Braver Angels leaders John Wood, Jr. (red) and Ciaran O'Connor (blue) come together for a wide-ranging debate on the most critical issues animating the 2022 midterm elections, including the economy, abortion, and the future of American democracy. Throughout the discussion, John and Ciaran demonstrate how to embrace humility in the pursuit of deeper truth.
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Stop Fighting, Start Fixing: This Is How We Rebuild Democracy
Feb 07, 2026
Twenty-five years ago, a political scientist noticed something changing in American bowling alleys and predicted something close to our current fraught and polarized moment.
In his best-selling book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam documented how Americans were no longer connecting with each other in common places or in pursuit of common aims. Instead of bowling on a team, we did so in isolation. Putnam warned that a likely consequence of this growing isolation and withdrawal from genuine ties with neighbors would be a rise in undemocratic, and even authoritarian, politics.
Our nation’s problems, of course, are far more serious than the decline of bowling teams, or coffee shops in which everyone wears headphones and stares into a phone. Yet when we stop talking to one another in routine social settings, it’s easy to lose trust in our fellow citizens and faith in our common institutions – especially when we live in news bubbles designed to generate outrage rather than informed citizens.
With our divisions escalating into tragedy in Minneapolis and elsewhere, it’s time to remind each other that our constitutional self‑government is tied to a shared duty to secure one another’s rights and to respect one another. This is especially important where disagreements run deepest. The social contract binding our country is not the domination of some people by others. It is a mutual pledge that each of us will help guarantee what all of us retain – that my freedom is bound up with yours. That my disrespect of your rights and dignity imperils my own.
We're living through a test of that proposition. Our constitutional system has weathered civil war and economic collapse, but it's straining under the erosion of civic culture and democratic responsibility that makes self-government possible. The Constitution distributes power, protects rights, establishes procedures. But it can't make us care whether our neighbor can freely exercise the right to vote, or compel us to recognize the dignity of someone who voted differently. Those obligations belong to us.
The framers designed a republic that would channel faction and ambition into productive tension. But the machinery only works if we accept the legitimacy of the process and the rights and dignity of everyone. When we view fellow citizens as enemies to be vanquished, the constitutional order begins to buckle. When our elected leaders stop serving the interests of the general public in favor of a partisan few, our democracy becomes unproductive and, at times, counterproductive to voters.
When this moment subsides, and Americans turn their attention to repairing what has been broken, we will need much more than bowling teams. We will need a renewal of civic responsibility and practices in which we reach out to others – including those different from ourselves, but equally worthy of respect. Some have turned toward this work: The Disagree Better Initiative, for example, seeks to channel controversial topics into real conversation. Other groups have sought to bring red and blue America together. A new documentary based on Putnam’s work, “Join Or Die,” puts our choice in stark relief.
We will also need an electoral system that encourages us to talk to one another again. Today’s politicians, safe in their gerrymandered districts, chosen largely in closed, plurality primaries with a small percentage of the vote, have no reason to talk – or listen – to anyone beyond their partisan base. They have every reason to ignore or antagonize everyone else. That’s no way to choose our leaders. And to no surprise, it hasn’t resulted in progress or leadership, let alone problem-solving.
We have options. Ranked choice voting, which requires a candidate to earn over 50% of the vote to win, empowers voters to express their full range of preferences. It rewards candidates who can appeal to voters beyond a narrow partisan base, and incentivizes leaders to deliver for a majority of their voters rather than be beholden to that base. A more proportional U.S. House would end gerrymandering and encourage coalition-building among elected leaders.
These reforms won’t solve everything that ails us. But systems shape behavior, and our current system disempowers voters and is shaped for combat. If we're serious about renewing our commitment to constitutional government in our 250th year, we need not all become bowlers. (Though we should take off the headphones more often.)
But we should commit to speaking to one another – and to a politics where mutual respect and responsibility are an advantage rather than a weakness.
