Polarization? Government dysfunction?

Baldwin Wallace University political science students who participated in civil but energized discussions under guidelines established by professor Lauren Copeland. From left: Chris Moran, Jack Cain, Mia Basit, Liana Gonzalez, Bryce Cooney and Daisjah Brown.

Civil student conversations

I want to start with Lauren’s students at Baldwin Wallace and the remarkable conversations they had under Lauren’s leadership. I had the good fortune to spend a morning speaking with the students about their approach and the resulting connections they made. They gave me some hope for the future, with most students – but not all -- optimistic about chances for improving the national conversation.

The students give the credit to Lauren. She spent part of last summer thinking through how to, as she described it, “put civility front and center” in her political science classes. She designed a workshop aimed at teaching empathy and listening skills.

Instead of immediately arguing a point, the students had to digest what others were saying. One tactic might sound as basic as it gets, but students said a requirement that they raise their hands before talking – rather than just shouting out – had a profound impact on civility.

Almost immediately, conversations in Lauren’s classes changed. Gone were the close-minded orations. The discussions became dynamic, lively and respectful, with students following Lauren’s request that they see the person, not the position the person takes.

For the students, an early and memorable discussion was about gun control. “It went completely off the rails,” said Bryce Cooney, but in a good way. “We talked about it the whole class and there wasn’t really any animosity.”

Chris Moran, a vocal conservative in the class, said the diverse geographical backgrounds of the class injected perspective.

“I’m from a more suburban area, and then some people are from more rural parts, like southern Ohio. And we had completely different experiences growing up… So they prioritized other things, had different ideas. I just find it really interesting to hear those ideas… I still believe what I believe, but I can see where you’re coming from now, at least, from listening and hearing more.”

Boom. That’s what Lauren was after -- students listening to each other. To mix things up, she assigned people to work in groups on political projects, including designing a campaign for a candidate. Under the new rules, the simple group task of choosing a candidate changed. Instead of the majority of students running roughshod over the minority, they listened to each other.

One group had three left-leaning students and one leaning right. All four agreed on a candidate, with the right-leaning student able to reject some of the early choices. They ended up with Cory Booker.

Right off the bat we had three people who had already worked together,” said Daisjah Brown. “We already knew each other from previous classes… But if he didn't take the time to stand up and say no, we definitely would've gone with a different candidate and it would've gone completely our way rather than him having some say in it.’”

Lauren Copeland, a Baldwin Wallace University professor, works with her students in classes designed for civil discussions. Copeland is working on plans for a civility initiative at the school, one of several Ohio-based efforts to reduce polarization. You can help. Fill out a survey at the link below. The students, front row, are Kristen Oestreich and Emily Shelton; middle, Daisjah Brown and Liana Gonzalez; back, Andrew Smith, Gavin Gonzalez, Gehrig Stanley and Mia Basit.

I asked the students whether, with all they had learned, they could sit down and negotiate a compromise on a polarizing topic like abortion. The initial response from most was yes, but then Chris, who leans right, spoke up and said he could not, as he believes life starts at conception. I asked about guns, and he said probably not on that, either.

I pushed a bit, asking him and the others whether, pragmatically, they could do it. If people on both sides knew that they could not get everything they wanted, could they surrender some of what they wished for to meet in the middle. Most said probably.

“I think this group specifically (could.)” said Liana Gonzalez. “It would take a really long time, don't get me wrong, and we would need breaks to cool off in between. And there'd be slideshow presentations and facts and figures. It'd be nuts. But I feel at some point… someone would at least be able to say, ‘I hear where you're coming from.’”

Chris noted that students are required to have conversations in class. Outside the college, people can’t be compelled to speak with each other. He suspects that the only people willing to work toward compromise on a national level already believe in civil discourse and compromise. The people who spend every night watching Fox News or MSNBC are dug in and not open to it.

Breanna Sefcik described herself as and said she finds people wear metaphorical masks in situations like classes. Once they leave, the masks come off and they revert to form. She does not see anything changing on the national scale.

That would be sad, but I had to consider that these students have lived their entire lives in a polarized country. The adults have let them down. Lauren is trying to overcome some powerful forces.

“I think we have to be hopeful,” said Liana. “If not, why are we here doing this? … We have to have some sort of faith that we will be able to sit down and have conversations like this in our government system… That's what our whole system is built on -- being able to compromise with other parties.”

My takeaway from what Lauren did in the fall semester is that with people of good faith and some carefully considered guardrails, we can have respectful conversations with people who vehemently disagree with us. We just need to follow the trail blazed by the students.

Or, as Bryce put it, “I think everyone needs to take a class with Dr. Copeland. I think that would solve all of these problems.”

