The Future of Political Healing with Bill Doherty
In this episode, Don MacPherson is joined by University of Minnesota professor and family therapist Bill Doherty. He’s the co-founder of Braver Angels, an organization that aims to help Americans with differing political beliefs understand each other beyond stereotypes. Don and Bill discuss how extreme the political divide has become in recent decades, the methodology that the Braver Angels uses in its workshops and events, and the benefits that American citizens and politicians alike can gain from learning to communicate better with those who align themselves differently on the political spectrum.
Season Four of 12 Geniuses is dedicated to exploring the future and how life is sure to change over the next decade. This episode explores the future of political healing and what it will take for Americans to become more understanding of each other's views and eventually bring together a divided nation.
Bill Doherty’s work as a family therapist, specializing in couples who find themselves on the brink of divorce, has given him perspective on the human condition and has imbued him with the tools needed to bring together those who are at odds politically. His work in developing the depolarization methodology used by Braver Angels has been a success. He discusses why outcomes based on communication, understanding and willingness to engage with those on the other side politically are still effective up to six months after taking the workshop. Bill has also developed the Police and Black Men Project, which aims to develop honesty and trust within communities by hosting regular meetings between police officers and African American men.
Don MacPherson:
Hello, this is Don MacPherson, your host of 12 Geniuses. I have the incredible job of interviewing geniuses from around the world about the trends shaping the way we live and work. Today, we explore America's political polarization. Overwhelmingly US adults believe our divisiveness is a problem to the future of the country, and increasingly Americans want their politicians to solve this problem.
Don MacPherson:
Today's guest is Braver Angels' co-founder Bill Doherty. Through workshops, debates and campus engagement Bill and the Braver Angels are helping Americans with differing political beliefs understand each other beyond stereotypes The Braver Angels methodology and the skills they teach have the potential of healing our division.
Don MacPherson:
This episode of 12 Geniuses is brought to you by the think2perform Research Institute, an organization committed to advancing moral, purposeful, and emotionally intelligent leadership.
Don MacPherson:
Bill, welcome to 12 Geniuses.
Bill Doherty:
Glad to be with you.
Don MacPherson:
Why don't you describe who you are and what you do for a living?
Bill Doherty:
Yeah. I'm a professor at the University of Minnesota, the Department of Family Social Science; I'm a family therapist. I do a lot of community engagement and public outreach work, and I co-founded an organization called Braver Angels, which is trying to depolarize America.
Don MacPherson:
You also are a marriage counselor, is that correct?
Bill Doherty:
Yep. Yep. My specialty is couples on the brink of divorce.
Don MacPherson:
Let's just talk about marriage counseling for a moment. What have you learned and how have you grown as a result of doing this for a number of decades?
Bill Doherty:
Good question. I've been doing this for over four decades. I get something out of every relationship with a couple I see. People are very serious about trying to deal with deep relationship concerns. I feel privileged to be invited into the crucible that they're dealing with. I feel like I understand something about the human condition more.
Don MacPherson:
The divisiveness of our country right now has never been worse than as far back as the Civil War. Is that an accurate statement?
Bill Doherty:
Yes. Right now we are increasingly living in red or blue silos. Our news information comes from those. Even our neighborhoods; people tending to live near people who are like them politically. Families tend to go in those directions. So we are increasingly doing two things, and this is what the political scientists have found. One is that our politics are core to our identity. So party identity, or even if it's not party, it's liberal or conservative or libertarian or progressive, these become core to who I am, defining me in a way that religion often did before.
Don MacPherson:
That's newer, correct?
Bill Doherty:
Yes, that's newer.
Don MacPherson:
Had that never existed in our country?
Bill Doherty:
Not to this extent. Now people galvanized around abolitionism or slavery, I mean, we've had deep, deep divisions, but in terms of full out identity, at least in the modern era, I don't know if you go back to the Whigs or something like that, but in the modern era, since the beginning of the 20th century at least, the political parties had overlap. You had liberal and moderate Republicans, you had conservative and moderate Democrats. So if you belong to a political party, you belong to a fairly broad coalition that had a more liberal conservative tilt. So they were not as ideologically based.
