red blue rich poor country city left or right chances are you probably fall into one of those categories and you may be quite happy where you are the people have better angels believe there's still value and they've come up with a way of doing it that actually seems to bring people together with our better angels today on the laura flanders show the place where the people who say it can't be done take a backseat to the people who are doing well k of affection instead we must call upon the better angels well we know how that worked out the bloodiest war in american history two percent of the entire population dead equivalent to some six million people today obviously no one wants a repeat of that but the country is pretty divided and much of our money media seem to profit off opposing red and blue caps so what else is out there a group calling itself the better angels is dedicated to creating working and listening space for people of ostensibly opposing views to deep polarize they say it to tell us about it better angels co founded david blankenhorn and kalinda cole psychologist michelle brody she's what shop moderates us with the group so david to you as i said this isn't work out well for lincoln so so why go back into this frame of finding our better angels maybe we don't have any wink about we did he felt that there was something in us that could be better the original draft of that speech written by someone else had him calling upon the guardian angel of the nation something there to help us lincoln said no north and south we have something that can bring us together as a nation and did not work then but it's going to work now so what the heck leads you to think it's going to w we're resilient people we basically care for one another there's a lot of good things going on in local communities there's a widespread heart sickness in the country about the direction of our politics there's a widespread discussed with the way people on t organization that was founded after the two thousand and sixteen election to bring together people at the grassroots who don't agree with one another and we don't try to make them agree but we do try to encourage them to see some common values that they share as americans to look for some common ground and to continue to work together afterwards in the local community so we have about seven thousand dollars members now thirty two dollars local chapters all fifty states growing rapidly going to have a big convention next month in st louis and so do i would like to change the country would like to change the country all right so let's play a clip of you in action is an example of a workshop i think in ohio and this part been closing down left and right so i've seen a lot of forced retirement a lot of force layoffs once that some people get through the layoffs sometimes they are able to come back some a lot of times they w i've had the door slammed in my face i had people say very rude things about obama and ask if i voted for him and some people would say hey you're not going to lie to me go and put your sign in the yard and other people take it out here because you're a democrat i love don trump lot of people don't and i think it's not his personality he's a man that has given his life for his country if you think about it and that's why i love  but the biggest challenge is getting that sort of any message across of who he really is in my opinion if you voted for trump then you're taking on all of the things that he  want to talk to them but i'll tell you i'll be honest with you right now i'm i kind of feel afraid to talk on my mouth i am afraid if this vitriol and this animosity continues to grow it might give certain groups a blank check to touch of to touch upon violence that there are nice people people who do nice things and i don't know how we get back to that how does that video reflect the kind of work that you actually are doing on the ground to give us a sense of who's involved well those people were participants th were talking on that clip before they spent two days together and they spoke very differently afterwards a lot of those people are still working together locally right now two of those people are on our better angels board of directors and so i mean i mean michelle can talk talk about this because she's actually doing the work with people now on the ground but there is something very dramatic that happens when people who think they don't like other and think they have nothing to say to one another find out that they do it kind of lights up a pleasure center in the brain and you want more of it all right so michelle i was about to come to you with respect to what do you actually doing in these workshops and what have you seen play out sure well people we assume people come to these workshops with very strong beliefs but they also come with as the man in the clip said a sense of wanting to talk about it they want to be heard people in the country want to be heard and they want to be understood and so but they to bridge the divide so the way the workshop helps them is to really set up structured exercises and with that to help them express what they believe and be heard by the other side but we do it in the unusual way which is to say st we set a lot  of guidelines to say we want to go with your better angel which is the sense of we understand you have your adversarial side and you have your human side the side that wants to be heard so when when a stereotype for example is said about you how do you react to that what's not true about that stereotype can you refute it and then what has a little nugget of truth in that stereotype and how is it that in your the group that you belong to whether you're in the blue group or in your in the red group and we do some work with them separately st so they can kind of explore those stereotypes with their compatriots and then when they talk about what's the nugget of truth in it they're looking a little bit at the weakness of their own side or the unfortunate things that appear in the media about their side and then when they share it with the other group after a later point in the exercise there's a sense of well i'm listening to a real person who can look at it in a more nuanced way and there's a sense of bonding and connection around for a while being heard and also knowing that your side has value have you been surprised by people's appetite and interest in all of those people come in w right they they like the idea of it but they come in where and how do you find them so we do a lot of different recruiting efforts we have organizers in different locations who are interested in the better