As the exercise showed—or as you probably already know, if you’ve had a political debate any time in the past year, or three years, or decade—that’s uncommon. In Cary, one participant kept unwittingly critiquing the Republican Party, nearly to the point of slapstick. As a chuckle spread through the group, his face fell. “Am I doing the same thing again?” Leslie Selbst asked, with mild exasperation.

He’s hardly alone in this binary view of politics. Even more than the standard understanding of polarization—the widening chasm between preferred political outcomes—the U.S. is riven by negative polarization, a loathing for the other side. To cite the classic metric, the number of Americans who wouldn’t want their child to marry someone of the other political party has skyrocketed since, roughly, the 2008 election.

Read: Red state, blue city

This is not a novel insight. There’s so much pearl-clutching about polarization and the need for centrist solutions that it has spawned a cottage industry of groups peddling ideas for compromise, along with a counter–cottage industry of commentators who argue that civility is overrated and polarization underrated.

What is intriguing about Better Angels is that it isn’t seeking to formulate a broadly acceptable centrist platform, nor appeal to the vast middle who (Americans are told) really truly just want the country to work. 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. That seems more manageable and realistic than getting everyone to see eye to eye on policies, but it’s still no easy feat—and even if the group is successful, is fostering an open dialogue within a polarized system enough to fix American politics?

Sometimes it takes an unexpected leader to reach across the political divide, like Richard Nixon going to China. David Blankenhorn, the president of Better Angels, is not that type of leader.

He’s traversed the aisle several times in his career. Blankenhorn was reared in conservative Mississippi, attended Harvard, then became a community organizer. The think tank he established and led for many years, the Institute for American Values (IAV), found allies on the center-right. In 2010, Blankenhorn served as a witness defending California’s Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage, during a court challenge. Two years later, he changed his mind, announcing the switch in a New York Times op-ed. “That experience was pretty searing for me,” he told me, wryly noting that he has the rare distinction of managing to lose friends on both sides of the debate.

On November 9, 2016, the day after Donald Trump’s election, Blankenhorn woke up to a morose mood on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where he lives. He called David Lapp, a friend and colleague from IAV, who was in South Lebanon, Ohio—between Cincinnati and Dayton— where, by contrast, the atmosphere was buoyant and hopeful. The men decided they needed to do something to bridge that emotional gap, and within a few weeks, they’d gathered 10 Trump voters and 10 Hillary Clinton voters for a discussion in Ohio. With a nod to the notion that the U.S. was a house divided against itself, they recruited Bill Doherty, a veteran family therapist, to design and lead the talk.