terrible–even violent—behavior in response to the other side.

At IHS, Emily has taken a practical approach in response: they've banned war metaphors entirely. "We don't talk about freedom fighters for liberty. We don't talk about soldiers or winning battles," she explains. "What a terrible metaphor. If you're in the ideas world, it's not a battle."

She's describing what the author and columnist, Amanda Ripley calls the difference between "high conflict"—the kind that distills into good-versus-evil feuds—and "good conflict," where people can disagree productively while maintaining curiosity about the other side. When we use combat language, Emily argues, "we're going to be doing what people in combat do, which is to arm up, identify the enemy, dehumanize." Her observation hits especially close to home right now.

Ripley calls them "conflict entrepreneurs"—those who profit from keeping us trapped in high conflict where the fight itself becomes the point. And heartbreakingly, we continue to see what happens when high-conflict rhetoric spills over into violence.

Piercing the Collective Illusion

What buoys me most about our conversation is Emily's optimism. Her passion and commitment are infectious. She's not blindly hopeful—she calls it "warranted optimism"—but rather is genuinely convinced that change is possible because in one-on-one conversations she finds "an amazing degree of radical agreement around basic liberal principles."

The problem? We're trapped in what she calls a collective illusion. She tells me about Todd Rose's book, which tells a story about a town dominated by one woman, "Mrs. Salt," whose views everyone pretended to share out of fear. Everyone thought her views represented the community, but almost no one actually agreed with her.

The Mrs. Salt dynamic predates social media, but today's version is measurable. Research from More in Common documents a "perception gap"—Americans overestimate how extreme the other side is by nearly double. Democrats think Republicans are far more conservative than they actually are, and vice versa. We've misread the room entirely.

Modern platforms make it worse. Emily points to research showing that on some platforms the loudest 10 percent dominate the conversation. The loudest fraction becomes "the public." As Henry Farrell argues, these are malformed publics; together with Hahrie Han, he further shows how AI and various platforms can disorganize democratic publics.

So what do we do? "Pierce the bubble," Emily says. Name the illusion. Stand up and say, "I know this might not be popular, but I believe in basic liberal democratic principles." She'll get hate from both sides—"'Oh, liberal values are so 10th grade civics class' to 'If you’re merely liberal, you're morally bankrupt.'" But she does it anyway.

What Comes Next

Finally, I ask Emily what she's monitoring.

"Right now, there's a lot of commentary around our political moment," she says. "The thing that I've got my eye on is what comes next."

She sees two possible futures. In one, we experience illiberalism, watch the breakdown of liberal norms and institutions, learn from it, and "usher liberalism back in full force." But she's not confident that's the lesson we'll learn.

"I don't know that the feedback loop is as robust as it needs to be. What I fear is that we get illiberalism by another flavor with just different people in charge, and it could get worse, not better."

"What can we be doing today that fireproofs liberal principles?" she asks, and I know it is not a rhetorical question.

Now, writing this piece, I return to that 1946 textbook on my shelf. Its author, Edna Morgan, believed democracy must be lived, not just taught. That pioneering democracy requires sustained practice and experience. Emily shares this conviction, but with greater urgency—we need to remember what we've forgotten before it's too late.

Christina Wallace, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, entrepreneur, Broadway producer, writer, and self-described “human Venn diagram,” brings a thoughtful perspective to these questions. Having built her career at the intersection of business, technology, and the arts, Christina provides an especially unique point of view combining her diverse areas of expertise.

Christina’s focus on challenging limiting self-narratives, designing a “portfolio life,” and rediscovering joy in the process rather than just the product feels especially timely. Her idea of the “human Venn diagram” goes beyond professional growth. It invites us to embrace pluralism, starting with ourselves.