Braver Angels

Lauren said she did not know it at the time, but the model she created for civil conversations in her classes had a lot in common with the practices at Braver Angels.

I am not expert on Braver Angels, and you really should visit the agency’s website for a deeper understanding. I did, however, get to participate in a call with Lauren, some of her students and the two Ohio coordinators for Braver Angels, Beverly Horstman and Nancy Miranda. Beverly gave us the brief history.

Following the rancor of the 2016 presidential election, three people including David Lapp of Lebanon, Ohio, became so concerned with the national rancor that they decided to bring 10 Donald Trump voters and 10 Hillary Clinton voters together to see if they could be civil and find some common ground. The meeting, called a red-blue workshop, was in greater Cincinnati and was so successful that they decided to have another, in March 2017. They brought together another 20 voters, had another successful discussion, and Braver Angels was born.

What was success? It was participants not seeing each other as stereotypes but as fellow Americans. After the group’s workshops were featured on NPR, requests poured in from across the nation from people who wanted in, resulting in rapid growth.

Braver Angels has several forum types. In one, participants break into groups for discussions of specific topics. In others, the organization teaches skills, such as helping people depolarize themselves by examining how they speak about others.

“It’s real easy when we get within our groups where people think alike to have conversations that can escalate and become quite negative about the other side,’ Beverly said.

As with Lauren’s class, some seemingly simple tactics make a difference. Braver Angels participants are not labeled Republican, Democrat, liberal or conservative as they engage. They describe themselves only as leaning blue or red. Beverly said anything more specific pushes people into silos, and civil discourse is about getting out of silos.

Another tactic: “The joke we do, and you are going to laugh at the simplicity of this, but we try to do it in proportion to our face. We have two ears and one mouth. We try to use our ears twice as much as our mouth.”

Listening. Just like Lauren’s students.

Braver Angels gatherings moved to Zoom in the pandemic, and that helped with the rapid expansion into all 50 states. People could participate from home.

The expansion continues. Braver Angels now works with city councils and colleges. One of the founders does red-blue workshops with members of Congress. Maine wants Braver Angels to work with its legislature. And in Ohio, the organization works with students at Xavier University, Miami University and the University of Cincinnati. At Denison University, it is helping freshmen learn to debate.

If you want a place to have safe, respectful conversations with people who you don’t necessarily agree with, to learn more about why they feel as they do, Braver Angels can make it happen. The bigger this group gets, the better America will be.

And it started right here in Ohio.

An institute for civil discourse?

The newsroom at cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer has regularly worked on polls and surveys with Lauren and her colleague Tom Sutton in the Baldwin Wallace Community Research Institute. They are about the best partners we’ve ever had.

Lauren had something else in mind when she reached out at the start of the new year, responding to a column I published on Christmas Eve. Earlier in December, I had asked readers to send me their wishes for 2023, and to get the conversation started, I said my wish was that we would find a way to have civil discourse. Instead of general wishes, I received a lot of well-considered ideas on civil discourse. (I also heard from Braver Angels, which is how we first learned of their work.)

I compiled a lot of the responses into a piece for the Christmas weekend, thinking I might inspire hope in readers during the holidays. The column struck a chord for Lauren, who had been mulling some sort of institute on civil discourse, to build on what she learned in her fall classes. She wondered if cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer might be a partner.

She’s been sprinting ever since. She learned about Braver Angels from the column, signed up and participated in a session, learning about how much the organization had developed civility tools. She welcomed me into her classroom to talk with her students. She wrote a draft of a proposal for a Baldwin Wallace Democracy and Civility Initiative, which could take many forms.

Her initiative might teach faculty how to cultivate civility. Or it could teach Northeast Ohio how to engage in civil discussions. Maybe it teaches the community, students and faculty how to participate in the political process, come up with solutions to community problems, talk about challenging topics like race in a non-judgmental way or share information without making us more polarized.

Two students have applied to work on the initiative in the Baldwin Wallace Summer Scholars program, but an initiative like this needs money. Maybe a foundation that supports changing the conversation will step forward. The initiative needs a program director. It needs data.

Data? Remember that survey I mentioned way back at the beginning of this column? That’s the first data effort. Lauren put it together, with help from some of the students I spoke with, and Braver Angels Ohio had some great advice for wording questions to reduce the chance for sparking polarization.

Our role in the partnership is to spread the word. That’s what I’m doing here. Please, take a few minutes to fill out the survey. It is beautifully put together, and it might cause you some healthy introspection.

Here’s the link. tinyurl.com/civildiscoursesurvey

A way out

The last section of this meandering piece has nothing to do with Baldwin Wallace or Braver Angels. And it’s not my idea. It could, however, fire up some great civil discussions.

