Republish this content

<h1>Healing a Divided Nation Begins Face to Face</h1>

<p>Three
weeks after the 2016 presidential election,
a group of 21 people came together in South Lebanon, Ohio, outside Cincinnati,
to talk.</p>



<p>The group comprised 11 people
who’d supported Hillary Clinton for president and 10 who’d supported Donald
Trump. </p>



<p>After the contentious election,
there was a question lurking under the surface: “Could we as a country avoid a
civic divorce? Could we build a more perfect union?” says David Lapp.</p>



<p>That meeting marked the beginning
of what would become a national movement called Better Angels, that Lapp and
two colleagues formed to create friendly spaces for potentially unfriendly
conversations.</p>



<p>It’s among dozens of such arrangements—from weekly
dinners to meetups to formal debates—that have emerged after the 2016 election
to look for common ground across the political divide.</p>



<p>Better
Angels got rolling in 2017, with a summer bus tour of 15 communities between
Waynesville, Ohio, and Philadelphia, convening a similar mix of people in what
they called “Red/Blue Workshops.” A fall tour followed, from Washington, D.C.,
to Nashville, Tennessee. Along the way, Better Angels has trained 130
volunteers to moderate future workshops.</p>



<p>The
meet-ups, Lapp says, are “not an effort to change each other’s policy views or
political views, but we are trying to change our minds about each other.”</p>



<p>“Political
polarization” has become almost a buzzword, deprived of real meaning, given how
frequently it’s deployed in national media. Slicing and dicing the electorate
and the country into political tribes, oversimplifying entire state populations
by assigning each a single color, and reducing national elections into contests
over specific census tracts in a few key states have led to a widely shared
view that the United States no longer is united around common principles. </p>



<p>Much
has been made of the effect of social media on politics, too. Nearly <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/05/01/three-fourths-of-americans-regularly-talk-politics-only-with-members-of-their-own-political-tribe/">three-fourths
of Americans talk politics only with people who share their political views</a>,
researchers found in 2017. Given how social media algorithms serve us with
content that we like (or “like”) and shelter us from what we don’t, that’s
unlikely to change on its own.</p>



<p>That’s
where Better Angels comes in. In addition to Lapp, who is a scholar at the
Institute for American Values, the co-founders were David Blankenhorn, the
founder of the Institute, and Bill Doherty, professor and director of the
Couples and Family Therapy Program at the University of Minnesota.</p>



<p>The
name was borrowed from the final line of <a href="https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/lincoln1.asp">Abraham
Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address</a> in 1861, given on the eve of the Civil War as a plea
for unity when seven Southern states had already seceded: “The mystic chords of
memory … will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely
they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”</p>



<p>That
assumption—that everyone has the potential to act in a more civil manner—is
what drives the group and its outreach to everyone from die-hard Trump
supporters to left-wing progressive activists.</p>



<p>“A
lot more people are interested in working with people on the other side
politically than our stereotypes would represent,” Lapp says. He says the group
is intended to reflect the entire spectrum of Americans’ political convictions.</p>



<p>Centrists
also are welcome, he says, but “We are not a centrist organization.”</p>



<p>Several
early participants in the Better Angels workshops would agree. Ray Warrick is a
Tea Party organizer, who describes himself as a strict conservative:
“Republicans, by and large, aren’t conservative enough for me.” He has
participated in several workshops in the Warren County, Ohio, chapter, where he
says the discussions are civil and work to break down barriers. </p>



<p>“I’ve
often felt, you don’t hate people who you know, and I’ve had liberal friends
for years,” Warrick says.</p>



<p>And
it turns out there are areas of agreement that transcend party membership.
“There’s pretty solid consensus that A, the politicians aren’t serving us, and
B, the money in politics makes it wholly corrupt,” he says.</p>



<p>On
the other side is Rob Weidenfeld, a self-described pro-life Democrat who
credits Better Angels for opening his eyes to how he was behaving, especially
online. He and one of the Republicans in the Warren County group formed a pact
of sorts to check each other on Facebook, giving likes to constructive posts or
frowns to divisive ones.</p>