angels mission who do whatever they can  online recruiting people in their churches and synagogues in their communities and they try to just gather people who are interested in having a dialogue and being heard but when they come in they're wary people have come in saying my going to be yelled at here or will i be treated with respect and so it's really important as a moderator to set the guidelines to say this is how we're going to speak to each other and to do it in a structured way where people feel safe and can get something out of it and i say let's play a clip of one of these workshops in process take a look seven of us are conservative in our philosophy typically voting for a republican over democratic candidates and supportive of president donald trump and his administration while eight of us are liberal in our philosophy typically voting for democratic over out of me that i was afraid to show i did end up liking them as people and even the one that came in and listening he's arch conservative and trumpet guy we joked and it was a genuine laugh that we had with each other so i think cocky really can is not underrate if if more people had this experience i think maybe our country could come back together and pull together as one and learn to share and understand it's ok to have opposing ideas it's ok to be different we are still human we still love one another it smashes a lot of the stereotype of what one group or another group should post to be and i have permission to call in my muslim friend ok we are friends so anyway we have we're going to lay the groundwork he and i and we're going to lay the groundwork and one thing that we're going to do representing what we just came from is he's going to attend a church with me a christian church and i'm going to go visit i'm go visit a mosque with him and we want to see what you're doing so david tell us more about those folks what was it she feels really strongly about things and she had the experience of talking about them in a way with people who disagree with her that brought out a lot of emotion in her she's still active today in the local group there in lebanon ohio the two guys who said i'll go to the mosque and you go to the church they become friends are now the co chairs of their group and are actually both now on our national board of directors and you could not find two people who don't disagree as much and and yet they've they've become friends and so  not just friends they were actually working together on some local issues like well because i was going to say it's one thing to say that you fail and you know friendly but would you actually show up for one of them but they went to state legislators with their better angels members because there was an attempt to eliminate gerrymandering from the state legislative districts and we have a rule that you have to get seventy five percent support on both sides of local group and they got it they lobbied and they got it so they've been lobbying for gerrymandering reform as a bipartisan group in ohio and now they are sponsoring they're supporting legislation that would reduce the influence of money  state elections so so look we we're not just a group that has these workshops to help people feel better we're a group that has workshops that help people feel better as a way to get them involved as civic leaders in their community modeling a new kind of political effort is there anything else you've mentioned gerrymandering that brings the two together michel that you've experienced that you've seen in terms of outcome after or know that or issue on which people really do connect even across difference i think that where people connect is when they notice that they're actually polarized on values that are somewhat out of balance and so what you find is one side is is very strongly advocating for one liberal side will say more we have to treat people with humanity ok those don't have to be completely in contention with each other but they come up in the rhetoric and contention when you get people to talk about the underlying values themselves like does everyone want to treat people with humanity yes does everyone want the country to be secure yes it's just about we're out of balance and our rhetoric is blowing it up in a way that seems much more adversarial than it actually is so getting people there feels much more secure now to be fair or to be real where about to head into an election season that is probably going to drive us date through the red blue divide all over again thing that you've done do you think are going to win people from the appeals to sort of magic but what it does is help people rediscover one another at a spell citizens who they care about and that's the secret of it all and we're not big enough now to to change the country but we plan to be and we don't have a big we're not lobbying congress on things but what we are doing at the local level is coming up with ideas and there are basically we have groups of citizens who say we've come up with ideas on a bipartisan basis and so we're doing something that our elected officials can't or won't do look we're in an embryonic face we've only been around less than two years so we're seven thousand members and so we're not gonna shake our fist and change america but we're growing fast enough and there's enough hunger for so we have to persuade people this is a good idea people already believe this is a very important  needs an opportunity so i'm very optimistic that we can bring people together in increasing numbers around this even during an election they're going to be so people going to be so heartsick when they see all this stuff and we're an alternative and it has to be said you you have a good or a new your video we saw african american woman we saw a white people it's all women men an equal numbers pretty much some of the critique i've seen is that i very male white middle class heavy is that fair or not fair michel i think you did would speak to that more in terms of the demographics across but the people who came to the to the workshops that i've run are across the spectrum and i think we're making efforts to try to be sure we're inclusive of all different communities the idea is to be able to speak across divides that includes across racial and social economic divides as well so that's the intention yeah we have a our policy is to try to reflect the country we seek to serve that's our state but we fail in certain ways we the biggest failure we have is that we tend to skew toward the more educated people about a rd of the people in the country have four year colleges degrees a lot higher proportion of