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Donald Trump delivered his third and potentially last formal State of the Union address from the well of the House chamber where he was impeached on the eve of his likely acquittal by a deeply divided Senate. The 78-minute speech sought to look past impeachment to his re-election in November. He touted his accomplishments, claiming a strong economy, the killing of the Iranian general Qassem Suleimani and the passage of a bipartisan criminal justice reform bill.

But the mood was fraught on the eve of his acquittal, which is expected to take place on Wednesday as Republican loyalists stand by him. Few Democrats stood to clap for the president as Republicans chanted four more years.

Here are five key takeaways:

Trump dedicated nearly 20 minutes to ticking through his economic accomplishments, delivering a mix of dubious claims and exaggerations.

Our economy is the best it has ever been, Trump falsely claimed. While the unemployment rate is at a 50-year low and wages have risen, the economy is far from the best ever.

But other boasts were true: average unemployment is lower now than any administration in the history of our country. He touted the bipartisan renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, now called the USMCA as well as a deal with China to ease the trade war.

The rosy economic indicators could provide strong tailwinds for the president as he seeks re-election, especially if he faces a Democratic opponent who seeks to remake the economy as a number of candidates have proposed.

Trump inaccurately claimed USMCA would create 100,000 new high-paying American auto jobs. A report released by the US International Trade Commission estimated that the deal would add only 28,000 auto industry jobs in the six years following its implementation.

Ever eager to fan the flames of Americas culture wars, Trump delivered extended riffs on immigration, abortion, guns and religious liberty red meat to his conservative base.

We dont punish prayer, he declared before vowing to always protect your second amendment right to keep and bear arms.

He highlighted in grisly detail the stories of two US citizens murdered by an undocumented immigrant, a way to slam cities that refuse to cooperate with federal law enforcement to enforce immigration law. At another point, he called on Congress to pass a federal ban on late-term abortions.

He also praised his appointment of two conservative supreme court justices, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, both of whom beamed back at the president from the front of the chamber.

We have many in the pipeline, Trump said, as Republicans broke into another round of deafening applause.

In less than 24 hours, Trump will become the third US president to be acquitted by the US Senate after being impeached by the House. But unlike his Twitter feed, where Trump airs all manner of grievances about the trial and the House leaders who led the effort, he made no mention of it in tonights speech.

However, the tension was clear. When Trump approached the rostrum, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, appeared to extend her hand but he refused to shake it.

She then omitted the flourish of announcing I have the high privilege and distinct honor of presenting to you the president of the United States, instead simply introducing him directly to the chamber. Then, after Trump finished his remarks, Pelosi tore up a copy of the speech.

Asked by reporters why she did that, Pelosi replied that it was the courteous thing to do.

No matter who the Democratic presidential nominee is in November, Trump and Republicans already plan to define the election as a battle to protect the country against socialism.

In his speech, Trump vowed to never let socialism destroy American healthcare! while also dishonestly claiming that he would always protect patients with pre-existing conditions. In 2017, Republicans with Trumps strong support, attempting to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with a plan that would throw millions of Americans off their healthcare and would not guarantee its protections.

At another point, Trump pointed to one of his guests, Juan Guaid, the Venezuelan opposition leader who the US recognizes as the countrys rightful leader. Trump called the nations current president, Nicols Maduro, a socialist dictator and illegitimate ruler.

Socialism destroys nations, Trump said to whoops and cheers from Republicans. But always remember, freedom unifies the soul.

Its a tradition for the White House and members of Congress to invite guests who reflect their political priorities. Among the guests who attended on behalf of the president and first lady was Rush Limbaugh, the controversial conservative radio show host who announced this week that he is undergoing surgery for advanced lung cancer.

During his remarks, Trump announced that he would receive the countrys highest civilian honor, the presidential medal of freedom. In an unusual move, Trump paused his speech for Melania Trump to present him with the medal.

It was one of several surprises Trump had in store for his guests. He bestowed an education scholarship on a young girl whose mother could not afford to send her to a private school. And then, in a made-for-TV moment, Sergeant First Class Townsend Williams returned from deployment in Afghanistan to surprise his wife and children in the first ladys box.

Meanwhile, a handful of Democratic lawmakers chose to skip the affair altogether. The New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said she did not want to legitimize the presidents actions.

After much deliberation, I have decided that I will not use my presence at a state ceremony to normalize Trumps lawless conduct & subversion of the Constitution, she wrote on Twitter. None of this is normal, and I will not legitimize it.

The Massachusetts congresswoman Ayanna Pressley said she could not in good conscience attend the speech, when he incessantly stokes fear in people of color, women, healthcare providers, LGBTQ+ communities, low-income families, and many more.

Congressman Tim Ryan, an Ohio Democrat, attended the speech but left halfway through.

