Evan Meyer welcomes BraverAngels.org on this edition of Meyerside Chats. Interested in any of the civic topics below? Please tune in to Meyerside Chats on the Santa Monica Daily Press.
Evan Meyer welcomes John Wood and Randy Lioz with BraverAngels.org on this edition of Meyerside Chats. Interested in any of the civic topics below? Please tune in to Meyerside Chats on the Santa Monica Daily Press.
BraverAngels.org is a nonprofit dedicated to political depolarization. The organization runs workshops, debates, and other events, where “red” (conservative) and “blue” (liberal) participants attempt to better understand one anothers’ positions and discover their shared values. Its mission is to bring Americans together to bridge the partisan divide and strengthen our democratic republic.
Meyerside Chats seeks to eliminate the “us and them” narrative and toxic polarization by praising those who lead by example, virtuous community leadership, and authentic conversation. The intent is to showcase the humanity in those that take on the often thankless jobs of public service through civil discourse and honoring differing points of view.
Summary
-What is BraverAngels.org?
-Generalizing & grouping individuals based on a single belief. 8:00
-The immense courage it takes to stand up for what is right. 11:00
-The immense effort it takes to get out of the algorithm & echo chamber to understand the full picture. 15:00
-Successful discourse between differing parties must be had in a context of trust. 20:00
-Extreme viewpoints tend to be the most vitriolic, but not representative of whole group 22:30
-The demographic disparity of civic involvement in local democracies 26:30
-The irony of understanding the extreme level of information bias, yet evoking staunch emotional beliefs when exposed to it. 31:10
-The “I’m right and you’re evil” precondition that prevents the trust required for healthy discourse. 36:00
-Taking the first step in trust building. 41:00
-Perfect justice is impossible. 42:30
49/51% win is not really a holistic win, it’s just beating the game. 43:00
-Understanding the difference between facts vs the interpretation of facts 49:30
-Paleolithic brains, medieval institutions and God-like technology 55:00
-Facebook’s anger button 57:00
-Making politicians “human” and rebuilding an ecosystem of trust, and genuine connection. 1:00:00
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Listen to the podcast here
Meyerside Chats: Evan Meyer & The BraverAngels – Randy Lioz & John Wood
Gentlemen, it’s great to see you.
It’s great to be here.
Thanks for dropping by, Evan. It’s fantastic to host you hosting us.
You guys are good at this. It’s an interviewer-interviewee collaboration of sorts. I’m glad that we get to be here. I was thrilled when I found out about what you both do and doing it at a national level and pushing forth what this show is intended to create itself. When I found out about Braver Angels, I was thrilled that this was going on. To kick things off, tell me a little bit about what Braver Angels is and what inspired you to be part of this.
Braver Angels is the largest organization in the space, trying to help Americans come together and transcend the division we’ve been experiencing over the last several years. That has been getting worse. It helps Americans to understand one another rather than trying to make their point and win the argument. If we can understand one another, we can help to build a house united and make progress for this country in the way that a lot of people are hungry for. They have been frustrated seeing their leaders, people in their lives, friends and family, neighbors, and colleagues unable to have productive discussions about the issues that are important for them.
In late 2016, we brought together our first workshop. It was roughly equal numbers of Clinton and Trump supporters right after the election. We did a pilot workshop that gave structure to the conversation. It was led by one of our cofounders, Dr. Bill Doherty, who has a lot of expertise in helping relationships that are in crisis to move past that and use better communication skills to understand one another.
He’s a Professor of Psychology at the University of Minnesota and one of America’s foremost family counselors, a marriage therapist.
From there, that was such a successful experiment. We built an organization based on that. That Red/Blue Workshop blossomed into many programs. We have skills training workshops, debates, and new programs like Braver Politics and Braver Partners. There’s so much work blossoming around that as well as a local network around the country of local alliances that come together to do the work together and sustain relationships. They can understand one another and help this country move forward.
One way to understand the work that we do is to realize the fact that we are bringing people together in the community across the country. In the local context, but also in a national fashion, because of the magic of Zoom and web-based technology, we’re able to bring people together in real-time, across geography, and so forth, and not in live Zoom-based programs and conversations but people’s relationship with the Braver Angels Podcast, subscribing to the newsletter, being a part of the media content that we generate, and consuming. It’s sharing this narrative approach to saying that red and blue, left and right, ultimately complete one another in an American experiment that is based on the idea that is E Pluribus Unum, that out of many, we are one.
