The continuing disintegration of political cohesion in democracies throughout the world, the rise of authoritarian populism within democracies and the increasing suppressions of entrenched authoritarian regimes have created a growing crisis of failing governance around the globe.
The real-world turmoil and trauma driving our governing dysfunctions — political strife and economic inequalities, pandemics, floods, fires, debilitating storms, racial reckonings, and dehumanization of "others" — are bedeviling virtually every economic and political system on every continent throughout the world.
Representative democracies, including most specifically our own constitutional republic, cannot reform our cultural, economic and political institutions to better serve the needs and interests of our citizens and to meet the exigencies of the 21st century until we define a collective purpose and shared meaning that transcends ideology and special interests.
Narrow purpose, party dogmas and rigid ideologies of certainty are endemic to modern cultures, belief systems and political narratives. Spread relentlessly by hyperpartisan, for-profit communications companies and social media, our prejudices, biases and hatreds fester in the body politic like a metastatic cancer.
However, a healthy, constitutionally ordained representative republic cannot forever endure the toxins of resentment and vengeance without forfeiting the ideals of liberty, justice and opportunity for all.
Humans cannot thrive, much less survive, without a conscious, courageous and enduring declaration of faith in ourselves and our institutions.
Faith is not simply a religious precept; it is the foundation of human dignity and mutual responsibility. It is the means by which our species finds the will to hope and dream, accepts one another in spite of our differences and discovers common purpose in collective identity.
Faith requires a leap from logic; a belief in the future we have not yet seen or experienced. It begins as a figment of imagination. It manifests as a willingness to entertain affirmative human possibilities.
In these fraught times, it is worth trying to discern the elementary "faiths" that define 21st century core beliefs that are necessary to advance classic liberal democracy and combat authoritarianism in America and throughout the world.
The exigencies of the 21st century require a set of beliefs that transcend ideology, tribalism, nationalism, party and special interests. For Americans, this means conscious commitment to five basic faiths that advance an affirmative view of human nature and enable healthy self-governance:
- Faith in one another: belief that America's diversity, like diversity within all plant and animal species, is both a survival strength and a precondition for human thriving. As one of the most diverse countries on earth, America's continuing struggles for inclusion, cultural and social integration and political cohesion have been a central feature of our nation's experience since its founding. Only through respect for the dignity of each person and faith in Jesus' directive to "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" can human beings discover our mutual interests, common purposes and shared destinies.
- Faith in our Constitution: belief in the ideals enshrined in our Constitution that liberty, justice and opportunity for all are the foundations of human creativity, security and prosperity; and that no matter how long or hard the struggle to realize these ideals has been, and will continue to be, we have abiding faith in our collective ability to perfect ourselves and advance our collective interests.
- Faith in government: belief that a constitutional republic form of self-governance, rule of law, and fair and free elections ensure a government capable of functioning by, for and of the people. It also includes believing that this system is best capable of reforming itself and protecting against capture by narrow ideologies and special interests.
- Faith in free markets: belief that civil and economic freedoms are inextricable liberties and the bedrock of our constitutional republic form of government. Innovation, capital formation, fair and free markets, wealth creation, and business success create engines of dynamic change, much of the work that inspires human productivity, and the profits, if fairly distributed, that can ensure prosperity for the greatest number. Democracies that enable, and appropriately harness the excesses of, free markets will optimize liberty, justice and opportunity for all.
- Faith in global interdependence: belief that our global challenges require whole-world solutions that are dependent on global cooperation. Adversaries and allies alike contribute to our global problems and must share responsibility for addressing them effectively. Innovating and empowering means, methods, and mechanisms for agreeing on the dimensions of common challenges, framing cooperative solutions and accepting mutual responsibilities for their amelioration is a 21st century imperative. We have become an interdependent world in which acceptance of our common interests and destinies is central to human, national and global survival and salvation.
Faith is the essential building block for constructive interpersonal relationships and productive institutional cooperation. Our collective abilities to thrive in the years and decades to come are dependent on restoring the values of truth, trust, reason and civility in our human interactions. It is in our self- and mutual interests to find the will, courage and strategies necessary to have abiding faith in ourselves, our institutions, our communities and our nation.
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.