Braver Angels: Ciaran O’Connor

Americans are more divided than ever. Red and Blue Americans have increasingly turned against each other in an escalating cycle of dislike and distrust — views of the other party are currently at an all time low. On this episode we are joined by Ciaran O'Connor who shares how Braver Angels is uniting red and blue Americans in a working alliance to depolarize America and to try to understand the other side's point of view.

To learn more about Braver Angels visit www.braverangels.org.

Talia: So before we get into the Braver Angels story, I want to talk about why we're here. Obviously, people are really angry;  they're passionate about their political views, and there's this tension surrounding politics. Jonathan Haidt talks about politics being very tribal —  It has nothing to do with finding the truth, everything to do with beating the other side — and I'm curious if you think this is a new reality, or has this been the case for a while now?

Ciaran:  I think there's always been tribes and politics. Even when you go back to the founding of the Republic of the Federalists and the anti-Federalists; the colonies themselves were in some ways, tribes. I think humans are biologically predisposed to exist in groups of 40 to 100 people that exist with common purpose, usually to protect themselves from a common enemy. But in domestic politics, because of our two-party binary system, people are increasingly defining themselves in terms of negative partisanship. So it's not really about what you believe it's about what you're against. In the 1960s, it was more complicated because the binary was not as stark:  you had liberal Republicans, and you had conservative Southern Democrats, there was a little bit more variation in terms of the tribes. Over the course of the past few decades our identities in terms of race, ideology, class, and where we live, are increasingly stacked. So we are around people who are like minded. Our exposure to those on the other side is limited. Someone like me, for instance,  I grew up in Manhattan, both my parents are fairly liberal, most of my friends were progressive, and that becomes your worldview. It's the water that you swim in. Even as someone who grew up in Manhattan who sort of prided myself as someone who values diversity, being around people from all over the world, I realized there actually isn't that much political diversity, living in these filter bubbles online that further deepen that tribal perspective. That's everything that you begin to filter your sense of politics through. The last point I'll make is that I think people's identities are increasingly tied up with their politics so that when people perceive an attack on their politics, it feels like an attack on their identity. And I think that's why politics has become so personal for so many people in ways that transcend the very real stakes of the issues themselves.

Talia: So Braver Angels is then created as a reaction to this political polarization.

Ciaran: Yeah, so Better Angels, we’re now Braver Angels, at the time we were Better Angels. Our name came from Abraham Lincoln's first inaugural address in which he was calling on the nation on the brink of a civil war to try to summon his better angels to see the best in one another and to try to preserve the union. That was the spirit that animated the wish behind Better Angels, which was, could we come together after a particularly rancorous and divisive election season to talk with rather than simply at or about one another?

Talia: So the story begins in December 2016 in South Lebanon, Ohio. You guys took 10 Trump supporters and 11 Clinton supporters and gathered them together and what would become your first red blue workshop. What was the goal of this gathering?

Ciaran: Obviously, the divisions in our politics long predated Donald Trump and the 2016 election, but the 2016 election was particularly divisive. And we wanted to see whether there be a way that we could draw on therapy, particularly family therapy and couples therapy, as a way to help people bridge the divide. We really wanted to design a program that helps people understand each other's perspectives, but doesn’t necessarily intend to get people to change their minds. We operate under the assumption that we do have deep, important disagreements. That's the way it's supposed to be. We're supposed to have passion and vigor and difference in our politics in a democracy. And so one of our co-founders, Bill Doherty is a longtime family therapist, a professor at the University of Minnesota, and someone who specializes in working with couples who are on the brink of divorce. So how can we clarify disagreements? How can we start to reduce the stereotype thinking that we all do? And ultimately, how can we build the trust that is then needed to explore common ground in good faith? Because if you disagree with someone on 80% of things, but you have a relationship, and you trust that they are not just there to try to humiliate you, but to actually probe where you might agree, then you can work together on that 20%. But if you think that they're there in bad faith, even if you agree on most of the issues, you're never really going to get to any sort of meaningful progress.

Talia: So Braver Angels is encouraging people to have these conversations about politics, which obviously isn't easy in our current climate. I, for one, feel like whenever I speak up about politics, I'm nervous about who I'm offending around me. But I'm wondering what you guys saw in those initial dialogues.