Christina’s work also encouraged me to think about what this looks like inside a think tank. At R Street, we’re a policy shop, but we’re also a community of people trying to build something that matters. That means we ask hard questions, not just about what works, but what’s worth doing. It means leaving space for different perspectives, experiences, and career paths to inform how we think as much as what we produce. In practice, that can look like reconsidering old assumptions, resisting the pull of only what’s measurable, and staying open to better questions. Here, pluralism is more than a political idea. It’s a way of working and living together that starts with making room for difference, even within ourselves and our teams.

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The Human Venn Diagram: Living at the Intersection

Christina’s concept of the “human Venn diagram” offers a compelling framework for how we might think about the range of roles, values, and expressions that make us who we are.

“I came up with this phrase, ‘I’m a human Venn diagram,’ 15 years ago because I kept being asked at investor pitches, dinner parties, or anything in between: ‘So tell me about yourself.’ The default—at least in the U.S.—is to respond with your job title, but I am so much more than how I am monetizing my time at any given chapter of my life.”

Christina suggests we consider how we “show up in a room,” as storytellers, connectors, creators, and the unique value we bring through our overlapping skills, experiences, and perspectives. She also encourages us to think of ourselves less as job titles and more as verbs. Are you a builder? A connector? A challenger of assumptions? Rather than fixed traits, these verbs are ways of engaging with the world.

“I sit at the intersection of so many different skills and networks and perspectives that to limit my identity to my job almost feels disempowering.”

Christina believes this approach is also strategically advantageous at a leadership level. It sets you up to showcase a much fuller and richer version of yourself to others and invites unexpected opportunities and connections.

In my own work as a leadership coach, I often use the PRO model from INSEAD: person, role, organization. It’s a simple tool, but it helps surface meaningful questions. Who am I becoming? What does this role need from me? And how do I fit, not just functionally, but purposefully, within the culture I help shape? These questions come alive when we stop reducing people to titles and start seeing them, and ourselves, as complex contributors.

Challenging Limiting Narratives

Christina’s approach asks us to question the stories we tell ourselves, particularly those that might limit our potential.

“One of my favorite phrases from the startup world is ‘expire your data.’ What that means is there’s lots of times that we’re using data that is out of date, it’s old, and if the world has changed, it’s no longer true, it’s no longer helping us.”

The same applies to the stories we tell ourselves and others about ourselves. Christina shared a powerful example of how she had believed she “wasn’t athletic” for much of her life: “It wasn’t until I was turning 30 that I was like, ‘I wonder if that’s actually true.’…So I started running long distance and I realized that the key to being athletic is to do athletic things and then improve.”

This concept is relevant to us as individuals and as a society as well, especially in a year when many Americans have watched long-standing assumptions give way overnight. Institutions that once felt immovable have shown themselves to be fragile or adaptable. Cultural norms, political alliances, and economic certainties have shifted, sometimes dramatically.

In moments like these, we’re reminded how much depends on the narratives we choose to carry, and how we learn to live alongside others whose stories differ from our own. As the world shifts around us, it helps to revisit those internal stories, too, and allow new possibilities to emerge.

Designing a Portfolio Life for Different Seasons

One of the most practical frameworks Christina offers is her approach to designing a “portfolio life” that optimizes for adapting to different seasons and priorities.

“You start with, what do you need? What do you need right now to be your best self? To feel like you are getting what you need?…Those needs will change as you go through these different seasons. Based on what you need, then you also layer in what do you want? What do you wish for your life?”

Some priorities might need to be set at “zero allocation” during certain seasons, but can be increased when circumstances change. When our portfolio no longer matches our current needs and priorities, that’s when we see burnout or crisis.

I couldn’t help but reflect on my own path as Christina shared her story. In my mid-twenties, I opened an independent bookstore and ran it for nearly a decade before shifting into the think tank world. Before that, I was a radio host at my local NPR station, and later, a bike messenger in Seattle.

These roles don’t sit neatly together on a résumé, but they do form a kind of logic when I look back—chapters shaped by curiosity, a love of ideas, and a drive to build things that matter. I’ve lived in Europe for the last 12 years, and I’ve more or less stopped trying to explain my career arc in my time here—it feels too improbable, especially in cultures where people are placed on professional tracks early in life and expected to stay on them.

