Molineaux is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and president/CEO of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
A colleague noted recently how we, the people, collectively, seem to think in more black and white terms, disallowing nuance and complexity. Is this true? Have we lost the capacity to see shades of gray? Especially in politics?
Yes. But this state of polarized thinking is not permanent.
One of the primary causes of dichotomous, i.e. black and white, thinking is anxiety and depression. Is it any coincidence that we are living through hyperpolarized times? I think not.
Even before the pandemic of 2020, society-wide, we were experiencing profound increases in both anxiety and depression. Then the pandemic arrived and changed our lives, turbo charging our collective anxiety and depression.
It’s no wonder politics is more polarized than ever! When we are anxious, our fight-or-flight tendencies kick in. We think in terms of good or bad as a way to cope with our anxiety — to find something stable. But when the world doesn’t fit neatly into our polarized view of good or bad, our anxiety strikes again. It’s a cycle that requires attention, intervention and connection.
One way to pay attention is to identify polarized thinking in our use – or overuse – of “absolutist terms.” An occasional use of these words is OK. But when we say these words to ourselves over and over again, it indicates polarized thinking:
- always
- never
- impossible
- disaster
- furious
- ruined
- perfect
Once we’ve noticed that our thinking has shifted to black and white terms, it’s time to intervene. Creativity, mindfulness, and exercise or any movement, especially outside with nature, is helpful to reorient our thinking to the beauty of each moment. And we may need to talk with someone to stop the thought distortion that anxiety produces. Professionals will have other therapies, too. The key is to start the intervention as soon as possible.
Another tragedy of polarized thinking is how we disconnect from others. And the challenge of reconnecting might start the cycle of anxiety all over again. We wonder if we’ll be rejected, we may feel ashamed, we may want to just move and start over. Regardless of whether we are reaching out to current or new friends, we need skills to connect healthily, with all the shades of gray allowed. It takes practice, like learning to play an instrument. You may want to practice together with your loved ones – or you may prefer to practice with strangers first. It is through our deep connections with people that we can sense-make together to solve our nation's problems.
I started this column thinking I was going to blame computer programmers who started using zeros and ones for decision making. Or pollsters who often reduce choices into binaries and then report on them as fact. I was certain there was a boogeyman to blame. Turns out...it's complicated. Like everything else.
I’ll see you at practice.
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.