I have my own thoughts about what went wrong, or at least some of it, for the Democrats. Too many years doubling down on pushing the identity politics narratives of victimhood  for the various minority groups, racial and otherwise, that make up the party’s left, which led to what some feel as muzzling of free speech and freedom of thought, especially on college campuses and the failed ‘equity and inclusion’ programs practiced by many companies. A reputation, deserved or not, as the party of elites (despite the record spending by the billionaire Elon Musk on Trump’s campaign.) There’s the public distrust in government and institutions, bred by the gross missteps and overreach of the pandemic response. There’s what some, like Senator Bernie Sanders, describe as the party’s walking away from the working class, and there’s bread-and-butter issues like gas and grocery prices. While the economy has been doing well and the U.S. has brought down inflation faster than other nations, many Americans seem not to be feeling it this election season, and were in no mood to listen to anyone telling them things were otherwise.

There’s the handling or as some saw it ‘mishandling’ of the immigration issue by the current administration. There’s the toxically polarizing issue of abortion, used by both the left and right to energize their base to the point some pundits have speculated that neither party can afford to give the issue up. Perhaps Vice-President Harris’s gender and race factored in as well, no doubt for some voters, despite other countries’ having had some of their best leaders be women. And, of course, there’s the fact we Americans, red and blue, are watching different media, operating in our silos and listening to pundits who make their living keeping us angry and divided—and that is happening on both sides of the political spectrum.

I’m not talking about the minority on the right who were very likely motivated by the racial animus of Trump’s rhetoric. I’m talking about the everyday people who looked at the choices and said “I don’t like Trump but I’m voting for him anyway.”

America in 2024 is a complicated place. Even while we elected Donald Trump to the White House, according to the Guttmacher Institute, abortion rights measures that were on the ballot this November passed in seven states, including in Arizona and Montana. Kansas has a female governor, while California never has had one. Many farmers believe in climate change, utilize technology to manage their crops, and go to college to study ‘ag(riculture)’. 

Take a look at the demographic breakdown of Trump’s voters, and it becomes even clearer that America is a complicated place. According to an NBC News demographic, 54 % of Hispanic men voted for Trump as did 20% of Black men. Following the election, I heard interviews of Hispanic immigrants who said they don’t like that they themselves followed the immigration rules to gain legal citizenship, while other immigrants cheated the system.  They seemed not to have been put off by Trump’s campaign promise to deport some 11 million illegal immigrants.

If the only lesson the political left or any of us takes away from this election, is the simplistic assumptions of yore—for example, that anyone voting for Trump must be a racist—then we will have missed the point. We’ve been sinking into a morass of division for years. What if we took this opportunity instead to throw out the old assumptions, upend them, and change the game?  Could that be our way out? What would be the appeal of any would-be autocrat if everyday people didn’t feel disenfranchised, like no one was listening to their concerns, and instead of feeling that the old presumptions about anyone’s identity based on some immutable characteristics were no longer being used against them?

Change is inevitable but also difficult. America has experienced rapid change in the last few decades, not only technological change but massive cultural change. We seem not to be very good at helping people adjust, giving them a safe means to grieve some of our culture which is passing away. If things were better for some, at least imagined to be so, in times past, who is anyone to say their experience of their own lives is invalid?  Life no doubt was better for some and much worse for others at different times in history.  Both can be true at once. Would it be terrible if we helped them grieve it? Difficult emotions like grief and anger don’t magically disappear or resolve themselves. To deny them is to invite them to manifest in ways most of us wouldn’t choose, like in political violence.

When Benjamin Franklin famously said “a Republic, if you can keep it,” I don’t think he was referring to outside forces posing a danger. If we can’t figure out how to get along with people we strongly disagree with, who may not share our religious beliefs, look like us or live the way we do, whose values may be different than our own based on where we choose to live or the cultural in which we grew up, we will prove the old maxim, that democracies never have a lifespan of more than three hundred years. By that measure, we are on the way out.

If we don’t manage to keep our democratic republic, we will have done it to ourselves; and if we figure out how to keep it, we will have accomplished something no other nation ever has – kept together one nation knitting together peoples of many faiths and backgrounds. What a feat.

In the words of Winston Churchill “Success is not final. Failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts.” Let us begin.

Monica Rockwell is a member of Braver Angels and a routine contributor to BA’s community essays.

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If we start with agreement that “patriotism” means love of country, then there are almost no Patriots among us. Neither the Left nor the Right loves the country they live in. They love the idea of the country they want to live in.

But, of course, we can’t start with agreement on that definition of “patriotism”. The Left and the Right, almost by definition, disagree on everything. The only thing we seem to agree on is that there is now existential threat. However, we can’t agree upon whether that threat is to our way of living, our environment, our democracy, or our liberties. We do, however, agree that the cause of the threat is the other side.

I’m hearing a chorus from the Right singing that they love their country. It’s the best in the world. Yet they want to drastically change it. They want to start mass deportations. They want to weaken the separation of church and state. They want to take away a woman’s right to decide on her own health issues. They want to dramatically change the way we educate our children, and fund that education.

At least in my lifetime, the Right has usually been more vocal about their patriotism than the Left. They wear it like a tribal symbol. The Left finds that a bit uncool. But we cheer for our team at the Olympics. We get pissed at Putin for challenging us. We want the Chinese to stop stealing our tech. We secretly gloat about winning 2 world wars. And still, we want to fundamentally change things. We want to revamp the way we deliver health care; we want to restructure the supreme court, the US Senate and our elections; we want to re-write our history books; we want to trim even more of capitalism’s rough edges.   

So, who loves the country we live in? Who loves this stew of races, of religions, of sexual identities, of political beliefs, of varying faith in science, of worldviews, of ethnic backgrounds, of languages, of political beliefs? Who loves our anger and hatred with each other? Who is an American Patriot?

Almost none of us. We don’t love our country; we love our Tribe: our Red Tribe, or our Blue Tribe. We’re not American Patriots, we’re Red Patriots or Blue Patriots.

It’s easy to blame Fox News and MSNBC for this tribalism, but they are only giving their audience what the audience wants. When Laura Ingraham reports on “the Biden Crime Family”, or when Nicolle Wallace repeats her mantric Trump introduction (“Once-indicted, twice-impeached, forever disgraced”), they are feeding a fire that already exists.

Roger Ailes understood that news was entertainment, and that the better entertained his audience is, the better his ratings and revenues. For decades prior to the 1996 birth of Ailes and Murdock’s Fair and Balanced Fox News, the Right had been complaining about the liberal bias of the media. Ailes and Murdoch shared conservative values, but they also shared a long honed professional skill at managing media profitably. Had they not believed that they could make money catering the news to the politically conservative segment of the country, Fox News would not be what Fox News is. Profits, not ideology was the primary driver.

Ailes also famously understood that an angry audience watched his shows longer and more frequently, so he fueled their anger. And the ratings exploded. The rest of the media world had to react, and they did. MSNBC emerged to capture the left segment of the media market, and also focused their coverage on issues that would anger their viewers.

We enjoy being angry. We like having an enemy. We want to feel self-righteous. We want our adrenaline to flow and our emotions to peak. We want the dopamine release that happens when we get angry. We want to have secret conversations with other Tribe members where we demonstrate and reenforce each other’s Tribal Patriotism. We like the daily episodes of the serial drama that the news has become. 

We are polarized because we enjoy being polarized. 

Is there anything wrong with that? What does all this fun cost us? Is patriotism more than the fondness of an ass for his stall?

Well, historically it has been. It’s arguably why our two-party governing system used to be able to compromise and function. It’s an important reason why we accept being governed.  It’s why our grandfathers, fathers and some of us fought in wars to defend our freedoms. It creates the national unity that allows us to pull together rather than pull apart.

Do you believe in democracy? If so, you believe in compromise. If not, I guess you want an autocracy, a monarchy, a dictatorship, an oligarchy, a theocracy, or one-party rule. You don’t need to compromise in any of those systems; plus, your opinion would never be asked, and has no importance.

Now, if you are always right, please don’t compromise. If God has told you what course to take, please don’t compromise (but you may want to check with him again, because he told some other folks something different). If the other side is evil, please don’t compromise (and unless you are always right, you may be wrong about that).

Maybe we just need to modify our democracy so that those who disagree with us have less significance. We’ll only let men vote. Or only land owners. Or maybe we’ll limit voting to an informed electorate, and I get to decide who’s properly informed.

But what about those existential issues, those issues that are so significant that if the other side gets its way, the world as we know it will end? What about climate change? What about national security? And what about those issues where justice is at stake: economic inequality, racial and social justice? And what about those issues that if the other side gets its way, our freedoms and quality of life will be seriously damaged: immigration, the 2^nd Amendment, cultural preservation, religious freedom? We can’t compromise on those issues, can we?

Well, if we don’t compromise, what do we do? Right now, we can’t get anything done, so we complain. Alternatives to complaining exist, but they involve guns, waiting a decade or two for a generation to die, or a miracle trifecta political win (house, senate, and presidency). The trifecta is an awesome win for our side, unless it’s an awesome loss for our side. Maybe compromise is a safer bet.

I am not suggesting in any way that you give up your political beliefs. The answer is not that we all become purple. Wanting change is not unpatriotic. Obstinate conviction that you are right, and refusal to compromise is unpatriotic, undemocratic, and unproductive.

The answer is that we take pride in the fact that we are probably the most successful large multi-cultural, multi-ethnic nation in the world. The answer is that we take pride that our economy is the strongest and most resilient in the world. We take pride in the fact that much of the rest of the world wants to immigrate here and enjoy our standard of living, opportunities and freedoms. We take pride in the beauty of our country. We take pride that for a century, we have been the world’s leader in research and innovation, and that today we stand poised to create and profit from innovations like AI and Quantum Computing that will catapult the world into the future.

The answer is that we accept the fact that with so many of us from so many diverse backgrounds, we can’t be expected to see the world the same way, and yet our democracy works.

The answer is we love our entire country, we appreciate the importance of our democracy, and we compromise.

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Chris Lee never thought his face would launch a thousand ships. But the Eventbrite listings that Chris and his team work on have launched well over a thousand Braver Angels events.

Not many people in Braver Angels have seen Chris’ face, because the Eventbrite team works behind the scenes. They take the input that event organizers have entered into one computer system (the Event Request Form, or ERF) and then they check, edit, and nudge it into the shape that the Eventbrite system needs. The resulting event descriptions on the Eventbrite website are the first “face” of the Braver Angels organization that many event goers see. 

Chris came to Braver Angels in 2021 after experiencing what he describes as the goodness in diversity around the world. “I grew up in Arizona, listening to Country-Western music, sure that’s where I would stay,” he says. “But… I ended up attending UC Berkeley, living in Japan, and traveling the world for work before ending up in the San Francisco Bay Area. I have seen so much diversity – the goodness in it. Experiencing how differences have come to be a major way to tear us apart left me disheartened.”