I just walked out of the #StateOfTheUnion, he wrote. Ive had enough. Its like watching professional wrestling. Its all fake.

More here:
Trump's State of the Union address: five key takeaways - The Guardian

The U.S. Capitol at sunset, November 22, 2019(Loren Elliott/Reuters)A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream, by Yuval Levin (Basic Books, 256 pp., $28)

We are born as crooked creatures prone to waywardness and sin, Yuval Levin writes in his new book, A Time to Build, originally delivered as the Charles E. Test Lectures at Princeton. As a result we continuously require moral and social formation to refine and develop our defective characters. What we have largely forgotten, Levin argues, is that institutions play a part in these processes of soul formation: They structure our perceptions and interactions, and as a result they structure us. They form our habits, our expectations, and ultimately our character.

But our institutions are breaking down. In an age that values the unformed self, Levin writes, we no longer try very hard to uphold the formative traditions of the institutions in which we find ourselves. Instead of giving our hearts to our little platoons, we affect a cynical distance from them and play the disgruntled outsider. We think of our institutions less as molds that shape our character than as platforms that enable us to market our personal brands through attention-getting stunts and playacting on social media.

Thus the presidency and Congress, Levin writes, become stages for political performance art by strutting politicians, the university becomes a venue for vain virtue signaling by disaffected scholars with a yen for street theater, and journalism becomes indistinguishable from activism as scribes seek cable-TV notoriety by staking out the most outr positions in the culture wars. Rather than commit ourselves to our institutions, we pack up and move on whenever we feel that a particular outfit isnt working for me, as the duchess of Sussex is alleged to have said of the British monarchy before she and Prince Harry lit out for the fresher territory of the @sussexroyal brand.

None of these forms of self-indulgence is entirely new. But Levin argues that where once institutional mores restrained the more destructive forms of aggrandizement, todays institutions have lost their corrective, soul-forming power: They no longer give us the tools of judgment and character and habit to use our freedom responsibly and effectively. He attributes this institutional decay to a decline in the expectation that our institutions should be formative. If we no longer believe that there are, in fact, objectively better and worse ways of being formed, we can only resent whatever character-forming practices vestigially linger in our institutions.

Liberal education is one casualty of this resistance to the institutional molding of character in accordance with an ideal. From the seminaries of Athens to the grammar school that helped form the mind of Shakespeare, teachers agreed that nothing was more likely to awaken and shape a young brain than a wallow in what Matthew Arnold called the best that has been thought and said in the world. But where untaught formlessness is the ideal, the formative character of such an enterprise is suspect, a threat to the authentic, untutored self. Were all noble savages now.

Levin traces the same antipathy to soul formation in the professions. Before 1850, Henry Adams said, lawyers, physicians, professors, and merchants were classes, and acted not as individuals, but as though they were clergymen and each profession were a church. By contrast, todays professional meritocrats, Levin writes, are radically individualistic and dismally technocratic, with little concern for the distinctive integrities of the institutions they tenuously inhabit.

Yet amid the general disintegration some institutions have retained their formative character. In the Vietnam era the code of the officer corps, Duty Honor Country, was in danger of being lost. The only place I learned about these things, a young captain said, was from a copy of the Officers Guide that I happened to buy one day in the bookstore. But the military refashioned itself and today maintains a high degree of institutional esprit de corps.

Even so the judiciary, which, Levin observes, has done a better job than many other governing institutions in appealing to an ideal of integrity that is fundamentally institutional in character and also rooted in something of a professional ethos. This institutional pride is clearly present in Chief Justice Roberts, whose heart is pledged to the code of the judge bound in honor, in his words, to pronounce judgment without fear or favor, deciding each matter with humility, integrity, and dispatch.

But if Levin is right, these institutions are the exception. Americans, he observes, have long been skeptical of institutional allegiance. Our culture, he writes, has its roots in a dissenting Protestantism that sought a direct connection to the divine and rejected as inauthentic or illegitimate most forms of institutional mediation. A preoccupation with self-realization, he says, makes us suspicious of enterprises that seek to cast us in a particular mold. Yet it may be that radical Protestantisms prosaic descendant, Yankee utilitarianism, has done quite as much as Calvinism itself to frustrate the ability of our institutions to command the heart.

At the bottom of every really vital institution there is always a whiff of poetry or mysticism. Man without mysticism may be, as Whittaker Chambers said, a monster, but institutions that lack it are soulless. Why does the judge don his robe, the priest his surplice, the scholar his gown, the barrister his wig, the queen her crown? It is all a piece of (perhaps not very impressive) magic, yet it has its effect. The art of the civilizing myth, the pleasing illusion, which once did something to hallow the institution, has given way to a dress-down cult of the merely functional, a culture of drabness. Ernest Renan said of his hometown of Trguier in Brittany that it was enveloped in an atmosphere of mythology as dense as Benares. Christ Church, Oxford, was saturated, John Ruskin remembered, in a mysticism made palpable in the living and musical forms of its ritual and ceremony. Smoke and mirrors perhaps, yet Ruskin had no doubt that it animated the young toffs for the highest duties owed to their country. But we Americans, Wallace Stevens says, never lived in a time / When mythology was possible.

