When I first came to Braver Angels (back when we were still “Better Angels”) I was met by members of a community – a community that could even have been called a family. After having experienced a workshop in San Diego (I still remember Peter Yarrow quietly strumming a guitar in the corner of the room) I was invited out to a boardroom in Manhattan to meet senior members of the early national team. David Blankenhorn, Donna Murphy, Bill Doherty, April Lawson and others.
It was a unique experience. For all the rooms I’d ever been in across a short career in politics this was the first where the agenda was, purely and simply, to bring the American people together.
That was it. Nothing more, nothing less. In finding a community dedicated to transcending the dividing lines of tribe I realized I had found my own.
Six years later I still feel this way.
Yet, I would be the first to admit that things have come to feel more complicated inside of Braver Angels and outside. As we turn the corner into 2024 it seems evident to me that our journey together is delivering us to a new time of testing. Knowing this, I am filled with some emotion.
We have always known, at Braver Angels, that people of differing parties and differing worldviews can share the strongest bonds if made to see the redeeming humanity beneath their differences. The differences in our politics can be obstacles. But the right attitudes, aided by the right methods, delivers us to an understanding that transcends. When we truly see each other as human beings politics is no barrier to friendship…especially when all we are focused on is the dignity of the man or woman before us.
The trouble is that the fundamental question of the dignity of our fellow Americans is not the only feature of our politics that makes our divisions so bitter.
In principle a liberal may come to love a conservative as a neighbor and friend and vice-versa. Every instance of this is a powerful victory for the ideal of democracy. But despite our love for each other, the differences between us still ripple out into the perils of living questions…questions of justice and injustice, of life and of death.
Can I abide a neighbor who I believe, by her political actions, invites Marxism, or Fascism, to America? Who, even unwittingly, provides aid and comfort to those who cost American lives in a pandemic? Who undermined democracy in 2020? Who cheer the forces of genocide in 2023?
We wound each other in life. Sometimes we wound each other with the noblest intentions.
Understanding this makes it easier to release our contempt for one another. That may not be enough to close the wound. Especially if the actions arising from those intentions continue to cause us pain. As between individuals, so too in politics.
Where then does this leave us?
It has been said that there can be no humility without grace, but that grace has left us in the modern age. As the songs of Christmas linger in the air however, a holiday for religious and non-religious, left and right alike, I am left thinking this may not be true. There is still room for forgiveness in America, and the humility to recall that to be human is to sometimes be in the right and to sometimes be in the wrong.
It is only time and our friends that can show us the difference.
Let Braver Angels be a source of grace, humility and friendship for America in a moment when our country will need it most. And let us be this for each other. Only in this can we arrive at truth together with a love that stops the bleeding.
A very happy new year to you all.
