As 2022 draws to a close, The Fulcrum has invited leaders of democracy reform organizations to share their hopes and plans for the coming year. This is the fifth in the series.
Nevins is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
As we approach the end of 2022, I reflect on my journey that started 10 years ago to repair the political culture and political processes in our country. As I reflect, I realize how much has changed during that decade, unfortunately not for the best.
Ten years ago, I spoke at public events about the need for civil political discourse and a problem-solving approach to governance. In 2012, the unbridled lack of civility, crippling partisanship and dysfunctional gridlock that were preventing our country from solving the serious problems we were facing on a daily basis was top of mind for me.
Those problems of course still exist today and are certainly an important component of the work I do through The Bridge Alliance, The Fulcrum, and Citizen Connect but something else has changed dramatically. Today, almost two years after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on our democracy, I am now also focused on the need to protect and defend democracy to ensure its survival. And I’m not alone.
This is a major shift in thinking.
As recently reported in The Fulcrum, While partisan divides may keep Americans from agreeing on much, post-election polling by Georgetown University found that three-quarters of Americans agree that "democracy is under attack.”
While we agree that our democracy is under attack, the extent of the divide is so great that we can’t even agree as to the root causes. If we can’t agree on the causes, finding a solution to the threat becomes yet another unsolvable problem that is the result of our nation's partisan divide. For example, many more Democrats than Republicans are worried about election deniers threatening democracy while Republicans think voter fraud and the impact of “woke culture'' are the greatest threats to our democracy. Each claims the other is invoking authoritarian measures through election-rigging, infringement of free speech and abandoning the U.S. Constitution.
The impact of social media in the last 10 years is one of the greatest threats that must be addressed. The extent in which social media encourages division, facilitates confirmation bias and weakens the institutions needed to uphold our democracy is increasing at an alarming rate. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the case eloquently in his writing in The Atlantic titled, “ Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.” Haidt is clear as to the impact of social media upon our democracy:
A mean tweet doesn’t kill anyone; it is an attempt to shame or punish someone publicly while broadcasting one’s own virtue, brilliance, or tribal loyalties. It’s more a dart than a bullet, causing pain but no fatalities. Even so, from 2009 to 2012, Facebook and Twitter passed out roughly a billion dart guns globally. We’ve been shooting one another ever since.
While the right has thrived on conspiracy-mongering and misinformation, the left has turned punitive. He continues:
When everyone was issued a dart gun in the early 2010s, many left-leaning institutions began shooting themselves in the brain. And, unfortunately, those were the brains that inform, instruct, and entertain most of the country.
Haidt’s prevailing metaphor of thoroughgoing fragmentation is the story of the Tower of Babel: The rise of social media has “unwittingly dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together.”
While it is tempting to just give up given the complexities of the problem facing our democracy, my belief in the ability of We, the People, drives me to work with others to find a better way.
We must create a new vision of what democracy is that includes a robust role for citizens.
I recently was inspired by a project titled, “Imagining Better Futures For American Democracy.” It was “born of a desire to gain succor and inspiration from those within and outside the democracy space who not only aren’t giving up, but instead are moving beyond critique and reaction to creation, who are inspiring those around them, generating abundant visions of better futures ahead, and laying the groundwork for achieving them.”
This is the role of Bridge Alliance, The Fulcrum and Citizen Connect. A place where people come to meet, talk and act into our future, to engage citizens and empower democracy. We lay the groundwork, along with others we know and have yet to meet, for the citizens of the United States so we can reclaim our rightful place of power and set our nation on the course towards a future we co-create.
And so I look to the future with hesitation but with hope – the hope as stated in the Better Futures report: A community “will emerge with a wide range of civil society actors who want to become part of a burgeoning positive visioning community – one capable of mobilizing and engaging growing numbers of people to realize better futures, including a robust, effective and healthy democracy.
I end with this inspiring song of democracy that hopefully will inspire you as well – well worth two and a half minutes to remind us what we have and what we could become.
"Democracy (Reprise)" from SOFT POWER | The Public Theaterwww.youtube.com
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.