Bill Doherty:
But once we got into the 70s, 80s, 90s, the Nixon era on, the parties moved apart. So that now the most liberal Republican in Congress is far to the right of the most conservative Democrat. So there's very little overlap. It becomes like divided religions. This has become part of our identity. I'll give you a little data point to document this. In 1960, only 5% of Americans said they would be uncomfortable with their son or daughter marrying someone of the other political party. Interparty marriage is a big deal. Now it's over 40%.
Don MacPherson:
That blows my mind. I saw that on your website. I think I've heard you talk about that. So one in 20 would have been uncomfortable, how long ago? 50 years ago?
Bill Doherty:
1960.
Don MacPherson:
60 years ago. And now it's 40%.
Bill Doherty:
Yeah, yeah. And large numbers in both parties. When I talk about that publicly, people who see themselves as enlightened, non-prejudiced, they admit they feel that way themselves.
Don MacPherson:
Do you know what it is for interracial?
Bill Doherty:
Yes. It's gone the other direction. It was 40% or so in 1960, and now it's down to five to 10% who would be uncomfortable according to what they say with an interracial marriage. So it's not that our societies become less tolerant overall; we have become more tolerant of racial variation in our loved one area. You could see it on the street. But we become less tolerant that somebody of the other political party would be sitting across the dining room table from us at Thanksgiving.
Don MacPherson:
There were some other statistics on the website that were pretty illuminating as to the extent of the problem. Could you talk about those?
Bill Doherty:
Well, a big shift has occurred in people's feelings towards the other party. Political scientists use something they call The Feeling Thermometer. How do you feel overall, from very cold to very warm, towards people of your party and the other party? If you go back 25, 30 years, there would be towards your own party maybe 72; nice, comfortable temperature, and maybe 52 to the other party, and now people hate the other side more than they love their side. This is ominous for our country, that there's increasing cynicism about one's own party, one's on side. In other words, you may love a particular leader, but think your party isn't a loyal enough to that leader. You may be suspicious of your party, but ideologically you're there. So it's not that we love our own side more; it's we hate the other side more.
Don MacPherson:
Why is that?
Bill Doherty:
Well the why questions are really the hard ones, right? Lots of potential reasons. One is in our politics we've used gerrymandering much more than in the past. So for our political leaders, they have to cover their behinds with potential opposition from the more radical side of their own party, because they're in a gerrymandered district. It's a safe district. So basically your primary election is your election. And they are more apt to be primaried by somebody who sees them as too cooperative with the other side. The passion is on the far left or the far right.
Bill Doherty:
Another big one, and this is clearly documented by the political scientists, the rise of social media. There used to be a few common news sources that people access. Now you could argue they had their own biases. It's not like there was ever a golden age where everything was objective. Some of us are old enough to remember Walter Cronkite from CBS News, and when he ended his news, he would say, "That's the way it is." And we said, "Okay, it's probably the way it is." Now we have television, you can choose your 24/7 news station that fits your prior views, and they want to see something as troubling. So everything is breaking news. We know from psychology that as human beings, our brains gravitate to the negative, because that's probably what gave us survival in the past.
Bill Doherty:
Negative counts about three times more than positive in terms of emotional reactivity. We have TV, we have social media, Twitter, Facebook, and these other devices that feed us two things. They feed us information that supports our own previously held views and values. It doesn't expose us to other information. And it disproportionately feeds us negative information that will create outrage. We are hooked on outrage. We're hooked on outrage about the other side.
Bill Doherty:
Money and politics is another one. I just mentioned three big ones; gerrymandering, social media and media in general, and money and politics that has increasingly been focused nationally, targeting a particular politician, targeting somebody on gun rights, gun control, targeting somebody on abortion. So we're living in this cauldron of partisan negativity that's fueled by many forces, such that the 70 plus million people who vote the other way are seen as strangers. We don't share almost a common humanity with them at times. They are not to be trusted and they are probably either immoral themselves or they support immoral causes.
