CEOs Have a Duty to Counter Political Polarization

Polarization isn’t just a political problem. It’s an economic risk that threatens Arizona’s competitiveness and the social infrastructure that made the state thrive.

At Arizona Town Hall’s annual meeting on June 17, 2026, John Fees, serial entrepreneur and co-founder of Leadership Now Arizona, argued that CEOs and organizational leaders have an obligation to counter the erosion of common knowledge. While institutional trust in government has collapsed, CEO trust has risen—yet most business leaders are afraid to use that credibility.

“Over half our CEO list is worried about retaliation,” Fees said, explaining that many executives decline to speak up on issues like election integrity and democratic norms because they fear offending employees or customers. The cost of that silence is high: without a shared factual foundation, polarization calcifies.

Fees pointed to the media collapse as a root cause. The Arizona Republic’s paid subscriber base has shrunk from 600,000 in the 1990s to fewer than 100,000 today. Social media algorithms now feed each citizen a different information diet. “How do you overcome polarization when we don’t operate from the same information?” he asked.

Arizona Town Hall, Fees argued, is one of the few institutions providing “signal”—research-backed, factual dialogue—in a landscape of “noise.” Yet the organization’s impact depends on business leaders amplifying its work and recruiting peers to participate. This requires what Fees calls a “flywheel”: research → convenings → consensus-building → decisions.

He urged the room to consider polarization and civic engagement as the 2028 Arizona Town Hall topic, timed for a presidential election year when water literacy and institutional trust will matter most.

“The infrastructure exists,” Fees said. “We don’t have the will. We don’t have the data. We need leadership now to rebuild what Rotary and third places used to do.”