Molineaux and Nevins are co-founders of the Bridge Alliance, a coalition of 100 democracy strengthening organizations. (Disclosure: The Bridge Alliance Education Fund is a funder of The Fulcrum.)
As we look to history, it has always been the mystics and scientists, innovators and outliers who saw the future most clearly and acted to push — or call — society forward, to awaken from our slumber of the way things are and envision a better future. The stories of their personal transformation inspire us to be better individually and collectively. With this inspiration, we can and must transform our nation into a more perfect union.
As co-founders of the Bridge Alliance, we are inspired and challenged by the problems facing our country. Our 100 member organizations work daily to protect the ideals of our American Dream so we can create healthy self-governance that has never fully existed before. Our members work to harness the tension of our differences as we enact our inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, balancing individual and community needs.
Our constitutional republic and democratic ideals are being challenged daily — from our own actions to foreign influence campaigns. In our search for healthy self governance, we must put country before party or self-interest as we explore solutions to the complex problems facing our nation and the world. Doing so will not only make our government more effective but it will also strengthen the soul of who we are as a country.
Decades of work by cross-partisan practitioners, while having many successes and garnering the support of millions of Americans, has had limited impact on the social fabric as a whole, and we have watched our public discourse degrade into a raw power struggle.
The struggle continues despite the deep love for our country that we believe many or most Americans share. As we witness the division separating us as a people, we are reminded of a dysfunctional family: We take sides, blame others and treat each other without love or a sense of empathy. How effective could we be if we took a stand for the health of our national family?
Taking a stand means having an understanding that we are a diverse nation and to thrive as a people we must provide room for more diverse perspectives. At our summit last October, this was generally agreed upon, yet we realized that the democracy reform field itself lacks diversity. It is currently a mostly white, older and progressive-leaning; people of color, conservative thinkers, youth and the LGBTQI community are underrepresented.
The Bridge Alliance immediately set out to address this problem as an important component of our 2019 strategic plan. We created a diversity and opportunity task force to study the problem and establish a process for ensuring the democracy field becomes genuinely diverse and representative of the country as a whole.
Diversity and Opportunity — meaning diversity with regard to race/ethnicity, sex/gender, social identity, religion, ideology and age — will be the operating system of the October 2019 summit. Diversity is often the topic of such meetings — but our meeting topic is living into a multicultural, pluralistic democracy. We will discuss how we are going to create it within a diverse community and just do it. So it's the operating system, not the objective of the meeting. We believe that, for the Bridge Alliance and the cross-partisan movement to be more impactful as we plan for 2020 and beyond, we must truly reflect the diversity that defines America.
But we can't do this alone! We are asking citizens (meaning you) to help us.
These words by Langston Hughes, a great African-American poet, have never been more relevant than they are today: "America never was America to me/And yet I swear this oath/America will be!"
We can and must embrace our diversity as the operating system of our nation. Despite our many frailties, America is exceptional because from the outset its citizens saw themselves as participants in an experiment that would have implications for all of mankind. Our task is far from complete.
Send us your story (written or video link) that you want to tell the children and grandchildren of our future to story@BridgeAlliance.us. We are developing a scrapbook for the future story of America that may be used to inspire participants at our summit.
What is your oath today? What will America be for our children and grandchildren? What stories will you tell them? The journey that is the United States was started by visionaries, scientists, mystics and outliers more than 200 years ago with the motto e pluribus unum: Out of many, we are one. America is exceptional because it was launched with a dream to take the diverse many and make them one. Let us fulfill this dream.
The journey will never end.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.