As aspirational and even naive sounding notions that might be to people in the present moment, we do come from the premise which says that we need each other in an inclusive fashion to make democracy work. We can’t make democracy work excluding one another, not in terms of voting rights, but even in terms of our ability to connect with and relate to each other. Our work is about bringing people into a community that affirms that, at least as an aspiration and something we get to by modeling internally.
Democracy can’t work by excluding one another.
The idea is not to model that in one-off conversations but in the programs that Randy mentioned in our Red/Blue Workshops, debate programs, and skills training workshops, where people learn effective means of communicating and empathizing across the divide. Through many other formats, people are developing skills and attitudes and cultivating new norms for political, social discourse, and behavior that they take with them back out across the social and institutional landscape.
Those are attitudes, perspectives, and habits they take with them back to their college campus, business, place of work, church, local community, local government, or even back to their kitchen table, all while being plugged into a larger national community and growing movement which seeks to articulate the idea that the success of democracy is based on our ability to trust one another in the spirit of goodwill. We can only get to that point by modeling that and being willing to go first in empathizing with each other across the divide.
In that way, although it is an activity that is spurred forth by a lot of spontaneity, grassroots volunteerism, and community momentum, it’s also part of a larger structure of social impact, which reaches out across institutions, geography, demography, and the political spectrum, changing and reorienting the way we interact with each other.
What is that you’re seeing as the biggest trust issue between people, government, and each other? Maybe it’s not one thing.
I don’t think it’s one thing. Certainly, it’s going to be one thing more than the other.
What’s coming to the top?
Now, it’s hard not to put the issue of abortion right up at the top of that list. That’s fresh now. We’re here speaking a few days after Roe v. Wade was overturned, and millions of Americans who thought they had a certain constitutional right that’s deep and intimately held now feel pulled from under them. On the other hand, you got millions of Americans who, for years and years been advocating for change in our society. That’s a deeply entrenched, moral commitment and even religious for many millions of Americans. They are overjoyed, but it reinforces this long-standing reality that we are operating largely separate universes, morally and epistemologically, and so forth.
What I would say is that it’s not a single issue, but that each individual issue finds itself wrapped up in packaging where it’s the conflict of the identities we have that are somewhat composed of the individual issues that find themselves being the fundamental forces in conflict in American society. If I’m a conservative, you’re a liberal, it may be that I hypothetically believe in the Second Amendment, and I’m pro-life. You believe in universal healthcare and climate change, but it’s not that we disagree about the issues.
It’s the fact that if you buy into those things from my vantage point and if I’m polarized, you are somebody who’s buying into a large federal and maybe global conspiracy to take away my rights and freedoms. If I believe the things that I said, I’m somebody who’s a part of a larger White supremacist push in society to disenfranchise people of color and people of different sexual orientations.
We take one piece of information and draw an entire picture of the person based on that one piece of information. It’s unfair. It’s incorrect.
There is an interesting dynamic that this process has been underway for decades. That’s one of the watersheds of what has happened to give each of us our unique feed of media with the cable television revolution, where each person could go to a channel that was uniquely suited to them. You no longer have a shared national narrative.
Now with the progression of technology, it gives us a personal feed of our own information. We are each steeped in exactly what we think is the proper worldview. We constantly are getting information that is reinforcing that worldview. There is this ironic counterpoint that we are getting more customization of the universe, but our caricatures of one another are more flattened. You can only be on 1 of 2 teams at this point. Otherwise, you risk being accused of disloyalty or naivete by the folks who you perhaps feel a most kindred spirit with.
You can’t even ask questions about it. If you even pose that there may be a difference between what the news is saying and what you’re thinking, you are automatically construed as the opposite of whatever party is being presented to.
You could be damaging people by bringing an idea to light and wanting to discuss that idea in more detail. This is a problem that a lot of folks ascribe to the left these days, but there are analogs on the right. There is a lot of reinforcement of that loyalty that people feel such pressure to Q2. It takes a lot of courage to be able to stand up to that. I was watching the Jan. 6 Committee Hearings and seeing the testimony that was being given.
In my mind, it took such courage for many of the people who were quite loyal deputies of the Trump administration. They decided, “This is what I feel is right. I have to come forward.” Careers have been ended because of it. Some similar things have happened on the left where people are like, “I’m not comfortable with the pressure on free speech that’s being brought to bear,” especially on college campuses, for example. When people speak out, those careers have been cut short.
As an organization in general, we think the free exchange of ideas is important to this country. One of the reasons why, when we changed our name, it was originally Better Angels based on the Lincoln quote, “Summing the better angels of our nature.” When we changed our name, the reason we chose Braver Angels is because it takes a lot of courage to engage in these conversations when often there is so much at risk. People are risking their relationships. They are risking perhaps their livelihoods. If people are too scared based on those risks, we stop having a national conversation. That is one of the scariest things of all from our perspective.