Don MacPherson:
Describe what Braver Angels does. What's the mission?
Bill Doherty:
Well, the mission is we like to say it's reds and blues, conservatives and liberals coming together to try to depolarize the country and create the possibility of a pluralistic democracy, where we can live with our differences and be productive citizens in this country.
Don MacPherson:
It might seem obvious, but why did you start it?
Bill Doherty:
Well, there was no big master plan here. It was happenstance. A couple of weeks after the presidential election of 2016, which everybody remembers, two colleagues of mine, David Blankenhorn from New York city, David Lapp from Southwest Ohio, were on the phone talking about the election and how people in their communities were feeling about it. Upper East Side of Manhattan, it was a funeral. In Southwest Ohio, it was hope and change.
Bill Doherty:
They decided on the spur of the moment to get together 10 Hillary Clinton voters, and 10 Donald Trump voters in Southwest Ohio for a weekend in December of 2016. Just we have to get people talking to each other. Can they talk to each other? And then they called me because I have experience in designing group processes and asked me if I'd like to design it and facilitate it. Yeah, okay. That sounded a lot harder than couples on the brink. So I flew to Southwest Ohio, and we did 13 hours over a weekend with these 20 folks, and it was really powerful, and we decided not to stop there.
Don MacPherson:
How did you recruit the 20 people?
Bill Doherty:
David Lapp, who lives in Southwest Ohio, did the recruiting. He's a red, a conservative. He then, had a network of conservatives. He contacted the liberals he knew, the Democrats, he went to the Democratic County Commissioner, and then they recruited people, and so they pulled them together.
Don MacPherson:
How do you recruit people who want to go through something like this with an open mind? Because that seems very, very challenging right now, and even five years ago, that seems like it would be a big challenge.
Bill Doherty:
Yeah. Well, we've had over a thousand workshops, both that kind of one we call Red/Blue, but also Skills Workshops and common groundwork. We've had over a thousand workshops, so we know something about who comes. They are people who have their own political viewpoints, some very strongly liberal conservatives, some more in the middle, who are concerned about the country and also concerned about their families and their personal relationships. They are people who are worried about the paralysis of the country over polarization.
Don MacPherson:
When you did the first group, could you describe the process that you used? And then we'll get into how that process has evolved.
Bill Doherty:
Yeah. The process is one in which you create kind of a venue, a container that maximizes people's listening to one another and not debating one another. You set a ground rule that we're not here to try to convince anybody to change their mind about their core political beliefs. So it's not a place to debate somebody to show how stupid they are or to win them to my side, but rather to explain my views and my values and listen to yours. The design has to be a carefully constructed to satisfy that.
Bill Doherty:
For that weekend, always beginning with introductions and why people came so that everybody's in for what they're here for, and they all hear each other. It was all over the place there, but there were people who said they were worried about the future. These are blues, Democrats who worried about their grandchildren. Some Trump supporting conservatives saying, "We have to get past this complete divisiveness here." A number of people in fact said, "We have a small town here to run. We have a hospital to maintain and schools to run, and we can't do it if we're just fighting each other all the time." That's why people came.
Bill Doherty:
And then a series of exercises or activities, a number of which have continued in our other workshops. I'll give you an example of one. It's called a Stereotypes Exercise. Each group, reds and blues, go to a separate room and they come up with the top four negative, false, exaggerated stereotypes that they think others have of them and their side. What do people think of us that is not true is exaggerated? For reds, they believe others think of them as racist, homophobic, anti-science, Bible thumpers, anti-woman. The blues, they believe others see them as big government for its own sake, stifling free speech if it's not politically correct, arrogant, an elitist, baby killers around abortion.
Bill Doherty:
What happens is they come up with these separately and then they come together as a group and somebody from each group presents this to the other side. These are the stereotypes we think people have of us. Here is what we think is actually true, but here's the kernel of truth. Then they process this. The process question, the key one in this whole workshop is a two-part question. What did you learn about how the other side sees themselves? And do you see anything in common? Reds and blues and pairs, process that, they answer those questions and then they do it in the whole group.