<p>“If
you actually spend time with these people and talk to them, you realize they’re
actually not that different from you,” Weidenfeld says.</p>



<p>Diana
Mutz, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied the
mechanisms of political polarization, says that a lot of the divisiveness is
made worse by lack of contact between different groups.</p>



<p>“When
politics is sort of at the forefront of mind all the time, it makes these
cross-cutting relationships harder,” Mutz says. She is author of the 2006 book,
<em>Hearing the Other Side: Deliberative Versus Participatory Democracy. </em></p>



<p>Civic
life wasn’t always so politicized, and there have been times when, even during
fraught periods, the polarization didn’t seem so extreme, she says. She recalls
that when President Richard Nixon resigned, most Republicans, including her
father, agreed with the Democrats that the president had committed acts that
warranted his removal from office.</p>



<blockquote><p>There's pretty solid consensus that A, the politicians aren't serving us, and B, the money in politics makes it wholly corrupt. </p><cite>Ray Warrick, a Tea Party organizer</cite></blockquote>



<p>It’s
different now, with disagreements even over what is considered objective
reality. “Will that happen again, or will Republicans and Democrats just deny
what the other side said?” she says. </p>



<p>Getting
past that may mean taking a step back from politics.</p>



<p>That’s
the reasoning behind an initiative launched as an outreach project by KUOW-FM,
an NPR-affiliated radio station in Seattle, whose listenership, like the city,
tends to skew left. Called “Ask A…,” the project brought about 10 people into
the studio to talk to another 10 individuals who have been misunderstood in
broader society.</p>



<p>The
goal of the events, titled “Ask a Muslim,” “Ask a police officer,” “Ask a Trump
supporter,” and so on, was to provide a series of conversations in an
environment that focused on understanding rather than argument.</p>



<p>Ross
Reynolds, the station’s executive producer of community engagement, says the spark
of the idea came in 2015 when he heard then-candidate Trump talking about
banning Muslims from entering the country.</p>



<p>“I
kind of wondered if this guy had ever talked to a Muslim,” Reynolds says. “Then
I wondered if any of us had ever talked to a Muslim.”</p>



<p>The
first “Ask a Muslim” event was held at the station in 2016, focusing on
six-minute one-on-one conversations, in the style of a speed dating event,
between people in the local Muslim community and in the general listening
public. That was followed by a shared meal.</p>



<p>Reynolds
says, “I felt like something had really happened.” But there was some question
as to whether the effects of those conversations were lasting.</p>



<p>He
secured a grant from the University of Washington and reached out to Valerie
Manusov in the Department of Communication to create a series of questionnaires
to be given to the participants before, immediately after and three months
after the talks. The “Ask A…” conversations continued throughout 2017 and 2018,
featuring groups such as gun owners, Special Olympians, Trump supporters and so
on, usually depending on what is trending in the news, Reynolds says.</p>



<p>Manusov
published the results of her study in the <em>Howard Journal of Communications</em>.
The questions measured participant’s <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10646175.2019.1649763?journalCode=uhjc20">knowledge
about, attitude toward, and empathy for people different from themselves</a>.</p>



<p>No
matter which group was featured, she says, all three measures increased from
before to after the event, and for all the groups, the follow-up surveys three
months afterward showed that levels of knowledge stayed higher and attitudes
toward the group were more positive than before the event. Empathy tended to
rise initially, but it didn’t “take” as well as the other two metrics.</p>



<p>Despite
the groups’ small size, the results were consistent with numerous other studies
conducted over the years based on what’s called Intergroup Contact Theory,
which was created in the 1950s to look at <a href="https://www.in-mind.org/article/intergroup-contact-theory-past-present-and-future">ways
prejudice can be reduced between groups</a>.</p>



<p>That
was the case with Teresa Maxie, a Black woman who owns several firearms for
hunting, but also favors more gun restrictions, such as background checks. She
wanted to participate in the “Ask A…” program because she felt it was important
for people, including students in the national youth movement against guns who
attended the session, to meet a gun owner who didn’t look the part.&nbsp; </p>



