At UMRA’s April 2025 Living Well Workshop, Bill Doherty, University of Minnesota professor emeritus and co-founder of the nonprofit organization Braver Angels, spoke about the polarization in American politics that has been rising for 40 years and has become, as he called it, “a big national problem” at levels not seen since the 1850s. The divide is not just about issues; it is also about how we regard our fellow Americans who differ from us. 

Increasingly, we see people across the divide as untrustworthy and morally compromised.  This divide is made worse by a lack of shared facts. However, Doherty pointed out, it’s not usually constructive to assume that if we just share more facts we will change people’s minds. “We the people,” he said, “don’t lack information. We lack social trust. We lack shared sources of trustworthiness.”

People who identify as more liberal (“blues”) and those who identify as more conservative (“reds”) each have fears and prejudices about engaging with the other, and often don’t recognize that their counterparts have fears, too. In fact, according to testimony from hundreds of participants in Braver Angels workshops, “reds” are more afraid of engaging than “blues,” and “blues” have less understanding of the fears of people across the divide from them.  

Speaking specifically to the environment in a university community, Doherty acknowledged that an academic experience can feel hostile to someone on the “red” side of the divide, and the “red” person may see their only options as to go silent or to cause a disruption and be thought of as an immoral person.   

Divorce is not an option

Unlike in a marriage, however, as divided as we get in our politics divorce is not an option, said Doherty, past director of the Marriage and Family Therapy Program in the Department of Family Social Science. We can choose to stop talking to those across the divide from us, or we can learn how to stay in the conversation and “disagree better.”

What’s to be done? Doherty provided tips for engaging across a political divide, similar to those that are effective in any interpersonal situation where emotions run high. The important first principle is to let go of trying to change minds during the conversation. Instead, aim for a respectful exchange. The objective with the Braver Angels approach is to change minds not about the issues but about each other, and to learn skills and habits to be able to stay engaged.

Responding to a question regarding what we can do about the coarsening of what gets said by our elected officials, Doherty suggested we can start with ourselves, by avoiding hateful and violent speech, modeling respectful language, and then letting our political leaders know that’s what we expect of them. 

Braver Angels is a grassroots effort to depolarize American politics. It started with a phone call to Doherty from two former colleagues, after the November 2016 election, asking him to facilitate a workshop bringing together 10 Hillary Clinton voters with 10 Donald Trump voters to see what they could learn. 

Many workshops, dialogs, and debates later, Braver Angels now has 12,200 members in 117 local alliances across the country. Braver Angels Minnesota went on the road in late April to visit six communities in Greater Minnesota for workshops with elected officials, outreach to schools, and evening workshops for the public. 

—Jan Morlock, UMRA Program Committee