He signed up for the Eventbrite team not long after joining Braver Angels. “I like using my skills to help folks in Braver Angels get their events going,” he says. “My background is in mechanical engineering but I have ended up working in product management, applications engineering, and product marketing for capital equipment hardware and software makers.”

Over the years, the number of volunteers on Chris’ team has gone up and down, but it’s always been a fairly small team, and Chris has always been there. Most of the time, the team never sees each other – in person. They consult with each other online and share the work as it comes in, using a simple shared spreadsheet to distribute the workload.

Chris’ role isn’t only about working on events. The job often involves working with event organizers and sometimes developers. When things aren’t completely clear, or untypical situations come up, you’ll find Chris answering questions and troubleshooting with organizers in the Eventbrite group’s email chatter.

“Chris once helped me out of a sticky situation where I had created two listings for the same event,” recalls Julianne O’Neil, a Pennsylvania Braver Angels organizer. “I was worried how I was going to fix the registration impacts, but Chris straightened it all out. And he kept a cool head the whole time.”

So, Chris, keep on keeping on. We need you – and more like you.

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To backtrack a bit, while my brother and I shared our growing up years, our adult lives looked very different from one another.  After completing college in a small town in the northeastern mountains of Pennsylvania, my brother settled down back in the small, rural community where my parents still lived.  The community in central Pennsylvania was once home to the steel industry and is easily as politically conservative as one thinks of when we think of politics in the southern United States in the 2020s where it so happens I currently live.  In contrast, I’d attended a large university in a metropolitan area and then moved to Washington, DC to begin my career and where I lived for several years before returning to the city where I’d attended college until I eventually moved south.  I’d also had a brief stint living in Philadelphia, PA attending another large university. 

Our parents were my dad on one hand, whose grandparents immigrated to the U.S. in the early 20^th century and whose own father and grandfather were blue collar industry workers, who was long a union supporter and always a “Made in America” champion, so he leaned politically more liberal.  My mom, who grew up on the Midwestern plains of Kansas, by contrast, came from a politically conservative family.  I figured we stood a 50/50 chance of adopting either leaning, circumstances depending.

Conversations with my brother, whom I mostly saw at the holidays, could be tense if he brought up politics.  One holiday stands out as he ranted at me for an extended period as other relatives looked on.  I couldn’t glean from his rant that it was any specific matter of policy or even ideology with which he strongly disagreed with me but more a generalized sense of anger over my supposed liberal leaning, what we in Braver Angels call affective polarization. 

In the aftermath of his suicide, I wondered whether his politics were behind his seeming need to stockpile guns in his home that had made them an easy reach when he experienced some major depression. 

Fast-forward to 2024, and I’m scrolling through my social media to see that someone I knew from childhood had died with a post from his sibling that reads “RIP (name). I hope you find more happiness in the next life than you did in this one.”  The deceased, whom I’ll call Greg, and I had many exchanges via social media sometime around the 2016 election.  Greg clearly leaned on the political left, and he was clearly very angered over its outcome but also over many of the same things we often read the left is concerned about.  As more of a pragmatic centrist who often sees multiple sides of any issue and as someone who had read several books trying to understand the right’s anger, I tried to offer him a different perspective or a way to see where “the other side” was coming from.  Suffice it to say, he wasn’t having it and eventually one or both of us decided to drop the conversation.  While we remained friends on social media, we’d had no interaction for several years. 

When I learned of his death, I was curious.  What had he been posting on social media in recent times?  His most recent post reads in part “Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide from under it with a wink and a grin. If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it personal. Do as much damage as you can. Get your message across. That way, you stand a better chance of being taken seriously next time. Of being considered dangerous . . . And time and again they cream your liquidation, your displacement, your torture and brutal execution with the ultimate insult that it’s just business, it’s politics, it’s the way of the world, it’s a tough life and that it’s nothing personal. Well, f*** them. Make it personal.”  Wow, just wow.

While I’m sure Greg had other factors at play operating in the background, had politics helped lead to his death? I wondered.

This week, scrolling through my social media feed, I see another man I know from childhood posting angry rants with memes and pictures which seemingly promote violence to take back what some in the U.S. see as their way of life going away.  Is he intending to promote civil war as an answer to our current culture and political problems? I wondered.  Where will it lead?

I currently serve as a state coordinator for Braver Angels in South Carolina.  I’ve been involved with Braver Angels (originally Better Angels) since its founding in 2017.  What drew me to this work was the dawning recognition that trouble had apparently been brewing for years while many of us were oblivious to it and a recognition that we needed some serious repair work if our democracy/republic is to continue standing. 

This past week, I learned of a friend of a friend’s friend, also 51, who took his own life.  And while I can have no idea whether politics played any role in his case and taking the poor state of our system for dealing with mental illness into account, I am beleaguered by the number of suicides, particularly among middle-aged men, which I continue to learn of. 

We need to figure this out.  Politics at its heart is how we organize ourselves to live in a civil society.  Our politics should not be killing us.  Consider this a wake-up call to lay down our arms, so to speak, and continue in this most important of work.

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So naturally I’ve turned to thinking about my New Year’s resolutions, and in addition to renewing last year’s, I resolve to treat my parents with more respect. It’s not that I’m often disrespectful, but I do need to work on my patience with them, especially in the realm of filial tech support, a common source of exasperation for many of us lucky enough to have healthy, but aging, parents.

While you can most certainly teach an old dog new tricks, it doesn’t get any easier for us to absorb new ideas as we age, and I was ruminating on how this works. Sure, our processing power and memory may decline somewhat, but there’s also something to be said for all the good data cramming up our heads. The older we get and the more we remember, the more old data the new stuff has to compete with—and be weighed against.

And this fact doesn’t even need to have a moral value; it just is. It can hold us back, and it can ground us to be able to move us forward more easily.

I consider myself progressive—even if I don’t call myself by that label due to differences with the current popular school—and I hope I retain that inclination for the long term. But at the same time I have—largely through Braver Angels—come to appreciate more the perspectives of those “who [stand] athwart history yelling Stop,” as William F. Buckley put it.

It’s actually less about preventing our impulses for forward movement, and moreso about the regard we hold for those who feel differently about which way actually is forward.

We would be wise to recognize that eventually we all play the role of fuddy-duddies stuck in our ways. It may be as a grandparent struggling to learn new tech tools to communicate with our grandkids. Or we may find ourselves disoriented as the moral universe shifts over time, bending towards a new conception of justice that seems extreme, even absolutist, with no room for our “problematic” selves.

As I move ahead into the new year, I resolve to keep this in mind, trying to judge less, learn more, and practice grace, knowing I eventually will be the one who needs it.

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That day shocked our nation with its horror, perpetrated against innocent very young children. If, like me, you had a child that same age sitting in their elementary school classrooms, you likely felt the horror literally, in your body. You realized how easily it could have been your child, in their school, in your town where you drop your kid off daily on weekdays, never thinking it could be a place of mortal danger.

Six years after Sandy Hook, in 2018, a troubled 14-year old boy who had been expelled from his high school drove to an elementary school in Townville, South Carolina, just outside the town where my family lives, and armed with an AR-15, he gunned down a 6-year-old boy on the school’s playground. Shortly beforehand, he murdered his father. This event shook our community to its core as tributes were made, funds were raised for the family and symbols were everywhere, dedicated to this young boy who lost his life. Days later, he was buried wearing his beloved batman costume.

Events like these shake our sense of safety that we expect in our homes, in our communities going about our daily lives inhabiting the places we normally go. Sandy Hook and the events of that day stand in stark relief in our memories as they left us reeling in ways we haven’t since. Sadly, we’ve become largely numb and immune as we’ve witnessed shooting after shooting, in schools, in churches and synagogues, in stores and in workplaces. That is, pretty much anywhere humans congregate as they go about their daily lives has become a potential place of danger, to say nothing of the communities, often minority ones, that live with the threat of daily gun violence.

In the months and years since 2012, we’ve seen many efforts to address gun violence at the state and federal levels, some successful, some not but none that’s provided a universal fix to our seemingly intractable national scourge, a problem that doesn’t seem to plague other nations.

Shortly after the shooting in a nearby town and the bitterly divisive 2016 election, I joined Better (now Braver) Angels, driven by a need to understand how we had become so politically polarized, how our fellow Americans could see events in our communities and in our country in such divergent ways that were hard to understand and as we identified as blue or red, liberal or conservative. I also deeply felt the frustration with our seeming inability to solve some of our most intractable problems, from immigration to gun violence. Sometimes we’d seem close to agreeing on solutions to big problems only to be frustrated yet again when our elected leaders, existing in a highly charged partisan environment, couldn’t make it happen. I kept thinking there had to be a better way. 

In the years since, Braver Angels has inspired me to read widely across the political spectrum, reading and listening to a myriad of voices, liberal, conservative and in-between and to consider divergent views. I’ve attended BA workshops, listened deeply to BA and to other liberal, conservative and libertarian podcast interviews. They’ve made me realize that no one ‘side’ has the lock on morality or on good ideas. They’ve made me realize that few problems lend themselves to simplistic solutions and that includes solving gun violence.

In the years since, I have realized that the path to a solution to our particular problem of gun violence will look like all of us working together, listening deeply to each other, finding the areas where we can agree and working from there. Complex problems often require multi-pronged solutions, not one solution imposed by one group on another. For gun violence, this is likely to look like us agreeing on some restrictions on who should have access to guns and when there are some people who shouldn’t. It likely looks like figuring out scalable interventions in conflict de-escalation. It likely looks like understanding how our culture at times promotes solving our problems through violence. It likely looks like understanding and addressing why Americans and maybe young men in particular are feeling a sense of loneliness and missing identity that sometimes translates into violence.

For me, Braver Angels gives me hope that we can work toward finding these solutions. In this season of Christmas and Hannukah, we can feel hope. In 2023, we can get to work.

Monica L. Rockwell

Braver Angels South Carolina State Coordinator

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That was the plaintive question from Yvonne Boyd’s daughter almost two years ago, as the US election results rolled in and it looked as if Donald Trump might win another term as President.

Yvonne, who leans Blue, is an energetic trainer of and resource for Braver Angels, and an organizer herself. A naturalized American born in England, she had been voicing heartfelt concerns throughout 2020. “I’d been at home all year with the pandemic, and watching the news all the time,” she explains. “But I was making myself ill; I couldn’t drag myself away. It was like one of those reality shows.”

Earlier, Yvonne had made a mental note about Braver Angels after hearing about the organization on the radio. But as the election result became clear – and contested – she knew the time had come to stop worrying and start doing something.

Days after joining, she received an e-mail from Washington state coordinator Will Clemmer inviting her to one of the informal gatherings of Braver Angels in the east and central regions of the Evergreen State. Those get-togethers were on Zoom, not just because the pandemic was still very much a thing but because the state is vast – almost 240 miles north to south.

After a few such meetings, Yvonne offered to write up a description of the gathering, as a way to extend its impact. Her note was warmly welcomed. It wasn’t long before she was also drafting agendas for the next meetings. Those inputs were valued too – and they helped lay the groundwork for formation of the Central/Eastern Washington Alliance.