We find ourselves pushing each other out of all of our shared spaces. I do agree with Randy. That cancel culture is something that exists broadly across body politics. You see it on the left and the right. If there’s an asymmetry, it probably comes in the fact that left-leaning cultural forces are more pre-dominating than mainstream cultural institutions. You got to find it more in the vehicles that broadcast out across the national landscape, the entertainment industry, academia, and so forth. The culture of the federal government tends to be left-leaning on the level of bureaucrats.
If you’re talking about the Southern Baptist Convention, the culture of small towns, Republican state parties, and central committees, censoring folks like Mitt Romney, or kicking out people from long-standing veterans of the GOP for not viewing the party line and kissing the ring of Donald Trump, you see that this is something that exists pretty widely in American culture.
What it ensures as progressives push conservatives out of mainstream institutions is conservatives build up their own parallel infrastructures. It reinforces the echo chambers phenomenon and divides our epistemological universe to where our ability to show up to reality, in the same way, becomes as starkly divided as the way Randy and I are dressed now. People show up to the same party thinking it’s a different show.
To jump back to your point a little bit and follow up on yours, you have to go so far out of your way to get out of the algorithm, and you have to want to do that, to not get out of your echo chamber and hear other perspectives because likely your friends think similar than you. I have seen this. The few that don’t end up not hanging out as much anymore. In the family situation, the ones that think differently end up being on the edge.
If you’re the one person that thinks differently in a crowd of five, you are the one person who thinks differently in a crowd of five. It’s like, “What’s going to happen when that people talk?” You have to work hard. You have to watch more of the stuff you disagree with than the stuff you agree with if you want a good perspective because it’s easy to find things you agree with. That’s super easy.
The algorithm works in a momentum-building way. We’re all inclined to look at the things that affirm our biases. The technology response to that continues to feed that to us. You put somebody who’s used to watching MSNBC or Pod Save America all day, and you sit them in front of Blaze. It’s the same thing going the other way.
You have to go out of your way and learn how to get comfortable with views you’re uncomfortable with. I encourage people to do that, but it’s difficult. The thing that Braver Angels does is we don’t exactly eliminate discomfort because you can’t. On some level, we are trying to get people to become comfortable with discomfort. What that does allow for in the right context is an ability to see the humanity in the person coming from the other side in a way that allows you to learn, expand your own perspective, and more effectively represent your own.
People need to learn how to get comfortable with views that they’re uncomfortable with.
You can progress to the point of being more comfortable with perspectives you are uncomfortable with. It’s seeking those relationships in your life, or you’re more comfortable tolerating the ones that are already there without the desire to cut off relationships because we damage ourselves when we do that. Many people have cut people out of their lives, who then miss those people. Because we have collapsed your political affiliation into something that we presume to be equal to your moral character, which I would argue it is not, and drawn this equivalency, we find ourselves forced to make these hard decisions rather than reasoning with each other in a way that can allow us to expand our understanding of reality.
If you force people to watch the news from the other side of the aisle, it is a good thing, but the amazing thing about Braver Angels is a good thing for people to have that habit. The amazing thing about Braver Angels is that if you’re somebody coming from the left, we’re not Sean Hannity shouting at you that your libtard for having the point of view that you have. If you’re somebody is coming from the right, we’re not someone saying that you’re a fascist for thinking the way that you think.
Isn’t there an argument that says, “Once you compare someone to Hitler, the argument ends?” You can’t do that.
It’s not that uncommon of thing.
A lot of people jumped to the Nazis.
I heard both, Obama is Hitler and Trump is Hitler. How can they both be Hitler?
To John’s point about our emphasis on relationships, I read a book by Chris Bail, Breaking The Social Media Prism. He exploded some misconceptions that we have about our media bubbles. Most people think, “We’re only seeing things we agree with.” I alluded to this before, but it isn’t exactly right. We are also seeing things that we disagree with, but they’re framed in a way that is not helpful for us to understand them.
He talked about when people on social media encounter a particularly virulent strain of the other side, a strident point of view, that it doesn’t help things. It hurts things. Encountering other viewpoints has to be in the context of relationship and trust. When you get to know someone, you start to understand their journey towards how they came to believe what they believe. We continually emphasize the power and the value of the story of narrative because human beings are such a narrative-driven species. That’s how we understand our entire world.