Don MacPherson:
What are some of the other things that you do in the workshop to kind of get these groups of people who have opposite ideas or different ideas, opposing ideas, talking and listening more empathetically?
Bill Doherty:
Another exercise in our Red/Blue Workshops is what we call Fishbowl Exercise. This uses an old technique in group dynamics. When you have two groups that share common characteristic, you have one in the middle, you flip a coin, let's say the reds are going to be in an inner circle in a conversation, the blues will be in an outer circle. The job of the blues is to listen to the conversation, no interruptions, no verbal or nonverbal communication. Listen to this group of people who are unlike me in some way. My purpose is to learn how they see the world and to identify anything that might be in common with how I see the world.
Bill Doherty:
There's two questions for the inside of the fishbowl. First question is how are your side's values and policies good for the country? And the second is what are your reservations or concerns about your own side? And then the second question is the humility question. Just like in the Stereotypes Exercise, what's the kernel of truth in the stereotype, this is the humility question, what are your reservations or concerns about your own side?
Bill Doherty:
And then when that's finished, they reverse. The inner circle goes to the outer circle; the outer circle goes to the inner circle. And then you listen to that other group, have that conversation. Then afterwards, the processing is the same way as the Stereotypes Exercise. You process first in pairs, regular pairs, and then when the whole group, what did you learn about how the other side sees themselves? And did you see anything in common?
Bill Doherty:
Now with both of these exercises it's really important, people have agreed in the ground rules part of this, that they're only going to respond to questions that are on the table at that time. And so when the question is, what did you learn about how they see themselves, did you see anything in common, the two-part question, that's all you're permitted to respond to. We train the moderators to intervene if somebody were to say, "Well, what they said about their side that's hypocritical," or, "They missed that point." You just stop them. You stop them in mid-sentence because they've agreed, we're just going to talk about this.
Bill Doherty:
So you can see what it encourages is the expression of what I believe are the core values of my perspective and what are the downsides, and then I listen to the other side. Think about the fact that we never get a chance to listen to a group of people who differ from us, talk among themselves, share among themselves where they're not arguing with anybody.
Don MacPherson:
So what's next? You've done the Fishbowl Exercise. You've done Stereotypes Exercise.
Bill Doherty:
Yeah. We have a meal. The next exercise ... Again, this is the all day Red/Blue Workshop. We have a whole variety of workshops, but this is your signature one.
Don MacPherson:
All day is eight hours?
Bill Doherty:
It's seven hours.
Don MacPherson:
Seven hours, okay.
Bill Doherty:
Just to be clear, we have Skills Workshops, we have all kinds of others. In this seven hour Red/Blue Workshop, people break bread together. We encourage people to sit with people who are different from them politically. A lot of what goes on here is just the social time too. And then in the afternoon, the next activity or exercise is a questions and answers one. So now that you've heard people during the day, you get to frame questions for them. We did this in the initial workshop, but not carefully structured enough. So I thought that you're truly explaining the difference between a question of understanding and curiosity versus a gotcha question, that five minutes of my explaining it with examples would be sufficient for people to get the difference.
Bill Doherty:
Well, what happened was we had reds and blues, mixed groups, two smaller mixed groups, and gave people a chance to write down some questions and deliver the questions. They were mostly gotcha questions. Some version of now, given that your guy is a sexual predator, I'm curious about how you voted for him. This is the classic gotcha question. What I realized was this was harder than I had imagined, to ask a non-gotcha question.
Bill Doherty:
Now what we do is the reds and blues go to separate rooms again, and they have 20 minutes to come up with four good questions for the other side. Questions that deepen, that ask people to expand on something, that ask people how they deal with potential contradiction, and they're curated. The group curates them word for word. Everybody writes them down so we all know what the questions from our group are. The ground rule is that you ask the question, you can ask a follow up, but you can't give your own opinion on it and you can't disagree. That's all moderated. So the questions go deeper. And then once again, you process it. The process question then is what did you learn from this exercise? Because they learn lots of things. They'll learn about the other side. They also learn how hard it is to ask a good question.
