There’s no shortage of irony in the fact that Thanksgiving, ostensibly our national day of gratitude and unity, falls mere weeks after the midterm elections, which are almost certainly guaranteed to expose the many ways in which we despise one another. Good luck avoiding politics while you share giblets and stuffing with your loudmouth uncle.
So much ink has been spilled about the country’s current spasm of toxic tribalism, but very few people are actually doing anything about it. I recently met some people who are. Better Angels is a nonprofit, grassroots, bipartisan citizens’ “movement” intent on bringing reds and blues together to talk in workshops across the country, in a broader attempt at “depolarizing America.” The group’s name comes from Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address and his famous appeal to the country on the brink of the Civil War. He proposed that the nation could reaffirm its bonds if Americans listened to the “better angels of our nature.”
I attended the group’s first-ever convention this past June. In fact, my team from Nightline followed two of the most unlikely political bedfellows imaginable as they road-tripped to the event together. Greg Smith is a retired police chief and construction worker from rural southwest Ohio; he’s a devout evangelical and a Trumpist. Kouyar Mostashfi, an Iranian immigrant, is a computer engineer who resides in suburban Dayton, where he is an active member of the local Democratic party. They live only a few miles apart but might as well inhabit separate planets. And yet, through participating in Better Angels workshops, they have become real friends.
As they drove from Ohio to the convention site in Virginia, Smith and Mostashfi talked about everything from abortion to gun rights, all while managing to keep it civil. How? Fittingly, Better Angels’ approach was crafted by a marriage counselor who has developed practical, actionable tips that we can all use to survive encounters with the opposite tribe, and maybe even have a polite dialogue with family, friends, or colleagues.
Getty Imagesskynesher
1) Don’t try to change minds.
Per Bill Doherty, the gray-haired, preternaturally affable marriage counselor who designed the Better Angels approach to interpartisan dialogue, if your interlocutor senses that “your goal is to show them how stupid they are, they’re going to put their defenses up.” Instead, go in with the goal of simply trying to understand where people are coming from.
2) Make “I” statements rather than truth statements.
For example, a Democrat might have better luck saying to a Trump supporter, “I’m worried that President Trump may be violating the emoluments clause of the Constitution” rather than “The president is irredeemably corrupt, and you’re a horrible person for supporting him.”
3) Don’t characterize the other side’s opinion; just characterize your own.
For instance, a pro-Trumper would be advised to say, “I’m worried about higher taxes damaging the economy” rather than “You Democrats just want to feed at the trough of a bloated welfare state.”
The goal is not to convince people to abandon their core principals. Instead, it’s to reach what Doherty calls “accurate disagreement.” When you see that members of the other side have reasons for believing what they do—even if you don’t agree with them—it can have the effect of humanizing them. It’s a powerful corrective to the news and social-media echo chambers most of us inhabit, where our opponents are demonized and…