Before we even develop language, toddlers, at the end of their day, are processing their day in a narrative form and putting themselves into that narrative. When we’re able to hear someone’s story, it helps us identify with them. It helps us to fully understand or more fully understand at least their process and to make them a lot less alien.
When you hear someone’s story, it can really help you identify with them and make their views a lot less alien.
Can I even pick out one of Randy’s points a second ago because it’s worth underlining? Randy mentioned the fact that in the partisan media landscape, it’s not that you never find yourself exposed to the other point of view. You have to be exposed to it in some form or fashion because if not, there’s nothing to talk about.
We do have a psychological impulse towards conflict and some of this messiness. The thing I was going to pull out is that you oftentimes are getting hit with strawman versions of the other side or the most extreme version of the other side if that’s what’s representative of the people and the interests that you find yourself in opposition to. All the research shows, more in common data from the American Enterprise Institute, I imagine any number of other sources that you are archetypal conservative or progressive, where you go down the list, hire marginal taxes, single-payer healthcare, whether it’s pro-choice or gay marriages that or the other.
The person who checks all those boxes on the left and the person who’s straight down the line, low taxes, market healthcare, pro-life and pro-gun this, that, or the other, represents somewhere around 8% to 15% of the people who would identify or affiliate as Republicans or Democrats generally or vote that way, which means that everybody else is in the middle. There’s nothing wrong with checking all those boxes if that’s your point of view. I’m not saying that’s the problem. What is true is that the more partisan people tend to be, the more fully they align, oftentimes, the more aggressive and vitriolic they might tend to be in the way they advocate for their position and the more zero-sum their social engagement with people on the other side of the aisle.
My only point here is that we get the sense that everybody is a jerk on the other side because it’s the business model of the media and the prevailing political establishment to make you think that, but that’s not true. I don’t think it’s true of regular folks. I don’t even think it’s necessarily true of most of our elected officials, but all of the incentives are there to make you demonize people that way.
It’s Squeaky Wheel syndrome at its best. It’s clickbait and engagement based on conflict. People engage with things that are contentious.
Let’s bring this into the context of how our programs address this issue. I have moderated a bunch of Red/Blue Workshops. I don’t think I can recall one where someone didn’t say at the end, “We’re a lot closer to one another than I realized.” What they also say is that, “My side is less monolithic than I thought. We have a lot more diversity of opinion.” That flattening gets completely destroyed, and people’s understanding of the variety of viewpoints on either side of the issue is brought into full vibrant color by these workshops.
Sometimes we get criticism, “Isn’t your Red/Blue framing inherently self-divisive?” We have to explain. When we’re trying to address an issue, we have to name that issue. You have to look at it in the face and say, “The issue here is that people have these skewed, stereotypical, and flat understandings of people who often don’t know at all.” You bring those people specifically together.
That’s why we have people who identify, at least in the Red/Blue Workshops and our discussion workshops. Not all of our programs do this. You bring those folks together to go through exercises like the stereotypes exercise, where they say, “This is the stereotype that you have of us. This is why it’s unfair. Also, this is how we can be self-reflective. We can own maybe a little of a kernel of truth of that stereotype and understand why you see us this way.” It’s powerful because it lends that color and texture to one another, but it also is an incredible act of good faith between the two sides in terms of being vulnerable. That is some of the biggest power of those programs.
It’s amazing that you have done so much work around this and have seen the reactions of people, what happens, and what is possible when we realize that it’s not our values and aspirations that are in question. From what I’ve seen, it is the same. Everyone wants their kids to go to a good school and have good education for the country. No one wants to have mental illness and homelessness. We all want to take care of people, especially all the people in the middle who are getting caught in the clickbait and that squeaky wheel driving the conversation. It happens at a local level on local issues, too, on basic stuff. A lot of it is because people have time to do it.
It’s difficult to be someone in your 20s, 30s, and 40s and have the time to be involved at a local level and do that community service and volunteer effort. When you’re trying to build a career or a family, it’s hard. A lot of that starts to create an imbalance in the concept of democracy period. You say, “These are all the voices we’re listening to.” All of them or the activists say, “We are the voices of the people that are thinking somewhere in the middle.”
Part of the issue we struggle with Braver Angels is the fact that, while our programs touch a more diverse range of people, the folks who are able to volunteer and work with us on a regular basis tend to be more middle to upper-class, more educated, and closer to their retirement years. There are a couple of organizations, namely one in particular, who we work with on campuses called BridgeUSA, which have done a phenomenal job mobilizing Gen Z in this work. That’s an issue we faced within Braver Angels, but broadly speaking, across the body of politics, your point is well taken too.