Soon, the new alliance had held its first workshop – Skills for Bridging the Divide. “I became an organizer pretty much just by feeling my way around!” smiles Yvonne. At that time, super-organizer Mary Beth Stibbins, based north of Seattle, suggested that Yvonne could help to pilot the new Event Request Form – a document that streamlines and routinizes the organizing of workshops, debates, and other Braver Angels events.

Given her highly active and effective involvement, it was hardly surprising that Yvonne considered being a candidate for one of the three Blue chairs of the Central/East Washington Alliance. But she demurred, opting to stay where she knew she could be most useful. “I consider myself a problem-solver,” she says. “I said ‘I’ll be an organizer – I’ll be your secretary or assistant – but you’ll make the decisions.’”

Yvonne’s problem-solving prowess and volunteerism are ingrained. In England, she had worked in customer service for one of the UK’s largest national banks. “I was fixing problems for people. I loved the investigation aspects of it,” she says. Moving to Washington in 2000 when her husband was recruited to work at the Hanford nuclear site, she became a busy volunteer for her kids’ school parent-teacher association, for a women’s shelter, and more. Characteristically, she excelled in the support roles rather than on the front lines. That extends into her professional life today, as the secretary of a middle school in her town of Richland, WA.

Yet as Yvonne brought her battery of skills to bear for the new alliance, she was keen to do more. Learning about Braver Angels’ Ambassadors program, she took the training. Again, though, she fitted naturally into a key support role as a participant manager and Zoom event manager.

Next up: early work on the “Event in a Box” pilot program, when she paired with Casey Jorgensen, Red, to envision what physical signage – stand-up signs, retractable banners, and so on – could be standardized, assembled, and shipped to alliances that could benefit from such a kit.

That last program didn’t pan out as planned; the package wasn’t cheap, and the logistics of buying, assembling, packaging, and shipping the box required more Braver Angels resources than were available. (Subsequently, the signs and products were made available for Alliances or volunteers to purchase.) But Yvonne’s amicable collaboration with Casey took her on to her next Braver Angels role. “Casey had been asked to take over as National core coordinator of training of new organizers,” explains Yvonne. “I stepped in to help the fledgling organizers – those who’d been trained but are new to the job. Just this week, I was answering questions for a new person organizing her first workshop.”

The overall initiative is rigorous and disciplined — more and more critical as demand for events grows and it becomes tough to recruit and train organizers fast enough. “Casey, Mary Beth, and I are struggling with the volume of work. We’re training between 5 and 10 organizers a month – sometimes up to 12 – and constantly receiving e-mails asking for help from new organizers,” says Yvonne. (Help Wanted ad here: if you think this is a role you could move into – with the right training and support yourself – Yvonne and her co-trainers would be all ears.)

At the same time, it’s crucial to present Braver Angels in the best possible light – ensuring that everything is handled as professionally as it can be. That can be a challenge in a volunteer-run organization. In three separate instances, an organizer has accidentally submitted two ERFs for one event, creating two versions of an Eventbrite registration and two Zoom calls, which resulted in two sets of participants for the one event. It was necessary to delete one of the events but save the registrations and merge them with the other event, making sure participants then had the correct Zoom coordinates.

So how does Yvonne help run a family, a middle school, and do all that she does for Braver Angels? By her estimation, she devotes 15 to 20 hours each week to the organization. “The other night I was on three Zoom calls that took four and a half hours altogether.”

In practice, she has rolled off of some roles as other volunteers have stepped in. And practice has made perfect. “It used to take me maybe 15 hours to put together an alliance workshop, but now it’s just three hours or so. I know all the steps by heart,” she says.

So what does Yvonne see herself doing a year from now? She expects to be handling much the same behind-the-scenes jobs – “maybe better, more efficiently.” And if she had free rein to do what her heart desires? “I’d love to develop a project to bring Braver Angels into high schools,” she says.

Don’t be surprised if that’s where we see Yvonne Boyd next. And after that? Whatever it is, it will be of enormous benefit to Braver Angels.

Yvonne: we need a thousand of you!   ⧠

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“We think this is a teachable moment, with trust ratings in the media being so low,” says Sue Lani Madsen, the Braver Angel behind the concept. “It would be a chance for them to think about and talk about the words that are used that often inflame as much as they inform.” She explains that most media people are steeped in the doctrine of their apparent objectivity. They’ve been taught that their profession is, by its nature, non-biased. That’s what they think. But it often doesn’t play out in reality.

The concept of media people working to depolarize themselves will soon to be piloted in Washington state, where Sue Lani, Red, co-chairs Braver Angels’ communications commission for the state and is one of six co-chairs for the Central/Eastern Washington Alliance. “We want the media to talk about the words they use – to think about their choices of words and how others may perceive them.”

This initiative might sound like something thought up by a fierce foe of the media – someone who regularly uses the term “fake news,” perhaps. But Sue Lani is herself a journalist, and a dedicated, persuasive, and highly articulate one at that. Although much of her working life was spent as a licensed architect, about seven years ago she began a second career as a freelance writer for local publications in the east of Washington state. “I’ve always consumed newspapers,” she says. “I wrote my first letter to the editor when I was eleven!”

Her work as a columnist for The Spokesman-Review, in Spokane, was at their invitation to try to provide rural and conservative balance. “I really am looking to see that there is balance,” she says. “I try to be a good translator of rural and conservative points of view. Participating in Braver Angels events – where we get nuanced discussion – is very useful to me in writing my columns.”

The idea of a DPW workshop for the media resonated immediately with Braver Angels’ national leadership. Now Sue Lani is teaming with Lorraine Howell, Blue, in Seattle to bring the idea to life. Together, they are assembling a group of about half a dozen to go through the current DPW slide deck to see how best to customize it for journalists and media, with an emphasis on words, phrases, and expressions and on questions asked and not asked. It’s a topic that has been on her mind for a while, as this 2020 column indicates.

The intent is to launch the DPW-Media program next January – after the craziness of the 2022 elections and before the next election cycle kicks up – piloting it in Washington and hopefully getting some significant local media figures to participate. Assuming the program is a success, it could (and probably should) be rolled out nationwide, with outreach to America’s leading journalism schools.

A definitive regional objective of the program is to help bridge the “Cascade divide” – the cultural chasm between the Seattle-Tacoma metropolitan sprawl and the farmland in the east. “I live in a county that has four people per square mile,” smiles Sue Lani. “I don’t think people in downtown Seattle understand why our concerns are different.”

Sue Lani joined Braver Angels about 18 months ago after observing a debate about voter activity in the 2020 election. It wasn’t long before she was invited to join the state communications commission as the Red Co-Chair – a role she was quick to accept since she already knew her Blue counterpart-to-be and had great respect for him.

Then, when she stepped into one of the three Red chairs for the Central/Eastern Washington Alliance this summer, she entered another world altogether. She points out that the alliance is very new – formed during the pandemic – and it remains almost entirely reliant on Zoom because it spans a region that takes four hours to drive across.

Now though, Sue Lani and her co-leaders are talking about what comes next – in particular, how they can meet and engage in person. “We’ve got more options for meeting now,” she says. “We’re looking to community festivals and county fairs; we want to figure out a way to have a presence there.”

Plans are underway to field a Braver Angels booth at the family-focused Spokane Valleyfest weekend at the end of September. One of the stipulations of the fair’s organizers is that every booth must have an activity for children, so Sue Lani and her colleagues are exploring all sorts of fun things, such as competitions for building things out of Lego or Duplo blocks.

Now, all they have to do is get loads of red blocks and the same number of blue blocks…

The post Colleague of the Week: Sue Lani Madsen appeared first on Braver Angels.

Which helps explain why Roxanna, who leans Blue, slid so easily into volunteer tasks that involved technology when she joined Braver Angels two years ago. “There were all these Gmail accounts and accounts on Dropbox. I just kind of cleaned things up,” she says.

Others aren’t so ready to downplay her many hours volunteering with the alliance in central Texas. “She has been especially helpful with behind-the-scenes logistical support, like our website, Mailchimp, Eventbrite, and our Alliance’s interactions with Braver Angels’ [technology leaders],” says Karl Schmalz, Red Co-Chair of Braver Angels of Central Texas. “She keeps the trains running on time in a busy environment!”

Roxanna’s contributions in just two years go well beyond tech assistance. She has energized her community in Comal County about 30 miles south of Austin. Through her efforts and persistence and with the help of a few friends, Roxanna helped set up and run two in-person workshops (one Red/Blue, the other Depolarizing Within) in June of this year. Another in-person Red/Blue workshop is scheduled for next month. And there are plans for a Family and Politics workshop in November – again, in person. 

She and several others in her community have become Braver Angels Ambassadors, setting up and making presentations in the area. And she has worked recently with Ron Frisk, a definite Red, and Lynn Silver, a true Blue, who met at one of the workshops and who have collaborated on an opinion piece for the local newspaper, the New Braunfels Herald-Zeitung. “Lynn and Ron are regular contributors to that paper and sat next to each other at one of our workshops,” says Roxanna.  A photo accompanying the op-ed has Lynn wearing a “Mothers against Greg Abbott” shirt and Ron’s shirt says “God, Guns, Trump”. I think great things will come from their shared op-ed piece,” says Roxanna.

Roxanna was a natural fit for Braver Angels from Day One. During her career as the director of the library in Canyon Lake, she made certain that the books her library purchased and lent out represented a wide range of disparate views. Long worried about the loss of civility in ordinary civic life, she had been organizing workshops at the library, some hosted by The Institute for Civility in Government, a non-profit with aims similar to those of Braver Angels, and others leveraging the Great Decisions themes developed by the Foreign Policy Association. “My board of trustees was always in support,” she says. “Civil discourse is a part of the library’s mission.”

Recently, Roxanna has been pounding the pavement as a trained Braver Angels Ambassador. She has presented at her church, and has plans for plenty more outreach in the months ahead. “The idea is to try to drum up an appetite for workshops,” she says. She is a strong believer in the power of the incremental approach. “We don’t need hundreds coming to hear us,” she says; all it takes is one passionate person who sees the value in depolarization and who is willing to join the effort. “If people are exposed to just the one workshop and it changes how they respond, then that has already made a difference,” she says.

And if those people happen to be natural connectors – people with large active networks of contacts – then so much the better. Roxanna uses herself as the example: “When it came time to figure out people to call to attend our new workshops, I knew everyone,” she says. “Ron Frisk [the Red mentioned above] was on my library board.” 

Meanwhile, Roxanna continues to meet Karl each week on Zoom; they discuss priorities and brainstorm new ideas. She enthuses about working with large, influential groups such as Rotary International – already a Braver Angels partner – and she wants to expand the number of workshops organized and run by her community – maybe one every other month.