But to me, it’s always made sense. I laugh sometimes and think it’s the most American thing about me. That winding path, that permission to explore, to grow is what Americans do. Christina’s idea of a “portfolio life” helped me see my path not just as a quirky backstory, but as something more intentional—a design built around meaning, season by season.

Measuring What Matters

Christina’s thinking has been profoundly influenced by Clayton Christensen, whose final lecture in his Harvard Business School class left a lasting impression on her.

“In this last session, he delivered this sort of off-the-cuff monologue that turned into the book, How Will You Measure Your Life?”

Christensen warned his students about the danger of consistently prioritizing easily measurable career achievements over more abstract investments in relationships, health, and personal development. Christina summarized it neatly:

“How do you measure your life? Because what you measure is what you manage. Be really intentional about the stuff that actually matters and not the stuff that’s easiest to measure.”

The exact same sense-check should be applied to the worlds of policy and business, especially in a pluralistic democracy, where what matters can’t be reduced to one metric, one value, or one story. Our discussion touched on how Silicon Valley start-up culture is a prime example of where some of these incentive structures are misaligned and can lead to negative long-term impacts on communities and people’s lives.

Finding Joy in the Process

When discussing what she optimizes for, Christina spoke powerfully about fulfillment: “Am I having more good days than bad? There are going to be weeks like this one that are hectic, but on balance, am I happy? Do I have agency? Am I getting to do the things that bring me joy?”

This perspective extends to how we approach activities where external validation or achievement might no longer be accessible. Christina gave the example of returning to the piano after years away from it: “Do I actually enjoy the playing of it and not just the applause at the end? As long as the answer is yes, then it’s worth doing.”

At R Street, we care about outcomes and impact, but we also care about how we get there. The process matters. Sometimes it’s slow, messy, or invisible from the outside, but that is where learning happens, where trust is built, and where new ideas take shape. For me, there’s meaning in doing good, aligned work—even when it doesn’t come with applause. That’s part of what it means to be a learning organization, one that grows by doing and not just by delivering.

Final Thoughts: Embracing Complexity

This conversation with Christina Wallace felt like an evolution of the themes we’ve been exploring in Real Insights. Lenore Skenazy asked what happens when we stop optimizing for safety and start trusting people—kids included—to navigate risk and learn as they go. Jonah Goldberg reminded us that meaning isn’t found in national politics but in the small, daily acts of showing up, being useful, being needed, staying in the room.

Christina threads those insights inward. Her “human Venn diagram” isn’t just a fun turn of phrase; it’s a way to live with integrity across seasons. It’s a reminder that a life doesn’t need to be reduced to one label or role to be meaningful. If anything, embracing that complexity might be the clearest signal of a life well-lived.

What I took away from our conversation is that pluralism doesn’t just apply to democracy—it starts in us. If we want institutions and societies that can hold competing ideas without falling apart, we need to start by practicing that capacity within ourselves, in how we come to know, revise, and live with our own complexity, and in how we hold tension, make meaning, and stay open to change. Learning to hold tension within ourselves might just be the best preparation we have for holding it together in public life.

I came in curious about how his thinking had evolved. What I didn’t expect was the depth of personal responsibility that animates his work—or the generosity and humor infused in it. You could feel it in the room. He has a seriousness of purpose that never tips into self-importance. And even more than that, he has a way of connecting with others that makes his ideas feel all the more relevant, meaningful, and personal.

But, all told, Jonah Goldberg is a reluctant sage. He’d rather crack jokes, test ideas, and argue about dogs. But he knows he has a role to play. He feels obliged to tell the truth. Not for praise or followers, but because, as he puts it, “Someone has to.”

We began, fittingly, discussing disagreement.

Democracy Depends on Disagreement

Jonah started with a reminder that shouldn’t feel radical, but in today’s political climate, somehow does: “Democracy is built on arguments. Democracy is about disagreement, not about agreement.”