The failure of myth and mysticism in the modern institution is complemented by an obliteration of institutional memory. The traditional institution has its pedigree and its ancestral portraits, a poetry that brings to life the different phases of its growth, so that the past always is obtruding on the present, and the present is continuously throwing an unsuspected light on the past. But the typical organization today exists in the shallow present of Henry Jamess Mrs. Worthingham, who was up to everything, aware of everything if one counted from a short enough time back (from week before last, say, and as if quantities of history had burst upon the world within the fortnight).

Levin is alive to the lack of place, connection, and belonging in American life and institutions, but his solutions seem a bit tepid and hortatory. He envisions lawyers developing a professional code that will hold them to a standard that has more to do with integrity than with raw intellect. But in fact the bar is always coming up with these kinds of reformatory codes. They are the work of committees and end in regulations that perpetuate all the vicious mediocrity Matthew Arnold, in Culture and Anarchy, foresaw in efforts to create an English Academy that would codify the integrity of English letters.

Rod Drehers Benedict Option might be a better way forward. If the archaic techniques of the separatist institutions he proposes really can promote a richer and more satisfying common life if they really are able to make of places and institutions what Florence was for Dante, a fair sheepfold, the center of a world they will catch on; the rest of us will try to emulate them. On the other hand, we might learn something from the pastoral instincts of the now-discredited WASPs, who, Levin observes, were raised and educated in ways intended to prepare them for responsibility and authority, to live up to a code of public service, humility, and institutional devotion. After the Civil War, when WASPs found themselves overshadowed by Gilded Age plutocrats, they reinvented themselves as a service class by means of the boarding school: an institutional combination of muscular rigor (the football field), humane education (the classics), and poetical mysticism (the chapel) that bit deep into the souls of impressionable youths. Much in this pastoral approach will now seem as archaic as Arnolds Rugby Chapel, but it may be that some of the techniques the WASPs used to foster a culture of civic conscience and institutional loyalty can be grafted onto our own soul-corroding schools.

Levins A Time to Build is a brilliant piece of work: lucid, dispassionate, composed in a calm and philosophic tone that rises above the rancor of the moment; its focus on institutional decline promises to change the terms of many sterile debates. But the institutional gangrene to which Levin draws attention seems to me to go beyond what the unguents in our current chrismatories can heal. To reform souls as crooked as ours, one wants a richer brew. One wants myths: But when one calls them myths, one implicitly concedes they arent true. A difficulty no amount of ingenuity can solve.

This article appears as Twilight of the Institutions in the February 24, 2020, print edition of National Review.

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'A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream' Book...

Meghan Daum is the author of The Problem with Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars, in which she examines her own cognitive dissonance as a liberal and a feminist, and her feeling of alienation in todays cultural climate. She and Bridget discuss how society has changed dramatically in the last 10 years, the gulf between Gen X and Millennials, coming of age in a culture where theres a conversational chokehold happening and what the effects might be, and the death of cultural gatekeepers. They dive into the minefield of being writers in the age of social media when a provocative piece can get you cancelled, reminisce about growing up reaping the benefits of the feminist movement that came before them, explore why learning to stick up yourself is such an important skill for a woman to have, and wonder what happened to the life isnt fair philosophy that they were raised with. Its a fascinating conversation between two women on the front lines of the culture war who still believe that nuance is something that should not be vilified.

Subscribe to Walk-Ins Welcome w/ Bridget Phetasy in Apple Podcasts (and leave a 5-star review, please!), or by RSS feed. For all our podcasts in one place, subscribe to the Ricochet Audio Network Superfeed in Apple Podcasts or by RSS feed.

See more here:
Meghan Daum Believes We Have Lost the Ability to Sustain Complex Arguments - Ricochet.com

There were a few days in mid-December when it looked like the nation might have won some respite from its daily diet of shouty culture wars. But then, on 17 December, just days after Boris Johnsons election victory, Piers Morgan signed his new contract with Good Morning Britain, and the most enthusiastic cheerleader of national disharmony was granted two more lucrative years behind his breakfast desk.

Morgan insisted that this would be his last term of office, and that he will sail off into the sunset in 2022. His original tabloid mentor, Kelvin MacKenzie, argued a year ago that Morgan would not be happy until he absolutely owns breakfast and is making 10m a year. I dont imagine he is quite there yet.

