When Donald Trump was elected in 2016, many of us thought our democracy might depend on the resistance of a few brave, powerful Republican souls. And when Sen. John McCain voted against the repeal of the Affordable Care Act in 2017, it looked as though he might have begun such a movement. But McCain died in 2018, and Republicans with political power were reluctant to oppose the president.
Lately, two men have made me wonder if we’ve been looking in the wrong place for courage, maybe even looking for the wrong kind of courage. The first is a friend, Francois Rochat, who teaches at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. The second is Douglass Teschner, who for several years represented Haverhill, Orford and Piermont as a Republican state representative in the New Hampshire Legislature.
I asked Rochat to send me a copy of a lecture he delivered in 2002, “Common Decency Facing Political Mass Violence.” His lecture was based on work he’d done in collaboration with Andre Modigliani at the University of Michigan, and the question he asked in his subtitle suggests a challenge similar to those our country has faced during Donald Trump’s term: “How Did Some People Come to Protect Persecuted Minorities During World War II?”
Early in his lecture Rochat mentions the last scene in Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List, the story of a German industrialist who saved more than a thousand Jews from the Holocaust. In the scene some of the people saved by Schindler gather at his grave with actors who played them in the film. With the exception of a little girl who appears in a bright red coat earlier in the film, the rest is in black and white, evoking an old documentary. But this final, graveside scene is in color.
The film’s shift to color in the closing scene, Rochat suggests, assumes the extraordinary nature of the heroism revealed by those who protected Jews from the Holocaust. But as the phrase “common decency” implies, Rochat makes a case for a grassroots kind of heroism that didn’t feel extraordinary or even heroic to the rescuers themselves. Social and psychological research among the 14,000 rescuers identified by Yad Vashem: The World Holocaust Remembrance Center has not identified moral certitude or previous behavior that sets the rescuers apart from others.
Rescuers, Rochat says, were not inclined to think about moral choices even though German authorities portrayed Jews and other refugees as “pernicious villains who had launched a secret war against the nation, and against Christian values.” Instead, rescuers considered practical necessities such as food, clothing and shelter, and knowing they could be punished by the authorities for providing help, they considered how to do it safely.
There is something primal in Rochat’s description of rescuers’ responses to persecuted minorities, as though a person arrived at your door badly wounded or dying of cold, and you began to help without asking questions. He puts it this way: “One could say that they paid attention to the persons they saw, the situation of distress they were in, or the dangers they were threatened by.”
This is where “common decency” connects with Douglass Teschner’s volunteer work in a national organization called Braver Angels (www.braverangels.org).
The little girl in a red coat in Schindler’s List gave the victims of the Holocaust an appealing, innocent identity in the mind of the German industrialist, ultimately turning him into a rescuer. Braver Angels sets out to help people get to know individuals from whom they feel deeply divided politically. The organization brings Democrats and Republicans together to talk, providing questions and methods for seeking common ground. In a 2018 Atlantic piece, David Graham describes the purpose of Braver Angels this way: “It’s not trying to end partisanship; the group’s very concept, with its red versus blue structure, presupposes polarity. Its premise is not that everyone needs to agree, but simply that they need to be able to talk to one another, and that such a skill has been lost.”
As I talked and exchanged emails with Teschner (dteschner@braverangels.org), it seemed to me Braver Angels’ goals might be even more ambitious. Maybe people who learn how to talk with each other despite important political disagreements begin to see each other as more fully human. Braver Angels began in 2016 as “Better Angels,” the famous phrase in Lincoln’s First Inaugural for the good impulses shared by most of us, the instinctive generosity and forgiveness that he believed could help the North and South come back together after the Civil War.
If you think of “braver” as Lincoln seemed to think of “better” — an individual’s intrinsic ability to be good as well as bad — “Braver Angels” makes a lot of sense. It takes gumption to sit down and talk with someone who might have yelled at you one day when you were carrying a sign. People who risk such conversations are calling on their braver angels.
They are learning, as Teschner puts it, to “put the person first and the opinion second.”
People with power in our divided country are going to have to learn again the skills of talking across an aisle that has turned into a deep chasm in recent years. The work Rochat and Teschner do holds out the promise that we as common citizens can press our leaders to do so by helping to build constituencies that bravely try to bridge chasms in our own communities.
Bill Nichols lives in West Lebanon. He can be reached at Nichols@Denison.edu.