Anyone on the frontlines of the effort to bridge America's partisan divides knows there is no silver bullet for this work — no one game-changing app or intervention that will swiftly transform the way Americans engage with each other across our divides. Shifting social norms and fostering a pluralist ethos in America requires a multipronged approach and a long-game mindset.
But we also know our democracy hangs in the balance and we don't have the luxury of time. So as we elevate and scale standout initiatives that are achieving measurable success, we need to continue identifying untapped opportunities for widespread and dramatic impact on the problem of toxic polarization.
We believe popular entertainment is one such opportunity. TV shows, movies, short-form videos and other types of on-screen entertainment offer unique ways to reach Americans at scale, even those not already predisposed to want to bridge divides. Entertainment can play a vital role in popularizing new social norms around how we engage across lines of difference, and a growing number of entertainment content creators, Hollywood executives, social scientists and bridging practitioners are recognizing its power to do just that. Until now, these stakeholders haven't had a home or a way to find and collaborate with each other.
The newly launched Center for Entertainment & Civic Health is this home. The center aims to galvanize the entertainment industry to address declining civic cohesion and harness the power of storytelling to bridge our partisan divides. "Our country is at a critical moment, and entertainment can play an important role in helping bridge the gap between left and right in America. The Center for Entertainment & Civic Health is a new center of gravity for Hollywood to explore entertainment's impact on polarization and its potential to foster civic health and pluralist norms," said Dave Caplan, showrunner for the hit ABC show "The Conners."
On Oct. 16, the Center for Entertainment & Civic Health will host its kickoff event, a free virtual summit titled "Hollywood and Storytelling in a Divided America." This unprecedented convening will gather entertainment industry stakeholders from across the partisan spectrum under one virtual roof to explore entertainment's untapped potential to help fix a divided America. Some of the industry's most celebrated content creators, entertainment executives, bridgers, experts from academia, and leading nonprofit organizations will come together to explore the question "Can popular entertainment save a fracturing America?"
Hollywood has wielded the unique power of storytelling since its earliest days, but the last two decades have seen the industry fully embrace "social impact entertainment." The notion that content can both entertain and drive social change has gained traction throughout the industry at breathtaking speed.
We believe the time has come for Hollywood to tackle toxic polarization as an urgent social impact issue of its own. The same energy and talent that have been brought to bear on other critical issues in our society can be applied to our crisis of division. We've seen the role entertainment can play in advancing a range of social causes; now is the moment for the industry to explore the power of storytelling and entertainment to mitigate polarization and bridge deepening divides within our country.
Storytellers are among the most influential agents in our society; they can use their superpowers to help us see each other in new ways and imagine new possibilities for America. They can help us reimagine the meaning of "national unity" and reinforce healthier social norms around how we navigate our conflicts.
Renowned international peacebuilding organizations like Search for Common Ground have recognized the power of entertainment to transform intergroup conflict in conflict zones abroad for decades. As Americans, we're not accustomed to thinking of the United States as a conflict zone in need of peacebuilding interventions. Yet recent events have illustrated that we are not immune from the kind of domestic intergroup violence with which other regions in the world have long struggled. We have an opportunity to interrupt the cycle of escalating partisan hostility before further damage to our social fabric and institutions is wrought, and we would do well to examine examples of entertainment media being employed to reduce intergroup bias and hostility in conflict zones abroad.
Elevating toxic polarization as a distinct impact issue represents a unique challenge for Hollywood. While issues like climate change and racial justice neatly align with the priorities of an industry known for its more left-leaning predilections, polarization is different. Embracing the cause of depolarization and partisan bridge-building requires a different mindset and calls on stakeholders to think about their partisan "others" in ways that may feel unfamiliar. Individuals and institutions must be willing to commit to the goal of humanizing one tribe to the other.
The goal of this humanization is not to convince one side or the other to abandon its moral convictions or embrace an opposing ideology. Nor is it an effort to push Americans into the "middle" and away from bold positions on social issues. Rather, the goal is to create the necessary preconditions for rational debate and collaborative problem-solving. No one need leave their convictions at the door. If entertainment succeeds in this endeavor, the good news is that research shows there is more common ground to be plowed than either side recognizes now.
The economic and cultural forces that sustain and profit from polarization are strong. Are storytelling and entertainment powerful enough to combat those? We believe they are, and we're enlisting stakeholders throughout the entertainment industry to take up the challenge.
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.