In the four and a half years since Morgan took up his seat back by unpopular demand Ive done my best to avoid watching Good Morning Britain because, well, obviously, who in their right mind wants to start the day with Morgan at their breakfast table? But in fact there is no escape. You dont need to be among the million viewers who tune in to Good Morning Britain to feel its daily presence in your life. Anyone with an eye on this countrys media, whether print, social, broadcast, will have absorbed Morgans more strident opinions about vegan sausage rolls or Donald Trump or gender identity by osmosis.

As part of a somewhat perverse new years resolution, for the past few weeks I have reversed my abstention, and watched Good Morning Britain the nations most talked about show as much as work has allowed. After the increasingly disconcerting political events of last year, I felt some need to begin the decade immersed in the nations prevailing gobby mood; where better to start? I have come to think of this hair-shirt commitment as Morganuary.

For Morgan, Monday mornings are critical he can set the dogs of particular itemsrunning all week

The exercise has reminded me of another story I once wrote for this paper, when, at the time the movie Super Size Me came out, I was required to eat only fast food for a week. Before and after my seven days of Big Macs and Bargain Buckets and Double Whoppers I had to undergo blood tests. The results, magnified on a hospital screen, showed an alarming rise in all sorts of fatty deposits in my veins. As I near the end of Morganuary I cant help feeling I should have taken similar before and after fMRi scans of my brain activity. I imagine neural pathways muddied with bombast, and clogged with undigested gobbets of vitriol.

Morgan has, as you will know whether you like it or not, begun this decade as he finished the last, as the nations self-appointed headline-generator in chief. His long-running obsession with Meghan Markle became, as if at his personal direction, also the nations primary obsession: having amplified the persecution of the Duchess of Sussex, Morgan then choreographed the fallout of her escape from that persecution. Along the way there has also been the usual quota of viral sidelines. Inevitably, Morgan chimed in with Laurence Fox and his acoustic struggle to highlight the plight of white male TV celebrities, along the way explaining his definition of racism to colleagues including mixed-race weatherman Alex Beresford and guests in what GMB regulars enjoy calling diversity corner.

Counter-intuitively, one effect of social media has been a dramatic narrowing of the range of topics that capture the collective mind. Morgan with his 7 million Twitter followers is a master of the kind of circularity that online debate demands all links lead back to him. As Roger Ailes, creator of Fox News, observed of the so-called infotainment age: People dont want to be informed, they want to seem informed. Morgan is a prime mover in that principle.

I should make a very obvious point, belatedly, here: that Morgan is never alone at his Good Morning Britain desk (though he sometimes seems to believe himself to be). He is, for a start, not there at all on Thursdays and Fridays, or over the weekend. And beside him, from Monday to Wednesday, sits the unflappably charming and sane Susanna Reid, winner of numerous awards for television valour. Reid is paid more than 1m a year; leaving aside the manifest absurdity of that wage, there can hardly be a regular viewer of Good Morning Britain who does not entertain the idea that she earns every penny.

The industry cliche has it that news anchors are finally hired on the basis of how convincing they appear with the sound off. Reid has taken that principle to a whole new level. Though she is an incisive interviewer witness her brilliant evisceration of Nicky Morgan talking nonsense about nurses before the election much of her best work is nonverbal. There are YouTube compilation videos of Reids grimaces and eye rolls during Morgans never-ending monologues. Susanna Reid dies a little inside every time Piers Morgan opens his mouth has nearly 800,000 views.

The more you watch the pair at work, you cant help but feel Morgan and Reid, for better and worse, dramatise precisely, depressingly, the public mood, in which those who talk loudest feel empowered to drown out those you might want to hear. Much of the time Morgan and Reid are engaged in inane banter about ratings or Gwyneth Paltrow, but arguably no television double act has better reflected a fracturing national psyche since Steptoe and Son. Just as Albert Steptoe never gave Harolds dreams of a more civilised life a moments thought, so Morgan blunders over Reids every effort at compromise or nuance.

Reid worked for 20 years at the BBC and once reflected that she had the corporation running through her like the words on a stick of rock. Her role on the show represents the collective memory of a more civilised, easygoing national sofa, before the arrival of her co-host and his confrontational desk, before trolling, before Brexit. Talking recently to the Radio Times, Reid noted, along with the rest of the nation, how [Piers] has pushed me to get more opinionated. I dont agree he should be left to chew these people up and spit them out like one of his rare steaks. Piers too needs to be held to account for what he says.

The latter is obviously easier said than done. Take last Monday. Even in the short time I have been watching I have noticed that some mornings matter to Morgan much more than others. Mondays are particularly critical because he can set the dogs of particular items running all week. The three stories that he has decided are dominating that mornings agenda are all out of his own back pocket, or at least he makes them seem so.

