Better Angels Convention 2019 Day 1

I'm in St. Louis--in a dorm room at Washington U--the night after the first half-day of the Better Angels 2019 Convention.

Better Angels is a national, secular group led by David Blankenhorn aiming at depolarizing America. They specialize in facilitated interactions between "reds" and "blues." The "red-blue workshop," their signature activity, consists of a day of structured activities. Reds and blues (about 7 each), led by two moderators, go through a series of exercises designed to get them honest, get them thinking self-critically, get them listening to their ideological opposites, and finally to get them talking to the other side.

I've been researching Better Angels for about a year. Last fall I went to several red-blue workshops in different parts of the country as an observer. Earlier this year I completed training to become a moderator myself (I have yet to moderate a workshop).

When I tell people about Better Angels, I get one of two reactions. Either the enterprise seems self-evidently praiseworthy or transparently unethical.

The praisers tend to align with Better Angels' own rationale for acting. Political polarization is tearing America apart. BA can help make these disagreements less toxic, more productive. The goal, BA insists, is not finding a "happy medium" where disagreement evaporates, nor is it embracing some stress-free nirvana of puppies and rainbows. Rather, as Blankenhorn has clarified, the goals involve "accurate disagreement" (making sure the disagreements aren't based on false stereotypes) and face-to-face (rather than distanced/digitized) interactions that make dehumanization difficult. Those who find BA laudable affirm these goals.

The condemners hear a bit about BA and read a glaring subtext: can't you be a little less angry? And usually, the "you" equals some kind of marginalized or structurally oppressed group. Can't you be less angry, black people? Women? LGBTQ folk? Immigrants? Native Americans? and so forth. Such movements have to do work overtime simply to make their plights known and noticed by the powers that be. To get there, they have to generate tons of energy, passion, and outrage/anger. No one cares about a problem no one's upset about.

Yet the majority's initial reaction to criticism/outrage tends to take the form of anger at the outrage--that is, anger at those saying stop killing/hurting/exploiting/mistreating us--rather than attention to the cause of the outrage. This shoot-the-messenger mentality often fuels a kind of patronizing call to civility: Maybe people would listen to you more if you wouldn't yell or block highways or sit at lunch counters or have die-ins? Or even:  I wonder if it isn't your attitude that's creating a lot of the problems for you rather than this supposed mistreatment you keep screeching about? 

Mind you, I don't think BA endorses anything of the sort. But, if you're a front-line activist for a marginalized group who spends twenty-three out of every twenty-four hours fighting the majority's apathy or skepticism about the life-and-death struggle you're going through... Well, a call to love thine enemy and approach each other on equal grounds can seem like the majority's same old willful ignorance repackaged and rebranded as the solution for what ails America today.

It's hard to care about depolarization, in other words, when unarmed black men are being shot/mass incarcerated, when children are taken from their parents at the border, when the planet is burning, etc.

The hope of Better Angels is that it can get people to value a kind of civility alongside their political convictions. The audacity of Better Angels is that it asks people to value a kind of civility alongside their political convictions.

More tomorrow

JF