A liberal and a Tea Party Patriot enter into a conversation. What happens next? A screaming match? A bitter Twitter feud?
With the proper parameters, they just might find common ground.
Six years ago, Joan Blades, a progressive political activist and co-founder of Moveon.org, and Mark Meckler, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, sat in Blades’ living room. Instead of hurling insults at each other, they discovered that they shared similar ideas — so much so that they ended up launching the Coalition for Public Safety, i.e. the largest bipartisan group working to reform the justice system.
That meeting was part of a series that Blades co-founded in 2010 called Living Room Conversations. Today, Living Room Conversations is a California-based nonprofit that works to support civil discourse in spaces that have traditionally played host to such conversations: our living rooms.
The living room has traditionally been a place where people could gather and discuss politics and culture. With Living Room Conversations, the actual physical location is irrelevant — a “living room” might very well mean a coffee shop, park or library. And the purpose of these conversations is not to solve a problem but to try and humanize one another via thoughtful dialogue.
“The goal is to have a rich conversation where the intent is to understand and to listen, and not necessarily change somebody’s mind but to find a connection with them as a human being,” Mary Gaylord, the managing partner of Living Room Conversations, told NationSwell.
In our ever-more-connected world, many people feel that society is actually growing more disconnected, as people turn to screens instead of engaging in face-to-face interactions. Sherry Turkle, director of MIT’s Initiative on Technology and Self, found that people who spend more time connecting online are more isolated in their everyday lives than people who are largely unplugged. Turkle found that life online often leads to emotional disconnection, mental fatigue and loneliness. In this way, Living Room Conversations functions as a corrective to the above, providing a chance for people to connect in real life.
Living Room Conversations isn’t the first group to support such civic dialogue. Ron Gross, who joined a recent Living Room Conversation, founded Conversations New York, a local group that hosts free public gatherings. Democracy Cafe, National Conversation Project and Better Angels all have a similar goal to spark conversations and find common ground among diverse groups.
“Our country is in a crisis right now with the disconnection and the discord and the really toxic sort of way that people are lining up on sides and feeling really disconnected,” Gaylord said.
A group of six people, mostly strangers to one another, joined a Living Room Conversation on a recent Tuesday evening at the Project for Public Spaces, a nonprofit dedicated to building community in public spheres. The group sat around a coffee table with hummus, cookies and sparkling water, and launched into a dialogue centered on the topic “The America We Want to Be.”
“The world we live in is incredibly stressed and incredibly disconnected, even though it’s incredibly connected — digitally — but that doesn’t mean connected human-wise,” said Jay Williams, the sales and partnership head at a mediation company. That disconnection is what led him to Living Room Conversations, he said.
Each Living Room Conversation uses a conversation guide that anyone can find on the nonprofit’s open-source site. Living Room Conversations offers more than 100 guides on topics like gun violence, healthcare, tribalism and forgiveness. The nonprofit suggests finding a group of four to seven people with different backgrounds, religious beliefs, political views or perspectives to engage in a conversation.
Each meeting starts with “general value” questions, such as, “What sense of purpose guides your life?” (It’s Living Room Conversation’s version of an ice-breaker.) “These core values, it doesn’t matter where you fall in a political or racial spectrum, those are things that almost everybody cares about,” Gaylord said.
Williams said creating a positive future, one where his two children could freely travel to any part of the world, guides his life. For Chandler Simmons, a video editor, he looks to honesty and authenticity. Meg Walker, the senior vice president at Project for Public Spaces, wants to leave the world a better place than how she found it — a sentiment that the entire group agreed with.
The discussion then turned to harder-hitting questions like, how does your ideal modern America reflect its founding aspirations and past? Or what role, if any, do you experience our history playing in America today?
The group also discussed the country’s founding rhetoric around the concept of “the pursuit of happiness.” A pursuit that Morey Bean, a community architect, felt that many should reassess. “You keep hearing that there’s the pursuit of happiness, and my thing is that maybe we should stop pursuing and know that we’ve got this abundance [of happiness] right here and right now.”
Chandler Simmons, a video editor, agreed, adding that at some point, someone will suffer for the gluttony of another. “Without any awareness of where the limit is, then what can we expect? Someone at some point in some part of the planet is going to suffer if we’re pursuing happiness nonstop.”