Ciaran: In those first couple workshops, people were nervous, suspicious, and  mistrustful of the other side. I mean, the first workshop was three weeks after the election, so feelings were pretty raw. It took place in, as you mentioned, South Lebanon, Ohio, which is a pretty evenly divided community. It's a community where political divisions run through families, through churches, and through workplaces. And so it's a little bit different than if you are a blue, who lives in New York City, you could go six months if you wanted to, without ever talking to a Trump supporter. Whereas in a lot of communities across the country, people don't really have that luxury. And that that was the context of the first workshop. So a lot of these people, they knew some of the other workshop participants, and they knew that they had voted differently. And so there was this feeling of apprehension. Am I going to get called a racist? Am I going to get called a communist? Am I going to be disparaged for my political affiliation, but we've found that one of the reasons our workshops are so powerful is that they pretty quickly get beyond the labels and talking points that people associate with politics and political conversations in particular, and they give people an opportunity to hear people's lived experiences that have shaped their political world-views.

Talia: Okay, so let's take a listen to one of these workshops. 

I am red, I have voted for Trump.  I would describe myself as a fierce partisan for blue. I am a red. I'm a blue.

Talia:  A moderator leads the conversation in a fishbowl setting where the red sit on the inside and the blues, listen from the outside.

Moderator: Where do you stand on the gun rights gun control issue? Who wants to go first?  

Red 1: I am adamantly seriously upset when people start to try to infringe on that second amendment. It really does disturb me.

Red 2:  We're in a spiritual battle. This is not a battle of anything else. It is a battle of good and evil.

Red 3:  I know with my grandchildren, when I travel in some areas, the first thing I say is, “do we have our guns?” because I want to be able to protect them.

Talia: Next step is the blue team.

Blue 1: I don't see myself in the Second Amendment, although I recognize it's there.

Blue 2: It should be like every other amendment in the Bill of Rights, that it's not absolute.

Blue 3: Why don't we have extreme vetting for owning a gun?

Talia: And then we find out if the exercise did in fact work.

Red Participant: Whether you're blue, red,  doesn't matter at the table. You want to see something happen, and we all think realize that doesn't come free.

Blue Participant:  It's not so much a debate as it is to be enlightened, because so we have so many stereotypes, this gives us a chance to see that it's not really the way it is.

Blue Participant: Before I came, I was just thinking that the other side would just be like, very status quo, and I think the openness to understanding that there is an issue, in that proper training, could help was a start.

Talia: Ciaran, I'm curious, in these gatherings, what you find people tend to disagree about the most.

Ciaran: Well, I would say that Donald Trump is a lightning rod, because he's so polarizing. People in politics these days will tend to ascribe the characteristics of a certain political leader to that political leaders’ supporters, and then the supporters or the opponents will then begin to identify with that. if you're a Trump supporter, and somebody starts attacking Trump, what you're hearing is them attacking you. And vice versa, if you're a Trump opponent, and you hear somebody attacking Democrats, the same thing will happen. Humans can be so defensive when they feel like other people are questioning their values or motivations. So if someone is expressing an opinion about abortion, and then all of a sudden, they think the other person is either accusing them of killing babies on the one side, or trying to control women's bodies on the other --  those have become such the sort of standard expressions of that issue. And we've been conditioned to think like that. And so on certain issues, it's particularly sensitive. And that's why we've actually developed versions of our workshops that are specifically based around one issue. And we've also now developed debates geared toward --  how can we argue in the Braver Angels way? How can you really try to persuade people and make your point and do so in a way where you're not beating around the bush, but not do so in a way where you're just out there trying to make people look bad and score points?  It's actually about an exchange of ideas.

Talia: Have you been able to keep that respective dialogue even online when people kind of feel a bit further away from those who they're talking to?

Ciaran: It depends…the answer is yes when it comes to virtual events. When it comes to a workshop or a debate or a training, we have found that while you do lose a certain level of intimacy that you get with face-to-face conversation, you can maintain the basic lines of communication and you can maintain structure. I do think there is some self-selection bias because a lot of the people who come to our work, are there because of some baseline level of curiosity or because they really believe in the value of what we're doing.

Talia: Right, I want to talk about that, because obviously, it's difficult to create a broader conversation if it's an opt in program. People who care about those divides, and bridging those divides are going to seek you out. But how do you reach those, especially young people, who really need to be having these conversations?

Ciaran: Yeah. So when the George Floyd protests started happening, we started launching a series of debates on police reform, social justice, and criminal justice. Those debates allowed us to reach out to pretty polarized communities on both sides and invite them into the conversation.  