Bill Doherty:
And then the last activity of the day is a, what do we do next? What do I want to do personally, in my own life to further this idea of depolarizing the country to prevent a potential long-term civic divorce? What do I want to do personally? What could people on my side do together? What could we potentially do together across the sides? Everybody gets five minutes to fill that in, which we encourage them to put at least something in each of those columns, and then they share it with somebody.
Bill Doherty:
So you notice during the day, there's this opportunity for one-to-one pairs, a little more intimate, and then they share in the whole group. When we're in the whole group when people are processing, we go red blue, red blue, red blue. Basically that's it. We do a little please join Braver Angels. We have an evaluation. The last one is people go around and answer the question, what are you taking with you from our time?
Don MacPherson:
What sort of outcomes have you seen?
Bill Doherty:
70 to 80% people in terms of the objectives of this, at the end report that they were accomplished. Did you learn about the other side? Did you feel understood by the other side. Did you find ways to communicate better? Are you likely to talk to other people in a positive way about this? We just now have our first formal academic study of this process that's about to be submitted for publication by an independent group of researchers, and they found using standard tools from political science that out six months, there's still some effectiveness
Don MacPherson:
And effectiveness meaning?
Bill Doherty:
On the depolarization measures. I'll give you an example. The polarized attitudes how much I hate the other people, remember the warm to cool thing?
Don MacPherson:
Yes, yes.
Bill Doherty:
So there's some of these standardized measures, and honesty at the six months, a number of those fades, so you have a control group. This is one dosage, but it doesn't change it forever. But at the six month mark, what they call the behavioral measure of polarization, still held strongly. And that is if people were invited to contribute money to different sorts of organizations, including a depolarizing one, that worked on depolarization, and the people went through the workshop are more likely to say, "I would donate $20 to that cause." They call that a behavioral measure. This is going to be published in a journal. It's done completely independent. It was done with college students.
Bill Doherty:
Part of what we learned is yes, there's some power in this workshop, and we have all these other workshops that people take that we think are added doses. The next study that this academic group wants to do is to look at not just people who take one workshop. We have Skills Workshop. We have a Depolarizing Within Oneself. We have Families & Politics. We have other sorts of things. So our current feeling is based on that independent evaluation that we have something, there's some power in this workshop.
Bill Doherty:
But given the extent of the outrage, polarized messages that come from the larger culture, that one workshop is not going to have a five-year impact on somebody. That's one of the reasons we have other opportunities for people. We want to study that. We want to study additional doses, if you will.
Don MacPherson:
It seems like there are a number of skills. I've heard you talk about different skills that you're helping these people build. Could you talk about what those skills are and how everyday people who may not go through the workshop can start to identify them and use them?
Bill Doherty:
There are two steps in it. One is connect with what the other person said. Connect first and then share a different perspective. It's shared as an I statement. What we teach people is to listen and join with somebody in some way. The two ways you join is to say, "I get what you're saying." If I can find something to agree with in that that's even better. Because a lot of, and this is something I've learned from the marriage counseling, 70% or more of problems that couples have they'll never resolve. You just learn to live with it better. But what people want is to be heard. In other words, "This way you're in the world sometimes is a problem for me. Maybe you can't change that in some sort of major way, but I want to be heard as opposed to you blowing me off."
Bill Doherty:
So if people feel heard, and then they have something they can agree with, they soften and you're more likely to do it with me. But what we teach people in our skills, and this is something I'm proud of with Braver Angels, is that when people come and they learn our skills, we tell them expectations to abandon. And one of those expectations is if I use the skills, then you have to. What I say is, if your brother-in-law has never paid much attention to what you have to say, why would he suddenly start using I messages and active listening because you took a workshop? In fact, I'm only responsible for my side in this and how I handle my side in it.
Don MacPherson:
These skills seem like they're very helpful, not in just political discourse, but in a lot of our lives.
