Chang is the co-founder and CEO of GenUnity, a civic wellbeing nonprofit. Reid, a rising senior at Yale majoring in history, is a special assistant to the CEO.
The Fourth of July was painful for many Americans. The first half of 2022 brought the war in Ukraine; mass shootings in Buffalo, Uvalde, and across the country; and most recently the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade. In the midst of these upheavals, feelings of celebration felt out of touch with this somber moment in our nation’s story.
At the same time, this week provides the perfect opportunity to reflect on the legacy of July Fourth as the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, a visionary statement of not only what the United States of America can become but how we can build our more perfect union.
Our Declaration of Independence sets out a revolutionary vision: equality as the bedrock of freedom. In pronouncing independence, the founders justified their revolutionary action with universal principles of human equality. Not only that we are all created equal, but each of us is the best judge of our own happiness. And, as a result, it is only through the practice of understanding each others’ lived experiences and engaging as equal co-owners in the design of a system of self-governance that we can build a society free from oppression and tyranny.
A community for everyone has to be built by everyone. Recently, however, this foundational principle feels evermore distant due to extreme attacks on voting rights, rampant gerrymandering and the everyday exclusions of those who may not share our views – whether in schools, social settings or the workplace.
Fortunately, as the Declaration lays out, we have the power to change this through the practice of everyday democracy:
- Take your passion for an issue and seek out those across your community who are experiencing or addressing it.
- Reflect carefully on whose perspectives you haven’t heard and ask yourself whether your understanding of someone else’s perspective is rooted in proximity to their lived experience.
- Build diverse relationships rooted in compassion for each others’ shared humanity.
- Act strategically to drive change with the best of what you know today, while welcoming continuous feedback and the opportunity to learn from those most proximate to the issues
With each rep, you’ll strengthen your democratic muscle, deepen feelings of agency, purpose and resilience, and spark positive change in your community.
Admittedly, in the context of our hyper-polarization and the fierce urgency of now, the practice of everyday democracy can feel like placing a feather on the scales of justice. The hard truth is this is what democracy demands. Democracy asks us to be vulnerably honest about our differences, to extend compassion in conflict, and to believe that the honest effort of millions working together to build a better society will actually result in one. There is no escape from this uncomfortable truth.
Yet in the face of these seemingly insurmountable odds, we find faith in an equally powerful truth – that we have no choice but to try.
We can do what we must because we must do what we can. In choosing to practice everyday democracy, we persist and invite our fellow Americans to join a lifelong project to uphold our inextricable ideals of equality and freedom.
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.