First, there is the tragic death of Kobe Bryant, which for Morgan inevitably becomes an occasion for personal reminiscence of his time watching basketball in Los Angeles when he was hosting his talk show for CNN. Second, there is the latest chapter in the ongoing Meghan Markle story, a trail for another exclusive interview with Markles estranged father, Thomas. And finally there is the kind of story Morgan gets up for. This is generated by a stray comment that Hugh Grant has made in promoting his latest movie, suggesting that the December election result was a catastrophe and, because of Brexit, Britain is finished.

In one of his many reflections on his decade editing the News of the World and the Mirror, Morgan once observed that on newspapers every day is a feud. All editors need one to get by. Morgan always needed several. Most days he rips into his current nemeses Gary Lineker, Alastair Campbell, feminists, Meghan Markle, assorted snowflakes, Lord Adonis but the feud with Grant seems more primal.

As he gets into his stride about how much he despises Grant one of Morgans gifts to the nation has been to normalise the idea that it is natural for presenters to own up to loathing and hating the guts of particular public figures you are reminded that one of the moments in his career of which Morgan is most proud was the day he ran out of his office punching the air delightedly and shrieking an order: Get the hooker! This after Grant had been arrested with a prostitute on Sunset Boulevard.

The drama of finding and buying off Divine Brown for the News of the World is presented in Morgans memoir, The Insider, as if he had taken possession of the Pentagon papers. Grant had the temerity not to be overly chuffed about that treatment in the News of the World, or about the fact that his phone was subsequently hacked by other journalists. Grant is many of the things that Morgan cant abide: he went to private school and to Oxford (Morgan, who grew up with his mother and stepfather at a village pub in Sussex, was educated privately until he was 13, then went to the local comp after his family fell on harder times).

I'm far enough into Morganuary that it seems that the reporting of no world event is complete without input from Morgan

Using all this stored animus, Morgan revs himself up at 6.40 to a quite alarming pitch about the romcom actors lack of patriotism while Reid winces silently beside him. Inevitably, an immediate poll is called for by Morgan (it is an overlooked fact that the national either/or of Brexit was primed by countless such online barometers of staged anger). Do you agree with Hugh Grant that Britain is finished?

It is then that Good Morning Britains hold on the national conversation kicks in. As you watch Morgan and Reid argue about Grant, you can also watch Morgans mansplaining immediately amplified in real time. Some of this comes from online reaction unchecked outrage about Grants throwaway line is by now trending on Twitter some comes from online newspaper journalists, who appear to watch Good Morning Britain in the way that their predecessors used to watch the tickertape of newswires.

Hardly has Morgan half-uttered the words Shut up to his co-host than an online news story in the Sun is breathlessly reporting the fact: Piers Morgan has admitted he pushes co-host Susanna Reid to her absolute limits when the pair host Good Morning Britain. This morning the pair exchanged fiery comments whilst presenting GMB live on air, signalling no end in sight to their stark differences in opinion, the paper announced.

Susanna attempted to shut down her fellow presenter by saying: I dont want to talk about Hugh Grant any more. In this particular moment, Susanna knew how to wind up the former newspaper editor as he was almost caught saying Shut up on camera. He let out a Shu before quickly correcting himself

By now I am far enough into Morganuary that it can seem that no reporting of a world event is complete without input from Morgan. There is a genuine weirdness in watching this unfold. Morgan writes newspaper columns for the Mail and the Mail on Sunday. There was a time when that would have meant that rival tabloid newspapers would have operated a blanket ban on coverage of him. Now, perversely, certain rival online editors appear to work on the principle that if a tree falls in a forest and Piers Morgan has not tweeted about it, has it really happened?

Here, for example, is how the Express ostensibly the biggest rival to the Mail for the hearts and minds of middle England first reported the tragedy of the helicopter crash in which basketball legend Kobe Bryant and his daughter died: Piers Morgan pays tribute to icon Kobe Bryant after death aged 41 the Express headline reads. And this is how the story that follows is constructed: PIERS MORGAN took to Twitter alongside many celebrities to pay tribute to basketball legend Kobe Bryant, who has passed away at the age of 41 The Good Morning Britain presenter, 54, shared a photo of the basketball star in his Lakers kit and wrote in view of his 7.1 million Twitter followers: Few bigger icons in the history of world sport than Kobe Bryant.

This habit of filtering world events through Morgans eyes is very far from an isolated case. On Monday morning there are by my count at least a dozen clickbait stories in the papers featuring Morgans reaction to the world. The previous week, in the Express alone, I had counted 16.

Does any of this matter? It used to be observed partly because of the grounding principles of the BBC in our media that something like Fox News, which set the tone for the extremist populism of Trump, could never gain a foothold in this country. With BBC news under siege from all sides, Good Morning Britain, operating in that no mans land between news and highly partisan presenter-dominated comment, goes some way to proving the opposite.