Meredith Sumpter is the president and CEO of FairVote, a nonpartisan organization seeking better elections.
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do not cross police barricade tape close-up photography
Photo by David von Diemar on Unsplash
2025 Crime Rates Plunge Nationwide as Homicides Hit Historic Lows
Feb 07, 2026
Crime rates continued to fall in 2025, with homicides down 21% from 2024 and 44% since a recent peak in 2021, likely bringing the national homicide rate to its lowest level in more than a century, according to a recent Council on Criminal Justice analysis of crime trends in 40 large U.S. cities.
The study examined patterns for 13 crime types in cities that have consistently published monthly data over the past eight years, analyzing violent crime, property crime, and drug offenses with data through December 2025.
The report found:
- Reported levels of 11 of 13 offenses were lower in 2025 than in 2024, with nine offenses declining 10% or more. Drug offenses were the only category that rose during this period, while sexual assault remained even.
- Looking at trends over a longer period, only reported motor vehicle theft and non-residential burglary remained elevated compared with 2019 levels, before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and nationwide social justice protests of 2020.
- Two crimes that captured significant public attention during the pandemic era—carjacking and shoplifting—have receded from their peaks. Reported carjacking has declined 61% since 2023, while reported shoplifting is down 10% from 2024.
When nationwide data for jurisdictions of all sizes is reported by the FBI later this year, there is a strong possibility that homicide in 2025 will drop to about 4.0 per 100,000 residents. That would be the lowest rate recorded in law enforcement or public health data going back to 1900—and would mark the largest single-year percentage drop in the homicide rate on record.
While the downward trajectory of crime is clear, it’s extremely difficult to disentangle and pinpoint what’s actually driving the drop, said CCJ President and CEO Adam Gelb. “As a result, we have a battle of sound bites and abundant claims of credit but scarce evidence to back them up.”
To help inform this debate, the Council released a supplemental assessment featuring perspectives from leading experts on the primary drivers of the recent decline, specifically in homicides. Last week, CCJ also held a webinar with several of these experts to dive in further.
Here’s what they emphasized.
- No Single Cause. Researchers and practitioners broadly agreed there’s no single explanation for the decline. Instead, it reflects multiple forces moving in the same direction, from prevention efforts and law enforcement strategies to broader social changes following the pandemic shock.
- Community investment and prevention. Several experts pointed to increased investment in violence intervention and prevention programs that engage at-risk groups, as well as federal funding that helped stabilize local governments and bolster police forces during a period of extreme disruption.
- Changes in criminal justice practice. Many cities sharpened their focus on the small number of neighborhoods and repeat offenders driving violence, improved shooting investigations and clearance rates, and worked through court backlogs that built up during the pandemic.
- Broader social and behavioral trends. As the pandemic disruptions faded, daily routines normalized. More people returned to work, school, and public spaces, increasing "eyes on the street" and reducing opportunities for violence to escalate unchecked.
Now the question on everyone’s mind is what comes next. Will crime rates continue to fall in 2026? Some of the experts CCJ spoke with expect further declines, while others warn that the end of federal funding could slow progress.
The administration’s immigration enforcement operations are a big unknown. It could deter crime, but it could also erode trust in police, making it harder to work with communities to reduce violence.
The Council on Criminal Justice will continue to monitor these crime trends in American cities, so that these critical debates are grounded in facts and evidence, not partisan soundbites.
Ernesto Lopez is a senior research specialist at the Council on Criminal Justice.
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Marcelina Pedraza at a UAW strike in 2025 (Oscar Sanchez, SETF)
Photo provided
The People Who Built Chicago Deserve to Breathe
Feb 07, 2026
As union electricians, we wire this city. My siblings in the trades pour the concrete, hoist the steel, lay the pipe and keep the lights on. We build Chicago block by block, shift after shift. We go home to the neighborhoods we help create.