<p>“The
looks on their faces when we had dinner with them—and there was [another]
enthusiastic NRA member there trying to convince one to come out on the course
and shoot a few, and she’d fall in love with guns. You could see on her face
that she was completely horrified,” Maxie says. “That impacted me quite a bit,
and I feel impassioned about educating people about gun ownership.”</p>



<p>Douglas
Campbell, a gun owner who grew up in Alaska, said meeting non-owners and seeing
the debate from their perspective changed his own, especially regarding
assault-style weapons.</p>



<p>He
recalls sitting down across from a woman who had grown up in a refugee camp,
and listening as she “explains to me what guns symbolize to her, which is tools
of state violence,” Campbell says. </p>



<p>“To
actually see another person who’s been deeply affected by this, and to see the
disconnect where she’s fleeing violence and she comes here and—it’s creepy, is
what it is,” he says.</p>



<p>Those
one-on-one interactions are what makes the experience so powerful for some,
especially over a shared meal, which Reynolds says is “where the magic happens”
during the “Ask A…” events.</p>



<p>Overcoming
positive bias is a challenge, in that, even once you factor in the local
political environment, people coming to these events are doing so because they
want to engage with people different from themselves. Not everyone feels that
way.</p>



<p>“Clearly
you can’t force someone to sit down and talk to someone else and you can’t
force them to listen,” Reynolds says. But he thinks that even people with
strong views who come to these events might go back into their communities and
share their experience.</p>



<p>Better
Angels has turned that goal into a national movement, with local chapters in
each state hosting Red/Blue Workshops and also a series of subject-specific
debates on timely topics like gun laws.&nbsp; </p>



<p>Everything
follows the “Better Angels Rule” of including both sides in everything. “We
don’t even go to breakfast if we don’t have a red and a blue,” Lapp says.</p>



<p>He
says the causes of today’s polarization won’t go away after the 2020 election,
regardless of the outcome.</p>



<p>“Right
now, the source of the polarization is if you’re pro-Trump or anti-Trump, and
that subject does come up in the workshops,” he says. “But the polarization
between conservative and liberal has been coming along for a while. Something
tells me we’ll still be around.” </p>

<p>This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org">Yes! Magazine</a> at <a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/issue/building-bridges/2019/11/12/healing-a-divided-nation-begins-face-to-face">https://www.yesmagazine.org/issue/building-bridges/2019/11/12/healing-a-divided-nation-begins-face-to-face</a>.</p><link href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/issue/building-bridges/2019/11/12/healing-a-divided-nation-begins-face-to-face" rel="canonical"/><p>Yes! Magazine is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of ... . Learn more at <a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org">Yes! Magazine</a></p><img id="republication-tracker-tool-source" src="https://www.yesmagazine.org/?republication-pixel=true&post=72505&ga4=G-74QJNNY44Z" style="width:1px;height:1px;">

Healing a Divided Nation Begins Face to Face

Three
weeks after the 2016 presidential election,
a group of 21 people came together in South Lebanon, Ohio, outside Cincinnati,
to talk.

The group comprised 11 people
who’d supported Hillary Clinton for president and 10 who’d supported Donald
Trump.

After the contentious election,
there was a question lurking under the surface: “Could we as a country avoid a
civic divorce? Could we build a more perfect union?” says David Lapp.

That meeting marked the beginning
of what would become a national movement called Better Angels, that Lapp and
two colleagues formed to create friendly spaces for potentially unfriendly
conversations.

It’s among dozens of such arrangements—from weekly
dinners to meetups to formal debates—that have emerged after the 2016 election
to look for common ground across the political divide.

Better
Angels got rolling in 2017, with a summer bus tour of 15 communities between
Waynesville, Ohio, and Philadelphia, convening a similar mix of people in what
they called “Red/Blue Workshops.” A fall tour followed, from Washington, D.C.,
to Nashville, Tennessee. Along the way, Better Angels has trained 130
volunteers to moderate future workshops.