When I was running for office, I ran as a Republican for Congress way back in 2014. I was a Vice Chairman of the LAGOP for a couple of years or so. Back then, I used to wish there was an organization like Braver Angels because when I was speaking to folks in neighborhoods, churches, and communities context, generally speaking, people were reasonable, whether they were left, right, or willing to engage and listen. They tended to have their leanings but also tended to be more practical and pragmatic a lot of times than they were ideological, or at least that’s the way they wanted to be.
In terms of people who are organized to make social change, those environments tended to be much more polarized and radicalized. In the Republican Party, you’ve got a lot of folks who are generally older, who might have more time for this volunteer work, who are also polarized and are great people so much of the time but in a state of mind where it’s difficult to see what the other side is saying.
At the Democratic Party, you have something similar that happens on the other end of the demographic spectrum because you have people who may have a little bit of bandwidth because of your college students. It’s not to say you do not have to work hard at school, but you got enough of the pressure taken off of you to where you don’t have as much pressure to pay the bills as you would if you were a working-class person with a family of 3, 4, or 5. There’s also a social economy that evolves around activism where you scale that a bit by being the person who’s most unrelenting or unyielding in your advocacy for racial justice, gender justice, or whatever the case may be.
We have these social economies that grow up. To be simplistic, it’s a little bit more for older people on the right, a little bit more for younger people on the left, but a little incentive for anybody to meet in the middle or listen to each other across that divide. One is because of the polarization industry. Two is because they are not necessarily as grounded in the day-to-day concerns of regular working folks who got to think much more about making about things, working in their day-to-day lives rather than winning culture wars. That thing breaks out in that way.
Most people would agree that the news and media portray these extremes, where the clickbait and contentious engagement problems are real. They know that advertisers fund the media agencies. There is some relationship there. People know this. I will throw one more, bots, AI, the level of information and curation that has to be done to get a well-balanced perspective on any issue, and still, you will never get to 100%. To me, it seems wild that people don’t, in general, have the humility to say, “I understand that because they understand that.”
When it comes to having the staunch belief that they have about what the thing they read, the article they read and get enraged in, name call, ad hominem attacks at people, go up and yell at people and destroy relationships with friends and family because of this thing they saw in the news that they thought was all objective truth which is almost impossible to get to the bottom. No one knows in the room where it happens. We can’t even get to the bottom of the politics of development in Arizona at Santa Monica. There’s so much reality TV around, even at the most local level stuff. People think they understand what’s going on in the room of these federal politicians. Those are international leaders in rooms.
We constantly have to reinforce to people in our workshops that we are swimming in a different sea of facts for every single person. It is a common lament from folks on both the left and the right that the other side doesn’t care about facts. They are focusing on their emotions. It’s the exact same argument. First of all, emotions are a constant presence in human communication. That is undeniable. You can’t separate that out. You have to listen to your pod with the city manager that you did, and you were talking about people losing sight of the fact that we’re all human beings.
Everyone is swimming in a different sea of facts, so people don’t care about each other’s facts; they just want to focus on their emotions.
We’re not fax machines that are regurgitating what we hear online. We have all of these experiences that we have to bring to bear. People say, “Yes, I understand that I have seen things that someone else hasn’t and vice versa.” As you said, we hear something, and you’re like, “How could someone else possibly hear this?” We’re hearing it right now with the January 6 hearings from a lot of blues who are like, “This has to change everything. How could someone watch this and not be convinced?”
The story is 100% clear and has zero uncertainty.
Part of that is a function of the fact that they are not Trump supporters on the committee. I lean blue, and I happen to believe that the committee is making an airtight case that the other side can’t rebut. The fact is we do have to recognize that there is some information they are not motivated to include. We always have to be thinking about that.
“What’s the motivation of anyone doing this?” You have to dissect that. January 6 is a tricky one because there are a lot of these compelling things that are happening, and a lot of people are watching that. It’s also a hot topic now. It does seem like there’s no way to see the possibility of someone who thinks differently. There are still, even with this, millions of our friends and neighbors of this country who see things a little bit differently. They get different news. They are reading different stories, testimonials, whatever. Those are not presented here.
It’s not to say whether it’s right or wrong, but you have to say, “If you want to solve the problem, it’s 100% truth in this case that this happened on January 6 as presented in the hearings.” If you want to know why people feel the way they do and what you have to ask them and dive deep into that conversation and say, “Let’s lay out the information that we’re reading here and tell me why.” If I want in the future to make things a certain way in this country, I have to understand what is the argument that I will have to get over even if I want to win a certain policy or whatever.
