Better Angels Convention 2019 Day 3

Another long but productive day.

So, everyone attending Better Angels (the "delegates" from each state) have name badges with lanyards. Each lanyard is color-coded to the delegate's ideological side--red or blue. Various activities--breakout groups, planning sessions, feedback times--all make use of the identifiers to help us break out of echo chambers. "Find someone of the opposite color" is a common instruction.

Such IDs make every casual interaction charged with significance. You're either reaching across the aisle or talking with a coalition. There's meet and greets involved in every conference. But here we're encouraged (not even explicitly) to be extra outgoing, make ourselves known to strangers, and build some connections. You'll see plenty of blues hanging with blues and reds hanging with reds. But the red-blue interactions are really what the organizers want.

I made friends with a red from Alabama (I'll keep his exact info mum for now). We hung out a lot. As we did so, we found ourselves framed by various BA photographers on the lookout for cross-party pals. Eventually we got pulled aside for an interview. I'll post that if/when it's made public.

I've found the red/blue lanyards useful in the inevitable "so what do you do as a theatre prof with Better Angels?" question. I say I read the event through a performance lens, pointing out how so much of BA's Convention involves us performing--or suppressing our performances of--our political leanings. We perform them via lanyards and speeches. But, in fishbowl exercises and in listening more generally, we all consent to the emotional labor of schooling our expressions and responses. Thus the common complaint in red-blue workshops: it's so hard not to roll your eyes!

Such emotional labor is, like civility itself, a vexed enterprise. Marginalized groups usually are made to perform more such labor than privileged groups, so asking this labor of them is no small thing. Most everyone seems up for the challenge, though. I've met and had rewarding conversations with so many people.

Do rewarding conversations solve polarization? Of course not, not alone. But they are something other than affective polarization. They establish a modest little utopian space of realized moral imagination. That it can happen--at least on small scales--disrupts the idea that polarization is inevitable.

More tomorrow,

JF