And beyond that? More Braver Angels members. “We have maybe 15 members in our county,” she says. “I’d like there to be 100.”  Roxanna being Roxanna, reaching that goal really won’t take long.  ⧠

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Braden, who leans conservative, is a rising junior at Indiana University (IU). He’s double-majoring in History and in Law and Public Policy, with a minor in French. He will soon take on the presidency of IU’s chapter of BridgeUSA, a partner organization to Braver Angels. He’s an active churchgoer, and an advocate of getting community institutions involved in Braver Angels’ depolarization efforts.

And in recent months, Braden blazed a meteoric trail as a Braver Angels intern. Hired by communications leader Moni Guzman, he made a real impression from the get-go. “He set up measurable goals for social media impact overall for the Media team. He actively contributed to our “10X” project, identifying key attributes of impactful social media posts,” says Braver Angels leader Steve Saltwick. “And he contributed to the Central Texas Alliance’s media outreach project.”

Braden has been fascinated by politics from an early age – an interest that became a passion in 2016. His own particular depolarization journey became very real a couple of years ago when he left the cornfields of southwest Indiana (his description) to become an IU student. “[The city of] Bloomington was going to be a lot more liberal than where I came from,” he says. “63% of the people in my county voted for Donald Trump in the fall of 2020, but the same percentage of Bloomington residents voted for Joe Biden.”

His entire freshman year at university was conducted virtually as Covid took its toll on America. Aside from his considerable load of coursework, Braden committed to volunteering as soon as he could. In practice, that was right before the start of his freshman year when he heard about BridgeUSA. “They’ve done really well with younger people,” he says.

Even though his early days with the movement were virtual, he was able to fully immerse himself in the organization, as he puts it. He’d also become aware of Braver Angels but hadn’t gotten involved until he heard about intern opportunities at the BridgeUSA National Summit in April of this year.

Although his internship ended last month, Braden is full-on with depolarization activities. He has just returned from Israel where he and others met people from both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide; the trip, organized by IU’s Hillel group, invited 20 non-Jewish student leaders along.

At the same time, he wants to persuade leaders in his own house of worship – Sherwood Oaks Christian Church – to partner with other community institutions to host a Braver Angels debate. He’s in talks with local Braver Angels leaders about gathering volunteers for a Habitat for Humanity build in Bloomington, bridging generational and political divides. And he’s trying to tap his conservative home community to attract more Reds to Braver Angels. All while juggling five and six classes a semester.

So how does Braden fit everything in? Aren’t college students supposed to be playing Frisbee golf, making TikTok videos, and sleeping late?

“I kinda have to prioritize. I swear by Google calendar!” he says. Tight scheduling has been essential: in the first six weeks of this summer, he has had classes that are credit requirements. He is part of his school’s Hutton Honors College and the O’Neill Honors program, meaning additional study. Sundays he’s at church, and Monday morning he was completing the media metrics report for Braver Angels and participating in the media team “Summer of How” editorial meetings.

Watch this space, Braver Angels members. We haven’t seen the last of Braden Chapman. And that is a very good thing for America.

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Remember when comedian Jon Stewart went on that old CNN show Crossfire and all but destroyed it?

“I watch your show every day, and it kills me,” Stewart tells Red / Blue co-hosts Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala in a 2004 segment I’ve watched and rewatched countless times. It’s one of the nicer ways he skewers them for the point-scoring Left v. Right showdowns they frame as “debate.” Stewart outs their format as pure partisan theater — all in front of a live, stunned studio audience.

“Here’s what I want to tell you guys,” Stewart says to the co-hosts, batting away their attempts to get him to mock anything else. “Stop. Stop hurting America.”

What happened next is the stuff of legend: CNN canceled the show, citing Stewart’s takedown, and the whole thing went down as one shining example of media justice served.  

‘Stupid, incompetent, or both’

Setting aside his broader political work, I can’t tell you how much I admired Stewart’s courage and clarity in the segment. The way he spoke up for so much frustration with how our media can exploit us. It was nothing short of an epic win for me… until I stumbled on an essay that made me see what we’d lost.

“In 2003, the idea of a show where Republicans and Democrats would meet and debate — on equal terms — felt mundane and taken for granted,” writes Will Chamberlain in Human Events. “In 2019, however, there isn’t a single show on cable television where Republicans and Democrats routinely meet on equal terms.”

In fact, Chamberlain argues, “By ‘destroying’ Crossfire, Stewart unintentionally brought on an era of monologue-driven news shows that portray their adversary as stupid, incompetent, or both.”

Drat, I thought. He’s right. Tucker Carlson Tonight, The Rachel Maddow Show, you know the ones. Even when these shows speak powerfully for their side and for our shared struggle toward a better society, they build ideological fortresses within which the idea of making equal space for opposing voices — let alone the practice — isn’t just pointless. It’s a joke.

But as I look around at where these one-way citadels have led us, how we’re crushed by the weight of assumptions we don’t test and certainties we don’t challenge, I’m not laughing.

Sharing ground and sharing power

Do I think Crossfire was worth saving? Absolutely not. But I do think that losing stages where liberals and conservatives meet on shared ground with shared power hurts America more than we realize.

Which is precisely what I was thinking as I watched and rewatched two powerful clips from recent Braver Angels Debates, produced for our Instagram account by summer media intern Andrew Mister: the first from our debate on abortion, the second from our debate on guns.

In each debate, everyday Americans — sorry pundits! — met on equal footing to give honest, opposing takes on two of the toughest issues we face with no hostility, no theatrics, no lack of genuine conflict or passion, and whole heaps of courage.

• How come all these mass shootings stop whether by death or suicide when the insane meet a reactive force? … Are the kids not worth protecting?

• The idea of having armed teachers is a scary thought, and the idea of needing a gun to be safe in society certainly doesn’t make me feel safer.

• Do we wish to be known as a country that preys on our most vulnerable? If we begin to justify abortion on this basis, what prevents us from doing the same with the elderly, those with mental illness, and those with genetic disabilities?
  
• How can we help stop pregnancy before it starts, help people not get pregnant when they don’t want to be? Can this be about men and not about women?

Maybe cable news lacks models for how opposing perspectives can engage each other on equal ground. But we don’t. Apart from our debates we have our podcasts, our workshops, and a full slate of alliance meetings challenging the status quo all across the country.

If we’re going to stop hurting and start truly sharing a country that is sometimes a battleground but always our home, we need to create and recreate these models as often and as strongly as we possibly can.

The post What Jon Stewart missed: Sharing space (and power) across the divide appeared first on Braver Angels.

That’s Stan Lisle describing how, in late 2018, he was drawn to the organization not long after watching a 60 Minutes program that mentioned Braver Angels and its activities. Based close to Knoxville in eastern Tennessee, Stan is the lead organizer and Blue coordinator for the state, and he has big plans for bolstering and expanding alliances.

“Our goal would ultimately be to have more alliances in eastern Tennessee – maybe as many as three,” he says. “Chattanooga is big enough to justify having an alliance.” He also mentions Johnson City in Tennessee’s northeast corner, a few hours’ drive from Knoxville.

The Volunteer state already represents Braver Angels very well. Aside from the East Tennessee Alliance that Stan belongs to, there is already a very active alliance in Nashville and a newer group in Memphis, in the southwest. Not bad for a state that ranks 16^th in the US terms of population.

Stan joined the organization not long after being widowed and after retiring from a career in commercial real estate. Finding he had plenty of time on his hands, he put one of those hands in the air to help organize the next Braver Angels bus tour around the country. But when the pandemic torpedoed that plan, Lynn Heady, then the state’s Blue coordinator, had other ideas for leveraging Stan’s talents: she asked him to organize a Skills for Bridging the Divide workshop in Knoxville.

At that point, the only alliance in Tennessee was in Nashville; a few people were involved from the east. “Some of us started trying to build an alliance in that part of the state.” He gives most the credit to Vandy Kemp, the head of the local chapter of the League of Women Voters. “She is an influencer,” he says. “She’s a person who is immensely involved in her community.”

Which leads Stan to make a vital observation about how Braver Angels can expand and ideally scale. He believes that the involvement of influencers and local dynamos like Vandy is absolutely critical. “I can say without any hesitation that the growth of an alliance has everything to do with the strength of the champion who agrees to take it on and work it tirelessly,” he says. Earlier this year, Stan and Lynn harnessed a Memphis champ, Kali Kucera, to pull together enough interest to start a Memphis Alliance.

Stan also acknowledges a truth about alliances: they are not all alike. Research led last year by Braver Angel Jennifer Hall-Witt uncovered that fact, showing that metro-based alliances operate quite differently from rural groups.

That’s evident in Tennessee, where the Nashville alliance draws from a wide enough metro area to have significant momentum and no shortage of event activity, whereas the East Tennessee alliance, with a dispersed group of members, relies on monthly Zoom meetings and has more of a social aspect centered on discussions of key topics.

For its part, Memphis, the state’s newest alliance, is just getting on its feet, with small group get-togethers in coffee shops and suchlike. Early efforts to contact potential allies such as Rotary Club chapters were cut short by Covid. But those efforts revived when a Quaker congregation in the city approached Braver Angels. Lynn Heady and Stan made a presentation to the Quakers, and the seeds of an alliance began to grow.

Like his counterparts around the country, Stan is bothered that it continues to be difficult to recruit Reds. He has led an effort to try to supply Braver Angels speakers to Rotary Clubs in smaller Tennessee towns that lean heavily Red, but without result so far.

Indeed, Stan is not optimistic that the dearth of Red Braver Angels will change, and he voices a sentiment based on his experiences in his strongly conservative retirement community where he and his fellow Blues certainly interact with fellow Red retirees but don’t readily socialize with them. “It’s almost like this inability to talk to your neighbors is our new normal. It’s just accepted that there’s a Red world and a Blue world,” he says. “This is not a Braver Angels problem – this is a national problem.”

But none of that is stopping Stan Lisle from cranking – 10 and more hours a week – on what he can control as Blue state coordinator. He is working hard to try to bring the Collegiate Debate program into Tennessee’s university system. He is proud that there are now several trained moderators in east Tennessee and Memphis, enabling more events to be planned and implemented. He is on the lookout for new “champions” who’ll sponsor a workshop or who want to build an alliance and are fully prepared and able to do the work to make that happen.

And he signals his commitment to Braver Angels in his description of how he personally has benefited. “I’ve been influenced greatly,” he says. “I am not in my echo chamber nearly so deeply as I was before. I’ve developed the humility to realize I’m not right about everything.” He notes that for many people, a Braver Angels workshop can be a life-changing experience, as it was for him. 

That reflection, all by itself, is reason enough for Braver Angels everywhere to recharge and refresh in our shared effort to depolarize all across this great nation.   

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The post A Red and a Blue walk into a workshop. Can they find common ground on a controversial issue? appeared first on Braver Angels.

That’s Janelle Burke, the Red co-chair of Braver Angels’ Angels of Color Caucus. Janelle is an action woman by any definition – mother on the move, active member of Braver Angels’ We the People’s Project (WPP), married to a US Marine and the daughter of an Air Force veteran, and leader of a spiritual group in her community. 