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, especially in my work at R Street. Disagreement isn’t a problem to be solved; it’s a condition to be embraced and structured. Put more simply, our job isn’t to erase conflict, but to make it productive. Similarly, democracy isn’t meant to create perfect harmony; it’s meant to create space for deliberative negotiation—where we disagree on values but commit to outcomes and show up to do it again.

That’s why Jonah’s defense of argument is so compelling. He treats conflict as a civic good—an essential component of how free people live together. In a time when dissent is often viewed as disloyal, Jonah’s insistence on staying in the room, disagreeing respectfully, and refusing to make enemies out of opponents is both rare and necessary. It’s the kind of intellectual courage that pluralism depends on.

Lest anyone think Jonah has run away from his conservative roots, he reflected on what he sees as the movement’s greatest historical strength: its willingness to argue with itself. “One of the defining strengths of whatever you want to call the conservative movement has been its willingness to have internal arguments,” he explains.

But he’s watching that strength erode into what he calls a “popular front attitude” where loyalty matters more than truth.

Some readers may not share Jonah’s politics. That’s okay—I don’t agree with him on everything either. But part of what Real Insights is about—and part of what drew me to this conversation—is the commitment to stay in the room with people we don’t fully agree with. Jonah doesn’t just speak from conviction or what he’s lived. He draws on history, evidence, and thoughtful reflection. He’s not asking for loyalty. He’s inviting us to think alongside him. And in an age of performative outrage and shallow consensus, that kind of invitation feels both rare and necessary.

Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places

One of the most clarifying moments in our conversation came when Jonah invoked Friedrich Hayek to explain why so many people try to extract deep emotional fulfillment from politics, which it simply can’t provide. “You’ll destroy the microcosm if you try to make it part of the macrocosm,” he warns. “And you’ll make the macrocosm tyrannical if you try to make it act like the microcosm.”

Jonah’s point is that we confuse the moral logic of home, family, and community—what Hayek called the microcosm—with the rules and institutions needed to govern large, impersonal societies—the macrocosm. In our homes, love and loyalty prevail. In a liberal democracy, abstract rules, rights, and reciprocity must do the work. Each has its place. Trying to scale one into the other leads to distortion and dysfunction.

This is where subsidiarity (the principle that power should live close to the ground) comes in. Jonah sees this as not just good governance but also as a moral necessity. Bottom line: federalism isn’t just about administrative efficiency. It’s about allowing space for the microcosm to thrive.

He explains that the fight for liberty begins in our backyards, adding that so, too, does “the fight for a meaningful life […] with people who actually know you, need you, and reflect the best version of yourself back to you.”

Liberal democracy cannot love you, but it can guard the space where real belonging happens.

That’s why his strongest policy instinct is radical decentralization. “If you wanted to make me czar for a little while,” he jokes, “I would send as much power down to the most local levels possible.” Why? Because scale alters the character of power. Local governance creates visibility, accountability, and moral friction. “The winners would have to look the losers in the eye. You’d see them at your kids’ soccer games.”

Jonah hopes for a democracy that’s not just a system, but a relationship. Where people feel seen, needed, and responsible, and where citizens aren’t just subjects of national policy but stewards of the communities they inhabit.

Finding Meaning in the Microcosm

If the macrocosm offers rules to live together, then the microcosm offers reasons to get out of bed in the morning.

Jonah doesn’t reject the human desire for meaning. He simply suggests we’re looking in the wrong place when we demand it from politics. Meaning, he reminds us, is rarely handed down from grand abstractions. It’s earned in the small moments every day.

This is where Arthur Brooks’ concept of “earned success” comes in. It’s the idea that meaning stems not from accolades or status, but from being needed. “It’s not about being rich or famous,” Jonah tells me. “It’s about knowing that someone needs you. That if you disappeared, it would matter.”

He illustrates this with a characteristically funny but disarming example: his dogs. “My dogs don’t care if my books sell. They don’t care if I’m wrong about trade policy. They’re just happy when I come home,” he quipped, flashing the kind of self-deprecating humor that makes his seriousness captivating.

