Alton Russell is a white, 85-year-old toilet paper salesman from Columbus, Ga., where for years he was the chair of the local Republican Party. Wane Hailes is a Black, 68-year-old newspaper owner from Columbus, where he formerly served as the president of the city’s chapter of the N.A.A.C.P.
Until last year, the two had never met. About all they had in common was that they had both lived for years in Columbus, Georgia’s second-largest city, on the banks of the Chattahoochee River.
Then, one morning last fall, the two were introduced to each other in a local church, where they received a simple instruction: to have a conversation about anything except politics. So they chatted amiably for 50 minutes about their lives, their families, their jobs.
As they talked, they discovered that they did have one important thing in common: They liked each other.
“Wane is just a regular-old person,” Mr. Russell said. “The more we talked, the more I realized he didn’t have slanted ears or horns or anything like that.”
“There ain’t nothing wrong with Alton,” Mr. Hailes added. “How can you be mad at somebody who sells toilet paper?”
The men had come as part of One Small Step, an initiative by the nonprofit oral history project StoryCorps. Its humble format — two people of opposite politics, chatting in a room with a moderator — belies an ambitious goal. Dave Isay, the founder of StoryCorps, hopes to scale experiences like Mr. Russell’s and Mr. Hailes’s into a kind of wave of national reconciliation that will help heal our political polarization, on the theory that two people from opposing groups who engage in an unguarded conversation about their lives will usually grow to like each other. (Fittingly, One Small Step has attracted funding from the charitable foundations of the co-founders of the Home Depot, Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank, megadonors for opposing parties. Another major funder: Steven Spielberg.)
Now, StoryCorps is opening the One Small Step program up to anyone, through a new website that matches those who sign up for it with a partner across the political aisle, and sets up a video call for them to talk. These virtual conversations, which Mr. Isay wants to ramp up in time for the day after the 2024 presidential election, won’t have a moderator.
He knows he has his work cut out for him.
“We’re asking people to do something that they’ve never done before,” he said. “Talk to a stranger across the political divides at this toxic moment in the country.”
Mr. Isay is hardly the first one to try to address the nation’s partisan divides through dialogue. Since the 2016 election, a number of organizations have cropped up with similar objectives, including Braver Angels, a nonprofit that facilitates “healthier” conversations among people who disagree politically, and Make America Dinner Again, which helps people host dinner parties with guests from across the political spectrum.
There are skeptics. Shanto Iyengar, a professor of political science at Stanford University, pioneered the study of affective polarization — when polarization is not based on policy issues but on the tendency for partisans of one political party to dislike and distrust the members of another. He says programs like One Small Step treat the symptoms of polarization, rather than the root causes.
Mr. Iyengar pointed to a 2022 study in the journal Nature Human Behavior, which found that cross-party conversations could make participants feel better about other political groups, but that they did not necessarily change anti-democratic attitudes or reduce support for partisan violence.
“This is equivalent to saying to someone with cancer and a lack of energy, ‘We’ll make Red Bull available to all patients,’” he said.
But Jennifer Richeson, the director of Yale University’s Social Perception and Communication Lab, which works with StoryCorps on this initiative, said there was empirical evidence that conversations could actually shift peoples’ ideas about each other.
Based on findings from surveys her team designed for One Small Step, Dr. Richeson said the conversations made liberals more empathetic toward their conservative counterparts, and vice versa. Perhaps more unexpectedly, she added, there is also some evidence that this shift in empathy extends beyond the conversation partner to all members of their political persuasion.
When Mr. Isay began exploring interview formats for his project — which he also began during the 2016 presidential campaign, as he fretted about the state of the country — he came up against some limitations.
At first, his team tested conversations between family members with opposing politics, which Mr. Isay came to think of as an ineffective way to create social change.
“At the end of the day, for the most part, you don’t want your family member to die,” he said. “Even if you disagree with them.”
Then they had strangers with opposite views talk politics, but those conversations often devolved into arguments.
They arrived at the current model in 2018, conducting over 3,000 interviews with participants who include construction workers, teachers, retirees, stay-at-home moms, students, enlisted military members and engineers.
To attract participants, Mr. Isay’s team entered into partnerships with local radio stations, placed stories in local newspapers and bought digital advertising. The people who signed up were often apprehensive, Mr. Isay said, because of years of messaging that he believed encouraged Americans to demonize their political opponents. But many were willing to participate in the conversations, a sign, he added, that they shared his worry for the state of the country.
“Our dream is to convince the country it’s our patriotic duty to see the humanity in people with whom we disagree,” Mr. Isay said.
Those on a steady diet of Fox News or MSNBC might say: Dream on. After the 2016 election, well-meaning guides about how liberals might speak to their Trump-supporting relatives over the holidays proliferated to such a degree that they eventually became a joke.
A YouGov/Economist poll from April showed that 56 percent of Democrats and 64 percent of Republicans think that the other group doesn’t share their values. And a hotly contested election season — one that has so far included two assassination attempts against former President Donald J. Trump, as well as lies from the Trump campaign that have upended an immigrant community in Ohio — has raised the temperature on an already boiling national mood.
Mr. Isay, though, has a good track record with vast and quixotic projects. StoryCorps started as a single interview booth in Grand Central Terminal in 2003, drawing inspiration from a Works Progress Administration program that collected biographical stories about everyday Americans in the 1930s. Today, it is a cultural institution, having recorded 350,000 conversations that are now preserved by the Library of Congress and syndicated by National Public Radio.
Perhaps Mr. Isay’s greatest challenge with One Small Step, though, is getting the word out, particularly to conservatives, who have been slower to participate. StoryCorps is well known among NPR listeners, who skew liberal. That’s why, in addition to a national billboard campaign and a partnership with Cumulus Radio — whose hosts include right-wing stars like Mark Levin and Dan Bongino — One Small Step is rolling out a partnership with the N.F.L., which Mr. Isay calls “the great unifier.”
Still, that the program has had more trouble attracting conservatives than liberals points to a possibility that complicates the elegant symmetry of his project: that Republicans may think Democrats are more responsible for the national division, while Democrats may blame Republicans.
Mr. Isay is banking on the idea of a so-called exhausted majority — mostly unengaged Americans who do not spend much time consuming news on social media, whose voices are drowned out by the fringes on both sides, and who are tired of national polarization.
Recently, in Georgia, Mr. Russell attended the swearing-in ceremony for a friend who had been elected to local government. The first person he saw when he arrived was Mr. Hailes. As they had done before, the men struck up a conversation.
“People would come in who we both knew, and they never did say, ‘What are you all doing sitting together?’” Mr. Hailes said. “But you could tell they were thinking it.”
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