When did we start fearing our neighbors’ disapproval more than actual danger?
That’s the question sitting underneath a conversation Welcome.US just published with Braver Angels CEO Maury Giles. It’s worth your time, and not for the reasons you’d expect from a piece framed around immigration and welcome.
Maury makes a point early on that stands out: people fear social death more than physical death. That’s not a throwaway line. It explains a lot about why disagreement in this country has curdled into something meaner than it used to be — why a policy opinion becomes a referendum on whether you’re a good person or a bad one. When the stakes feel like exile from your own tribe, people stop arguing positions and start signaling loyalty. Maury calls it “social road rage,” and once you hear it named that way, you start seeing it everywhere.
The piece also gets into something we talk about a lot internally but that outsiders don’t always register: the discipline behind our 50/50 structure. You can’t start a Braver Angels Alliance without both a conservative and a progressive co-leader. That’s not a symbolic gesture — it’s a design constraint that forces the organization to mean what it says about representation, at every level, every time.
What I liked most is where Maury takes it: courageous citizenship isn’t a slogan, it’s a decision to sit at the table anyway. To lean in with curiosity instead of contempt. And critically, he connects that directly to how we treat newcomers — the same instinct that lets us see a political opponent as fully human is the instinct that lets us see a new American as a neighbor instead of a threat.
This is exactly the kind of partnership we want more of. Welcome.US works from a different angle than we do, but we’re aiming at the same thing: a country where people build together instead of retreating into their corners.
Read the full conversation with Maury here: Becoming a Courageous Citizen
What’s your version of “social road rage” — a moment you caught yourself treating disagreement like a threat instead of an opening? W’d like to hear it.