There’s something beautifully grounding about that. Jonah finds a sense of purpose in the routine, loyalty, and wordless joy of being known and needed—something that politics, for all its power, can’t deliver.

Dogs, family, friends, and neighbors can’t compete with politics. They sustain the people who can do politics well.

So yes, liberal democratic capitalism might be impersonal by design. But that’s exactly the point. Its gift is negative space—room to breathe, room to build, room to love without permission. Jonah’s not asking us to abandon the search for meaning. He’s asking us to start it where we live.

Credible Optimism

Toward the end of our chat, Jonah explains that he supports liberal democratic capitalism because it keeps proving itself—not because it’s perfect, but because alternatives fail more catastrophically. He shares that “[f]or 250,000 years, the average human lived on less than $3 a day. That changed once—and only once. And it was because of liberal democratic capitalism.”

But more than that, he believes in the power of example. People learn by seeing what works, not by being told what should work.

This aligns with something I return to often in my own work at R Street: credible optimism. We don’t need to manufacture hope or pretend that problems don’t exist. We need to model the kind of institutional culture and civic engagement we want to see more of. That modeling happens at every level. As Lenore Skenazy reminded me in our last Real Insights conversation, children are the canaries in the civic coal mine—they flourish not in surveillance states or utopias but in communities that trust them and trust themselves. Jonah makes the same observation about democratic institutions, explaining that they’re built through earned trust and small acts of responsibility, not grand declarations.

For Jonah, this comes down to a simple personal commitment he maintains, crystalized in a quote from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: “Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph, but not through me.”

He’s not trying to single-handedly rescue the American republic. He’s just trying to do his part—live with integrity, tell the truth even if it costs him, and trust that if enough people make the same choice in enough places, it will add up to something meaningful.

Final Thoughts: Why This Matters

Talking with Jonah reminded me that democracy doesn’t depend on flawless citizens or perfect institutions. It depends on enough people doing the small, daily work of showing up with integrity and care.

Jonah Goldberg doesn’t want to be your hero. He just wants to write, engage in productive discourse, add a little levity to the world, and come home to dogs who are happy to see him. He reminds us that character still matters. Truth still matters. And you don’t have to be perfect to participate in our great American experiment. You just have to show up, stay in the room when it gets uncomfortable, and keep working alongside people you don’t always agree with—toward a future still worth believing in.

That is why my conversation with Lenore Skenazy felt so relevant. Lenore, founder of the Free-Range Kids movement and co-founder of Let Grow, has spent years pushing others to rethink childhood, independence, and risk. What struck me within our discussion was how clearly her insights resonate beyond parenting, speaking directly to the broader questions our society faces around trust, agency, and our impulses to optimize for control rather than growth.

Our conversation deepened my thinking around how we prepare not just children, but ourselves, for navigating a complex, uncertain future. If we want institutions and societies that can thrive amidst uncertainty, we must begin with trust. And, that process starts earlier than we might think.

Surveillance and the Erosion of Trust

Lenore shared a simple but profound insight: “It’s not certainty that gives you peace of mind. It’s trust.”

Everywhere we look today there’s an obsession with certainty: tracking our children with apps, monitoring employees’ productivity, attempting to erase uncertainty from our lives. However, in seeking certainty, we’re actually dismantling the trust essential for healthy relationships, productive workplaces, and resilient democracies.

Lenore illustrated this dissonance clearly, imagining how it feels to be a teen: “If I said I wouldn’t go to the party and then I didn’t, is that because I’m trustworthy, or because you were tracking me? There’s no way to prove I’m the former when the latter is happening.”

This point resonates powerfully for me, both as a parent and as a leader. Leaders who insist on constant oversight—’butts in seats’ and keystroke monitoring—aren’t cultivating accountability. They’re undermining trust.

“When we normalize surveillance as ‘just checking,’ we redefine relationships—work, family, social—into something devoid of trust.”