Bill Doherty:
That's right. But part of what happens is even people who know how to communicate well, give themselves a pass when it comes to politics. We say to ourselves, "I don't have to bring my best self, my better angel to politics because it's so darn existential." Where that occurred to me, what I just said was I did a workshop in Maryland and there happened to be 13 therapists in the room. Some of my colleagues knew about it and came. When I asked at the end, "What are you taking with you," some of them said, "I know these skills. I teach people these skills, but I never thought to use them in political conversation." In other words, you just go for the juggler or get self-righteous. Right after that, there was a minister who does interfaith work and he said, "So these skills are part of my work, but I've never used them in political conversation."
Bill Doherty:
So there's a way in which we de-skill ourselves, we lower our bar of what we expect of each other, because politics is become so visceral, so emotional, we become gladiators, and we don't know how to do what we ordinarily might know how to do.
Don MacPherson:
There are times when I see somebody out on the street or a stranger, and I can tell that they disagree with my politics, or they seem like they might disagree with my politics. How can I approach them and have a civil conversation or a productive conversation?
Bill Doherty:
I'll answer it in terms of people in your social world in some way, not a complete stranger on the street. Families are one of the last bastions of political diversity because you don't get to say who your in-laws are. If you think of extended family, you're going to have people who voted different ways. You're going to have people who love and hate Donald Trump, for example. That's true in my extended family.
Bill Doherty:
Here's a technique and that is to ask an open-ended question that doesn't even ask the person to tell right away their own political beliefs. Here's an example. Thanksgiving, in-laws, other people arriving from different parts of the country. I will in a one-to-one conversation with an in-law say, "So what are people in your part of the country saying about this election?" Or, last year he and I talked about President Trump. He'd expressed he had voted for him. He expressed his reservations. "So how is Trump playing in your part of the country this year?" That invites the person to be a commentator on something political in their environment. That's an example of an entry.
Bill Doherty:
When you ask somebody their perspective, maybe around a particular issue. It might be about gun rights, gun control. Maybe you're not a gun rights person, but you know somebody who owns a bunch of guns. You could weigh in by saying, "Man, we're in a big national debate these days about guns and with the shootings and all that. What's your take on it? I know you're a gun owner. What's your take on it?" And then you listen. You listen, and you learn, and you probe. Maybe even the first time, you don't even share your perspective unless the person asks you. You could be an anthropologist with people in your life where you are genuinely curious.
Don MacPherson:
You've done over a thousand workshops. That's tens of thousands of people. We have hundreds of millions of people. How do we scale this?
Bill Doherty:
Well, since the pandemic, we've learned to put all of our workshops online. We're learning to use online technology. The other thing I'll say is that we're getting increasing interest from companies. For Target we did a webinar for 5,000 employees. We're also getting an increasing interest from political leaders. Last year, we did a workshop for members of the state legislature. We had 30 members of the Minnesota Legislature. We did a Red/Blue Workshop for the congressional staff members of a Republican and a Democrat from Minnesota. Pete Stauber, the Republican, Dean Phillips, the Democrat. And we are in conversations with some congressional groups about us doing some workshops there.
Bill Doherty:
One of the reasons why there is interest at the political leaders' level is that they're getting the message from their constituents that they have to get past this stuff. When I did the workshop for the Minnesota Legislators, it was right after an election. When I said, "Why did you come?" A number of them said, when they did door knocking, the biggest issue people brought up was polarization and paralysis, more than taxes or anything else. So they felt like they needed to show in some way that they're trying to address this.
Don MacPherson:
If you do this work with Congress at the federal level, how does that work? Is congressional leaders coming together in a workshop going through the workshop and actually participating? Is that how it would work?
Bill Doherty:
Yes. We've done it with staff members and we haven't done it at the level of Congress with political leaders. We've done this with county commissioner type folks in states, civic leaders. What we've learned is that when we have elected officials, we have to modify the workshop because the Stereotypes Exercise that I mentioned before, where people acknowledge what the stereotypes are of their own side and the kernels of truth about those stereotypes, that's too risky for elected officials. We do a variation on this that we're able to do in our big, long 13 hour workshop that we don't do that often anymore. But I'll tell you what that exercise is. That is that in small groups, everybody gets four minutes to answer this question, what life experiences have influenced your approach to politics and the public good? And then they take turns sharing that. And then afterwards people reflect on what they heard. That's a very humanizing experience.
