Hello.

I'm April Chatham-Carpenter.

And I'm Glen White.

Welcome to A Braver Arkansas.

This is a show about how Arkansans can talk to each other across political and other differences, and why that matters now.

We hope the show will encourage you, our listeners, to find ways to get more involved in your communities in ways that make sense for you.

April and I are both longtime active members of Braver Angels.

It's a national organization that has a mission of encouraging people to engage with those on the other side, and to do that with respect.

That mission is based on the belief that in a constitutional democratic republic like we have, it's imperative that people with differing ideas are able to talk with each other and find common ground on problems we face.

We're going to be explaining much more in today's show about what Braver Angels is, and what we do here in the state, and why we think a television show is a useful place to demonstrate this work.

You know, the inability to talk to the other side or to compromise because of extreme polarization is not good for the country or our citizens or for our relationships.

And that's why this work matters, and it's why we're doing this show.

So, April, it's time for folks to know a little bit about us, where we come from, about Braver Angels.

Why don't you start off and tell us a little bit about how you got involved with Braver Angels and the kind of impact it had on you so far?

Sure.

Well, Glen, it's your fault.

Actually, I remember you had a cold call for me as a at the university where I teach and asked me if I knew anything about the organization called Better Angels at the time was the name of the organization, and I didn't.

And as you started talking about it, it really made me realize how much I could benefit from an organization like this.

And I'll tell you why.

I had been a student of communication for over 40 years as a professor who teaches a relationship communication, conflict management kinds of classes.

But I never had taken that work of conflict management into the realm of politics.

Maybe it's because I grew up in the South where people were saying, don't talk about politics or religion because you might hurt your relationships.

Well, as I began to see that both sides, all sides were treating each other with contempt, with mockery.

And I just I'm like, okay, I just made me want to not be engaged at all.

I was getting tired of it.

The presidential election cycle was was vitriolic.

It was hostile.

The people towards each other and the fans of the of the people, the people who were supporting each side.

And then Covid came along and my gosh, the whole idea of masking and not masking became a kind of a flashpoint.

And people weren't agreeing.

I had to make sure students were wearing masks in a classroom, and some of them didn't agree with that.

And my own family, we had different opinions about it.

My relationships actually felt really fragile during that time, so it made me even more want to kind of back off and just stick my head in the sand and not want to do anything with politics.

And then, you know, you show up at my door and you said, do you know where you stand politically?

At that point, I didn't even know for sure if I was conservative.

I grew up being very conservative with my faith and my belief and personal responsibility and community impact family values.

But I didn't want to say I was conservative or liberal because of the culture wars that were going on, and I felt like I'd be attacked.

There were people in my family that were much more conservative than I was, and yet when I hung out with them, I would become, like pretty conservative, more even more conservative like they were.

And then there were people at work and sometimes at my church and just friends that I had outside that were more liberal.

And I kind of hang out with them and I would be like, hey, don't really like the way they're talking about the other side, but I would just sit there and not say anything.

And so I oftentimes felt caught in the middle.

This kind of, you know, it doesn't matter what I say, doesn't matter what I do because I'm not going to change their opinion or the way they talk or believe about the other side on either side.

And so I avoided conversations.

I muted people on Facebook, even family members online, because I didn't.

What they said made me mad.

And so I want to respond back.

And then people that I didn't even know would respond back to me, and I'm like, this is no, we're just going to not do this.

I would drew from it.

And yet here I am teaching classes on conflict management and on good communication and good relationships.

And I'm like, I'm really not practicing the communication principles that I teach about.

And I came to realize that it's really harder when there are people that you want to talk to are people that you love, because you don't want to lose those relationships.

It's one thing if I'm on social media and I don't ever see those people again, but but the people that I love, I don't want to lose those relationships.

So when you came to me and I started looking into the mission of Braver Angels and they were talking about good speaking and listening skills, I'm like, that's what I teach.

Why wouldn't I be interested in learning more about how to better have conversations in a way that I could listen to a person, not to try to persuade them, not to try to make an argument, but that I could really listen and then make them want to listen to me as well in the way that I was treating them.

