Becvar is the executive director of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund, which houses The Fulcrum.
Last week, the National Association of Nonpartisan Reformers convened a summit in Denver. It was a gathering marked by a sense of camaraderie among peers, juxtaposed with an acute awareness of the challenges posed by the upcoming November election. The stakes for our field, the nation and the global community have never felt higher. Yet, as we departed from the summit, I felt ready to face whatever complexities 2024 might hold.
Then, while waiting for my plane to take off, news of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny's death reached me. Rather than dwell on the geopolitical consequences, my thoughts turned to the inevitable polarized reactions I predicted to see on mainstream and social media. True to form, platforms quickly became battlegrounds for narratives, casting Navalny's struggle within the binaries of U.S. politics. This dichotomy overlooks the complex reality of Navalny's legacy, both as a critic of corruption and as a figure with contentious views. The rapid oversimplification of Navalny's life and work into binary political narratives challenges us to acknowledge that multiple truths can coexist.
The Navalny reporting underscores a broader issue in our media landscape, exemplified starkly by the divisive coverage and polarizing discourse surrounding the Covid-19 vaccine.
This week, AllSides evaluated coverage of a study published on Feb. 12 analyzing 99 million individuals vaccinated against Covid-19 worldwide. The study's findings were often relayed as a reduction of complete information into partisan talking points. The essential details, such as the comparative risks of health issues from the vaccine versus the virus itself, are lost in a sea of polarized content, demonstrating the difficulty in achieving a balanced understanding in today's media environment.
As we move towards the 2024 elections, a significant danger to our democratic processes lies not in specific parties or ideologies but in a declining trend in information literacy. The oversimplification of complex issues for the sake of engagement and clicks erodes our collective capacity for informed discourse. This environment enables conflict profiteers to muddy the waters of truth, making it challenging for the public to discern fact from fiction.
Hannah Arendt famously wrote in her essay “Truth and Politics” that the essence of truth-telling is lost when we lack a non-political standpoint from which to interpret the world. Historically, the press, scientists, artists, judges and historians have provided perspectives that anchored a common reality. Today, as communities across the U.S. grapple with crises that erode common understanding, it becomes evident that embracing the complexity of truths is vital for preventing division and fostering unity.
The American Values Coalition highlighted one of those communities, East Palestine, Ohio, which has been facing a loss of community, as well as independent and non-politicized facts, surrounding the train derailment that occurred there last year. Reading their story, it again stands out to me that in East Palestine, multiple things can be true at once and, by acknowledging that, their community can help prevent them from dividing against each other into false binary narratives that cannot possibly capture all that has happened.
As members of the Bridge Alliance and advocates for healthy self-governance, we must champion the cause of nuanced understanding and resist the allure of oversimplification. We can counteract the forces that seek to divide us, building a more informed and resilient democracy and a shared commitment to the common good.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.