Although conversations start in the metaphorical living room, the skills, ideas and new perspectives reverberate outside of any one dialogue.
For example, these conversations have given Gaylord the chance to practice the art of listening. With a seven-member family that bridges the political spectrum, her practice with strangers has shaped her approach to family dinners, Thanksgiving meals and holidays.
“I’ve developed the capacity to be curious and not so reactive,” Gaylord said. “I practice all those skills and then when I’m out in the world … I can bring those skills to those relationships.”
Walker, who tends to lean left politically, said her first Living Room Conversation gave her new strategies to approach conversations with her right-leaning cousins. As her family heads to a birthday dinner later this month, she said she plans to use these newfound skills.
Blades started Living Room Conversations in 2010 when she noticed her friends all held similar political beliefs. Blades, a progressive and passionate climate change advocate living in Berkeley, California, found it challenging to find people on the other side of the table. She wanted to better understand what was motivating people on the right side of the political spectrum to think and vote the way they do.
So she sought out friendships with more conservative-leaning people and had genuine conversations with them. “She decided her passion was to work in a space of building bridges between people,” Gaylord said. From there, Blades and Amanda Roman formed a bipartisan friendship and came up with the idea to create structured guides that anyone can use.
“There are enough players in this space now of bridge-building that I think a movement is forming,” Gaylord said. “It’s not about ‘kumbaya, we all have to agree,’ but it is about, ‘Hey how do we disagree but do it a little bit more agreeably.’”
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Tag: political polarization
Can Red and Blue America Ever See Eye to Eye? She’s Betting on It
In the days after Donald Trump emerged victorious in the 2016 presidential election, Paula Green watched as the shock and disbelief gripping her small New England community began to give way to a deep, dismal sadness.
The residents of liberal Leverett, Massachusetts, where Green lives, had overwhelmingly voted for Hillary Clinton, and many were struggling with the same questions: What had inspired their conservative countrymen to vote the way they had? And what, if anything, could help them find common political ground in the future?
Green, a psychologist with more than 30 years of field experience as an international peacebuilder and facilitator in war-torn communities across Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East, wasted no time. Together with other members of the Leverett Peace Commission — the local organization she and a few friends had formed years earlier to protest America’s seemingly ceaseless wars — Green organized a get-together at the local library. Somewhere between 60 and 70 stunned residents turned out to talk and mourn, but also brainstorm a way forward.
Within a few months, the Leverett residents formed Hands Across the Hills, an organization dedicated to bridging partisan divides through structured dialogue. In October 2017, more than a dozen of them met face-to-face with a sister coalition of 11 members from Letcher County, Kentucky — a conservative coal-mining community nestled deep in the heart of Appalachia — for three days of music, potlucks and discussions. The results from that weekend, and another between the two groups in the spring of 2018, exceeded even Green’s expectations about the transformative power of compassion — especially in an America that seems more polarized now than at any time in its history.
NationSwell spoke with Green about the ways in which simply initiating a conversation can impact relationships and promote empathy, and how Hands Across the Hills plans to help bridge the deep-seated political divides that define today’s America.
NationSwell: It’s just after the 2016 election, and you’ve decided that you want to partner with a sister city to have this dialogue series — what was it like even trying to find a community willing to do that, given the political climate?
Green: We looked for conservative people in our own town or a neighboring town and discovered pretty rapidly that we couldn’t find anyone who wanted to talk to us. People’s emotions were pretty raw from the election, and polarization had set in already. That’s when one of our members found Ben Fink, who works for [the Appalachian arts nonprofit] Appalshop in Whitesburg, Kentucky, and who was writing about dialogue and similar work. We reached out to him and eventually formed a partnership, and that’s how we wound up with a coal community in Kentucky as our first partner.
NationSwell: What specifically about the election was so troubling to you, besides the obvious partisanship of it?
Green: We saw immediately that people were splitting into enemy camps, and those enemy camps were demonizing each other. Because that’s been my work internationally, I recognized the danger signs of so much dehumanization happening in the country. I wanted to step in, and this provided me with the perfect vehicle to do that.
NationSwell: What was the thinking behind having conversations as a means to bridge that divide?
Green: My international work has focused on supporting people in local contexts, in war-torn and war-recovering countries, who invited me and my organization to help them sort out how they could restore what had been before the war. That of course was extremely difficult, because there had been armed conflict in most of these places, and people were very fragile and frightened. But they also knew that unless they joined with the other side of the conflict, they would not be able to rebuild their community.