I live on the Southeast Side with my family. My great-grandparents immigrated from Mexico and taught me to work hard, be loyal and kind and show up for my neighbors. I’m proud of those roots. I want my child to inherit a home that’s safe, not a ZIP code that shortens their lives, like most Latino communities in Chicago.
That’s why I support the Hazel Johnson Cumulative Impacts Ordinance.
Union folks know this: a contract isn’t just about wages. It covers safety rules, training, PPE, healthcare and a say in how the job gets done. We don’t accept “trust us” from a boss who wants to cut corners. We negotiate standards and enforce them.
Our neighborhoods deserve the same deal.
For too long, the City of Chicago has allowed heavy industry to accumulate in communities of color like mine. Each new facility gets evaluated by city agencies reviewing the application on its own, as if it operates in a vacuum. Meanwhile, Black and brown residents from these communities breathe the combined pollution from trucks, stacks, dust and debris.
One permit for a new industrial facility might look fine on paper. Ten new heavy industrial facilities together in one area of Chicago can be a disaster to our health.
We see the results of these inhaled toxins every day: inhalers on classroom desks and asthma vans outside the schools, neighbors with cancers that don’t run in the family,the “closed windows today” warnings that come with every strong wind and kids not being able to play in their own yards out of fear of exposure to toxic metals.
This is not how you treat the people who built your city.
The Hazel M. Johnson ordinance is simple and long overdue. Before major new industrial facilities move into a neighborhood that’s already carrying a heavy load from the pollution emitted by those facilities, the city has to consider the cumulative health impacts. Not just what one facility emits, but what all the stacks, trucks and sites together will mean for the lungs and lives of the people downwind and next door.
This approach is not radical, it’s common sense. It’s the union way– look at the whole job, set the standard and hold everyone to it.
Critics will say this threatens jobs. I don’t buy it. Workers know a false choice when we hear one. We can build things the right way, in the right places, with rules that protect both paychecks and people. Strong standards create better jobs – skilled, safe, long-term work that doesn’t leave a toxic tab for the neighborhood.
This is about playing by the rules. If you want to profit here, they must meet the same expectations workers face on the job. If a project can’t clear that bar, it’s not a good project for Chicago.
Labor belongs at the front of this fight. Our movements rise and fall together. A safe job site doesn’t mean much if the block you go home to is making your kid(s) sick. Wages matter. Work conditions matter. Living conditions matter. They’re part of the same fight, dignity for working people. We shouldn’t have to choose between a job and our health and safety.
Hazel Johnson – the Mother of Environmental Justice – started that fight right here on the Southeast Side. She organized so her neighbors could breathe. She stood up to power and demanded fairness. This ordinance carries that legacy forward. It says the city must count what counts: our health.
I want fellow union members to see themselves in this. We take pride in the quality of our craft. We don’t slap together junk and call it a day. We fix what’s broken. We plan. We prevent it. We protect our own. Supporting this ordinance follows the same ethic, after the whistle blows and we head home.
Chicago has a chance to lead with a standard that’s basic and just: before piling more industry into one area, measure the full burden and protect the people who live there. Make decisions with all the facts, not just the narrow slice that looks neat on a permitting form.
I’ve been a union electrician for 26 years. I love my city. I’m proud of my ancestors’ sacrifices and the life we’ve built here. I want all of our kids to grow up in a neighborhood where “progress” doesn’t mean more inhalers and less time outside.
Pass the Hazel Johnson Cumulative Impacts Ordinance. Because the people who build Chicago deserve to breathe in it. Nothing about us, without us!
Op-Ed: The People Who Built Chicago Deserve to Breathe was first published on Illinois Latino News, an affiliate of the Latino News Network, and was republished with permission.
Marcelina Pedraza is a fourth-generation union electrician and member of UAW Local 551 at Ford’s Chicago Assembly Plant. She is a Southeast Side Chicago community leader focused on labor and environmental justice.
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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.