Morgans main opponent in this war is consensus. Increasingly of course, that means he casts himself as the defender of common sense and plain speaking in straw-man arguments about whether clapping should be replaced with jazz hands to make it more inclusive; or in rants about plus-sized models, gender-neutral clothing or men carrying babies in papooses.

Culture war seems a grandiose term for what Good Morning Britain does. But the effect is to add to that pervasive impression that public life is a zero sum game in which for me to win, you have to lose. Morgan jokes continuously about his rival morning show on the BBC (which brings in twice the viewers but emits a fraction of the noise). I want to destroy them, I want to dismantle them, I want to wreck them, he says, only partly tongue in cheek.

We might think of this kind of tone as an invention of cable networks and shock jocks in the United States. If you trace its history closely, however, the language of Breitbart and Fox News that mixture of laddish mischief and bigoted cruelty was lifted wholesale from the Sun and the News of the World in the 1970s and 80s. Rupert Murdoch first injected it into the American bloodstream in the pages of the New York Post, and then into television through Ailess Fox News. The lowest common denominator principle was to Give people what they want.

Morgan was in many ways the wunderkind of that impulse. In 1994, Murdoch scenting an ambition he could work with, promoted 28-year-old Morgan from being editor of the Suns celebrity gossip column, Bizarre, to the editorship of the planets most read paper, the News of the World. He no doubt sensed that Morgan understood, at heart, that profit should always come before principle. Morgan tested that idea a couple of times, most notably in his bold anti-war stance while editor of the Mirror at the time of the invasion of Iraq. A crash in sales, however, saw him send a note of apology to his then boss, Sly Bailey. One thing I wont be doing is sitting here defiantly telling myself how Im right and they are all wrong, he wrote. The readers are never wrong. Repulsive maybe, but never wrong.

That definitive populist wisdom is something Morgan has carried with him ever since; the sense that news was a business, or a game played with public sentiment, and one that you would be a mug not to play to win. Sometimes the job does feel a bit like playing God with peoples lives, he said of his time at the News of the World. I get, ultimately, to decide every week who lives and who dies by the NoW sword The obvious glee with which my newsdesk rehearse the weekly stories of misery and mayhem created by our revelations slightly unnerves, as well as excites.

That excitement has never quite left Morgan, even now he slurps his tea for the breakfast cameras. He would like you to believe that most of it is for show, these days, and that perhaps it always was.

In interviews, he says: My persona in public is a slight pantomime villain. I constantly fuel this because its fun, its entertaining, its provocative, it gets everybody going, it encourages debate. All the things I like.

The thing he most doesnt like is the suggestion that any of that villainy might ever have been for real. Morgan has long performed triple-salchows on the thinnest of ice around the hacking scandal that led to the closure of the News of the World, and 14 criminal convictions. By his own admission before the Leveson inquiry, he knew about illegal voicemail hacking some years before it became a public outrage but he has always strongly denied any involvement in the practice. These denials have never been tested before a jury because his former employer, Mirror Group now Reach plc has preferred to settle any claims out of court 70m has been set aside to cover compensation payments and legal fees and significant sums have already been paid out.

Two live cases may yet require Morgan to answer more legal questions. Princess Dianas former lover, James Hewitt, is suing Mirror Group for damages arising from unlawful information gathering during Morgans time as editor at the Mirror, while Prince Harry also has a suit pending against the Mirror and the Sun on similar grounds.

Morgan did not mention that latter case in the latest instalment of his headline-making interview with Thomas Markle on Monday, though he was once again pointedly critical of Meghans recourse to the courts in her privacy battle against another of his employers, the Mail on Sunday. He did not feel the need to highlight any conflict of interest.

When news of Hewitts suit against the Mirror was tweeted by Hugh Grant, Morgan was, as ever, however, quick to respond:

Great! Always wanted to get the Major into court so we can discuss his treasonous adultery with the wife of our future king. This will be fun! Ps Just a reminder, again, Saint Hugh one of us has a criminal record, and its not me. So stick your moralising up your a**.

Watching Morgan at breakfast over a period of time, and despite all his self-mockery, that old tabloid nastiness is never too far from the surface. Though by all accounts an affable and charming colleague and friend, in his professional life, even at 7am, he retains the right to a bullys instinct for taking advantage of vulnerability. That instinct, which he exploits more effectively than any other journalist in our tribal times, drives attention where he wants it: towards him. He knows how to feed that playground impulse that made you run toward a scrap when the cry of Fight! went up.

On Wednesday morning, Morgan was obsessing about his no-show at the National Television awards, and slagging off another of his hate figures, David Walliams. I watched Reid trying to get a word in edgeways, and felt her lucrative pain a few times when she had to give up. I could sense my resolve to keep my Morganuary habit going into our post-Brexit February waning. As with all new years resolutions, a month suddenly seemed like more than enough.

