Transcript: John Wood, Jr.

My conversation with the Braver Angels ambassador

Given the state of our politics right now, it is easy to feel hopeless. But my guest on this week’s program says things are not as bleak as they seem, that people want to heal our deep societal divisions, and that the answer to bridging these divides lies in rebuilding civic life — one conversation at a time.

John Wood, Jr. is a former nominee for congress, a columnist for USA Today, and a national ambassador for Braver Angels. Its new campaign is called American Hope.

This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can stream the interview for free here.

---

TH: I want to start today with the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. This is a pivotal point in American history. As someone who works in depolarization, what do you think this political violence says about where America is at right now?

JWJ: I think that you can look over the arc of American history, and there are innumerable other examples in history where social relationships begin to fray, the stakes of political outcomes begin to rise, and people lose their faith in the capacity of conversation and ordinary political processes to move the country forward in a just or ethical direction, in their view. And so, what winds up resulting from that is resorting to the age-old way in which we know, as human beings, as human animals, to solve our problems — and that is through violence. 

Now, if you look at the person who tried to assassinate President Trump, if you look at the individual who killed Robert Kennedy, and others, these are usually people who have mental issues, and who psychologically are not necessarily reflective of you and me. But I do think that they exist spawning from a larger environment of frayed social relationships, the deterioration of our ability to communicate. This is key: The normalization of deep and bitter personal contempt between political tribes that, I think, begins to create the permission structure for more and more extreme ways of dealing with each other. 

So, it's not an A to B jump to violence — to find yourself polarized against the other party and then, the very next day, you decide to pick up a baseball bat and go attack somebody with it. That's not quite the way that it works. But in a larger environment in which we increasingly see each other in less than empathetic, less than humane terms, we see one another as essentially being more enemies than neighbours. Then, at every degree along the scale of human interaction, it becomes more and more normalized to engage one another in less and less humanizing ways — whether that's through contempt in speech, or wielding the power of the institutions without respect to the integrity of law and for the advantage of your tribe. And then in the ultimate expression of that, violence, right?

So, it's a larger trajectory that we are accelerating upon that, I think, was indicated by the Trump assassination attempt. And if that's true, then that means — and I don't mean to be alarmist — but it does suggest that the worst may be yet to come.

TH: I think a lot of people are feeling hopeless about the state of our politics. I certainly feel like that sometimes. I was quite heartened to see that Braver Angels has just launched its American Hope campaign. For listeners who are not familiar, tell us what Braver Angels is and what it seeks to accomplish with this campaign.

JWJ: Thank you very much for that question. Braver Angels is America's largest grassroots, bipartisan, cross-partisan organization. A community dedicated to the work of political depolarization. I like to deepen that by saying that what we're really about is reviving the communal fabric of American democracy. We're a membership organization. We began in the aftermath of the 2016 election, and our work began with a single workshop. We would take small groups of people from the right and the left — Reds and Blues, as we say in-house — not to argue or debate politics so much, but really to speak from the vantage point of their own personal experience, in terms of why they see politics the way that they do. Basically, we started off doing marriage counselling for the relationship between Republicans and Democrats. That's really what it was about.

But since those early days, we've expanded into a community of some 13,000 members, 2,000 or 3,000 active volunteers across the country, about 100 or so local bipartisan alliances across America. Digital media work, and programs at every level of government from congress, state, and municipal — even school board-level. A community of artists and musicians, probably a couple hundred strong across the country, work on college campuses across America. And [we have] a suite of probably upwards of 20 or so programs, teaching people how to communicate empathetically across the divide, how to debate in a way that prioritizes the search for truth and the building of community — giving people the opportunity to make real relationships with people who think differently than they do.

But it's all about reviving trust between the American people and setting the stage for us to begin to rehabilitate the trustworthiness of American institutions. That's really the core aim of Braver Angels. And I think it's an expression of the fact that the American people and our political mainstream — we've forgotten the most fundamental truth about politics, which is really that it's not so much about who has the best argument. It's not really so much about who has the most compelling speakers, in terms of what makes politics work. Those are aspects of value in elections. But democracy only functions if there's enough trust between groups in society for us to be willing to respect the rules of what is inevitably going to be an imperfect system.

If we believe that the other party is made up of individuals who we disagree with, but who nevertheless are part of this larger experiment with us as neighbours, then we can abide by the outcome of an election which we lose. We can respect the results of a bill being passed that we disagree with. Because we'll have some faith in the integrity and the legitimacy of the processes by which these outcomes come about. We're willing to play by the rules the next time around. But if we think that the other side literally are something like existential threats to us and our wellbeing — and that we have no deeper common ground with them as countrymen — then there's no reason to respect the rules. There's no reason to respect the institutions. There's no reason to respect each other. In that context, there is no social foundation upon which a democratic republic can long endure.

TH: I know you've worked as a national leader with Braver Angels for some time. Your colleague, Mónica Guzmán, has also been on this podcast. I'm curious about what these depolarization efforts look like on the ground. Braver Angels points out that people on opposite sides of the political spectrum don't just disagree, they dislike or even hate each other, as you've just been talking about. But your organization says 97% of the participants who have one-on-one conversations find common ground. Can you give us a recent example of two people overcoming this kind of affective polarization?

JWJ: One of my favourite stories to tell is one of the stories that's baked into the lore of Braver Angels’ larger story. The very first workshops that were produced in the aftermath of the 2016 election were in South Lebanon, Ohio, which had split pretty evenly for Trump and Clinton. Those early workshops were actually much longer than the ones that would come after them. So, this was a weekend affair that brought together 11 folks who had just voted for Hillary, and who had just voted for Trump. Among them two individuals, people who I consider to be friends today, Greg Smith, who's a former small town sheriff, construction worker, evangelical Christian, somebody who was and is very much a supporter of Donald Trump, and individual named Kouhyar Mostashfi, who is a leader of the local county Democratic Party, a technology expert, an immigrant from Iran, and a Muslim.

