INTERVIEW // Can America Muster Its Braver Angels? An interview with John Wood Jr.

interview by Heather Shayne Blakeslee

EXCERPT //

John Wood Jr. is national leader for Braver Angels, and is also a former nominee for Congress, former vice-chairman of the Republican Party of Los Angeles County, a musical artist, and a noted writer and speaker on subjects including racial and political reconciliation. He spoke with RQ Editor Heather Shayne Blakeslee about how we might move forward together as a country, even when we disagree; about the power of stories; and the need to understand our moral foundations. …

Braver Angels has based a lot of its methodology on getting ‘red’ (conservative) and ‘blue’ (progressive) people into rooms together, talking with one another, not necessarily to change one another’s minds, but to find common ground—a lot of people are under the impression that we don’t have anything in common, especially on a policy level. Is there any way in which the pandemic has actually helped people understand that we are really, truly, all in this together? 

Wood: I think, particularly in the early stages of the lockdown, there seemed to be a way in which many Americans were seeing the importance of banding together and putting our differences into perspective relative to the larger things that we have in common. What’s been frustrating to observe is that I think that initial space of goodwill has still managed to give way quite a bit to our conventional pose with respect to embracing the polarizing rhetoric and postures. So that’s been tough to see, but it wasn’t altogether unpredictable. And it just means our work continues to be more important than ever.

When people talk about ‘the center’ or ‘moderates,’ many feel like it’s a dilution of more radical programs, policies, approaches that might be needed for change, whether those calls are coming from the right or the left. But I wonder if there are more nonlinear ways of thinking about ‘the center’ or ‘moderation’ or ‘common ground,’ however you want to characterize it.

Wood: People, I think, operate under the assumption that any bipartisan organization like ours is, by nature, a sort of moderate or centrist organization. We really don’t see ourselves that way—which isn’t to say that we don’t have a lot of moderates or centrists. We certainly do. But we’re not a policy advocacy organization. And so there are people who work with us and support us, who are part of our community, who are well-to-the-left and well-to-the-right people, who support Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and who support Donald Trump, etc.

I do think of us as trying to establish a new center in a way. But it’s not so much an ideological center in a policy sense, so much as it is sort of a new civil-society center, or a new center with respect to our conception of ‘what should the character of the civic space be?’ ...

For full text and images, consider reading RQ in print, on a Sunday afternoon, sun streaming through your window, coffee in hand, and nary a phone alert within sight or in earshot… just fine words, fine design, and the opportunity to make a stitch in time. // Subscribe or buy a single issue today. // Print is dead. Long live print. //