"We are not enemies, but friends,” Abraham Lincoln said. “The mystic chords of memory … will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
Those last words of Lincoln’s first inaugural address inspired the creation of the group Braver Angels in 2016, a nationwide non-profit that aims to curb political polarization. Local groups, called alliances, host regular depolarization workshops and meetings where conservatives, liberals and independents can share their perspectives on specific issues.
The mid-Missouri alliance is based in Columbia. Its last gathering of the year was a post-election potluck — the perfect opportunity to break bread with folks across the aisle.
The only problem? Conservatives aren’t showing up. And the group’s leaders don’t know why.
“We've been talking about that at our leadership meetings, about how we want to move forward with that,” said Cynthia Gardner, the group’s liberal co-chair.
It doesn’t seem like it’s for a lack of trying. Gardner, and every other member of the group, says they invite their conservative friends to meetings. But they don’t stick around. She thinks it could be due to a lack of trust.
“It's harder to build trust with conservatives,” she said. “Because conservatives think that you're going to invite them and say, ‘we're going to all share our opinions and not try to convince one another,’ but what you're really going to do is get them in a room and then explain to them how they're wrong and try to get them to see the light and change their mind.”
It’s not a completely unfounded fear. In a sort of self-perpetuating cycle, the lack of conservatives at meetings can make discussions appear more like lectures and debates.
Communication scholars call the phenomenon the “spiral of silence” – a situation where people who have opinions deemed unpopular are hesitant to express them. This can sometimes make it seem like these opinions don’t exist, even when they do.
At an October meeting, the Columbia group got together to discuss the state of the economy. Liberals and moderates filled the room, leaving the lone conservative regular, co-chair John Potter, in the hot seat.
The night did feature substantive discussion about how some groups are left out of economic development. But for large chunks of the meeting, Potter was on the defensive, fielding data-driven diatribes from the group’s liberals.
“It was the last meeting up to the election,” Potter said. “I think tensions were kind of high.”
He says that meeting was a wake-up call.
“At our leadership meeting, we did talk about having to go back to the rules and the reasons why we're here, and that's to find common ground,” he said. “It can seem like a debate to a certain extent, but I think there's a fine line between finding understanding and debating.”
Potter is a controversial figure in Columbia. He’s a Republican who ran for the Missouri Legislature and for the Columbia School Board. He’s a frequent face at school board meetings and a critic of some of the district’s COVID and diversity policies.
He says it’s not easy being a voice of dissent in Columbia and that could be a reason why conservatives are reticent to attend meetings and share their perspective.
“When you're a conservative in a liberal town, you can be attacked, called names, things like that,” he said. “I think a lot of conservatives in Columbia have just given up on the political ideas or trying to learn from the other side, because it's very polarizing, and it's hard for people to come out of their shells.”
But it’s not a problem that’s unique to liberal towns.
In Jessamine County, Ky., Stephen Clements is the conservative co-chair of the local Braver Angels alliance. He’s also a professor of political science at the Asbury University. Even in a county Republican presidential candidates have easily won since 1968, he says the group had to work harder to recruit conservative members.
“It has always been challenging,” he said. “My understanding is it's not just with us, but in a lot of other groups as well. Typically it's more difficult to get red voters to come and engage.”
One of the things Clements studies is political polarization. He says siloed, sprawling media ecosystems are sowing distrust.
“It’s not just Rush Limbaugh out there doing his radio show,” he said. “It's now an entire kind of ecosystem with lots and lots of different elements. That right wing ecosystem plants suspicion on mainstream media outlets and ‘others’ the blue voters.”
And as working-class people are voting increasingly conservative, perceived class divisions plays a role too.
“A lot of it just has to do with the suspicion of elites, suspicion of the Democratic Party and the left, and suspicion of highly educated people,” Clements said.
Plus, working people may have less time to dedicate to groups like Braver Angels. That also explains the fact that Braver Angels meetings, in Columbia, Jessamine County and elsewhere, are typically attended by older adults.
“I could never have had the time and margin to do this kind of thing 25 years ago, when I had little kids, and we were running around the ball games and other kinds of stuff like that on Saturday mornings,” Clements said.
And the situation appears the same in other conservative areas. Braver Angels leaders in Mississippi and Arizona also say their members skew older and say conservative meeting attendees are harder to come by.
“We have been given feedback nationally, even locally, that it is perceived as a blue organization,” said Joy Lubeck, a state coordinator in Arizona.
Other nonpartisan organizations are sometimes perceived as left-wing. For example, the nonpartisan League of Women Voters has a progressive reputation, according to reporting from ProPublica.
But the League takes stances and makes statements that lend to the reputation. For example, ProPublica reports the group has supported universal health care and gun control.
But Braver Angels doesn’t take those kinds of stances. It advocates for depolarization and reaching across the aisle. Alliances are required to have bipartisan co-chairs. So why, regardless of the locale’s politics, is there a lack of conservatives? Local leaders are dumbfounded.
Clements said building trust just takes time. While conservatives didn’t attend much when his alliance started in 2021, it now has 35 members and is just about politically balanced.
“I'm not sure how we can get to a point where there are enough forums and Braver Angels,” he said. “We recognize that this is a pretty long-term and difficult task, and I don't really know what a solution is.”
Of course, Braver Angels’ namesake may carry with it a bad omen. Lincoln’s plea for unity was followed by a civil war. And the fear of a divided union is why members like Paul Steeno keep attending meetings in Columbia and why the group will keep trying to bring people together.
“I'm 71 years old, and I experienced the Vietnam War, and I think we're more polarized now,” Steeno said. “And the only time I think in our nation's history that it's been more polarized would have been the Civil War.”
“This polarity is something that troubles me as a person,” he added. “There's much more of a middle ground, and the theme or desire of the group is to come together and through discourse, polite discourse, to find commonality.”