You have to make sure that you don’t have preconditions going into that conversation. Around this specific issue, there are many blues who say, “If someone is not willing to simply accept the fact that this was an insurrection, how could I possibly talk to them?” If you’re going to put a precondition on your willingness to even talk to somebody, odds are the conversation is never going to start. We’re not going to make the progress that you’re hoping that you can convince this person to change their entire worldview. You’re unwilling to even come to the table unless they are already partly there.
What I used to hear on each side was we think that they’re wrong, but they think we’re evil. Although I’m afraid that these days it might be tipping a little more towards, “No, maybe they are evil.” Randy, possibly the most controversial thing we have ever done at Braver Angels, was willing to hold actual debates and discussions on the subject of voter fraud and voter suppression, including the point of view that the 2020 election was stolen by fraud. We got members at Braver Angels who believe that. We might have a member of staff or two, I’m not sure, but that’s a view that’s present within our community.
From our vantage point, that’s a good thing. Not because I agree with that view necessarily, but because, as Randy said, you got to be able to name the divisions and the polarities that exist in America. We’re going to be able to set the stage for an honest conversation that can allow us to reason our way towards truth but to do that from a vantage point of interpersonal trust. I may not, right off the bat, agree with what you have to say, Evan. If I think like, “Evan is a good guy. He means well,” I’m going to at least be willing to listen to you. I’m going to be comfortable sharing my point of view with you.
That’s the precondition that needs to be set before you have that conversation.
Folks who feel that the way to combat dangerous misinformation is to make sure that nobody who holds any of these views has a platform. It’s like sweeping all the dirt under the rug and saying the room is clean. It’s more that you hid the problem from your line of sight, but it’s out there. The dust is there in the air you’re breathing in.
Ultimately, it’s going to come back around in the next election. It’s going to poison people’s trust in the larger democratic system unless you engage their arguments and points of view. If you have the truth, you might be able to reach people with it. The thing that people will tell you is, “If people don’t listen to facts, what does it matter?” Our response to that is it’s not necessarily the case that people are unavailable to facts. They’re unavailable to facts when they do not trust the people who have the facts or who presume to have the facts. They will not trust those people unless they feel that those people mean them well.
They will never feel that those people mean them well if those people relentlessly traffic and stereotype or otherwise demonize them for how they come at the issues. People may again say, “They demonize us.” My response to that is, “That was the eye for an eye thing that leaves the whole world blind.” At a certain point, somebody got to be willing to go first and show a little bit of grace here and try to empathize at least with how people feel, even if you don’t feel their reasoning. You got to break that cycle. That’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to break that cycle of mistrust and contempt.
There was a powerful idea in the book by Steven Pinker a few years ago. He wrote it in 2011, The Better Angels of our Nature. Steven Pinker has worked with us, and we value his perspective. This book reframed a lot of things for me about the arc of human history and the way that we have related to one another. There are a lot of important things in there to understand. One of them that he framed up was when societies were moving past traumatic and collective experiences like civil wars, genocides, and apartheid. The key to moving past that trauma is for at least one side, as John said, “Take the step first to recognize that there will be no perfect justice.”
If we demand perfect justice, that often comes at the expense of the other side, and we may feel that that’s right, but the other side is not going to see it exactly the same way we do. There is going to be a cycle of recrimination. That other side is going to demand to be compensated in a certain way. You have a cycle that never ends. You have to accept the idea that imperfect justice is a worthy goal. Understanding one another and establishing those relationships can be the bridge it takes to accept that you’re not going to get perfect justice. You’re not going to be made perfectly whole by a solution. That has to be okay because there’s no way for anyone to be perfectly whole in this absurdly complicated world of the human condition in which we exist.
You make an important point. That manifests locally and even more federally when you start extrapolating how far this can reach. When you win something 51/49, that’s not a win. What you did was beat the game, but you lost 49%. Those people are angry about a lot of different issues. They will come back and think that’s a loss for them. They have to fight harder on the next one, and they hold that deep. It’s part of their egoic existence. As part of like, “I can’t believe they took that from me.”
When something like Roe happens, we’re seeing in real-time that conservatives are being mobilized to like, “Now we can go all the way. We can make sure that abortion can never be illegal anywhere in this country,” because they want to press their advantage. This is going to be the issue of mobilization in the midterm elections. It will be that ping pong effect.
