Rubin is an alumnus of the Bridge Alliance Leaders Mastermind Cohort. He is founder and principal of Bstory, an initiative that uses the power of collective story to breathe new life into our civic and moral imaginations. This is the first in a regular column called Civic Soul.
There exists something transcendent in the best of what the African American experience has to offer. It is reflected in the many cultural contributions made throughout American history. Africans brought to America have had a profound influence on the American civic landscape. I use "soul" as a metaphor to describe this sense of awareness. It can be heard in the music, from spirituals to hip-hop, and it strives to raise the consciousness of this nation.
When one encounters life from the underside of our society, it fashions a sensitivity to the political, social and economic inequities that exist. When people say that change happens at the margins, they are pointing to a certain set of circumstances that lead to the very essence of a solution. These life lessons are not found in ivory towers. To view life through a soul lens is to intuitively view problems from a different vantage point.
Too many fail to know her name, but we need more voices like that of Fannie Lou Hamer. While criticized for not being the most articulate, Hamer summoned a power to speak in a way that demanded attention. Hamer had a way of truth-telling and we need more people who will ask questions in the best interest of all, as she did at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. She asked, "Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings?" Basic human dignity is an appropriate starting point, but unfortunately Covid-19 and the frequent recordings of police brutality have only exposed the gaps that many were already aware of.
Reflecting on the state of things during the early part of the pandemic, columnist David Brooks wrote, "Everywhere I hear the same refrain: We're standing at a portal to the future; we're not going back to how it used to be." I do not know if our visions are the same, but like Brooks I can see possibilities of alternate futures.
I know that many would like to return to "normal" because they argive only prepared to weather things that are predictable and it causes us to avoid what cannot be measured. I get it, risk is scary while business as usual is tangible and safe.
However, like James Baldwin said, "I do believe, I really do believe in the New Jerusalem, I really do believe that we can all become better than we are. I know we can. But the price is enormous."
The possibilities that I see ahead require more than simply reform, but a complete reorientation of values. We must come to a point when we move past the idea of American exceptionalism that Princeton Professor Eddie Glaude calls "a lie that hollows out the nation's soul and leaves its democracy flawed and threatened." Too often we are grounded in a nostalgic remembrance of a past that never existed. There is much work to be done.
I was inspired by a question posed by the Rev. Andrew Wilkes. He authored the book "Freedom Notes: Reflections on Faith, Justice and the Possibility of Democracy," which at its core is an exploration of how we get free. The question he asks us is, "What if all of us — not just politicians — are elected for public service?"
It is much easier to look to Washington to be the Change That We Can Believe In, or to Make America Great Again, but at some point there must be a groundswell of citizens who do not bow down and worship at an altar of exceptionalism or any claim of supremacy. Rather, we must tear down every false idol and replace them with visions that carry possibilities that awaken our imaginations and gives voice to the voiceless as we consider this present moment and beyond.
In his posthumous op-ed in The New York Times, the late Rep. John Lewis wrote, "Ordinary people with extraordinary vision can redeem the soul of America by getting in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble." Therefore, I am excited to share this column with you. Beyond all the analysis, change starts with our collective individual beliefs and actions. As we journey together in civic soul, let us do it toward casting a vision that will redeem the soul of America.
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.