She’s also a former nurse and school board candidate in her city of Everett, Washington, founder and editor of an activist community blog, co-founder of a community outreach organization dedicated to healing in the Black community and for U.S. veterans, and…the list goes on. 

There’s one more thing. Janelle, who is originally from Missouri, is a creature many believe is rare if not actually non-existent: a Black Republican. “You can’t possibly be a Black Republican in the United States,” she says, wryly.

Which brings up the unusual way in which Janelle became a Braver Angel. Attending a local county fair a few years ago, she got into conversation with people at the Republican Party booth. A registered Democrat at the time, she surprised her new friends. After hearing her views on a range of political issues, one of them said “There’s nothing Democrat about you!” And when the topic of polarization came up, she was asked if she knew about the group then known as Better Angels. 

Intrigued by what she learned; she joined Braver Angels. It wasn’t an immediate fit, though, and to some extent, it still isn’t. That’s because the organization still skews heavily white, older, and educated in four-year colleges. Janelle contends that it’s one thing to hold workshops on depolarizing conversations about race but quite another to act on the outcomes of such workshops in ways that consistently engage people of color. “It should be about putting in the work to make change,” she insists.

She is candid about having come close to leaving the organization at least once, but she credits co-founder David Lapp with helping her “recognize her worth” and what she could contribute to Braver Angels.

She was one of the founding members of the Angels of Color Caucus, a group that now has 53 members in all – about a third of whom regularly attend the meetings — but deserves to have many more. “We’re still in our infant stage – still trying to get our legs under us before we spread our wings,” she says. That means the members are still sounding each other out on key topics, and beginning to crystallize some shared positions, including how, without putting themselves into a monolithic “people of color” box, they represent themselves within and outside of Braver Angels. 

Janelle is in the thick of things, leading a project to rewrite the content on the Angels of Color page on Braver Angels’ site and planning outreach campaigns to expand membership quickly. “I do the communications for the group and help to plan external events. The main goal is outreach – finding the right messaging to promote us,” she says. 

The hard part is getting target participants to, well, participate. Janelle reiterates a concern voiced by other Braver Angels: that it’s hard to break down outsiders’ preconceptions about the organization. “People in my communities say it’s just another white organization; a lot of us don’t have four-year college degrees,” she explains. That’s clearly frustrating for her, and she wants people of color – people of potential, she likes to say – to give Braver Angels a chance rather than passing judgment. “I want to see us participating,” she says. 

The other lever that Janelle can pull is as a proactive member of WPP. Last September, she was central to a powerful and emotional WPP forum built on an incident in her own experience. Some years earlier, her then 14-year-old daughter had been detained in error by local police and then, in an unusual twist, Janelle and the (White) local police chief began talking, and gradually established a strong and highly respectful connection. 

Next month, Janelle will again be in action as a lead participant in a Common Ground workshop on bridging the divide between police officers and the Black community. The event – a follow-up to the WPP forum last fall – is largely of Janelle’s making, with inputs from David Lapp and others. Notably, the Everett chief of police – Dan Templeman – will again be a key voice in calling for strides toward common ground. 

Watch out, America. Janelle Burke is coming your way, with a broad Braver Angels smile and a determination that will certainly benefit the organization for years to come. 

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One of the less-frequent, still-salient critiques of depolarization (“depol”) work I’ve heard, is that it’s uninspiring; that there’s little in it to stir the soul to greatness, to awaken the passion and energy that fuels all worthy politics. It’s a fair critique, if you suppose the task of depol work is classically political, in terms of “getting something done,” “solving problems,” electing certain sorts of leaders, getting policies enacted, “having a seat at the table,” or being a player in “the room where it happens.”

But, to my own biased perspective, that’s never been what depol work has been about. In depol you’re not jostling for power and wrestling with your fellow Americans—you’re wrestling with yourself. You’re wrestling with the dark angels inside you, you’re striving to bring forth the better angels of your nature, no matter what other people do or what happens in politics. We do that in deliberative groups, family-therapy style, because that’s the best way to do it, through encounter; but the change is always personal.

In a sense you’re an ultramarathoner of the spirit, a bodybuilder of the soul; the end goal of depol work, is that you become and act as the sort of citizen with the inner strength, the malice toward none, the charity for all, the confidence in compassion, the love of countrymen and country, to do the depolarizing thing, even when all the world’s demanding you walk the other way. 

We all lived through 2020 and 2021. We were surrounded by our fellow Americans—good people, with all sorts of politics, of all sorts of backgrounds— succumbing to their cruelest demons in fear, condemning each other as un-American, sometimes endorsing acts and attitudes of violence and contempt toward their fellow Americans, because so often it seemed to them to be the right thing to do. Sometimes we might’ve slipped into these habits ourselves; the temptations are always strong, and when the world’s on fire, they’re only stronger. 

We have to be ready. Whatever else Braver Angels does in 2024, we have a firm and solemn obligation to hold the line—to practice what we preach—to live up to the radicalism of our principles—to build a house united—to be a beacon for our fellow Americans who suffer just as we suffer, to show them there’s a better way to live as fellow-citizens. If we would remain a nation we must stand by one another. 

It won’t just be about civility, decency, kindness, niceness. It will be very difficult; it will take a lot not to lose our heads, and we’ll have to hold each other to it. We will have to hold the line when the whole world is telling us not to hold the line, when our fellow Americans who we strive to serve, are screaming at us, demanding that we cease to hold the line; when even in our own hearts, we ourselves might want to give in to righteous hatred, anger, fear. 

But that line is not between us and our fellow Americans, and it’s not between us and any political enemies we might imagine we have. That line is inside each and every one of us; we must hold that line against our own worst impulses, especially when it’s most difficult. To paraphrase a quip associated with President Eisenhower: “To conquer oneself, is greater than to conquer great cities.” We must exercise our better, our braver angels, for if we don’t, it will be so, so easy to succumb to our worst, in the coming fury of 2024.

If we can hold the line in that coming uncertain time, we will have won a great victory for American union, nationhood, and redemption. We will have shown our fellow Americans and the world that unconditional patriotic empathy, the very foundation of social trust in a pluralistic society, is possible by reflection and choice, and hard, hard work. Whatever happens that year, we will have lived as free, self-governing citizens, taking up the task of union and defending it amid the swirling storms of politics, and far more difficult, amid the swirling storms of our own passions. 

So yes, there is a vigorous and assertive virtue in depol work, a way it fans the flames of what the ancient Greeks called thumos and brings out our very best. It’s the hardest virtue to practice, because it demands we conquer something in ourselves, and even then we’ll never beat it forever. But 2024 is barreling towards us; so let’s get down to work.

-LNP

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“It was just like this big third rail was out there in the room,” she recalls of the Red/Blue workshop she was moderating a few years ago in a rural community south of Austin, TX. Unlike the groups that Connie, Blue, had been moderating in and around the city of Austin, this was a community where everyone knew each other really well. 

In fact, that was the very reason why there was so much fear in the air because differences that had previously been understood and probably not addressed were out there in the open. 

“These people had been neighbors for years before identifying as Red or Blue or other,” says Connie. “By the end, everyone was acknowledging the tension in the room. During the check-out session, one big strapping guy―a Red―confessed that he’d been afraid. The woman next to him―a Blue―looked at him wide-eyed and said, ‘I had no idea you were afraid too!’” 

And right there, Braver Angels had established common ground again. 

Connie Shortes had found Braver Angels in 2018 when her partner, Chuck Linton, had  read about the organization on social media. Connie, retired as the CEO of a shared office space firm in Austin, was intrigued; as the only Blue-leaning person in her own family, she recalls being “in a lot of pain” because of the sharp political disagreements that followed the 2016 election. “For me, it was real, real personal,” she says. 

Finding her local Braver Angels group, she jumped right in, taking a Skills for Bridging the Divide workshop. “I appreciated the structure of it; it took me through the steps of how to manage a conversation. I liked that we had some sample scenarios to work with,” she says. 

Next, a Red/Blue workshop in which, over the course of the six hours, she says she really did get into the trenches with her Red counterpart. She recalls it being frightening at first―the intensity and openness of naked opinion in 2018, a time when emotions were running very high―but she saw how the moderators kept everything inside the guard rails. “What I learned was that this was possible,” she says. “You can have a conversation with someone who’s diametrically opposed to your views. It just gave me hope for our country.” 

It wasn’t long before her involvement and level of participation were noticed. Someone suggested she should be a moderator. In previous times, Connie had taken some training as a mediator; she likes helping people to communicate. So she stepped forward to take moderator training―and hasn’t looked back. 

Workshop followed workshop―some Skills for Bridging the Divide, some Red/Blue, and others. At that time, Braver Angels’ Central Texas alliance was just forming, but its members’ rich web of connections meant that they would get calls to run workshops locally, at a synagogue and at churches in Austin. Often, Connie was the lead moderator. 

But her best contributions still lay ahead. When Covid hit, Central Texas alliance stalwart Steve Saltwick had been working with Citizens Climate Lobby (CCL). He and their leadership got together to see if they could share workshops online. Steve put together the slide decks, assembling all the necessary clip art, photos, and text and creating the time tracker and the format for how to put a team together and prepare them for their online roles. 

For her part, and with guidance from Braver Angels’ co-founder Bill Doherty, Connie translated the early moderator guide into a format suitable for Zoom. “We had to come up with scenarios. We started integrating current events into formats, creating sample conversations,” she says. “We put workshop participants through their paces in handling their own ‘immune responses’ to provocative statements. Zoom has been a really powerful tool to help us do that.”

The shared online event with CCL went very well; since then, Connie has moderated multiple Zoom workshops for CCL and Braver Angels together. Indeed, the format has proven so successful that it quickly became the default for organizers and moderators of Zoom events all across the organization.

At the same time, Connie has added an organizer hat to her headgear. When she and Chuck moved out of Austin to the nearby city of La Grange, she quickly built a network of friends and acquaintances, a surprising number of whom expressed interest in Braver Angels. She leaned on the Central Texas alliance and the national organization for resources to start another group in her new town and has succeeded in creating a balanced crew of both Reds and Blues who are enthusiastic about the possibilities of Braver Angels for the community.

The La Grange group is keen to increase the strength of its community bonds by allying with other organizations in the state―among them local chapters of the League of Women Voters and BridgeRural.org. “We’re connecting,” says Connie.

Connie wants others to join her in her lead role. “A year from now, I’d like to have another one or two moderators here in the community. We have a core group of organizers already―balanced Red and Blue―but if we had more moderators, we could do more events. We could reach out to BridgeRural and maybe to the town of La Grange,” she says. “I would so love to make more inroads into the community.”

That sounds like a true Braver Angel, does it not? 

The post Colleague of the Week: Connie Shortes appeared first on Braver Angels.

That’s Theo Brown, explaining why he jumped at the chance to become Braver Angels’ state coordinator for Mississippi and Alabama, even though he lives and works in Maryland more than 750 miles to the northeast. 