The
meet-ups, Lapp says, are “not an effort to change each other’s policy views or
political views, but we are trying to change our minds about each other.”

“Political
polarization” has become almost a buzzword, deprived of real meaning, given how
frequently it’s deployed in national media. Slicing and dicing the electorate
and the country into political tribes, oversimplifying entire state populations
by assigning each a single color, and reducing national elections into contests
over specific census tracts in a few key states have led to a widely shared
view that the United States no longer is united around common principles.

Much
has been made of the effect of social media on politics, too. Nearly three-fourths
of Americans talk politics only with people who share their political views,
researchers found in 2017. Given how social media algorithms serve us with
content that we like (or “like”) and shelter us from what we don’t, that’s
unlikely to change on its own.

That’s
where Better Angels comes in. In addition to Lapp, who is a scholar at the
Institute for American Values, the co-founders were David Blankenhorn, the
founder of the Institute, and Bill Doherty, professor and director of the
Couples and Family Therapy Program at the University of Minnesota.

The
name was borrowed from the final line of Abraham
Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address in 1861, given on the eve of the Civil War as a plea
for unity when seven Southern states had already seceded: “The mystic chords of
memory … will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely
they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

That
assumption—that everyone has the potential to act in a more civil manner—is
what drives the group and its outreach to everyone from die-hard Trump
supporters to left-wing progressive activists.

“A
lot more people are interested in working with people on the other side
politically than our stereotypes would represent,” Lapp says. He says the group
is intended to reflect the entire spectrum of Americans’ political convictions.

Centrists
also are welcome, he says, but “We are not a centrist organization.”

Several
early participants in the Better Angels workshops would agree. Ray Warrick is a
Tea Party organizer, who describes himself as a strict conservative:
“Republicans, by and large, aren’t conservative enough for me.” He has
participated in several workshops in the Warren County, Ohio, chapter, where he
says the discussions are civil and work to break down barriers.

“I’ve
often felt, you don’t hate people who you know, and I’ve had liberal friends
for years,” Warrick says.

And
it turns out there are areas of agreement that transcend party membership.
“There’s pretty solid consensus that A, the politicians aren’t serving us, and
B, the money in politics makes it wholly corrupt,” he says.

On
the other side is Rob Weidenfeld, a self-described pro-life Democrat who
credits Better Angels for opening his eyes to how he was behaving, especially
online. He and one of the Republicans in the Warren County group formed a pact
of sorts to check each other on Facebook, giving likes to constructive posts or
frowns to divisive ones.

“If
you actually spend time with these people and talk to them, you realize they’re
actually not that different from you,” Weidenfeld says.

Diana
Mutz, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied the
mechanisms of political polarization, says that a lot of the divisiveness is
made worse by lack of contact between different groups.

“When
politics is sort of at the forefront of mind all the time, it makes these
cross-cutting relationships harder,” Mutz says. She is author of the 2006 book,
Hearing the Other Side: Deliberative Versus Participatory Democracy.

Civic
life wasn’t always so politicized, and there have been times when, even during
fraught periods, the polarization didn’t seem so extreme, she says. She recalls
that when President Richard Nixon resigned, most Republicans, including her
father, agreed with the Democrats that the president had committed acts that
warranted his removal from office.

There's pretty solid consensus that A, the politicians aren't serving us, and B, the money in politics makes it wholly corrupt. Ray Warrick, a Tea Party organizer

It’s
different now, with disagreements even over what is considered objective
reality. “Will that happen again, or will Republicans and Democrats just deny
what the other side said?” she says.

Getting
past that may mean taking a step back from politics.

That’s
the reasoning behind an initiative launched as an outreach project by KUOW-FM,
an NPR-affiliated radio station in Seattle, whose listenership, like the city,
tends to skew left. Called “Ask A…,” the project brought about 10 people into
the studio to talk to another 10 individuals who have been misunderstood in
broader society.

The
goal of the events, titled “Ask a Muslim,” “Ask a police officer,” “Ask a Trump
supporter,” and so on, was to provide a series of conversations in an
environment that focused on understanding rather than argument.

