Three weeks after the 2016 US presidential election, a group of 21 people came together in South Lebanon, Ohio, outside Cincinnati, to talk.The group comprised 11 people who’d supported Hillary Clinton for president and 10 who’d supported Donald Trump. After the contentious election, there was a question lurking under the surface: “Could we as a country avoid a civic divorce? Could we build a more perfect union?” says David Lapp.
That meeting marked the beginning of what would become a national movement called Better Angels that Lapp and two colleagues formed to create friendly spaces for potentially unfriendly conversations. It’s among dozens of such arrangements—from weekly dinners to meet-ups to formal debates—that have emerged after the 2016 election to look for common ground across the political divide.
Better Angels got rolling in 2017, with a summer bus tour of 15 communities between Waynesville, Ohio, and Philadelphia, convening a similar mix of people in what they called “Red/Blue Workshops.” A fall tour followed, from Washington, D.C., to Nashville, Tennessee. Along the way, Better Angels has trained 130 volunteers to moderate future workshops. The meet-ups, Lapp says, are “not an effort to change each other’s policy views or political views, but we are trying to change our minds about each other.”
