Earlier this year, I joined in the work of Urban Rural Action, founded by Joe Bubman. URA's primary mission is to bring together Americans across geographic, political, racial, and generational divides to build relationships, strengthen collaboration skills, explore different perspectives and tackle issues that impact all communities.
Being fully transparent, I am often suspicious of bridge-building efforts and I initially was reluctant to fully embrace the work. This is not because I do not believe in the premise, but because the end goal is often simply civility. Put another way, if we all just agree to not critique or debate then we can all just get along. Joe and I have had this discussion and he admitted in his own reflection that "We bridge-builders too often view the problem through a narrow lens."
For many of us this is hard to admit, but even our well-intentioned initiatives privilege some voices over others and in subtle ways uphold the status quo. As a result, consensus is formed and we spend more time, in the words of Anand Giridharadas, marketing "the idea of generosity as a substitute for the idea of justice." Ghiridharas related this to what he called the Aspen Consensus, which says, "Do more good" — not "Do less harm." ( The Aspen Institute from which this consensus is derived, is in a loose network of many of these bridge-building organizations.) Rarely is consensus a road to justice.
This may be problematic to some of you, but our beloved President Abraham Lincoln stated, "If I could save the Union without freeing any slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it." Our calls for unity cannot come at the expense of those on the underside and while we are on the issue of slavery, we have to stop treating it as a footnote to American history and truly wrestle with how it has and continues to shape our nation.
Wrestling with our collective past has the potential to free us from guilt and move us toward reclaiming our shared humanity. As James Baldwin stated, "Guilt is a very peculiar emotion. As long as you are guilty about something, no matter what it is, you are not compelled to change it."
Wallowing in guilt is not the way forward, but neither is pretending that it never happened. Going along just to get along may be the easiest way to navigate this system, but it is also a sure way to maintain more of the same. Some of us need to become more comfortable in being uncomfortable. And perhaps even more challenging, some of us need to become comfortable in making others feel uncomfortable. It will be crucial to individual and shared growth. Too often we want to silence disruptors who insist on remembering, but every critic is not an enemy.
This past fall, I had the privilege of being chosen to participate in the Civic Saturday Fellowship, a program of Civic University. Civic Saturday is a civic analog to a faith gathering. Civic Saturdays are arranged in this format because the founders understood that organized religion has figured out a few things about how to bring people together, about how to create a language of common purpose and about how to use story and narrative to spark people's reckoning with their own shortcomings, weaknesses and aspirations.
Civic Saturdays serve to remind all of us that we are in this together, shaping the future of our communities and country. While we all approach it differently, we are working to realize the promise of our democracy. Many think democracy is already established, but democracy is an idea that is still being perfected and until we break our routines, democracy will remain static.
In one of my civic sermons I stated, "we have to embrace the discomfort that true patriotism requires and be willing to contend with difficult questions. An example of this would be to ask, how do African Americans hold in tension the legacy of systemic racism and have pride in this Country?" We are too quick to move past the fact that Black people arrived on these shores as legal property and even after their citizenship was achieved Black Americans' relationship with democracy has remained complicated.
This an issue that for many creates discord, but it must be acknowledged. So when we gather together to embrace democracy, we must hold on to that tension and refuse to flatten the texture and grain of our varied lived experiences. Many of us want to find ways that our voices can flourish together, but we must anticipate that it might take what sounds like struggle along the way. Perhaps through this grappling, we will save our civic souls.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.