And could I do that in a political context, is what I, I had to ask myself, and so ended up developing a class that I began teaching on listening and civil dialog.

As I got more involved in Braver Angels and realized that I needed to continue working on hearing hearing both sides and approaching conversations on any topic, regardless of the side or the position, taken with humility and curiosity.

So what it has done for me is it's made me less fearful to have these kinds of conversations.

It's made me more intentional and mindful about how I have them.

And really, I'm still learning.

I don't do it perfectly.

There are times in which and I call it my classes, my lizard brain takes over and I just just say things in the heat of the moment.

I mean, you can ask the people that I work with and my family and they'll say, yeah, she's still learning.

And so but I think it's been a great influence in my life for all those reasons.

You know, it's interesting you talk about how you had your communication background in training, and then you learned some things from Braver Angels, which covered the things that you already kind of knew, but you hadn't thought about applying them to a political context.

And I had the same story, actually, because as a psychologist at the time, I'm retired now, but I was very familiar with the kind of things that the brave Ranger's skills are based on.

Their based on a lot of therapy kind of techniques, which are obviously communication as well.

So I was the same way as you were.

I saw that those skills and those concepts, and in new context, it was like I hadn't really thought about it before in the past, it was about, oh, it was about dealing with families and helping them communicate better, or in marriages and or parent and child and then, okay, this new way of thinking about it in terms of political differences in people on different sides politically came up.

So that's we have that in common.

One other thing that I think might be helpful to mention, we talked about you being more conservative.

I tend to be a little more on the liberal side, little a little moderate, I would say a moderate.

I'm playing with you, I know, but, you know, we use a term, a couple of terms that we may use from time to time is probably helpful for the listeners and viewers to understand this red and blue.

So when we're talking about red, we're referring to the kind of the conservative end of things, you know, and blue refers to the more liberal or liberal or progressive way of thinking about politics.

So are people in the middle purples then red and blue.

Purple, actually, we've heard that used several times.

So that's true.

And I'm sure there are people who would use the term green, you know, like the, the Green Party environmentalists.

But generally we the red, blue and purple because the truth is, no one is all red, no one is all blue.

We're all somewhere in the spectrum.

And sometimes we have some red and we have some blue and we have some purple.

Most of us in real life, we're all over the place.

Well, I know it's your fault that I got into Braver Angels because you introduced me to it.

What brought you into Braver Angels?

Well, okay, I mentioned being a psychologist for a long time and retired in 2018.

I have maybe a little bit longer, but what got me into Braver Angels was I knew that retirement was coming up, and I said, I have to figure out what to do with myself because it is not going to work well for me.

I know myself enough to know I would not do well in retirement.

If all I do is play golf and then sit at home and eat bonbons, that's not going to be good for Glen.

So I decided I need to figure out what I'm while I'm still working.

I need to figure out what I'm going to do with my time afterwards.

And I've always, over the years been someone who tends to do public service kinds of things.

I've done different things.

I was active in Sierra Club for a number of years, so I started looking at things and I tried this and I tried that.

And then at some point, I was watching Fareed Zakaria Global Public Square on CNN a number of years ago, my favorite news analysis program, and he interviewed David Blinken Horn, who was, as you know, one of the co-founders of Braver Angels.

And so I did that, and I was like, I like what he's having to say.

He was telling the story of this new organization he upstart called at the time Better Angels, and we changed to Braver Angels.

So I said, well, I got to check that out.

And at the same time, this was around 2016.

I was really worried about the the kind of things you were talking about, the polarization, people hating on each other because of their different political beliefs and the way things are going in the country, just worried me a great deal.

And so I said, you know what?

I'm a social scientist.

I know how to look at the science.

So I started exploring the social sciences literature and found a lot of things.

In fact, I found out more than I bargained for.

It's a very complicated subject to find out the things that contribute to our beliefs and how we change beliefs and things like that.

