After three decades as an investigative and political reporter and newspaper editor in the Chicago area, Madeleine Doubek switched to democracy reform advocacy three years ago. First came the Better Government Association, a nonprofit journalism outfit aiming to boost transparency and efficiency of the state government in Springfield, and for the past year she has served as executive director of CHANGE Illinois. Its top priority is persuading the solidly Democratic General Assembly and Gov. J.B. Pritzker to agree to put a referendum on the 2020 ballot turning over congressional and legislative redistricting to an independent commission. (The deadline is early May and three similar efforts have come up short.) Her answers have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
What's democracy's biggest challenge, in 10 words or less?
Gerrymandering is where corruption and voter suppression are born.
Describe your very first civic engagement.
At some point as a very young kid, I stood in the front hallway of our two-flat row house on the South Side of Chicago, listening and talking with the local Democratic Party precinct captain who paid my mom a visit before every election.
What was your biggest professional triumph?
Getting a law passed while I led the policy department at the Better Government Association that restricts the exorbitant, golden parachute severance packages that public executives get in Illinois.
And your most disappointing setback?
Having our Fair Maps Amendment blocked from being assigned to committee or debated despite having more than three-fifths of our state senators signed on as sponsors.
How does your identity influence the way you go about your work?
I've spent most of my adult life working as a political journalist so I am constantly thinking about new ways to communicate the need for systemic democracy reforms in a way that will make people stop what they're doing and get engaged. It's an unending quest.
What's the best advice you've ever been given?
Be the change you wish to see in the world.
Create a new flavor for Ben & Jerry's.
Bipartisan Blueberry Cashew Ripple
What's your favorite political movie or TV show?
"All the President's Men." Politics, newspapers, investigations and intrigue. Robert Redford. What more could you want? Although, another great one is "Deadline-USA," with Humphrey Bogart. If you've never seen it, check it out!
What's the last thing you do on your phone at night?
Check my calendar for the following day to make sure I didn't forget something.
What is your deepest, darkest secret?
I hate having to ask for donations so we can keep fighting for an improved Illinois.
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.