Author Afua Hirsch is asked to defend her New York Times piece Black Britons know why Meghan Markle wants out its the racism.

You cant just say these things are racist when theyre not, Morgan froths.

Im telling you that as someone whos lived the experience of being a person of African heritage in this country that there are narratives that are regularly Hirsch replies, before being cut off by her host.

A discussion about Harry and Meghans new life becomes another robust debate about whether the treatment of the couple by the UK media had been racist. Morgan says not. This prompts lawyer and activist Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu to say: You are a man privileged to have power and influence, and youre using your power so irresponsibly to spout some personal vendetta with nasty and vile comments.

Labour leadership candidate Lisa Nandy also ends up having to fact-check Morgans view that race and gender were not a factor in the medias treatment of Meghan Markle. If you dont mind me saying, how on earth would you know? she counters. As someone whos never had to deal with ingrained prejudice, youre not in a position to understand people who have.

He also picks a fight with GMBs mixed-race weather presenter, Alex Beresford, about, you guessed it, race and Meghan Markle.

After saying he had been championing the anti-woke frontman and Question Time celebrity Laurence Fox, Morgan clashes with him over Foxs comments that the inclusion of a Sikh soldier in the film 1917 was forcing diversity on people. Morgan points out that he was sort of insulting, actually, to Sikh soldiers who had served.

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Is Good Morning Britain the wake-up call we deserve? - The Guardian

Theres a crisis of citizenship in America.

Most people dont see many opportunities to participate meaningfully in our political process, and many others feel alienated from it altogether. Thats a dangerous place for any democracy to be.

One of the biggest challenges facing American politics is polarization. The public is increasingly split along partisan lines, and the very idea of Americanness who counts as an American and who doesnt seems hopelessly muddled. But its precisely because were so divided that now is a great time to ask what citizenship means and how we might revive it.

Danielle Allen is a political theorist at Harvard University who has been thinking about these issues for a long time. Last month, she wrote a feature essay in the Atlantic with a big question at the center: How can Americans become citizens again?

The implication is that we stopped being citizens at some point, or simply lost faith in our institutions.

According to Allen, the informal system of norms and rules that governs our political process has collapsed as the environment has become more fragmented and extreme. At the same time, the hollowing-out of our political institutions has left society disunited, disorganized, and raw. So not only is the public increasingly divided, most people see no pathway to change.

I spoke to Allen about how we got here, what democratic citizenship actually means, and what it will take to bridge the chasm at the center of our politics. A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

What does it mean to be a citizen of a democracy?

Thats a big question, but Id say that it means an opportunity to be empowered and to become a co-author of our collective way of life. Typically, we exercise that opportunity for empowerment through participation in political institutions. But we also get to exercise that opportunity just by contributing to shaping our shared culture.

So its active participation, in your mind, that separates democratic citizenship from citizenship in a non-democracy?

Yeah, I think thats right. The point of being a democratic citizen is that you are part of the sovereign, you are part of the governing body. And the only way to actually fulfill that role is through participation. That may come in the form of voting or running for office, but it might also mean working with neighbors to shape and influence your local community.

You say that Americans have to become citizens again. When did we stop being citizens?

I think its been eroding for the last half-century or so. And I think the biggest indicator that its eroded is how little respect we have for Congress. Congress has an approval rating that hovers around 20 percent. It hit a low of about 9 percent in 2013, I believe. And our disrespect for Congress is disrespect for ourselves, because the national legislature is an extension of our own democratic power. Its the form our power takes. So if we disrespect that body, we disrespect our own democratic empowerment.

There are lots of reasons why we landed in this place. In your essay, you focus on the 1970s as a crucial period in which things started to go downhill. What happened?

There are a whole lot of things that changed, but thats really a period when the power moved away from Congress. And my focus is on the economic part of the story. That was a point in time where economic policy shifted from a focus on fiscal policy, the question of what budgets Congress sets, to a question of monetary policy, where you have this independent entity, the Federal Reserve, which isnt elected and isnt really accountable to voters, setting the economic direction for the country.

Suddenly, the entirety of our economy is being managed by this independent body, and thats a massive reduction of power for Congress and therefore a reduction of the publics ability to control their economic fate. And all of this coincides with the increasing privatization of public life and with lots of social transformations that generate culture wars over sex and abortion and gay rights and drugs and so on. And that in turn leads to more partisanship and more hatred for fellow citizens, and this undercuts the connections that support a functioning democracy.

Lets step back a bit and then well circle back to this part of the story. The American founders had this idea of township democracy, where citizens shared a physical space and politics was mostly about local issues. Is their idea of citizenship even conceivable in the world we now inhabit? Do we need to completely rethink the concept of citizenship?