So I'll bet we'll hear a lot more about that in our program as we go on.

I plan on it.

Yes, I'm kind of nerd it out when it comes to the research on polarization and things like that.

So I will be getting into that later.

But at least at this point, I was starting to learn about that and hearing about the better angels thing, I immediately went out and joined.

Well, what happened was I joined there.

So I belong to the national organization, but there was nothing in Arkansas.

After a few months, got an email to me and maybe about a ten or so other people apparently in the central Arkansas region, basically saying, hey, you guys are in Arkansas.

You might want to talk to each other and see if you can get something going.

So some of us communicated by email, and we wound up agreeing to meet for lunch one day at the At.

I think it's called cafe 42 or was at the time.

It's the restaurant at the Clinton Presidential Library.

So we came, didn't know each other, and we talked about, you know, the organization better Angels at the time and says, okay, what do we want to do?

At some point we decided, do we want to do something?

The decision was made that we'd get one red and one blue leaning person, and we'd collaborate on a an op ed opinion editorial column in one of the local papers.

So we thought about different possibilities.

What happened was around that time, I went and talked to the editor at Arkansas Business and told her a little bit about what we were about, and she was interested.

So me and the red leaning person collaborated on an editorial and it was published in Arkansas Business.

That was our first one.

We've had a bunch done since then, but that's kind of how that went.

In terms of other aspects, I would tell you that my social media behavior changed quite a bit as a result of the influence of Braver Angels.

I started thinking about, because I've always had strong opinions politically, and I wasn't afraid to share them.

I know I've heard them and social media and with other people, but when I got to Brave Rangers and started hearing the skills in the approach, I said, you know, maybe I if I'm going to be involved in this organization, I need to tone it down a bit and follow more of what we're supposed to be preaching, you know, practice what you preach.

And so I did that and interesting thing happened.

And this is a lesson for our viewers that social media and the algorithm is based upon engagement.

And that's usually through strong emotions like fear and anger.

When I toned down what I had to say on social media, I got a lot fewer engagements.

I got a lot fewer likes, and so be prepared for that.

It's a good thing to do.

But, you know, if you really get off on all the interaction and the strong emotions on social media, that's what they're counting on to sell their advertising.

And you'll see a reduction in how you get reaction from other people.

I think it's a good thing and we can talk more about that later.

But that's one of the other things I had change about my own behavior.

I think the the other thing is that in terms of personal relationships, it made a difference.

But where it was really important was with my family.

I have a family that largely, not entirely, but largely leans pretty conservative there in another state.

So we don't see each other very often.

And so when I come visit, we get into discussions about politics.

And I became aware through braver angels and the understanding of the way to approach this, that I wasn't really accomplishing anything.

I wasn't changing anybody's mind.

And if anything, that either get more angry and dug in or what usually happened was like, let's not talk about that.

Let's not talk politics.

And so we didn't.

But I have learned and I continue to learn the lesson, that we need to be a little more mindful about how we approach people and how we deal with things like that.

So I'm just thinking, you know, I still have a long way to go, but, you know, I'm working at doing better and following the skills and with the expectation and the belief in some evidence that when you do that, the improvement in relationships will follow.

So it's interesting.

There's some things that I hear in common between us.

One is that we approach kind of these political conversations differently.

I mean, that doesn't sound like it's in common, but we had to make a choice for you.

It was really on before Braver Angels.

You would you would actually be more forthright, maybe in what you were saying, and say it in a way that might get some reactions.

For me, I chose to do kind of the opposite of that.

We both made choices, which is the common ground that I was trying to think, but I chose to the opposite, which is that I would basically just not choose to engage at all.

But we found in Braver Angels a way to to to help us improve our skills in interacting with others and especially with our families and other people.

So I see that in common.

Well, let's move in and talk just a little bit about kind of bridging, getting ready to talk about braver angels and what we do, you know, politics.

I think, Glenn, you and I agree, it's one of our greatest divides.