To foster responsibility, we must give people room to demonstrate trustworthiness. Yet, we’re designing a world that assumes distrust as its default.

Kids as the Canary in the Coal Mine

Lenore pointed out something important: “Kids are always the canary in the coal mine when it comes to culture change.”

How we treat children reveals deeper truths about our society’s trajectory. Today, childhood is heavily supervised, overly structured, and increasingly risk-averse.

But democracy thrives when citizens are confident in their ability to navigate uncertainty, exercise initiative, and trust each other. If we teach children that the idea of risk is inherently dangerous and bad and independence something to fear, what kind of adults—and democratic citizens—are we creating?

“Liberty was foundational in our country, but it’s eroding rapidly for children. Anything justified as ‘protecting our precious children’ quickly leads to more surveillance, more control, more policing.”

At R Street, we’re focused on cultivating trust, pluralism, and the institutional guardrails that support democracy. Lenore’s perspective adds an essential dimension: to build robust democratic institutions, we must consider the culture we’re creating at every level, starting with childhood.

The Perils of Optimization

Lenore challenged our widespread fixation on optimization: “We’re optimizing for safety, but safety isn’t the only good in the world.”

This optimization fixation applies far beyond parenting. In institutions—including our own—there’s often a temptation to prioritize efficiency and control. But this can backfire, eroding the trust and autonomy that actually fuel creativity and long-term resilience. At R Street, we’re building a learning culture that values curiosity, experimentation, and pluralism. Lenore’s insight refocuses this: if we want democratic institutions rooted in trust, we have to begin by trusting the youngest among us.

Lenore cited a fascinating Yale study: parents intervened half as much when they were told children’s messy, frustrating experiences were valuable learning opportunities. That insight struck a chord because I see parallels in the workplace. We often believe more control and oversight are helpful, but, instead, they frequently stunt genuine growth.

“When adults optimize play by structuring every moment, it’s like putting kids under a Chuck E. Cheese dome. They might have fun, but they lose all the crucial, messy learning that comes naturally through unstructured play.”

Credible Optimism and the Role of Think Tanks

A theme I often return to is credible optimism—the belief that clarity and realism don’t have to mean cynicism. Lenore captured this idea in her classic straightforwardness:

“If you don’t have optimism, you might as well not have a think tank.”

She’s right. The future remains unwritten, yet public discourse frequently presumes inevitable decline. Think tanks, leaders, and policymakers can—and must—do more than diagnose problems; we must actively shape positive futures.

Lenore reminded me historically, optimists are usually proven right: “We fixate on negative outcomes and completely misjudge the odds.”

She further explained that when we approach life—especially childhood—purely through a risk-reward lens, we miss something essential. In parenting, if we weigh even a joyful, everyday activity like walking to school against the worst-case scenario of death, no amount of mental health, confidence, or wonder can outweigh that fear. Freedom never wins when our culture magnifies rare risks to the point where any risk feels unacceptable.

However, the problem goes deeper: the rewards that matter most—the feeling of a great day, a lesson learned, a flash of awe—are often intangible and difficult to measure. If we focus only on measurable outcomes (like grades or future achievements), we undervalue the very experiences that shape resilient, imaginative citizens. In this way, Lenore challenges us to reconsider how we weigh risks and rewards. This challenge extends not only to children but also to our entire civic culture. If we want robust democratic institutions, we need to nurture a culture that trusts individuals to navigate life’s uncertainties, not one that tries to eliminate them.

Final Thoughts: Why This Matters

My conversation with Lenore left me with an important insight: How we structure childhood shapes how we structure society. To build a democracy founded on trust, agency, and responsibility, we must instill these values early. That means resisting the urge to control every outcome; embracing risk and uncertainty; and remembering surveillance does not foster trust—freedom and responsibility do.

Lenore has already had a significant influence on the way our society thinks about childhood, but I think her insights go even further—they inform how we shape leadership, democracy, and the future itself.