Theo, a Blue, has spent his working life as an organizer for citizens’ engagement groups. From 2010 onward, he has run a business consulting to organizations whose purpose is to bridge political and other divides among the American populace. “I’ve been really concerned about the divisions in the country for 10-12 years,” he says.

He had attended Braver Angels’ earliest convention in Harrisonburg, VA. But it wasn’t until about a year ago, as he scaled back on his own work, that he was in a position to do more directly. Of all the bridge-building organizations he was familiar with, Braver Angels was the one he chose to volunteer with. “I thought it was the most effective and had most potential for growth,” he says. “It’s doing the most significant things; it’s the only one doing field organizing.” 

Theo had known co-founder David Lapp through his consulting work, as well as Julie Boler, Braver Angels’ community collaborations manager. He had written to Julie, telling her he had a couple of days a week to volunteer, and back came the opportunity to step in as coordinator for two states that have until recently been very light on Braver Angels representation.

As of June 2021, Theo has been doing everything he can to change that. “Mississippi and Alabama have always interested me; they’re both very Red states. Braver Angels is particularly interested in getting more Reds involved,” he says. He benefited from a bit of a warm start: Barbara Thomas, now in the organization’s Office of Field Operations, had made some contacts in the two states that have definitely helped him in his outreach there. But with no more than 100 people in each state even on Braver Angels’ lists, he knew there was work to do. 

To start with, his work had to be on Zoom – not the optimal way to build personal relationships. This past Spring, though, Theo made a week-long trip to the southern states, meeting with a host of people he’d previously met only through Zoom and identifying the green shoots of Braver Angels initiatives there – shoots that he plans to help nourish, reseed, and graft elsewhere in each state. 

There is now an alliance in Jackson, MS, and that group, featuring a pretty good mix of Reds and Blues, has held two or three meetings to date. In rural Bolivar County in Mississippi, Theo has contacted a couple of largely African-American groups that seem very interested in collaborating with Braver Angels. In Alabama, a group in Birmingham is exploring the topic of how race impacts issues such as education; there are possibilities for Braver Angels to co-sponsor such discussions. Elsewhere in the state, there have been sporadic workshops to which Theo lends a Braver Angels hand if requested. 

Theo sees two types of institutions as pivotal to expansion of Braver Angels’ footprint in the two states: churches and universities. He notes that in 2019, there had been a Braver Angels debate at the University of Mississippi on the hot topic of what to do about Confederate statues. “I met recently with some of the conservatives who’d been part of that debate,” he says. He hopes to help spark another event on the UoM campus this fall. In the next state over, there is a very active Braver Angels ambassador who’s a faculty member at the University of Alabama – again, someone whom Theo has now met in person and with whom he can have deeper, more involved dialogue. 

He has also been meeting with pastors and lay leaders – a smart strategic move given the degree of churchgoing in the two states. It’s familiar terrain for Theo: back in Maryland, he runs the speaker series for a local church – a client of his consulting business. His medium-term objective is to have large numbers of churches across Alabama and Mississippi hosting Braver Angels workshops. “That would be the best mark of success a year from now,” he says. 

Part of the trick is to identify events that will strike chords with pastors and congregants. Events might use modified Braver Angels formats, or be straight out of the Braver Angels playbook, or other; whatever it takes to get things going. Theo has help: 

he has been talking for several months with Braver Angels leader Bishop Mark Beckwith (the conversations have included new workshops designed for houses of worship), and he is aware of the church-oriented workshops – both Catholic and Lutheran versions – that Bev Horstman, Ohio state director, has helped to design and develop.

For the foreseeable future, Theo’s work will involve more field organizing in the two southern states, laying the groundwork for more people there to coalesce into groups and for more groups to grow into full-fledged alliances. “There’s now a group of four or five of us who are pushing that field organization,” he says. And throughout it all: promoting, explaining, asking, urging – all of the one-by-one effort required anywhere to expand the ranks of Braver Angels. 

As mentioned, Theo is well-placed to reach many more Reds by dint of being the coordinator for two particularly crimson states. But there’s another crucial way in which he stands to make an outsized impact. Fully 38% of the Mississippi population is African-American; in Alabama, it’s nearly 28%. Braver Angels’ complexion is still far too White to be representative of the US population overall. 

Theo Brown may be the Braver Angel who can do the most to change that. 

The post Colleague of the Week: Theo Brown appeared first on Braver Angels.

But her fiction had nothing on the facts of her own past life of drug addiction and family tragedies. And as works of fiction, those stories pale in comparison to the harsh realities of polarization that Annette, a bright light in the Braver Angels constellation, now fights against. 

Annette, a self-declared Other (not Red, not Blue), is one of the leaders of the We the People’s Project (WPP) – the subgroup she can claim some authorship of following a long and thoughtful conversation with Braver Angels co-founder David Lapp a couple of years ago. 

With her articulacy, her drugs-to-dreams self-transformation, and her long-ago background working wherever there was a paycheck – nursing homes, cafes, wherever – to her current profession as an addiction counselor, Annette has perspectives and capabilities that make her invaluable to the group whose purpose is to involve the almost two-thirds of Americans who don’t have four-year college degrees.

It’s a mission Annette is passionate about. “I come from working people; my mother was a homemaker and my father was a Teamster,” she says. “But [in public discussions] you never hear from regular people. You always hear from the politicians, the experts, the academics – not the average Joe who works at a fast-food place.” 

Annette first came across Braver Angels when her good friend, an instructor in one of the college courses that Annette was taking, invited her to a college debate on healthcare. “My friend evidently saw the advocate and speaker in me,” recalls Annette. That inner advocate spoke out eloquently, taking the position that America doesn’t really have a healthcare system so much as a health insurance system. 

The debate format intrigued her. “I was impressed with the way the moderators handled touchy situations. I also loved the [Braver Angels] name,” she says. The purpose of the organization also resonated; Annette was president of the Peace Club group on the Allegany College of Maryland campus. 

She joined Braver Angels almost immediately. It wasn’t long before David Lapp came a-calling. The possibilities that came tumbling out of their lengthy conversation led David to reach out to others – Rita Chisum and Wilk Wilkinson among them – who would become the core WPP group. 

Together, they began envisioning what they could do to turn their ideas into actions. “It left me excited about what’s next,” says Annette. “It was like standing up on top of a high dive and feeling like you can fly.”

WPP got its start in April 2021. Annette helped work out the wording on the marketing statement: “giving the average person time at the podium.” With input from the WPP group, Annette was out in front of the idea of forums – not debates, not workshops, but conversations. The virtual events were designed as spaces where working people of whatever stripe would be welcome to speak out on issues they experience and care deeply about – yet often feel they have no room and even no right to speak about. 

The first forum in May 2021 — on the topic of whether expanded unemployment benefits are fair to American workers – was an instant success, drawing a substantial audience around an energetic discussion. Other events followed in quick succession, spotlighting everything from homelessness to proposals to get money out of politics and pulling in more than 200 participants nationwide. “The momentum is building!” says Annette.

Annette led the design of and hosted April’s forum on the topic of whether higher education is a bridge or a barrier for the working class. Abortion (one of Braver Angels’ most successful debate topics recently) is likely to be the theme of an upcoming forum, as is the notion of a third political party – a theme that Annette, as an independent, is especially keen on.

For all its successes to date, though, the WPP still faces an uphill struggle. A challenge is reaching – really reaching – the demographic that WPP is designed to reach. “We’re trying to find ways to get the attention of people who aren’t so easy to get a hold of – and overcome that stigma of who gets to speak,” observes Annette. “The real problem seems to be diversity – getting that group of hard-core Reds, disgruntled Blues, and the growing number of independent/ unaffiliated voters to speak up because they’ve been shut down so often.”

Implicit in her comment is the fundamental truth that working people are busy, well, working. And when they’re off work, the last thing most of them want to do is sit down to do the hard work – yes, work – of thinking about and talking about big issues that they feel they’re not entitled to voice openly.

“Marketing is tricky; we’re barely a year old, and we’re just a part of a fairly new national organization,” says Annette. So she and the WPP team are “looking outside of ourselves,” as she puts it, contacting other Braver Angels’ groups to see how they can leverage their platforms. 

One outcome of that outreach: WPP’s initiative will be the focus of an upcoming Ambassadors meeting. And team members including Annette and Wilk are looking at how WPP’s mission could be implanted in the activities of alliances all over the country. 

Meanwhile, the forums will surely proliferate, ideally with more publicity to attract even bigger audiences. “The more forums we have, the more videos we have to show,” Annette says. 

Annette would love to see WPP programs catch fire in community colleges nationwide. “We need more young people,” she says. “They’re the ones we need to hear from the most; they’re the ones who’ll be affected the most.”

With her energy, her passion, and her creativity, it’s a good bet that Braver Angels is about to become much more familiar to the “average American” — the people whose opinions and votes count just as much as those of the minority who attended four-year colleges. 

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“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Norman Rockwell found inspiration to paint Golden Rule from the knowledge that some form of this maxim is common to all the world’s major religions. Yet have you ever stopped to think about how utterly radical it is?

It’s radical because our brains are hardwired to think in terms of tribal identities. These identities can lead to relatively harmless rivalries, such as the one between Duke University and the University of North Carolina and its related pranks. Duke supporters stole Michael Jordan’s retired jersey from the rafters of UNC’s Dean Dome and placed it up in Cameron Indoor Stadium. While Blue Devils supporters wouldn’t have liked it if Tar Heels fans stole the memorabilia of one of their legendary basketball alumni, it was all in good fun, right?

Yet tribal identities can also lead to warfare, such as the Thirty Years’ War between Protestants and Catholics which caused 4.5 to 8 million deaths. Hatred between different identity groups in the U.S. is not typically socially acceptable these days. Yes, it exists, but even white supremacists know they’re not supposed to “say the quiet part out loud” in polite company.

As Ezra Klein noted in Why We’re Polarized, however, there is one form of identity that is fair game for hatred: political identity. There are cable channels, radio personalities and social media stars devoted to making the other side look bad, and they earn loads of money doing it.

When we’re with members of our own political tribe, we resort to ad hominem attacks. “Those Trump supporters, they’re ignorant fools!” “Those Biden supporters, they’re all out to destroy America!” Smug and superior, we bond over insults against Them, who of course are every bit deserving of our scorn. Boy, does it feel good. Let the endorphins flow.

Um, the Golden Rule?  Surely it doesn’t apply to Them, the ones we disagree with politically. Hey, don’t take away our fun!  Don’t plug up this wellspring of psychic pleasure and monetary profit!

But do you want others to think that you’re an ignorant fool, or that you’re out to destroy America? I don’t think so.

Again, the Golden Rule is radical. And so is the mission of Braver Angels—to bring Americans together to heal the partisan divide and strengthen our democratic republic—at a time when so many forces within U.S. society are tearing us apart. It takes courage! If you’re willing to step forward, Braver Angels will equip you to be part of the solution rather than the problem.