Early on, one of our workshop participants said something to the effect of, “We have to accept that we’re never going to vanquish the other side. We might as well learn how to work together so we can advance this country.” That’s something that once people hear it, they are like, “That is true. I’m not going to defeat them. They are not going to go away if I manage to mobilize enough people in my base.” What does that mean practically? What I always try to emphasize, especially when it comes to the most passionate supporters and activists behind a cause or political philosophy, is that I share many of those passions. I feel strongly about what is right and wrong and the path we should take as a country.
A lot of progressives talk about impact versus intent. It’s the impact that matters, even if you don’t intend something to be a marvel. They don’t seem to think about it in a practical sense that the impact that they are having by demonizing the other side and making it impossible for even many of their own former allies to join their cause because they have been cast out and have been deemed irredeemable is that they are shooting themselves in the foot and undercutting their own goals.
As an organization, we welcome people from all over the political spectrum. As John mentioned, there does tend to be a critical mass of folks who are constitutionally moderate and want to naturally reach across the aisle. One of the challenges is to communicate with the most passionate and the most strident that there’s a more effective way that you can be advocating for what you believe in. That is the Braver Angels’ way.
For me, it’s something that’s also deeply inspired by Dr. King’s Philosophy of Nonviolence. Part of what Martin Luther King Jr. taught was that we must pursue peace by means of peace. We must pursue social change in a way that allows us to ultimately put ourselves on a path towards reconciling with our enemies. It’s the idea that we do not wish to feed or humiliate them so much as win their trust and friendship.
The thing is that Dr. King was not somebody who, at the same time, retreated an inch from speaking the truth, firmly and righteously. That is the balance that has to be struck. People will oftentimes say, “How can I commit to the work of depolarization without moderating my position or making myself less effective?” You make yourself more effective when you’re able to lean into truth with passion in a way that also shows that you’re taking the moral high ground. Even if somebody disagrees with you, they have a more difficult time aligning your character or thinking that your opposition to them is something personal as opposed to principled.
If you’re coming from a place of principle and good intentions, I can respect you, and I probably have to listen to you because I can write you off a little bit if you’re somebody who I can easily characterize as a cartoon character or some villain. Part of our challenge is to show that the work that we do is empowering people’s ability to advocate and articulate, not disempowering. That’s part of our own challenge here.
It’s creating a culture also at a large scale. Good cultures are building safety between each other and having vulnerability and purpose. It’s sharing that vulnerability and knowing that those people are not bad people because they think differently than you. There are a lot of aspects to this that makes it super challenging for me.
I almost want to set the conversation where if we’re going to engage in a political conversation, let’s recognize that. We have to lay one definition down. People don’t even know the same words. You argue about a thing and don’t even have the same lexicon. That are two different languages. You can’t even get past facts. What is a fact? That shouldn’t be a conversation about what a fact is, but it is. I heard someone say, “A fact is I get all the information I can and make an opinion.”
What’s your take on that way of approaching things, gathering information, and rendering opinion? Are you saying that that’s not the way to do it?
That would lead to me that your opinion is a fact.
They are offering that as a definition of the word fact.
What this gets to is that facts and the interpretation of facts are different things. We might disagree on what the facts are, and it becomes a question of what are our sources, how are we arriving, and our information. That can be a complicated enough conversation as it stands. There is the question of how we are interpreting facts. All sorts of priors come into that. People act like facts are the issue. That is overblown on a certain level. There is an issue with facts, and arriving at incredible information is made complicated by social media.
I will give you an example because it has been on my mind. People are talking about 2000 Mules and Dinesh D’Souza. His first blockbuster documentary is Obama’s America, where he lays out this picture of Barack Obama. I worked for Obama’s campaign way back in the day. I became a Republican with some more conservative leanings. I got a lot of criticisms of Barack Obama’s policies. D’Souza looked at the fact that Barack Obama was the first President with $1 trillion in debts and a $1 trillion deficit. He identified that as a fact in his documentary, and that was a fact. Obama presided over serious financial shortfalls. D’Souza’s interpretation of that fact was remarkable. You can say Obama spent too much money. They are legitimate economic criticisms of the Obama administration.
Isn’t that the nature of becoming president? You spend too much money.
You could say Obama was worse than most, but he came into office with a $400 billion tax shortfall because of the recession. If you look at the numbers, mandatory spending on things like Medicare and Social Security each increased over the course of his four years or so by about $2 trillion. He spent $800 some odd billion on the stimulus package that was to counter the recession. If Republicans had been in office, they would have cut taxes possibly by about that much. The bottom line is that any Democrat or Republican president would have had a $1 trillion deficit and added trillions of dollars to the national debt. There might have been a real difference at the margins, but anybody was going to do that.