During the workshop, Greg said to him something along the lines of, “I can spell my problem with Islam in four letters, ISI….” Before he was able to complete the sentence, Kouhyar interrupted him and he said, “My friend, I know what you're about to say. My religion has been hijacked by people who don't share my values.” And he asked him if he could think of any Christians who called themselves Christians who didn't share the values that Greg believed in himself. Of course, it wasn't hard for Greg to think of quite a few examples of people who would represent that. So, by the end of the workshop, the two of them stood up together. They made a mutual pledge to each other and the others in the group, not just to continue the work of Braver Angels. Kouhyar pledged to pay a visit to Greg's evangelical church on an upcoming Sunday. Greg pledged to pay a visit to a service held at Kouhyar’s mosque. To try and build a relationship across the political and the religious divide in their communities.

It is a beautiful encapsulation of what Braver Angels is about. If you go through the annals of the Braver Angels story, you'll find any number of stories along those lines. Activists who oppose gay marriage finding common moral ground with people who are on the vanguard of the gay marriage movement. Police officers who are very much opposed to the defunding and the restricting of law enforcement in urban communities engaging in good faith with people who believe not only that systemic racism is a problem, but that law enforcement is generally racist by its disposition.  You have Tea Party leaders and Trump voters and Black Lives Matter leaders, and people who represent the far-flung edges of the political tribal discourse, finding their way to each other in the context of our programs, workshops, debates, events, conventions, and more.

It's almost like passing through a happy twilight zone, really. [Laughs] You step through this portal, you get a sense of what American politics could look like. The only problem with it is that it exists at a relatively small level of scale. Our programs have probably touched, in terms of direct in-person participation, probably some odd 50,000 Americans, and 13,000 or so members. At this point, we’ve got this long catalogue of inspiring events and actions. But what is needed really is to scale this up into a larger, I could say, movement — or, I could also say, a renaissance of goodwill in American civic life. To show people that this kind of a shift in our political culture really is possible. We know that because we've seen it happen time and time again. It's really a matter of allowing the American people, broadly speaking, to witness it and to understand that something better really and truly could be.

TH: It's very appealing. When you speak about it, I feel myself flooded with relief, of a different way that we could go with all of this. One of the key issues that Braver Angels is working to find common ground on is immigration. This is a big issue in Canada right now as well. We previously had a pro-immigration consensus among all the parties, but a massive increase in temporary foreign workers and foreign students coupled with existing mass immigration has put stress on many of our systems, including housing and healthcare. And that consensus has unfortunately collapsed recently. How does Braver Angels help American citizens to find common ground on that issue — and how might Canada look to that as an example?

JWJ: Braver Angels, originally, we were really solely focused on the interpersonal aspects of polarization. Part of our general philosophy is that foundationally speaking, it's more important to get the American people to change their minds on one another than on policy. Yet, of course, in the absence of trust and goodwill, progress on policy differences finds itself farther and farther removed from feasibility, especially on issues as fraught as immigration.

What we are doing in the context of immigration — what we've already done in the context of electoral reform — is to put together a sweeping effort. That will ultimately see the involvement of probably around 200 or so Americans, grassroots leaders, individuals with various levels of expertise and relationships to the immigration issue, pulled from across the country, to participate in an immersive series of workshops aimed at identifying common ground on the level of values, as well as policy. But that stem from Braver Angels’ foundational commitment to establishing interpersonal trust before going into the areas of policy agreements and disagreements.

The way our workshops are designed are … they really do focus on surfacing the personal experiences of participants. We want to know: Why does this issue matter to you? How do your own values and convictions play into your belief that ultimately we need to shut the border down, or we need to dramatically reduce restrictions on immigration? Wherever you might be coming from, how does this show up not just as an intellectual opinion or political opinion for you, but in the context of your experiences and your values? 

That part of the process creates the context for empathy and interpersonal trust. We come to see the humanity that lies behind our perspectives. We see the humanity that is intrinsic in our experiences, and that usually makes it possible for us to emotionally identify with where somebody else is coming from. Even if, again, we are not persuaded by their policy conclusion. But by humanizing one another, we give ourselves emotional and psychological permission to genuinely listen to one another, to genuinely reflect on where the merit might be in our different perspectives and points of view.

In this larger policy project that we're organizing, the approach here will be through what's called our “common ground workshops,” that will unfold according to the principles that I just laid out. The approach will be to create a deep sense of interpersonal trust between these participating Americans — again, spanning a wide spectrum of pre-existing viewpoints on the issue. From that foundation of personal trust, and personal relationships, we engage in an immersive discussion on where the common ground really exists, on the level of values as well as policy positions. From that, we distil a package of policy recommendations from a larger body of commonly-shared viewpoints. That we then intend to put forward into the larger policy discussion in a way that hopefully can have a constructive impact on the larger conversation — not just because the policy prescriptions that come out of it may or may not be politically palatable, and may or may not represent some potential new consensus. But because the process that leads to them is an outgrowth of rebuilding trust between Americans. And, in and of itself, we would hope it might serve as an example for the larger political culture in mainstream society to follow.

TH: One of the surprising aspects of polarization that we've been covering at Lean Out recently is this growing gap between young men and young women. With men becoming more conservative and women becoming more liberal. What are your thoughts on that?