Find out how to depolarize fellow tribe members when they launch into those feel-good attacks on Them.  Learn how to listen to and speak to folks who think differently than you do at a Skills for Bridging the Divide Workshop. Get to know different folks, in person or online, in a Red/Blue Workshop or a 1:1 Conversation. If you plan to engage with Them via social media, learn how to do so constructively with our Social Media eCourse. Or get involved in the new initiative to bring our skills to politicians, Braver Politics.

Our organization dares you to take on a broader, Braver Angels identity, as someone who forms relationships with those they disagree with, united in a higher purpose of working together to Build a House United. Folks can and do still maintain partisan loyalties, yet from the expansive vantage of the Braver Angels identity, it’s much easier to follow this Golden Rule: be kind and respectful to others, as you would have them be kind and respectful to you. And when you can pull that off, it makes you feel good about yourself, too.

The post The Golden Rule Doesn’t Apply to Them, right? appeared first on Braver Angels.

In April 2022, we were in Simpsonville, South Carolina, having the most improbable of dinners.  And, yet, it was utterly remarkable… in how un-remarkable it felt.

I had brought my family of five, longtime residents of deep-blue Brooklyn, NY, to meet a new friend, Eric Ireland, and his family, longtime residents of this solidly-red area.  We only knew each other through video chats and phone calls, as if we had met through an online service for taboo political friending. Not too far from the truth.  But more about that later.

We had chosen to dine at a casual local outdoor venue, with vendors offering pizza, burgers, Cubano paninis, a raw bar and more. Simpsonville is a town within the metropolitan area of centerpiece city Greenville.

Greenville has been heralded by Money.com and U.S. News as one of America’s best places to live. It was profiled in James and Deborah Fallows’ national bestseller Our Towns because of the renaissance city leaders ignited two generations ago.  The area is located in South Carolina’s Upcountry, at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, giving ready access to lush forests, lakes and waterways, not to mention scenic waterfalls in Greenville’s very city center.

Miranda (our 15-year-old daughter) and Eli (Eric’s 16-years-old son) sat at our communal picnic table discussing each other’s mind-bogglingly-different commutes to high school. Hers, by subway.  His, by the interstate.  Our two sons listened in.  My wife Christie and I sat adjacent and in rapt conversation with Eric and his wife Lisa.

As the sun set behind the trees, I found hope, faith and goodwill soaring in my heart.

There are pervasive societal forces in contemporary America incentivized by eyeballs and clicks—by dollars and votes—to prevent such a gathering.  To keep us wary of each other.  Fearful.  Angry.  Firmly opposed.

But, while it would be satisfying to stop there—to simply blame our country’s current tensions on the media, politicians and special interests behind such forces—it would be unfaithful to the most audacious notion of our nation: a “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

It is each of us who is ultimately responsible for the rancorous tenor of unconstructive discourse in the United States. Not Joe Biden.  Not Donald Trump.  Not MSNBC.  Not Fox News.  Not Facebook.  Not Twitter.

We owed that lovely night—and our delightfully engrossing but otherwise very typical adult conversations about vacations and children and careers and health concerns and marriage origin stories—to one of the surging new forces in American society addressing that uncomfortable, unavoidable fact: Braver Angels.

Braver Angels is an organization bringing together Americans of all political stripes, repairing the very fabric of our democracy.  Stitch by stitch.  They are taking the flip side of our collective culpability and empowering us and challenging us to become the solution.

Braver Angels was formed in December 2016.  Ten Trump supporters and 11 Clinton supporters gathered in Lebanon, Ohio, to actually listen to each other.  I joined in December 2020, grasping for an antidote to the year’s ever-increasing tension and ever-heightening stakes.  By early 2022, Braver Angels had over 10,000 active, dues-paying members.

I watched a few video gatherings which impressed me with insightful, sensible, third-way depictions of current events.  I read newsletters.  I participated in one of their 1:1 conversations which pair people across differences.  As an urban dweller, I had a wonderfully thoughtful chat with Shantana Goerge Simmon, a farmer in rural Michigan.

Fast forward to August 2021.  My family and I had just returned from vacation on Hilton Head Island, SC. We enjoyed the sultry summer days and postcard-perfect beach time.  But I had been wracked by an undercurrent of anxiety, bracing myself for mask showdowns (which never materialized) and political confrontations (ditto).

I realized that, while I had seen aspects of South Carolina, I never got to know any of its people. So, I reached out to Donna Murphy, Director of Braver Angels 1:1 conversations, and she was able to accommodate my very specific and very unorthodox request to speak with someone from the Palmetto State.

Eric was curious enough and brave enough to heed her call.  He sent me a friendly email on August 29, 2021. We had a video conference on September 1.  Since then, we have had nearly a dozen other such conferences or phone calls.  We have exchanged more than two hundred emails. When I started my own podcast series, American Tributaries, to help myself and listeners learn about people outside our bubbles of existence, he enthusiastically agreed to be my first guest.

But why did we first click?  Imbued with the spirit and guidance of Braver Angels, we resisted the urge to engage each other as caricatures. We asked questions.  We listened to each other.  We explored our different ways of life.  We discussed what we liked about each other’s areas. We shared our respective frustrations and grievances.

Needless to say, sharing those feelings was the most cathartic—but also the most risky—part of our conversations (especially the first one) because of the vulnerability it required. But, I found, when I described my fears from January 6^th, Eric didn’t revert to a “party line” but listened and related.  When he spoke about his frustration with a national dialogue which didn’t seem to ever acknowledge the South’s progress on racism, I…yes…listened and related.

Eric, indeed, went further and explained how troubled he had been by the George Floyd tragedy and read some books to learn more about African-American challenges in our society. His inclination to lean in to what he didn’t know inspired me to ask for a recommended book about his state.  A few weeks later, I was engrossed in Walter Edgar’s nearly 600-page authoritative tome “South Carolina: A History”.

Curiosity begat curiosity.  Respect begat respect.  Compassion begat compassion.

Openness led to conversations.  Those conversations led to understanding and relating—which led to a friendship—which led to that dinner—which led to our families bonding.

We’ve since returned home to our tree-lined, brownstone-framed Brooklyn neighborhood.  But, now, a “blue” family of New Yorkers has treasured memories and American fellowship with a “red” family of South Carolinians.

Now, I want to get back to that table with the Irelands.

Now, I want to add seats and invite others to our table of fellowship.

That table may become admittedly raucous and contentious.  How could it not? Even the dinner table of like-minded friends or a family’s weekday meal or a holiday gathering of extended relatives (sharing DNA and family history!) can, at times, devolve quite precipitously.

But amidst the noise and distractions, we will break bread.  We will converse.  We will help each other understand each other.  We will support each other. We will listen.

Because we need each other.  We need the broad array of experiences and motivations and views that bring along a similarly broad array of insights and skills and ingenuity to successfully confront and overcome the challenges of our world—present and future—known and unknown.

I know this transformation which we so desperately need—and which so many silently yearn for—can happen, because I have lived it.

Because, before my heart soared on that April night, my spirit and confidence had been sunk in the most intractable anger and intolerance, confusion and impotence. For years.

Because, since December 2016, Braver Angels has had the unflinching courage and audacity to believe in the decency and unity of the American people.

Because Eric Ireland had the good heart and open mind to help a fellow American in New York learn a bit more about our country and its people.

Because this New York Democrat is now forever grateful to a South Carolina Republican.

Our dinner was most improbable. But it is most assuredly quite possible.

Be brave.  Be curious.  Pull up a chair.

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“Wilk” Wilkinson didn’t have to think long. “Derate the Hate” is the inspired (and inspirational) name this Braver Angel gave to the weekly show he started and has aired from his home in Clearwater, MN, for more than two years without missing one episode.

“I’m anti-hate no matter how you slice it,” says Wilk, a definite conservative. “But I am disgusted by almost all media outlets and politicians because of the way they manipulate. Things just aren’t as bad as they will have you believe.” His advice? “Shut off the news and talk to your neighbor.”

“Talking to your neighbor” sounds like something right out of the Braver Angels playbook. Early last year, the themes and approaches aired by Wilk each week caught the attention of Minnesotans Barbara Thomas and Rick Hotchner; in March 2021, the Braver Angels couple were guests on his show.

It was a short step from there for Wilk to become a member. Barbara and Rick recommended others as guests for Derate the Hate, and that, combined with their appearance on the podcast, led to others at Braver Angels reaching out to Wilk.

One of them was co-founder David Lapp, who at that time was laying the groundwork for what would become the organization’s We the People’s Project (WPP) – a “politically and racially diverse group of working-class Americans working together to build a house united in America” as the website describes it. The purpose is to invite into the depolarization conversation all those Americans without four-year college degrees – that is, almost two-thirds of the nation’s population.

Wilk was a natural to join the WPP. “People at all levels need to be involved [with the depolarization effort]; it can’t just be the most educated,” he says. “We have a huge problem in this country of people feeling that they’re not heard; a very large portion of the working class and lower middle class and even middle class identifies with conservative Republican values.” By the fall of last year, Wilk had become part of the group’s leadership team.

WPP has now hosted several We the People’s Forums – 90-minute, moderated conversations usually between two speakers who often have differing perspectives. After about 45 minutes of discussion with the speakers, the rest of the time is given over to discussion and Q & A with the audience.

The Forums have highlighted America’s class differences, homelessness and incarceration, and other real-world topics. Each has drawn a couple of hundred people – a very solid showing for a new format – and each has held firmly, civilly, to Braver Angels’ core practices of listening, learning, and giving space to others to air their points of view.

“Our WPP group brainstorms ideas for other Forum topics,” says Wilk. “We’re open to any topics that WPP members are itching to talk about – that would be attractive for other people to get involved with the Forums and the issues they discuss. “We’re hearing from people who usually aren’t heard from; we’re giving them an opportunity to speak. People just want to be heard,” Wilk says.

The groups meetings are not without frustrations. Wilk observes that it’s tough, in a Braver Angels setting where changing others’ minds is not on the agenda, to reach consensus on topics that will interest a broad constituency of potential participants. He’s also concerned that fewer than half a dozen of the leadership team meet consistently. And for Reds like him, there is often a “solutions” mentality that doesn’t always mesh smoothly with an emphasis on discussion for discussion’s sake.

“I like actions that lead to solutions,” Wilk says. “After a problem is identified, I like to break it down and then address the nucleus of the problems, not the symptoms.” It’s exactly how he operated in his previous life as a truck driver, and now, as a logistics and transportation manager for a wholesale industrial-goods company.

So what solutions does Wilk envision for Braver Angels’ central challenge of scaling up its nationwide initiative? For a start, he would love it if other members (could that be you?) would volunteer to add momentum to the WPP initiative. Like many, he is keenly aware that the organization skews Blue and urban and college-educated, so he is very committed to the WPP effort. But he is realistic in understanding that there isn’t likely to be an overnight explosion in membership. He harks back to the tagline he uses for his own podcast: “Bettering the world one attitude at a time.”