Ross
Reynolds, the station’s executive producer of community engagement, says the spark
of the idea came in 2015 when he heard then-candidate Trump talking about
banning Muslims from entering the country.

“I
kind of wondered if this guy had ever talked to a Muslim,” Reynolds says. “Then
I wondered if any of us had ever talked to a Muslim.”

The
first “Ask a Muslim” event was held at the station in 2016, focusing on
six-minute one-on-one conversations, in the style of a speed dating event,
between people in the local Muslim community and in the general listening
public. That was followed by a shared meal.

Reynolds
says, “I felt like something had really happened.” But there was some question
as to whether the effects of those conversations were lasting.

He
secured a grant from the University of Washington and reached out to Valerie
Manusov in the Department of Communication to create a series of questionnaires
to be given to the participants before, immediately after and three months
after the talks. The “Ask A…” conversations continued throughout 2017 and 2018,
featuring groups such as gun owners, Special Olympians, Trump supporters and so
on, usually depending on what is trending in the news, Reynolds says.

Manusov
published the results of her study in the Howard Journal of Communications.
The questions measured participant’s knowledge
about, attitude toward, and empathy for people different from themselves.

No
matter which group was featured, she says, all three measures increased from
before to after the event, and for all the groups, the follow-up surveys three
months afterward showed that levels of knowledge stayed higher and attitudes
toward the group were more positive than before the event. Empathy tended to
rise initially, but it didn’t “take” as well as the other two metrics.

Despite
the groups’ small size, the results were consistent with numerous other studies
conducted over the years based on what’s called Intergroup Contact Theory,
which was created in the 1950s to look at ways
prejudice can be reduced between groups.

That
was the case with Teresa Maxie, a Black woman who owns several firearms for
hunting, but also favors more gun restrictions, such as background checks. She
wanted to participate in the “Ask A…” program because she felt it was important
for people, including students in the national youth movement against guns who
attended the session, to meet a gun owner who didn’t look the part.

“The
looks on their faces when we had dinner with them—and there was [another]
enthusiastic NRA member there trying to convince one to come out on the course
and shoot a few, and she’d fall in love with guns. You could see on her face
that she was completely horrified,” Maxie says. “That impacted me quite a bit,
and I feel impassioned about educating people about gun ownership.”

Douglas
Campbell, a gun owner who grew up in Alaska, said meeting non-owners and seeing
the debate from their perspective changed his own, especially regarding
assault-style weapons.

He
recalls sitting down across from a woman who had grown up in a refugee camp,
and listening as she “explains to me what guns symbolize to her, which is tools
of state violence,” Campbell says.

“To
actually see another person who’s been deeply affected by this, and to see the
disconnect where she’s fleeing violence and she comes here and—it’s creepy, is
what it is,” he says.

Those
one-on-one interactions are what makes the experience so powerful for some,
especially over a shared meal, which Reynolds says is “where the magic happens”
during the “Ask A…” events.

Overcoming
positive bias is a challenge, in that, even once you factor in the local
political environment, people coming to these events are doing so because they
want to engage with people different from themselves. Not everyone feels that
way.

“Clearly
you can’t force someone to sit down and talk to someone else and you can’t
force them to listen,” Reynolds says. But he thinks that even people with
strong views who come to these events might go back into their communities and
share their experience.

Better
Angels has turned that goal into a national movement, with local chapters in
each state hosting Red/Blue Workshops and also a series of subject-specific
debates on timely topics like gun laws.

Everything
follows the “Better Angels Rule” of including both sides in everything. “We
don’t even go to breakfast if we don’t have a red and a blue,” Lapp says.

He
says the causes of today’s polarization won’t go away after the 2020 election,
regardless of the outcome.

“Right
now, the source of the polarization is if you’re pro-Trump or anti-Trump, and
that subject does come up in the workshops,” he says. “But the polarization
between conservative and liberal has been coming along for a while. Something
tells me we’ll still be around.”

Republish this content

Inspiration in Your Inbox.