I went through Leadership Cleveland in 2014-2015, when Marcy Shankman was the workshop leader. One day a month for nearly a year, dozens of us gathered to hear from speakers, tour parts of Cleveland and work in groups to discuss challenging topics. Marcy was the perfect guide, pushing us just far enough for ideas to take root and the discussions to flow.

I’m lucky that in the years since, I’ve sat down with Marcy at intervals to catch up and discuss the state of leadership and discourse. (She now is the chief organizational learning officer at the Cleveland schools.) Just after Thanksgiving last year, we met for coffee and talked a good bit about polarization and growing intolerance for open conversation.

Marcy also had a suggestion for me. She recommended I read a book called The Politics Industry, by Katherine M. Gehl and Michael Porter. I’m so glad I followed her advice.

The overarching point of the book is that elected leaders, seeking to remain in power, have corrupted the way we elect them. The American system of government is broken as a result. It’s stagnated.

The authors note that this has happened before. In the late 1800s, the Gilded Age, America was as polarized as it is now. Back then, the problem was that party bosses had a stranglehold on the system, leaving voters out of the process. And like now, the government was stagnated.

“By the end of the nineteenth century, America was on the cusp of unraveling. But as we know now, the country emerged from this chapter with our democracy made stronger, thanks to groups of determined Americans who spawned a generation of political innovation.”

The book examines how from 1890 to 1920, reformers across the nation reshaped the rules of politics. States brought in party primaries, so voters -- not party bosses -- chose the candidates. It’s also when voters, not state legislators, began choosing U.S. senators. Campaign finance reporting became the norm. And ballot measures in 24 states gave citizens the ability to bypass lawmakers and pass their own legislation.

The reforms worked, and America’s politics and government functioned pretty well until recent decades. But gerrymandering, dark money and other shenanigans have put the parties back in the driver’s seat, leaving voters with far less power.

The authors offer two simple changes to the rules of the game to get us back on track.

First, end partisan primaries. Instead, for every election, have one open primary in which all of us vote on one slate of candidates and the top five move on to the general election. We could still use party labels, so voters could easily vote for candidates in their parties.

Such a change would reduce the power of political parties and, more important, allow everyone a say on who gets on the ballot. Consider Cuyahoga County today. If you are an independent or Republican, you don’t get a vote in the Democratic primary. And in November, no matter how you vote, the Democrat is almost guaranteed a win. Your vote means nothing.

Second, use ranked voting. With up to five candidates on the general election ballot, you would rank your choices one through five. If no candidate gets more than 50 percent of the vote, you remove the last-place candidate, and anyone who voted for him or her then gives their vote to their second choice.

If, still, no one gets more than 50 percent, the second-to-last candidate is removed, and people voters for that candidate get redistributed to each voter’s second or third choices.

This is intriguing for several reasons. One is that no candidate wins with a plurality. The winner would have the majority of the votes, meaning more than 50 percent of the voters made the choice.

Much more important, though, is that candidates could no longer just appeal to the fringes of their parties. That’s what happens today. In partisan primaries, candidates who say crazy things appeal to the fringes and win, even though their platforms don’t come close to mirroring the overall electorate. That leaves voters in November with bad choices.

But if you were a candidate and knew you needed to appeal to more than half of the voters, you would likely be more moderate, more like most of us. You would have to fight for those second- and third-place votes.

The authors say such a system also would empower politicians to vote their consciences on legislation rather than fearing the wrath of their parties. Today, if a lawmaker goes against the party, the party declares war. Look at how Donald Trump and his supporters targeted anyone who voted to impeach. Or consider the punishment Republicans have threatened against Ohio House members who voted against the party’s choice for House speaker. But with this system of voting, the voters are back in control. The lawmakers would have to appease the majority of voters to win, without much worry about the party.

Changing the voting system as recommended in the book would also negate the effect of gerrymandering. Instead of trying to come up with more fair mapmaking methods, maybe we should change how we elect people, to make the maps less significant.

Like I said, it’s an intriguing idea. It could be the path forward. Or not. Think about it. Talk about it. With civility and respect. You never know. Lightning could strike.

Help it to happen. Please take the survey.

Lastly, to keep the wheels turning, I leave you with a simple, three-part test to measure your civility, courtesy of theconversation.com.

First, take one of your strongest political views, and then try to figure out what your smartest partisan opponent might say about it.

Second, identify a political idea that is key to your opponent and then develop a lucid argument that supports it.

Third, identify a major policy favored by the other side that you could regard as permissible for government – despite your opposition.

If you struggle to perform those tasks, that means one has a feeble grasp on the range of responsible political opinion.

When we cannot even imagine a cogent political perspective that stands in opposition to our own, we can’t engage civilly with our fellow citizens.

Let me know how you do. I'm at [email protected]

Thanks for reading.