Forget Exceptionalism, America Will Need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Forget Exceptionalism, America Will Need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission

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In 1996, a country shaped by decades of institutionalized racial oppression chose to confront its past head-on. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission rested on a simple premise: no durable future can be built on a contested account of reality.

The United States now approaches its own turning point, different in origin, but similar in consequence. America faces a choice: confront the political and institutional pathologies of the Trump presidency or allow them to harden and define the terms of its civic future.

For a country not inclined toward introspection, this will be a difficult but necessary test.

Donald Trump’s presidency has not simply strained norms — it has altered the relationship between power, truth, and responsibility in American public life.

This is no longer just a matter of repeated falsehoods, conflicts of interest, election denial and the bending of institutions for political and personal ends.  A deeper fracture is at play — reality itself is becoming whatever the president says it is.

This transformation is not the work of one individual. It rests on an ecosystem that sustains it. Influential segments of the media, political actors, and institutions themselves have relayed, justified, or internalized this logic.

There is no need to reach far back to witness this. One week is enough.

Consider what unfolded just last week.

Before the Senate Judiciary Committee, a scene bordering on the surreal: nominees for some of the highest judicial positions in the country were unable to answer a simple question from Senator Richard Blumenthal: who won the 2020 election.

The answers, nearly identical and clearly rehearsed, sidestepped objective, historical reality to avoid contradicting Trump’s narrative of a stolen election.

That same week, the war with Iran was described by the president in mutually incompatible terms: both “won” and ongoing; conducted without the need for allies while quietly relying on them; accompanied by negotiations announced by the White House and denied by Tehran.

In Trump’s multiverse, contradiction is not a problem to resolve it is an essential part of the scaffolding.

Then came the market manipulation. A presidential announcement suggesting de-escalation triggered sharp movements in equities and oil, some of them occurring minutes before the announcement itself, raising questions of insider trading.

Even the Speaker of Iran’s Parliament publicly mocked the episode, accusing Trump of spreading false information to manipulate markets and suggesting, with thinly veiled irony, that investors should treat his statements with caution.

That such accusations can now be directed at a sitting American president and serve as material for online trolling by a leader of an oppressive theocracy now at war with the U.S.  speaks for itself.

Yet the most revealing feature is not the events themselves, but their reception. No major political shock. No meaningful institutional response. These episodes are absorbed as part of the new American normal.

It is this capacity for normalization of abnormal, toxic and corrosive behaviour that reveals the true state of the American political system.

Over time, the abuses associated with Trumpism have become encrusted in the workings of American public life. A tangle of political, media, and economic interests now sustains them. In this context, the absence of reaction is no longer an anomaly, it has become a condition of stability.

Nor is this confined to elites or insiders. It has taken root in a segment of American society that found in Trump the validation of a worldview at the margins of what was the mainstream.

This dual lock — entrenched interests on one side, validated identities on the other — makes any path out of Trumpism difficult.

It is precisely why a truth and reconciliation process will become necessary.

When used—whether in South Africa, Canada, or Chile—such processes have not been instruments of retribution. Their purpose has been to establish a shared factual foundation that includes an acknowledgement of harm, a prerequisite for any durable reconstruction.

The United States is not post-apartheid South Africa. But it is facing a different kind of fracture: the fragmentation of reality itself, produced by years of systematic gaslighting in the service of political and economic power.

In such a context, relying solely on traditional mechanisms – elections, courts — may not be enough. The essential precondition will be the restoration of a shared understanding that a functioning democracy must be grounded in truth.

This will not be easy for America. It will require abandoning a certain idea of American exceptionalism: the belief that institutions will, on their own, eventually course correct.

As South Africa understood in 1996, some moments in History demand more than a simple reset. They require an explicit reckoning with truth.

The United States may well have reached that point.

The Resilience Myth: Why Burnout Persists Despite Workplace Wellness Programs

The Resilience Myth: Why Burnout Persists Despite Workplace Wellness Programs

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Across most sectors of our economy — including government — workplace mental health is often addressed through programs designed to foster employee resilience. In many organizations, a resilience-first model has become the default, prioritizing helping individuals cope with stressors rather than addressing their causes.

The effect is to shift responsibility for burnout onto employees, rather than onto the conditions that produce it.

