Four days before a Madison Square Garden campaign rally where presidential candidate Donald Trump said Kamala Harris was “a very low IQ individual” and comedian Tony Hinchcliffe called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage,” amid other misogynist and racist comments, a more civilized election conversation took place in living rooms across the U.S.
Twenty-five strangers from different states (and one from Toronto) gathered virtually to participate in “Anxiety and Elections,” a guided discussion hosted by Annie Caplan of Longmont, Colorado, for the nonprofit organization Living Room Conversations.
The event resembled other online or in-person discussions happening around the country in recent months that aim to engage participants in “compassionate conversations” about divisive topics. Ever since the first Trump campaign in 2015, a handful of nonprofit organizations sprang up to try to build bridges between polarized Americans through this method — but with little success.
“Compassionate conversation” refers to methods for people with different perspectives to engage each other with kindness and understanding by using conflict resolution skills, attentive listening, and other techniques. Guidelines for the Living Room Conversations, for example, include “be curious and listen to understand,” “show respect and suspend judgment” and “note any common ground as well as any differences.” Such programs are not meant to provide opportunities for participants to try to convert others to their own favored political party or candidate, but rather, to help people with differing views find common ground and see one another as human beings.
According to the Pew Research Center, from 2016 to 2022, an increasing number of Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. said members of the other political party are more “immoral, dishonest and closed-minded” than other American citizens.
With both sides harboring negative views about the other — the Pew study found, for example, that 72% of Republicans in 2022 regarded Democrats as more immoral than other Americans, and 63% of Democrats said the same about Republicans — proponents of compassionate conversation maintain respectful, empathetic dialogue is the way forward.
Many organizations have formed in recent years to bring people together from across perceived boundaries. Dave Isay (pictured above), who founded the audio project StoryCorps, recently launched an initiative called One Small Step. The goal? Simply to bring people to get to know each other.
Living Room Conversations encourages participants to share personal experiences and identify the group’s shared values.
“When you connect around values, people find it easier to relate to each other,” said Becca Kearl, executive director of Living Room Conversations.
But that approach may be most needed when people with opposing views are willing to join in. Leaders of dialogue-hosting groups have noticed that most participants are liberal.
During the “Anxiety and Elections” discussion, the participants were divided into virtual breakout rooms of three to five people, where they responded to such questions as: “What are your hopes and concerns for your family, community and/or the country?”
“My hopes and concerns are that humans get smart enough to start managing our planet sanely,” said Thomas Orjala, a retired construction worker from Couer d’Alene, Idaho, in the breakout room he shared with Carol Tellman, 72, who is retired and recently moved from Colorado to New Jersey, and Sheila Fox, 75, of Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, a grandmother, poet, painter and retired clinical social worker who does “archetypal dream work” and describes herself as an “activist since I was 18.”
“I am concerned about the way people are with each other, just politically, religiously,” said Tellman.
“I’m concerned about fascism and Trump being elected again,” Fox said.
This breakout discussion was, indeed, compassionate and respectful — perhaps because all three participants admitted they share similar political views.
More liberals than conservatives also sign up for Braver Angels, a group founded after the 2016 U.S. presidential election. It now comprises about 100 regional alliances with nearly 13,800 members; they meet online or in person for workshops, conversations and more.
Yvonne Boyd, a middle school secretary in Washington state and an organizer and trainer with Braver Angels, said she didn’t know exact numbers, but estimated that about 75% of participants are Blues (Democrats in the group’s parlance), and 25% are Reds (Republicans).
Joy Olsen, a rare Braver Angels member and retired accountant from Vancouver, Washington, who leans red, said she considers the imbalance between Republicans and Democrats an ongoing problem for Braver Angels. Rather than talk about values, as the program intends, she said she feels obligated to defend a conservative point of view..
Conservatives, she said, “really want to talk about issues. They want to have a discussion of why we disagree.” Meanwhile, she said that liberals are more interested than conservatives in listening and “hearing everybody out.”
Even the much-publicized and highly lauded Hands Across the Hills (HAH) dialogue project found a preponderance of left-leaning participants. Formed after the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the program ran from 2017 to 2023, bringing together residents in the rural communities of Letcher County, Kentucky, and Leverett, Massachusetts, for in-person and online discussions.
“The core of the group was really liberals,” noted Pat Fiero, who lives in Leverett, in a discussion quoted in a book about the project.
The book also quotes Gwen Johnson, of Letcher County, who explained, “It was a hard sell to people around here. They thought we had lost our ever-loving minds to be part of it. As far as organizing around this stuff in the community, naw, it didn’t work here. People thought it was crazy to try to do such a thing. Part of it was Fox News hard-selling people around here about liberals.”
“I am a participant in the church of dialogue, but I’m also a skeptic,” said Ben Fink, former lead organizer of HAH.
The project did not fully explore issues of class or race, and most participants were white, he said.
Where HAH — and other compassionate conversation projects — did find some success, however, was in providing communication tools applicable to a range of situations and in forging bonds among those who did participate. Many HAH members still keep in touch, though the formal meetings ended last year, Fink said.
That has also been the case for one of the oldest discussion-fostering organizations, Essential Partners, founded in 1989, which offers training, resources and community dialogue about divisive subjects. Its director of programs, Meg Griffiths, said that the group began with conversations about abortion rights. Afterward, “people talked about how their positions did not change an ounce,” she said, “but what grew was deep understanding for one another.”
As for Living Room Conversations, an18-month study by the Fetzer Institute found that the organization’s programs improved participants’ listening skills and knowledge and led to longer-term use of the communication tools in other areas of life and “interest in systemic change spurred by mutual understanding.”
Or, as the conservative Braver Angles participant, Joy Olsen, put it, learning communication techniques to use when she “feels triggered” helps her avoid “cussing someone out” or leaving the conversation.
Compassionate conversations can have deeper personal effects as well, said Matt Hawkins, chief operating officer of the Global Compassion Coalition and co-author of How Compassion Can Transform Our Politics, Economy, and Society. According to scholarly research the organization has compiled, he noted, compassion reduces depression, anxiety, stress and conflict, and can even improve life expectancy.
But no one yet knows whether — or how — such benefits can be produced in the political sphere. That, said Hawkins, has not been tested “in a peer-reviewed way.”
Simply looking around and listening to the news suggests that translating compassion into political discourse and policy is not likely to happen any time soon. The language used by pundits and politicians alike, said Hawkins, “is the source of so much antagonism, division and difference.”
(Photo credit: George Miller)
About the author(s)
Karen Lindell
Karen Lindell, a journalist from Southern California who has reported on arts and culture for more than 20 years for newspapers and magazines, is in the Master of Arts program at the Columbia Journalism School.