Bill Doherty:
This is a good time to add something here. Less people listening to us think that you can't be passionate if you use these skills; you can be. You can say that my belief about this is as fundamental as I can get as a human being. I try to live my life this way, and when I see this value violated, I feel angry and outrage. I care deeply about this issue as core to our democracy, as core to us being one nation that works for all of those people, I can be passionate without being contemptuous.
Bill Doherty:
If you want to think about who was that way; Martin Luther King. Passionate, but not contemptuous of other people. I heard a great phrase recently that contempt constraints change. If we go about with contempt for those we disagree with, they are much less likely to want to work with us for change. So I want to underline that you can be passionate, you can be an advocate. You don't have to just say, "Well, we'll split the difference here," but you can do it in terms of the skills with I messages. You can do it without saying, I feel strongly in what you and your side are doing is such and such. That's the attack, and the attack in a face-to-face here, is not going to get us anywhere.
Don MacPherson:
I had a realization the morning after the latest presidential election. I woke up and it was still unclear as to who won. My realization was we cannot look to the extremes, the far right, and the far left and demand that they come to us. Maybe this is obvious to you, Bill, but it was, being somewhere in the middle, I need to reach out to them and to welcome them back in and to understand them.
Don MacPherson:
Many of the things that you talked about here is explore, how did you arrive at that? Why do you feel that way? And listen with empathy. I think that's how we get out of here, and I think that's exactly what you're doing. So I really commend what you are doing. And thank you for that because it's incredible work. It really is.
Bill Doherty:
It's a joyful journey, a difficult one. I want to stress something I didn't mention before. A cardinal principle rule in Braver Angels, we call it the Rule of Balance, and our leadership are half red, half blue, and so every decision we make of any importance involves half reds, half blues. And so this is the crucible to work out how to do a pluralistic democracy together in relationship all the time. One of the things that we've learned is that the people who are attracted to doing this work, to moderating, to designing workshops and so on, tend to be blue. Blues dispositionally like diversity and reaching out across differences. And so those organizations, the board, the leaders, they're all blue, and it's very hard to get trust from reds. That's one of the reasons why early on our founders were both red and blue, and we just insisted on that. That has been some of what has made us successful.
Don MacPherson:
Where can people learn more about you and about Braver Angels?
Bill Doherty:
Well, braverangels.org is where they can look me up at the University of Minnesota.
Don MacPherson:
And people can support Braver Angels. I know that because I just provided a small donation this morning. Actually I became a member. You can become a member. What does being a member mean?
Bill Doherty:
It means you subscribed to our values and you contribute to at least $12 a year, so there's some skin in the game. We also have a big mailing list of people who don't want to be members, but want to know what we're about. We're a nonprofit. There's more money in polarized issues than in depolarizing, so money is always an issue. We're also committed in terms of foundations and big private donors to having red and blue donors in foundations. So we try to really walk our talk.
Don MacPherson:
If I remember correctly, 95% of Americans feel that political division is an issue. And so my hope is that they will get behind what you're doing because you are solving a very critical problem here.
Bill Doherty:
Yeah. I always like to say in my career, I've mostly had to do two things. One is convince people there's a problem, and then secondly, to convince them that my solution would be worth considering. This is the first one where everybody know there's a problem.
Don MacPherson:
Bill, this has been a fabulous conversation. Thank you for your time today, and thank you for being a genius.
Bill Doherty:
It's been a joy. Thank you.
Don MacPherson:
Thank you for listening to 12 Geniuses. Our next episode will be the season four finale. Our guest is bestselling author and NYU professor Minda Harts. Minda and I will talk about the changing workplace. Specifically, we will discuss the future of women at work, a topic that is a lot less certain in the aftermath of the global pandemic.
Don MacPherson:
To subscribe to 12 Geniuses, please go to 12geniuses.com. Thanks for listening, and thank you for being a genius.