The idea of transfusing some WPP ideas and actions into every Braver Angels alliance across the country also appeals to him (and to David Lapp.) He has begun talking with Barbara Thomas – now co-leading the organization’s Office of Field Operations – to see how that might start to happen. (If you’ re already involved with an alliance and are interested in whether WPP might offer an interesting platforms for new events, don’t hesitate to get in touch with Wilk at wilk@wilksworld.com or David at dlapp@braverangels.org .)

With his calm, thoughtful manner, his open, well-reasoned approach, his definite Red leaning, and his proven podcast platform, Wilk is very well-placed to have a major impact on, well, Braver Angels’ overall impact in the years to come.

Meanwhile, he’s a family man and working guy with a demanding day job to get back to. Oh, that and a weekly show to run. Hear you around, Wilk!

The post Colleague of the Week: Wilk Wilkinson appeared first on Braver Angels.

That’s what Robin Rowe and her husband experienced last summer, not long after retiring. Robin – now the Blue state coordinator for Nevada – recalls it this way: “We were on our way to Big Bend National Park in Texas, and we’d stop at these RV parks. It was interesting; people would be trying to figure out where you stood politically. We were relaxing poolside, but a couple on the other side got louder and louder. They were very radical in their thinking. I thought to myself: how could I ever talk to these people?” 

She didn’t. But she resolved to find a way to talk with people just like them – people whose views she didn’t share. Robin had already heard about Braver Angels from a friend she walked with; the friend testified to how helpful the organization’s methods had been in easing political tensions with her daughter. 

Robin could empathize; she’d had similarly agonizing upsets within her own family. So she did a little research on Braver Angels, loved what she learned, and joined soon after. “The organization really provided opportunities to learn skills to deal with such challenges,’ she says. 

At that time, Robin and her husband were retiring to northern Nevada, leaving behind their career lives in southern California. She knew the Silver State wasn’t exactly teeming with Braver Angels members; unsurprisingly, there was no alliance. “At first, I thought I would just read articles and participate that way,” says Robin. 

But things were about to move faster. Last July, she got a call from Rob Hansen, the Mountain States regional coordinator, who described what was needed to plant Braver Angels firmly in Nevada. Robin volunteered to become Blue state coordinator. “It’s kind of daunting when you accept that kind of role, for a whole state,” she laughs. “I didn’t know anyone in the state.” 

Braver Angels to the rescue. The wealth of information available for new volunteers surrounded her like a warm blanket – as did key field leaders including Steve Saltwick and Barbara Thomas and regional lead Rob. “You can talk to anyone in Braver Angels; it’s like an open book,” says Robin. “There’s tons of information and many ways to reach out.” 

Accessing the organizations’ database, she wasted no time in contacting the handful of members across Nevada, and then got busy setting up Zoom calls with most of them. The state’s sheer size – almost 500 miles north to south and more than 300 miles east-west – was the other reason (yes, Covid) why Zoom was the only practical way to convene people. After about four such virtual meetings, it was clear that there was interest in solidifying a Braver Angels presence in the state. By March of this year, the Nevada Statewide Alliance was official, with Robin as Blue co-chair in addition to her state coordinator role. 

She’s no longer alone in her Braver Angels endeavors, of course – and she has, at warp speed, gotten to know Nevadans up and down the state. Ted Getschman is her Red alliance counterpart, and Michael Mauser (Other) is the third alliance leader. There is also Marshall Mason, the Red to her Blue for the statewide coordination job. 

The new Nevada leaders are as “Zoomed out” as everyone else in the country, so there’s a definite appetite for meeting in person. They’re doing what’s practical, given the state’s vastness. She and Marshall have had lunch and coffee together a couple of times; he lives in Reno and Robin is in Carson City, the state capital, about 30 miles south. “Marshall and I recently went scouting for coffee shops where Braver Angels could meet,” she says. She counts about 40 people in their metro area who could be contacted about getting together in-person for coffee. 

Meeting face-to-face with co-leader Michael is more of a stretch; he’s nearly 300 miles east-north-east, in Elko. And then there are the 40 or so members scattered around the ever-growing metropolis of Las Vegas, plus a few dozen others across the state. 

Right now, the Nevadans are a pretty self-contained crew. “We’re training ourselves in becoming organizers, moderators, Zoom event people. A lot of us are going through the organizer onboarding right now,” says Robin. What she and her colleagues want to do ASAP is pull in many more members. Their plans call for small-group conversations on the familiar flashpoint issues discussed across Braver Angels – an appropriate tactic for a group that’s just starting out. 

Robin recently e-mailed all those on Braver Angels’ list of members across Nevada, introducing herself and her leadership colleagues and inviting people to meet them in person or on Zoom for one-on-one chats about Braver Angels. The message also urged recipients to continue or start their depolarization journeys by taking a Braver Angels workshop or skills training. The note asked for direct input as follows: “Tell us what you’d like YOUR Statewide Alliance experience to be by taking this very brief survey. We will award a $10 Starbucks card to a randomly selected survey response on April 14.” 

The team’s hope is that they can build up statewide membership some more, get some momentum in the statewide alliance, and perhaps start a regional alliance in the Reno-Carson City area, at which point they can start running Red/Blue and other types of Braver Angels workshops themselves. 

Meanwhile, Robin and her co-leaders will run with opportunities as they present themselves. One example: Michael belongs to Toastmasters – an organization with which Braver Angels has a particular affinity, especially because quite a few Braver Angels are also members of that group. Robin will soon be moderating one of Michael’s Toastmaster discussion groups, wearing her Braver Angels hat. 

Robin’s Braver Angels’ trajectory has been fast and forward-looking – and fun. Perhaps now, if she comes across boisterous groups airing their political opinions to everyone in earshot, she’ll walk right up and invite them to talk — Braver Angels style. 

The post Colleague of the Week: Robin Rowe appeared first on Braver Angels.

Which is what this retired Army colonel absolutely is, whether he’s planting new plum trees in his extensive orchards, or tending to his bees, or filming his wife’s varsity high-school girls’ lacrosse games, or making maple syrup―4,000 gallons of the stuff―as he did this spring. 

And then there’s the no-small matter of all of the energy he pours into his role as Red co-chair of the Braver Angels St. Albans alliance in northern Vermont. 

Yet Dan wants to slow things down. He wants to continue building and strengthening relationships among alliance members rather than trying to ensure perfect compliance with tightly scripted processes and protocols. 

“It requires time to develop personal relationships,” Dan says of the tight ties among the members of the alliance. He contends that those links are best nourished by making the time to consider the phrasing of a question or a response in ways that support Braver Angels’ ideals, so that trust develops and common ground is found. 

“It doesn’t work to assume you can just ‘teach to the slide deck’,” he maintains. That’s like trying to cram 10 pounds of soil into a 3-pound bag. We slow down and do a few things well.” He says a slow-but-steady approach is doubly important to retain the interest and involvement of people new to the organization. 

There’s a tension, of course, between developing standardized protocols for organizing the growing list of Braver Angels priorities and enabling alliance activities to emerge and unfold organically. Dan fully recognizes that: “We’re not some rogue outfit. We have  close ties with Braver Angels at a national level, and with our New England region,” he says. “But it’s not the ‘systems’ that are important. It’s the core ideas and the ways they’re expressed and how they support Braver Angels’ mission.” 

Dan―a career Infantry officer with more than 30 years in uniform―came across Braver Angels in 2017 when the co-founders’ initial bus tour came to rural Vermont. His neighbor, Shanna Ratner, invited the tour to visit St. Albans, the local town, and then asked Dan if he’d like to join her for the event. Shanna is the founder of the Braver Angels St. Albans alliance and serves as co-chair (Blue) and moderator for its gatherings. 

Over a spaghetti dinner attended by the state’s Lieutenant Governor and many community members, Dan asked a lot of questions and got answers good enough to encourage him to join. 

That day, Shanna set up what Dan terms “Braver Angels lite”: the underpinnings of the local alliance that now convenes 8-12 regular members every quarter and sometimes more often. Early on, the group ran some of the core Braver Angels activities, such as the Depolarizing Within and Skills for Bridging the Divide workshops, with positive feedback from the first members. Dan relies heavily on Shanna’s decades of experience which included moderating group discussions for her company and clients. “ We play to each other’s strengths. Everyone brings something to the table,” he says. 

After more than a year, the group found its rhythm; Red and Blue members grew close and enjoyed rich discussions. But some members wanted to go further – to push for action on an issue of relevance to the region, on the topic of personal privacy. By involving several Vermont state representatives in their meetings, they developed draft legislation that was sent for committee discussion at the state house. 

And then Covid hit. Not only did the draft legislation expire but the group was forced onto Zoom – a move Dan did not and does not welcome. “I despise Zoom,” says he. “At best it’s one-dimensional. I miss so much of the interpersonal cues; I quite often miss the tone. And I am not a digital native, as my kids will gleefully tell you.” 

Now, with in-person and hybrid gatherings happening again, Dan and Shanna are looking at what’s next. “We’re getting some younger people in – 26 or 27 years old – which I’m really excited about,” he says. So does that mean a push for big growth in membership? Not really. “Once you get larger than the kind of group we have now, it becomes bulky.” 

The focus instead is on the “what”: is the alliance heading in the right direction? What are its goals now, halfway through 2022? What direction does it want to go in? These are by no means questions for Dan and Shanna alone. “We’re pretty much as democratic as any small group can be,” he says. 

In line with its emphasis on local community, the Vermont alliance will soon try something new: a picnic at a local park or similar gathering place. “It’ll be a great opportunity to invite people to learn more about Braver Angels over a burger or a hot dog,” says Dan. Beyond that, the Vermonters are also thinking they’ll host and run a Zoom-based event, inviting Braver Angels nationwide. 

Pivotal to their idea: member Andy Crossman, who led the implementation of new workplace strategies worldwide at Pfizer before retiring last year. “That guy knows something about training!” smiles Dan. “Andy created, resourced, and implemented programs for over 20 countries across 12 languages… He’s an example of the amazing depth of experience we enjoy in our core group.” 

Meanwhile, Dan continues to act as an ambassador in the region, presenting to groups and to the media while always paired with a Blue, per Braver Angels’ protocol. He and Shanna also work with Lincoln Centers, the organization’s new state coordinator and someone who will help energize formation of other alliances across Vermont. 

With alliances such as this—currently the only one meeting regularly in the Green Mountain State—the research shows that there’s generally a good Red-Blue balance. “That’s one of the requirements for joining us; you have to bring someone of the other persuasion,” says Dan. (For aspiring Blue members, that’s not easy to do in one of the most liberal states in the nation.) Another stipulation: new members must have taken the Depolarizing Within training. 

All of which leads to great “unit cohesion” – the Army term for the state in which soldiers all pull together and keep pulling together for their mission, and for each other. Dan puts it in Braver Angels-speak: “With almost every topic we’ve wrestled with as a group, we’ve found common ground.” 

Now if only the essence of the Vermont alliance—the group’s simple, honest, hard-won togetherness—could be replicated in every town and neighborhood across the nation today, Braver Angels could safely say: “Mission accomplished.” 

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