I mean, the Pew Research Group has done multiple polls, kinds of studies and have found that has found that politics is even a greater divider these days than age or gender or, you know, economic status even or even more than even race these days, which was surprising to me.

And I was reading about that, and I know that it also has impacted our relationships greatly.

Yeah, makes a big difference.

In fact, one of the studies I've seen recently is that 37% of Americans have actually ended a relationship over political differences.

Mostly it's about friendships.

But I know personally people who it's cost them in terms of family.

There's I hear stories about work.

The common thread there is the negative impact on relationships.

That's critical.

We'll get to other things, including the impact on our government later, but that's a key.

Yeah.

So braver angels.

We'll talk more about how it got started in a little bit, but their response to kind of this polarization was to start teaching skills.

Right.

So the speaking and listening skills that will be covering in this, this series, this episode, these episodes coming up, and really the emphasis is not on changing beliefs of the other person, which makes some people feel uncomfortable.

Right.

Because some people, all of us can think, you know, I am right on a particular kinds of setting or situation or topic.

And they want to like, persuade the other people to believe that, that they're wrong.

But this is not really about persuasion in that way.

It's about listening.

It's about building relationships, building civic friendships, and really building things that can lead to the recognition that we have community problems in our individual communities wherever we live, whether it be rural or urban, that we need each other to come together to help solve.

And that's why we have braver angels, and that's why we're talking about braver angels.

So I think it would be helpful at this point to make sure that the viewers understand better what Braver Angels is.

You've heard a little bit about it, but April, can you tell us a little bit about the history kind of how it started, because you've been involved at a national level for quite a while.

You know, all the the national leaders fill us in on those aspects.

So I started in 2016, actually, there was a group of people in a small area in Ohio that they were neighbors.

They had been friends.

Kids went to school with each other.

And at the time, what happened in 2016, we had a presidential election.

It was Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump, and Trump won.

Well, those people kind of broke off the relationships with each other.

And one of the co-founders of the organization, David Lap, actually knew some people that he thought could come in and help them have a conversation that was grounded in good communication principles.

And so he asked Bill Dougherty, who is was a University of Minnesota marriage and family therapist professor, but also did therapy on the side as well to come in and develop a workshop, which they now call the Red Blue workshop.

And they ended up showing them how they could talk across the political divide and begin to understand each other.

It really was focusing at that point on speaking and listening skills, on kind of debunking stereotypes of the other, getting them in the same room to realize that some of their concerns about where the country was headed were similar, so that they weren't just thinking of each other kind of outside of relationships.

And it became this, this movement that's part of many in the US that tries to work on bridge building.

Now, the name itself actually came from President Lincoln's Abraham Lincoln's first inaugural address.

And he talked about that.

We can be better.

We don't have to be enemies.

We can be friends.

This is right before the Civil War.

But there were some states that had also already started seceding from the Union.

And he said, we need to be better angels of our nature, call on the better angels of our nature.

That name ended up being copyrighted, so we couldn't use that name in the organization.

So in 2020, they changed the name to Braver Angels.

And gosh, it takes courage now.

So it's very much appropriate for what we do.

But really it's one relationship at a time.

Hearing the stories of other people trying to realize that we are human beings with much more in common than we are with differences and focusing on relationships.

Yeah.

And the the courage it takes.

I think that's absolutely right.

In fact, we will later get into some things like courageous conversations and courageous citizenship and things like that.

But it's just so important the relationships that we have and being mindful of the impact of how we have conversations over differences.

So I think that's one of the things I look forward to the viewers learning from what we have to say over the coming weeks.

One of the things that they did after the Red Blue workshop is they developed other workshops, right.

So one of the workshops was skilled for bridging the divide.

Now it's called skills for disagreeing better.

Another workshop was called depolarizing.

Within that depolarizing within workshop actually has evidence to show that a person who takes that workshops, a three hour workshop, can come in with a certain amount of feelings towards the other group, and they actually the feelings towards the other group of animosity.

Lesson from just taking the workshop.

And but we use the term depolarization a lot in Braver Angels, and I think it might be helpful just to step back a minute and say, what does depolarization mean?