our members have four year college degrees a nd way we fail is in our leadership we tend to be more male in our leadership and then we then we should be so we're trying to fix those things it is i'm reminded as i listen to this of the sometimes frustrating disconnect between people like me you desire to let's talk this out and other people have often been the brunt of horrible policies saying i don't want to do that work all over again i just your boot off my neck and that it's emotional work for me to explain how your misperceive perceptions of people who look like me are wrong so how do you do you deal with that and if so how do you deal with people feeling like they're just too tired to explain it all over again you know i think about that in the similarities it has to couples therapy which is what i do in my day job where they go you know people are exhausted from fighting they don't want to they don't want to do the work of you know how do we settle this won't that take a long time and i think the country having gone through the last election is the feeling of the exhaustion of what that felt like to people i think it's still in memory and so at least people can agree in this sometimes happens in my couples therapy at least people can agree that they don't want that again and that they want something that feels a little more civil or that feels a little more reasonable or is more about the issues and less about the fight it when it feels like it's so win lose and of course we're up against that right and the idea that it's going to be when liz is there is there room to start a conversation about something that's more win win again i think there's an appetite for it but we need to i mean look people fifty plus one percent of the next election does anybody really believe they're going to get the country they want by having their team win fifty one percent of the next election it's not that it will make a difference not that it will be a great day for that side not that it won't have policy changes that have enormous implications but are we going to get the country we want by continuing in this way the answer is no we're not so i don't i don't i don't you know this is not a time to be tired it reminds me also of the conversation that we recently had about democracy maybe democracy is not well suited for these kinds of differences because you make it your fifty one percent but there's still forty nine percent there that are feeling pretty aggrieved in an opera  system we can just ignore them for another forty six dollars or eight years the system was not designed that way the system is designed to have all kinds of arrangements that  encourage deliberation and compromise those arrangements have been tossed out the window and now we just have this law of the jungle that you're describing but it need not be that way it is not always been that way and if you didn't have the town meeting even just congressional delegation to have people in congress actually talk to each other there was a study recently that said forty or fifty years ago the typical member of congress spent sixty percent or more of his or her time actually deliberating and making why just wait and now it's down to about five percent ninety five percent of a congressperson is time now consist of fundraising and grandstanding on television about how great they are their product percent making what just  tocqueville when he was traveling around the united states in the th century he saw a great land of civic engagement civic meetings everyone's part of something joining a group participating in deliberations about everything from school board to local governance  we've lost a lot of that is this perhaps surfacing a desire for people to get more involved as it parallel increased voting patterns or engagement of a cause or have that i think one other really important part of this is that we've sort of created slates of issues that have to go together and on the workshops what you notice is that people say why do these issues have to go together the one i'm really passionate about i want to do something about i don't really know why i have to just because i'm a republican also have to agree with the entire slate it used to be in our lifetimes a little more of a loose connection to a fleet of issues and so that built into the system i think a sense that you could wrap our minds on different things as opposed to having to take the whole entire sleep as one and i think one of the things that we can do is better angels be able to suffer rate those a bit in the in the debates and in the workshops as a way of of creating more independent and he wants thought have you found a method of holding these conversations that people could adopt even if perhaps they weren't members of better angels but part of other groups that could do with this kind of exchange this deliberative or deliberate process look i  think i'd like to say you know you have bartenders and schoolyard attendants and couples therapist for a reason because these things are hard to mediate on your own but if you set up the conditions in a way that says these are the set of rules we're going to agree to no one's going to punch anyone no i'm going to punch anyone we're going to call it out if we feel like something's getting too heated we're going to take breaks and then you work inside of a certain set of structured activities you can get really great conversations that you couldn't have before but it takes skill and it takes a sense of purpose in keeping the conflict down and there are lots of other groups that have sprung up in recent years that are doing similar things so there's no one there's no one recipe that's perfect but there is there's just a tremendous hunger for this even for people who don't think of themselves as workshop be tight people there's a hunger there's one hundred to  heard and to to be heard and to find out what these crazy people who voted for this maniac or voted against you know whatever you think is a crazy there is a there's a desire to actually who are that there's a real need for there so what's been your biggest surprise in this whole process either about a thing or a person my biggest twenty two very big surprise one was that a lot of people on both sides feel that they there they work with facts and reason but the other side doesn't that is a very common belief and that did that did surprise me another thing that surprise me a little bit was the degree to which the consistency with which people say afterwards i say you know we're less divided than we've been told and then if you ask them who's been doing the telling they say the medi