Talia: And how did you find these people?

Ciaran: Well, we've been doing a lot of our recruiting through partners. So we work with Black Lives Matter, for example, to bring in activists on the left. We work with the Tea Party to bring in folks on the right. And we've also been developing our own media network through our own podcasts and through videos, blogs and essays.

Talia: Are you also partnering with campuses?

Ciaran: We are. So we've launched college debates at dozens of colleges across the country, and we've found that there's a real appetite for that kind of work on college campuses. Because obviously over the past few years, there's been numerous controversies on college campuses where people feel like on the one hand, marginalized communities are being violated, and on the other hand, free speech is being suppressed. And so people are really operating in this tense environment, and I think there's a lot of fear with people who want to talk about politics, but maybe decide, I just am going to keep my mouth shut — I don't want to stir the pot. But what a Braver Angels debate does, is that we welcome everybody, but we do so with ground rules and the structure. People can slot into this structure and do it in a way where everyone's voice gets heard. There's no winners or losers in our debates, it's more about, you get an opportunity to speak your mind, and you get an opportunity to ask questions of other people, and ideally, everyone walks out with a fuller understanding of what the truth is, in all of its manifestations.

 Talia: Ciaran, I'm curious what we can expect from Braver Angels in this coming year.

Ciaran: I think that in 2021, we are going to be thinking through how we can depolarize institutions. A lot of our work to date has been focused on the grassroots level —  I think we're always going to be a grassroots organization, a bottom-up organization, a volunteer-led, decentralized, citizens movement. But as our numbers and influence grow, I think we're also going to be thinking through how we can leverage that to influence the institutions that affect how divided we are. So the media — we're trying to model an alternative to the partisan media complex. Can we show what robust constructive cross partisan dialogue looks like? And you can start to hopefully change some of the incentives because obviously, the incentives right now in media are often to inflame and divide, because that's what gets clicks. Another institution is academia—we are starting to scale our work on college campuses, and starting to give young people an opportunity to talk about politics in a healthier way and help build a healthier civic pluralism going forward. Because this problem is really generational; by working now, with college students, you can start to have more scaled-up effects in the next few years. And then with politics itself — we really want our work to bubble up to politics, primarily starting at the local level, where local alliances can start to take up issues of common concern. We want to encourage people to get involved in politics. I think sometimes people think that if you join Braver Angels, you have to renounce your partisan identity, which is the opposite. We want people to be strong Democrats and strong Republicans. We want them to be out there organizing, but we want them to be doing it within the spirit of our work. And we found that you can sort of have your blue hat and your Braver Angels hat or your red hat and your Braver Angels hat. Obviously there are tensions there, and there are tensions that are ongoing and that we always have to confront. But in terms of politics, we've done a couple candidate debates at the local levels, reimagining how can two candidates debate in a way that actually serves the interests of the people and people actually feel like they're answering their questions. We're also trying to re-envision what a Town Hall could look like. So rather than just a politician grandstanding before an audience for the television cameras, could Braver Angels help organize Town Halls that give people an opportunity to actually engage in the politician-citizen relationship. It would also be great to be able to do workshops with higher level politicians. We've done some red-blue workshops with congressional staffs, and there is a caucus in the house called the problem solvers caucus with 40 to 50 members, and I think there could be some interesting potential there. So we'll see...I'm hopeful that just given the sheer magnitude of the problems that we need to solve as a nation, that people will be able to better come together in the new administration. The division and the mistrust, and bitterness is still going to be there, but I do think people are exhausted, and I think most people inherently understand the value of working together -- but what's missing right now is trust. How can we not just reverse that narrative but actually show what's possible? When you feel like you can trust someone who thinks about politics differently from you because you both believe in improving the community in this country.

Talia: With inauguration day approaching and our country readying itself for a new administration, are there any final words of advice that you can share with our listeners for how they can be part of this effort to bridge America's political divides?

Ciaran: The best thing to do is to actually go to an event, to understand what this looks like in action. And if you're comfortable, put yourself in a situation through our programming where you actually have to articulate what you think about politics. It can be kind of scary, but it's actually fulfilling when you can do so in a way that feels safe, but also feels productive and robust. Because these issues that we have are critically important and the divisions in this country are very deep and the stakes are very high. And so finding a way to do this work in a way that leads to reconciliation and progress instead of further recrimination and toxicity, I think is paramount for anyone who wants to improve our democracy at a time when it seems to be under threat.