Matthew Altice | GNP contributor
America is not as politically divided as it seems, and groups in Craven County and at ECU are trying to keep it that way.
The secret sauce is getting political partisans to talk with each other, said Steve Warshaw, the eastern region coordinator for North Carolina Braver Angels. The state organization is part of a national one that facilitates civil conversation among partisans. The goal is to get them to see each other as fellow humans.
The Greenville News Project spent the spring months looking to answer the question, “How can the partisan divide be bridged?”
It found that talking to one another works. Braver Angels finds that 8 in 10 of the people who participate in its Red/Blue Workshops say they now understand the experiences, beliefs and feelings of people on the other side. Nearly as many say the workshops show them that both sides have a lot in common.
It found Braver Angels is active in North Carolina, and its closest workshops to Greenville are held an hour away in New Bern. ECU holds its own workshops, called Dinner and Discourse, three times a semester.
Emerging divide
Today’s deep political divide started in 1994 when Americans started grouping into hard-right and hard-left camps, says the Pew Research Center. It finds there is little left of a political center of moderates.
Pew’s surveys show that ideologically, 9 in 10 Republicans are way to right of the political middle ground, and 9 in 10 Democrats are way to the left of it. Both sides “have grown more … cohesive” in their ideology, and each sees the other as a “threat to the nation’s well-being,” Pew finds.
Nearly 60% of Republicans and somewhat more than half of Democrats say they find it stressful to talk politics with people with whom they disagree, Pew says.
Brown University has tracked America’s political temperature since 1978, and it finds the negativity between Democrats and Republicans has steadily intensified over the years.
In 2016, after that year’s particularly divisive presidential election, Braver Angels was launched in hopes of lowering the partisan heat.
Grassroots bridge-building
Braver Angels was founded by David Blankenhorn, Bill Doherty and David Lapp, and they held their first Red/Blue Workshop in Ohio with about two dozen supporters of then president-elect Donald Trump and his rival, Hillary Clinton.
Since then, the workshops have spread across the United States, covering 41 of the 50 states. Each state has at least one coordinator who facilitates branches set up in cities and towns.
Braver Angels settled in North Carolina in June 2018. “We came to the Triangle in North Carolina to set up the workshops and started a chapter called Braver Angels Alliance of Central North Carolina,” said state coordinator Steve Warshaw.
As of the end of 2020 there were 518 Braver Angels members in six branches across the state. For Greenville residents, the closest branch is in New Bern. It opened this spring and is led by Steve Skiffington.
The Red/Blue Workshops work a certain way. “We have a balance of Reds and Blues, and it is a total of 16 people but eight on both sides, and there are two moderators,” Warsaw says. “There are three conversation segments, and then there is an evaluation to end the workshops.”
First is the “stereotype segment,” where Red and Blue partisans list what they see and think of each other. Then in the second segment, the partisans sit in a circle and ask two questions of each other to spark a dialogue about politics. In the final segment the partisans break into smaller groups where they come up questions they genuinely want to know about each other. They all come together to close out the workshop with an evaluation.
“I hear a lot of ‘I don’t agree on policies’ from people, but they do see values in each other when meetings have ended,” says Warshaw, who has moderated workshops.
Talking works
Skiffington is already seeing some success in the New Bern group. “We manage to get an equal Red/Blue at the workshops, and the comments we got back from that were all positive,” he says.
The group is also doing work outside of Red/Blue workshops, and it has plans to partner with the YMCA on charity events. “We’re new, and I’m sure as we keep at it, we will grow,” Skiffington says. “There is much to be done to raise our profile in New Bern and other counties close by.
At East Carolina University, the Center for Leadership and Engagement works to bridge the partisan divide with its Dinner and Discourse. The workshops average about 20 student participates and are moderated by student-members of the Pirates Votes team, says Alex Dennis, a senior assistant director.
“Three years ago, when we started doing this, we thought of having a good program in the discussion of democracy on campus,” Dennis says. “Politics kind of ran some students off … [so] we did the dinner part to it, and it started attracting more people over time.”
Dinner and Discourse works along the lines of the Braver Angels workshops. “We have food and eat first, and we have two students moderate the thing,” Dennis says.
Then “we choose videos from both sides of the [political] spectrum and topics that are from both sides and have big open discussions that a very insightful and really let our students voice their concerns and their views about things.”
Dennis says students who attend the Dinner and Discourse “enjoy learning why others feel that way about topics and ideas.” More than half of the students who attend the event say they are motivated to promote and create civil discussion about politics, he adds.
For its part, in October 2019 Braver Angels held on-campus workshops at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Afterward, nearly 8 in 10 students who participated said they felt the workshops made them more willing to start constructive conversations with people on the other side of the political divide.
Future of political civility
Peter Francia, a political science professor at ECU, remembers a time of partisan civility of embodied by President Ronald Reagan, a Republican, and Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, a Democrat.
It was the 1980s, and “Reagan and O’Neill were still friendly with one another, respectful of one another, and were willing to reach political compromises when their country needed both to work together for the common good,” Francia says.
He adds, “a return to civility is what we need now.”
Altice reported this story for the Spring 2023 course, In-depth Reporting Capstone.
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