And I know you've studied a lot on polarization.

We'll get into that in a little bit.

But what does it mean to depolarize depolarize ourselves?

Well, briefly, let me just say what polarization is.

It's a generic term that talks about opposites.

You know, north, south, left, right, up, down.

In this case, political polarization is when you're on extreme or opposite views of something, there's actually some benefits to having polarization.

Basically, if you have people with different ideas, you have a bigger data set to draw from and different ideas that you can combine to maybe help solve some problems.

But the problem is when it gets too serious and too deep, the extreme polarization, which you can call affective polarization because it involves strong emotions or toxic polarization, with the differences of opinion comes bad behavior and kind of problematic ways of thinking and looking at other people.

So depolarization is about trying to reduce the emotions we have and to improve our behaviors, so that when we are dealing with people with different opinions politically, then we still kind of keep it between the ditches.

Okay, that that makes sense.

You know, one of the things we talk about is why do we need to do this work as citizens, right.

Because we oftentimes think about the political side of the House.

It's up to the politicians, right?

We elect them.

But it really is the founders vision for braver angels that everybody should play.

We all should play, right?

Some people may not have time, though.

They may just be able to get educated on voting and be able to to vote.

And other people might get involved in their communities.

Well, we're going to actually take a break now, Glenn, and listen to a video that will tell our listeners a little bit more about what Braver Angels is.

Yeah.

Very good.

Politics has always been a passionate subject and we've always had deep political disagreements.

That's the way it's supposed to be.

But we've gotten to the point where people can't even talk to one another.

Americans no longer see their political opponents as simply wrong or misguided.

They see them as bad people whose ways of thinking are dangerous and incomprehensible.

They see them as enemies.

This level of rancor and mistrust threatens our democracy, and it makes it harder for us to move forward as a nation.

Regardless of who the president is, the fact that we live in what feels like some people call it a cold civil war that takes a toll on all of us.

We've been communicated from a lot of our friends in the last couple of years, and it makes me sad.

This is one organization that's doing a lot to kind of overcome that and get people back to where we were, which is neighbors, friends, communities.

We are truly bipartisan, from our staff to our funding to our board of directors or evenly split.

Half conservative, half liberal.

Everything we do comes from the bottom up.

We're an almost entirely volunteer led operation.

We wanted to see could we get together a group of folks who voted for Trump, and a group of folks who voted for Clinton, and get them in a room together to see how can we bring people together to not get them to agree or to come to the middle, but to maybe change how they think about one another?

When you were there in person and you have to face the person you're talking to.

We remember suddenly the rules of civil discourse and kind of how we should act in society.

It's something that really distinguishes this form of conversation and debate.

It's all well and good to talk about stability and being nice to people, but the missing ingredient is courage.

The courage that it takes to have a difficult conversation, to put yourself out there.

What we've been saying is that this year, it's not enough to call on our better angels.

We have to call on our brave Rangers.

The name Braver Angels captures the evolving spirit of better angels.

We have to be willing to summon the courage to see the best in the other side.

See the best in our fellow Americans.

Courage means becoming a leader in your own community.

Who's standing up for America not just for your political party or your tribe.

For folks with whom you share an identity, but standing up for something larger that we can all believe in.

If we can create a large enough movement that is clamoring for more courageous style of politics, we can change the incentives.

That's something that can only be achieved through what we call patriotic empathy.

This idea that we love for your country is demonstrated in your love for your fellow American.

As brave our angels, we're able to lean into that with courage and boldness.

It will make you feel like we can serve this place, and our country can serve humanity in a way that is actually beautiful and actually does us justice.

This is not a left wing movement.

This is not a right wing movement, but it is indeed an American movement.

We still have it in us to be champions for what is right and what is graceful and what is decent here in the United States.

Go to Braver Angels.

Sign up to join our email list and at the end of the day, try to treat each other with respect, empathy and find the courage needed to talk to people, even if and perhaps especially when you don't agree with them.