The result is predictable: employees who struggle are not seen as signals of organizational failure, but as individuals who are not coping well enough.

While the causes of work-related burnout and the solutions may differ from one sector to another, the nonprofit sector offers a clear case study of this resilience-first model and its implications.

The YMCA WorkWell 2024 Workplace Well-Being Report, based on responses from more than 13,000 nonprofit employees, illustrates the consequences of this approach in sharp relief. Fifty-eight per cent of employees reported experiencing burnout at least sometimes, and one in four reported it often or extremely often. Among leaders, 71 per cent reported experiencing burnout.

Employees are equally clear about what is driving these outcomes. They point to chronic resource constraints, unrealistic workloads, emotional strain and a persistent “do more with less” culture. Many also cite compensation gaps and lack of recognition as reasons for leaving the sector.

These are not individual challenges. They are structural conditions.

The publication of the National Standard of Canada for Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace in 2013 marked an important shift. It helped elevate workplace mental health as an organizational issue and contributed to a rapid expansion of related initiatives across sectors.

But in practice, much of that response has focused on the individual side of the equation. Cognitive behavioural strategies (CBT), resilience training and other coping-based tools have become commonplace in the workplace. These approaches can be useful. But they are designed to help employees respond to stress, not how that stress is produced.

This is not just a half measure, in some cases, it can exacerbate the problem. Organizations invest in helping people cope while leaving their own structures, expectations and incentives largely unchanged.

Over time, this creates a disconnect between what is promised and what is experienced.  The dissonance alone can be harmful to vulnerable employees.

In today’s dominant resilience-first paradigm, employees are encouraged to build resilience, even if the conditions that generate strain persist. In that context, the struggles of many employees risk being seen as reflecting a poor organizational fit, rather than as a normal response to unhealthy conditions. They are, in effect, treated as defective within the system and become disposable.

At the heart of many nonprofit organizations is a structural contradiction. Ambitious mandates — often shaped by funder expectations, member demands or public commitments — are not matched by the resources required to deliver them. The resulting gap is not resolved by recalibrating strategy and tactics, it is absorbed by the workers.

In that context, resilience-based programming can become a way of managing the symptoms without addressing the cause. It signals virtuous concern for employee well-being while leaving the conditions that produce burnout largely intact.

It is like applying a coat of paint over the cracks in a building’s foundation.

This is not simply a problem of organizational design within individual workplaces. It reflects the broader system of incentives and expectations that the not for profit sector operates in.

Funders contribute to it when they support ambitious programs without fully resourcing their delivery. Organizations reinforce it when they accept mandates that exceed their actual capacity. And once those commitments are made, the internal logic of survival takes hold. Scaling back becomes difficult. Acknowledging misalignment becomes institutionally difficult.

The result is a system that rewards ambition and responsiveness but often eschews the question of sustainability.

If the problem is systemic, the response must be as well.

Funders play a central role in shaping the behaviour of the sector. Through the way programs are designed, evaluated and funded, they influence what organizations prioritize — and what they defer.

A different approach would make organizational health and capacity a condition of funding, not an afterthought. That could include requiring meaningful capacity stress tests before major program commitments are approved, clearer expectations that boards demonstrate alignment between strategy and resources, and evidence that organizations have credible plans in place to manage workplace mental health.

It could also mean tying board and executive performance more directly to measurable indicators of organizational health, including staff retention and workplace well-being.

None of this would eliminate the pressures inherent in nonprofit work. But it would begin to shift the system away from one that assumes resilience and toward one that requires sustainability.

More than a decade after the Canada Not-for-profit Corporations Act came into force, it is worth asking whether the current framework adequately reflects these realities. The Act sets out general duties for directors, but it does not explicitly address the role of boards in overseeing the conditions that underpin workplace health.

If those responsibilities remain implicit, they will continue to be unevenly understood and applied.

Until the sector moves beyond a resilience-first model and toward one grounded in governance, accountability and aligned incentives, it will continue to treat the symptoms of burnout rather than its causes.

That shift requires naming the problem. It will require leadership from boards, and changes in how funders define success. And ultimately, as I argued in an earlier article, it may require Parliament to clarify where the responsibility for workplace mental health resides.