Molineaux is president/CEO of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund, and Nevins is its co-founder and board chairman. They are co-publishers of The Fulcrum.
As Americans we are on a path to discard and diminish the concerns of our fellow citizens. This is a destruction of our democratic values as most people sit on the sidelines, picking whom we hate more.
As publishers of The Fulcrum we are dedicated to supporting the democracy ecosystem and the individuals and organizations striving to repair and reform our democracy so that it works more effectively in our everyday lives. A healthy democracy ecosystem allows all citizens and community members the opportunity to participate fully in society.
Unfortunately, today's toxic polarization has reached the highest levels of animosity since pre-Civil War. No longer are citizens just partisan for the candidate or the party that they support. Instead, a growing "negative partisanship" is driving our political process and poisoning our commitment to democratic values.
Not only do liberals and conservatives disagree, they actually hate each other and thus rather than supporting the positions of the party they like, they oppose positions of the other party no matter how reasonable their policies might be, merely because it comes from the party they dislike. We seem to hate each other more than we love our nation.
As a result, according to Emory University professor Alan Abramowitz and student Steven Webster, "the parties hang together mainly out of sheer hatred of the other team, rather than a shared sense of purpose." When negative partisanship dominates, a political coalition is united far more by animosity than policy. The policy priorities are malleable and flexible, so long as the politician rhetorically punches the right people.
Social scientist Lee Drutman and others postulate that "negative partisanship" has reached levels that are not just bad for democracy, but are potentially destructive. And extreme partisan animosity is a prelude to democratic collapse.
As Drutman points out, it hasn't always been this bad. "Forty years ago, when asked to rate how 'favorable and warm' their opinion of each party was, the average Democrat and Republican said they felt OK-ish about the opposite party. But for four decades now, partisans have increasingly turned against each other in an escalating cycle of dislike and distrust — views of the other party are currently at an all-time low."
The solution to this destructive mindset amongst politicians and citizens alike will not be easy. We must re-frame our thinking as a people. We must create a new narrative of cooperation, collaboration that is solutions focused. We must embrace the diversity that is America and find the best from the left, the right and the middle. We must decide to like each other and respectour common humanity. Maybe even acknowledge some reasonableness in each other's perspective. We must start loving our country and democratic values enough to stop hating our political opponents. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke poignantly to the problem facing America in the 1960s that still resonates today:
"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."
And his decision about his response to hate:
"As my sufferings mounted I soon realized that there were two ways in which I could respond to my situation — either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. I decided to follow the latter course."
To do so we must support and engage a new cohort of diverse community leaders (across ideological, racial/ethnicity, generational and gender lines) who embrace a crosspartisan problem-solving approach to governance.
We must come together as a constituency of millions demanding a new approach to governance from our leaders. How might we, the citizens of the United States, demand our elected officials do the work of governance instead of endless campaigning?
A "Crosspartisan Creed" that embodies principles based on finding commonalities that transcend the divides that separate us is already engaging hundreds of thousands of Americans. A democracy ecosystem of Democrats, Republicans and independents is growing and elevating the voice and capacity of diverse community leaders via strategic investments with community/regional foundations.
Within a democracy ecosystem, we can work together to clean up the toxicity and remove invasive species like foreign influence, disinformation and propaganda. We must examine our own thinking to root out the toxicity we have. We need to create a habitat in which our democratic values will thrive, so we humans can thrive, too.
Our failure to do so is to remain on the path to authoritarian rule.
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.