We need to do a lot of rethinking. The founders got a lot wrong and a lot right. We cant straightforwardly transplant their idea of citizenship into our own circumstances. Their concept of citizenship depended on an elite having stewardship over the entire community, and weve rightly blown that idea to bits. Were now committed to a more inclusive picture of democracy, where everybody gets to participate in power or at least thats the idea.

But I dont think we can abandon the idea that local citizenship matters. We need avenues of participation and pathways to empowerment at all levels of our society. And in particular, what really matters is that we find ways of making sure that structures of governance align with the communities who are affected. People, in other words, have to be involved in decisions that will directly impact their lives and their communities.

Theres also the reality that the founders were building a republic by and for white property-owning males. There was a convergence of interests that doesnt exist in todays multiethnic society, and so the idea of unity, if not quite impossible, feels quixotic. At the same time, there are now more groups competing for political and cultural power, and that creates real, insoluble conflict.

Is there a vision of citizenship that can transcend these differences?

Thats the key question. But I wouldnt say that we dont have a convergence of interests in the contemporary world, although that convergence may be pretty narrow. I think everyone has an interest in empowerment. Everyone should believe that their own sense of fulfillment or completion requires that they not be buffeted by other peoples decisions, that they have some part in shaping the world in which they live. And the only vehicle for achieving that is democracy.

We will never all agree about what to do or whats right and whats wrong, and we shouldnt. But democracy is about this fundamental commitment to the right of empowerment and self-government. This is a shared bedrock interest, and its as nonnegotiable as air or water or any other basic necessity of life.

My hope is that we can inspire this feeling of shared interest in more people.

I guess the question is, how do we do that? How do we get people to buy into that vision?

Well, there isnt one answer to that question. One specific area, which is obviously less fraught than issues around religion or race or sexuality, is the space of civic education. Weve failed ourselves miserably by not providing any kind of civic education in schools for a generation.

And one reason for this is polarization. We cant agree on how to tell the American story. Is it a story of triumph and invention and progress? Or is it a story of enslavement and genocide? The National Governors Association couldnt agree on common standards for social studies because of this disagreement, so it just gets pushed aside.

Im part of a coalition of people working on trying to rebuild civics education, where our first principle is that a diversity of views on this is fine. We have to be able to be honest about our history and its negative parts, and at the same time appreciative of its good parts without letting the honesty pull us into cynicism. I think theres a way to find enough common ground here.

And to be clear, Im not saying this is going to fix everything. Its not. But its part of the picture, and its the kind of thing we have to do better if we want to fix these deep problems that took decades to build and will take decades to overcome.

My worry is that citizenship real citizenship is virtually impossible in a sprawling consumerist society like ours. Our lives are mediated by screens, we rarely interact with people in our own communities, our media environment is designed to stupefy and divide how do we construct a citizenry in the face of all this?

Its definitely challenging, Ill give you that. But lets step back a little. What does it take to have a conception of citizenship that we might share? What does it take to realize it? At the end of the day, I come back to the shared interest in empowerment through participation, in having routes of participation that are actually workable and situated in a culture that actually supports those opportunities.

This leads up back to where we started, which is the feeling people have of not being in control of their own lives or economic future. And as you said, a lot of this started in the 1970s with the increasing privatization of public life. Since then, weve gradually given ourselves over to this neoliberal idea that the state only exists in order to secure the free market.

How in the world do we deal with this?

We have to flip ourselves from a vicious circle to a virtuous circle. We have to reform our institutions so theyre actually worth participating in, at the same time that we rebuild a civil society and a culture that supports participation. But there are some concrete steps I think we have to take to level the playing field.

For one, we have to increase the size of the House and re-weight the balance between populous states and less populous states. We have to bring greater equality to the vote of somebody in California versus the vote of somebody in Wyoming. Theres an enormous disparity right now thats plainly anti-democratic.

I think we need term limits for Supreme Court justices so that we can reduce the politicization of the Court, reduce the notion that every presidential election is an existential struggle. Ranked-choice voting is another institutional reform that I think would help a ton. The anti-democratic structures built into our system are increasing tensions in the country and undermining their own legitimacy.

On the culture side, and theres just no easy way to do this, but we have to inspire a love of democracy. Ultimately, nothing matters if people dont believe in democracy, if theyre not invested in it. And we have inspiring people in our history who gave us that love. Martin Luther King gave a lot of people that love. Barack Obama gave a lot of people that love. Ronald Reagan gave a lot of people that love.

What would you say is the closing message of your essay?

The message I want people to take away is that democracy is worth loving. And when you have a broken democracy, its worth fixing.

And whats the alternative if we cant inspire that love?

There is no alternative. If we lose democracy, then weve lost something great, something of transcendent human value, and no one should want that. So wed better get about fixing it.

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Do Americans still believe in their democracy? - Vox.com