NationSwell: I’m sure some issues are bound to spur some extreme reactions. What do you do to deescalate the situation when people’s temperatures get hot?
Green: Those three-day dialogues were all very carefully designed to maximize interaction between the Kentuckians and the Massachusetts people. Each day we’d have potluck meals and music and dance and art and theater games and homestays. Each of those activities was carefully chosen to enhance relationships so that the transformation occurred not just in the dialogue but in all the activities that contributed to that feeling of goodness and well-being that emanated from the group.
Nevertheless, tempers do rise in these situations, and my role as the facilitator is to manage that anger so that it doesn’t spill over into an attack. Sometimes it calls for a moment of silence and reflection, or for people to reframe their statements in a way that is non-attacking, or it involves people going from being in a big circle to being in small groups of three or four. We make sure that nobody feels they need to withdraw from the group because they’ve been too hurt, while at the same time keeping us really honest about our feelings.
NationSwell: If you could zoom ahead into the future, what does Hands Across the Hills ultimately look like to you? Do you have plans to scale, at this point?
Green: If I could wave my magic wand, I’d want to spread these dialogues all around the country to tackle the different issues that are polarizing us. I’m actually working with an institution called the Alliance for Peacebuilding to see if we can do some spreading of dialogue around the country. We’re only in the talking stages right now — there are many organizations attempting dialogues across divides, and I’m in support of all their various efforts. But most of these groups only allot a day or two, and what I like about the model we’re working with is that it can take people deeper because it allows for more time.
NationSwell: You mentioned that you recently led a second dialogue series in South Carolina, which focused on race. What that was like?
Green: It was very challenging. Race is a fundamental divider in our country and has been a national tragedy for 400 years — it needs to be dealt with on every level. We had people from Massachusetts and South Carolina, and I also brought in some of the Kentucky people to keep them in the loop. Each group was of mixed race, and we spent three days having deep, often painful, but very, very productive dialogues. We didn’t talk about Trump or politics — the only topic was race and racism.
NationSwell: I’m impressed that you can have a dialogue like that go off without a hitch.
Green: It was beyond my expectations. This one worried me, because this is a 400-year-old history with such endless suffering. People talked about their first experiences of discovering race and racism, and the wounds of African Americans who have been at the mercy of racist attitudes in this country. We talked about racism as the water we all swim in, which we don’t even necessarily notice all the time because we are all swimming in it, and its total, pernicious effect on the members of our society.
NationSwell: More so than exacting a political agenda, is that the endgame here? Seeing and understanding diverse perspectives for what they are?
Green: What we are ultimately aiming for is for people to rehumanize the “other.” There was a tremendous gap — the people from Kentucky, their region was the opposite of ours, going 85–90 percent for Trump. We didn’t run away from the issues but had conversations in the spirit of, ‘We’re not here to change each others’ votes, or change each others’ opinions on the controversial issues of our day. We are here to listen and learn and deepen our understanding.” Everybody wants better medical care, everybody wants better schools, everybody wants safer streets. The question is, how do we talk together to find common ground on how to get them?
NationSwell: But just to push back on that a bit — you’re naming things that are pretty unambiguous in their popularity. What do you do with issues like climate change or gun control, where not everyone agrees on how or whether we should approach them?
Green: Climate change is pretty black and white at this point, of course, but we understand why people whose only livelihood has been coal for a hundred years defend the industry. Defending coal means objecting to climate change data. So we understand where they’re coming from — it’s not out of stubborness; it’s out of desperation for jobs, for work, for feeding their families. Understanding that helps us to be compassionate toward their situation and work together to find policies that will change their situation.
People have attended our [dialogue series] in numbers far exceeding our expectations. It may look like we’re hopelessly divided, but we want to show people that there are ways to bridge that and to act together for the common good.
NationSwell: So in other words, there’s a way to change yourself without changing your worldview — or changing your mind.
Green: People change their minds. They expand their worldview, they open up to things they hadn’t seen or understood before. The way I think about it is that these encounters are a wonderful prelude to a commitment to institutional change. It’s about standing up for each other — realizing we’re in this together. We are tied together in this, we’re not separate.
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