D’Souza took that fact and instead contextualized it through the prism of Barack Obama’s father, who was a Kenyan socialist government official, and the fact that Obama had somebody who had left-wing associations and sympathies for social justice causes on the left. D’Souza’s interpretation of the debt was Obama’s deliberately driving us into debt to make America economically equal with the third world.
That was Dinesh D’Souza’s interpretation of those facts. We would agree on the facts, but where is the interpretation coming from? This is why we got to understand where we are coming from. It can get complicated when you’re talking about people, authority, and influence who have other structural incentives for pushing a certain line. If you’re going to make millions of dollars with a TV show or a documentary, that can make it a little bit difficult to back out of a certain narrative. These things all have to be taken into consideration, but to say that interpretation of facts is the key thing here, not facts in and of themselves.
The interpretation of facts is key, not just facts in and of themselves.
There is Daniel Kahneman’s book, which is one of my favorites, Thinking, Fast and Slow. If you read that book, at least my experience was that you start to not be wary of your own judgment. There are many cognitive biases that filter your thought process. Being emotional is one thing. There are recency, frequency, availability, and how intense something happened. It’s all of these social aspects of things. It’s something 50 or 100 of them.
Many of those were quite valuable to us in an evolutionary sense. There is rationality behind how our brains filter the world and interpret it. A lot of people saw the documentary, The Social Dilemma. Someone’s quote from decades ago talked about, “Human beings have paleolithic brains, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.” We can’t evolve our brains fast enough to deal with the environment that we’re in now.
Now we are dealing with things like deepfakes and technology that are vastly overtaken our ability to keep it framed up in our heads about what it’s doing to us. It does seem like the arc of danger in terms of human history is amping up. We need to figure out how to reign in this technology and not necessarily put Pandora’s box close it back up but adjust the incentives that social media companies and other media companies have.
People often talk about de-platforming others. I have a pretty unpopular view among my fellow liberals and progressives that Donald Trump should not have been kicked off of Twitter. What happens there is that he and other demagogues, in my belief, go into more enclosed spaces where the people who support them are in a bubble of reinforcement, and those who kick them off the platform no longer have any influence.
It reinforces echo chambers.
One of the main reasons we’re faced with this problem is because the incentive structure of social media, in general, is about chasing the highest engagement, and the highest engagement is always going to be anger. There is this built-in structure. People talk about the like button, which did the opposite, but now we have other reactions. We have angry reactions on Facebook. It’s an amplification of the angriest voices.
Social media is about chasing the highest engagement, and the highest engagement is always going to be anger.
We have to rethink that. At the same time, we’re trying to rethink how we relate to one another face to face. I know we’re getting close to the end. I know you have been involved in building your community in Santa Monica, listening to the pod with the city manager. I was impressed with his approach to things and his equanimity in the face of some of the trends we have seen. I work with a lot of partners who come to us, like corporations and other organizations that are being affected by this new vitriol that is invading formerly non-political spaces.
We have several initiatives that are focused on that. One of them is called Braver Politics. We want to help our political leaders engage in better conversations, but it’s also regular public officials, the folks who are running municipal departments and school board members, who are experiencing this vitriol like they have never experienced before.
We also have a program called Braver Communities. In Cincinnati, we are taking every angle that we possibly can and throwing it at the wall, seeing what sticks and how many institutions we can engage in a community, be they religious institutions, corporations, nonprofits, or any organization that has a stake in that community. The way that you’re engaging with your community, it’s reminiscent of that. I see you talking to all these different stakeholders and trying to get their take on how we can improve the dynamic.
What Randy’s trying to say, Evan, is, “Are you interested in a job?”
That’s very kind of you. I appreciate that. I believe we can make politics human because I don’t think most people think of politicians like humans, even regular people in the city often. There are a lot of issues with city bureaucracy and how things get done in the process. There are tons of it. If we can make people human, they can be authentic, have these conversations, and start to see that they’re people too, it will create an ecosystem of trust.
The Braver Angels does that, and that is my intention. There are a lot of good people out there. Not every politician is a great person, but there are. I know a bunch that is good people. If they can bring their world to the level of the regular citizen, we don’t know what will happen there. They need to bring that to us and not make it such a black box. Be a human, authentic, show and talk about their kids, which is a genuine connection, building safety and vulnerability.
That is part of what our work aims at. Randy mentioned Braver Politics. We’re addressing particularly local elected officials across the country in that spirit.
Thanks so much for doing this and taking the time.
Let’s not have this be the last conversation.
Thank you.