Mesirow is the founder of the Elected Leaders Collective.
Being an elected official today takes an extraordinary level of courage. And it’s taking a toll on the mental health of our elected officials. A small cadre of brave people, part of a project called the Elected Leaders Collective, is supporting leaders in doing their work in a healthier way, bringing tools of mental wellbeing to the arena. Too many heart-led elected officials are dropping out when we need them to stay in and change the system. With new tools of personal inquiry, transformation and empowerment, we can make it happen.
Let me share how I found this calling. I was bright-eyed and energetic, with a keen intellect and servant’s soul. Passion oozed from my core. A voracious reader, I consumed endless books on policy, learned every theory and studied the greats. I learned in the field, volunteered for campaigns and causes, became a state delegate, and took leadership seminars. I did all the external work that was expected of me. I applied these talents by running a statewide race at just 23 years old. I was idealistic and thought I would change the world.
Then reality struck. Someone tried to sell a Senate seat: moral decay. Social media screamed at me: public hate. Entrenched interests in my own party slowed progress: nihilism. A can’t-do attitude pervaded: apathy. Ward bosses operated like mob bosses: a toxic culture. Privately I battled my own demons, as years of childhood trauma ran the programming deep in my brain. I pointed my finger at others, blaming them for the world’s failings. I numbed the pain with workaholism, food, alcohol and drugs.
The liquid of ecstatic possibility turned to cement structures that would not change.
Though I did not know it at the time, I could not hold the toxicity inside me and that in the system. I dropped out and took with me my passion, zeal and force for change. All the books had been for nothing. The light at the end of the tunnel of democracy dimmed.
For the next eight years, I worked on healing, conquering addiction, and reforming my relationship with food, alcohol, work, and sleep. I looked inward, understanding the lessons my traumas were here to teach me. Like an archeologist, I uncovered my life’s purpose and operationalized structures, boundaries and a community to support it. This was the start of my internal work, work that I knew never ends. Having been elected as a city councilperson at 32 years young, I could apply my internal and external learning to giving back to my community.
Then reality came again. Hate poured in on social media; I listened to understand. The newspaper traded in misinformation; I spoke the truth and cultivated personal advice. People confronted me at the farmer's market; I met them with kindness. Colleagues' sought incrementalism, and I trusted in our collective wisdom and supported them. Working two jobs, I experienced stress and became overwhelmed, meeting people with curiosity, cultivating mindfulness. I experienced all this, taking radical responsibility and asking, “What can I do to alleviate the condition I claim not to want?”
The cement began to liquefy and possibilities opened.
During Covid I committed my life to "healing our politics." I founded the Elected Leaders Collective. We help heart-centered leaders of all kinds find their own, personal transformation. Working with a community of over 100 elected leaders across the country we co-create safe, sacred, confidential space for mission-driven public-sector leaders.
Everyone needs a community to support them, so we built “The Pride,” our signature peer cohort group coaching program. We provide courses, workshops, coaching and small-group work to help leaders remove our internal blocks, build resilience, and get out of our own way, as I had to learn over all those years in the wilderness.
Our politics is toxic, and it need not be. We can change our collective condition by changing our individual conditions. It takes all of us. And it works.
Myriad scientific studies confirm the efficacy of mindfulness, mindset work, and other methodologies we employ. Consider Google’s Search Inside Yourself corporate wellness project, which found that applying techniques of workplace mindfulness reduced the experience of burnout by 30 percent and increased resilience and “bounce back” by 42 percent. In this same research, acts of constructive empathy rose by 39 percent, co-worker compassion grew by 22 percent and, as a result, finding “workable solutions to difficult problems” improved by 22 percent. Imagine what we could accomplish in the public trust with 22 percent more solutions to difficult problems and feeling 39 percent more empathy from our co-workers. I want to live in that world.
As a result of doing the work, elected leaders and public servants’ lives are improving.
During the great resignation, we aren't dropping out, we are dropping in. We are experiencing a decline in stress and anxiety. Our feeling of connectedness and trust is increasing. We are becoming more effective. We are healing our politics by healing ourselves. It has happened to me. My days of stress per year are down from over 300 to under 30, my anxiety is down 70 percent in two and a half years, and our community is passing transformational legislation, deferred for nearly a generation.
This is the beginning. We welcome all heart-centered leaders. We are building something new, together. Diversity of all kinds, including thought, is celebrated, and you are welcome.
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.