It Takes Two to Tango

The idea the "both sides do it" is inaccurate, and frankly sloppy rhetoric. Yet it's true that neither side alone can bridge the divisions ruining our country.

America, as you know, is experiencing a period of internal hostility unmatched at any point in time other than the Civil War. The Wall Street Journal has a fascinating piece—so appropriate for the holiday season—about a group of centrists led by the nonprofit, Braver Angels,  whose short and long term goals are to get us talking with and to each other, instead of past and at each other. Short term because there is low-hanging fruit: the folks who lament our current condition and want to see us come together. Long term because most of the low hanging fruit is on the liberal or Democratic side of the equation (they love this Kumbaya stuff), and the long term challenge is to bring the recalcitrant, hard-right conservative Republicans to the table.

Heritage Foundation president, Kevin Roberts, himself a denizen of the hard-right, doesn’t think any progress in civility can be made until “leftist totalitarians” have given up control of civic institutions. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of the sort of “meet me in the middle” attitude we’re going to need to return to civic equilibrium. “What I foresee is a short period of conservatives needing to punch, and being innovative and forceful at the federal level, so we can put the left back in the teeny box that they deserve to live in,” Roberts said. “And then those efforts on revitalizing civil society will bear fruit.”

Yet the Journal reports that thousands of less partisan Americans are dying for the chance to restore comity, which is where Braver Angels comes in. From the Journal, “We’re not trying to change peoples’ minds about issues. We’re trying to change their minds about each other,” said Bill Doherty, a Minnesota family and marriage therapist who created the first protocols for how Braver Angels brings “red” and “blue” voters together in conversation.

The incivility is fueled by cable news, online sites, and social media, where people say the most awful things imaginable about each other, treating political opponents like blood-enemies. And what starts online with training wheels, graduates into the real world like a 500cc Ninja racer, all menacing, high-pitched whining, and flame-throwing exhaust. The things we would never have said in person are said easily in the anonymity of the online world, and the learned self-control we pick up in kindergarten begins to crumble, as the barriers to bad behavior fall. Too soon, the unthinkable is said in person: at the bar; at the game; at work; at Christmas dinner.

So now comes Braver Angels, and not a moment too soon. The paper says, “They are part of a growing bridge-building movement that has drawn in tens of thousands of Americans as participants,” many of whom see themselves as part of an “exhausted majority” worried that the coarseness in politics is tearing the fabric of civic life.

Monica Guzman, the author of  I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times,  is head of storytelling at Braver Angels, and she herself is a gifted conversationalist. The proud liberal daughter of conservative Mexican immigrants who twice voted for Donald Trump, she knows from personal experience that a middle ground still exists. On a recent episode of her “A Braver Way” podcast, she talked to Spencer Cox, the Republican governor of Utah, and Troy Williams, the activist at the head of Utah’s most active LGBTQ rights organization. The episode is called “How Can We Disagree Better?”, and I can’t recommend it more highly.

I wonder how long it took her to find two high profile leaders who were willing to abandon the hateful rhetoric extremists seem happy to promote. Governor Cox, who chairs the National Governors’ Association’s “Disagree Better” forum, has made it his mission to get Utahns talking, and is refreshingly candid about how reasonable discussion has morphed into unreasonable name calling, and refreshingly honest about the difficulty of  fixing that.

Troy Williams runs Equality Utah, the state’s biggest LGBTQ+ support organization.

Their relationship has been by turns collegial and contentious, but both have the rare ability in today’s marketplace of ideas to turn down the heated rhetoric and actually listen to the other one, and even occasionally find common ground.

 Both say you shouldn’t buy the notion that a good way to stand for the ideas on your side is to attack the people on the other. I’ve always loved the idea that you can be hard on the issues but soft on the people. These two are the embodiment of that concept, and Monica Guzman is a skilled interviewer who establishes guardrails and keeps the conversation from getting bogged down in unhelpful attacks and rhetoric.

I’ll be keeping an eye on Braver Angels in the new year. I hope you will too.

©2023 Jon Sinton