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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.

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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

As January comes to a close, here are three pieces from around the web that I particularly recommend. Enjoy!

Representative Darrell Issa in the basement of the Capitol with a painting of Ronald Reagan by artist Steve Penley. Photo By Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call, via Getty Images.

Have you ever heard of Steve Penley? I havent, but then I guess the fact that I dont know his colorfully dappled paintings of US presidents and American flags just means that I dont watch much Fox News.

Penleys art is more than just a regular feature and symbol of all that is patriotic on Fox. You have seen his patriotic paintings all over Fox & Friends, and actually Fox News channeleverywhere you go, we see your pictures hanging up in the halls, the shows cohost, Ainsley Earhardt, enthused to an audience a few years ago, during an appearance by the world-famous painter on the show.

Its all over my radio studio nowwe took em all! another one of the friends, Brian Kilmeade, added. Its brainwashing!

That level of media exposure surely makes Penley one of the countrys most high-profile painters, whether youve heard of him or not. In a funny way, the right-wing mediasphere has a lot more use for artists than its liberal cable-media rivals.

Wetzler wades through a lot of Fox News (so you dont have to) to find the Fox News Theory of Art, and its pretty much what you think it is: Only three kinds of art exist for Fox News: patriotic, stupid, and obscene.

Any way you slice it, its a mainly instrumental view of art: a given artwork gets the spotlight either because it is useful as propaganda for the Fox News worldview; because it serves as an illustration of how dumb and empty-headed liberal elites are; or because it outrages conservative sensibilities, and so can be used to rally the troops for the culture wars.

The favored patriotic aesthetic tends to channel Norman Rockwell by way of Andy Warhol, a late-Pop recycling of comfortingly clichd American symbols. (Like Penley, the late Thomas Kinkadealso took direct inspiration from Warhols Factory and described himself as Warhols heir apparent.) The best you could say of this work is that its probably more aware of how it operates than the art-loving public thatdoesnt watch Fox Newsgives it credit for.

Conservative aesthetics are stereotypically all about taking a stand against decadent experimental art and for real traditional art. Ive made a version of this point before (about neo-Jungian philosopher of the manosphere, Jordan Peterson), but by putting this art into the context of Fox News, Wetzler makes the point even more forcefully: it shows just how classically postmodern this conservative art is, if by that you mean art reduced to hollowed out signifiers, mutable performances, and stripped of any sense of a reality outside of media.

The Fox News view of culture may slam contemporary art as deliberately valuing offense over enlightenment, spectacle over skill, ugliness over beauty. But beneath a very thin Rockwellian veneer, all of this is equally true of the Through-the-Looking-Glass sensibility of Fox Newss rearguard. You cant understand superstar Fox News artist Jon McNaughtons One Nation Under Socialism, a painting of Obama burning the Constitution, outside of the value it puts on offenseaka trolling the libs.

And you cant understand Joe Everson, whose shtick is live-painting the Statue of Libertywhile singing the national anthem, outside of the appeal to spectacle.

Patriot artist, nationally acclaimed flag muralist, and frequent Fox visitor Scott LoBaidos 20-foot-tall image of a musclebound Donald Trump isabout as farfrom the profundities of real traditional art as Andres SerranosPiss Christ.

Whats it all mean? Probably that you should take Fox News art a hair more seriously than it is normally taken. Not in the sense of plumbing it for deep meaningits meaning seems mainly to be its appeal to Fox News audiences. But as simplistic and easily mocked as it is, its much more savvy and finely calibrated to be effective than it gets credit for.

The blur in action: Donald Trump speaking before a luncheon with US and African leaders at the Palace Hotel in New York. Photo by Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty Images.

Petrovich, by contrast, reads political meaning in a phenomenon that youve probably seen everywhere and not read much into: the increasing presence of the blur in mainstream political photojournalism. That we dont fall off our chairs when we see this tells us how far we have come, photographically, in a very short time, he writes. We are a long way from Pete Souzas languid, almost classical compositions on the Obama-era White House Flickr account, which in retrospect feel tinged with approaching horror.

Its an observant and nuanced essay, with the implication being that all the blurring is an almost an unconscious aesthetic symptom, registering a widespread, unnamable sense of looming dread. On the other hand, such blurry images are also slightly virtuosic and carry the blush of pure expression. Petrovich writes: I have been told that what I was seeing was just the increased prowess of the telephoto lens, or merely the resurgence of shallow depth of field.

I left the essay thinking it could be both. Photojournalism is in dire straights, images are cheap and everywhere, and it stands to reason that the dedicated professionals who remainwho are going to be focused in high-profile beats like political coverage and disaster reportingfeel pressured to register the individuality of their images with an arty shot. Wonky blurring is one way to do it. Whats interesting is that either wayas a symbol of an audiences general sense of unease, or as a symbol of the photographers intensified need to register their subjectivitywe arrive at the blur through a sense of a system in crisis, just by different routes.

Peter Schjeldahl at the 2011 New Yorker Festival. Photo by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images for The New Yorker.

Like a lot of people, Ive been thinking about New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl and what makes him an important figure, since his essay, The Art of Dying, was published last year. Earnests essay puts a commanding knowledge of his subjects writinghe edited Schjeldahls recent book,Hot, Cold, Heavy, Lightto try to explain Schjeldahls Olympian everyman style.

There really are few writers who have the effect Schjeldahl has: his writing is almost untouchably on-its-own. But hes also exceptionally engaging and reader-directed, and focused on connecting the circuits of artist biography and personal experience to make comprehensible a thought, an experience, a way of seeing.

Earnest describes his articles as detective stories about feelings, which gives a name to what I feel about them. He mentions Schjeldahls own account of his method: Looking at art is like, Here are the answers. What were the questions? he once told me. I think of it like espionage, walking the cat backwhy didthathappen, andthat?until eventually you come to a point of irreducible mystery.'

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How Fox News Weaponizes Art + Two Other Illuminating Pieces of Criticism From Around the Web - artnet News

Community Connections:This is a lesson from the Gospel of Moderation

In Christian churches, we often use the word Gospel. Many people know the word means 'good news.'

The good news, originally, was very specifically the good news of a military victory. A pitched battle fought in some distant region of the empire; the legions of Rome defeat their enemy and acquire new territory for Cesar; a runner is dispatched to herald the glorious win -- Gospel! Good News! We Win! Of course, Good News! for the Roman Empire was decidedly bad news for the unfortunate people of the newly-crushed and occupied territory.

I think about that when I use or hear the word Gospel. Our battles today seem far removed from some grim clash between Roman troops and Barbarian hoards. Instead, our current culture wars embroil us in contentious exchanges where words are weapons and the ground we fight over is political, ideological, or theological. We fight fiercely to preserve our freedoms, to protect us from what we fear by conquering -- no, vanquishing -- those who are different, to promote our truth against those who are not only wrong, but dangerously, deadly, wrong.

In polished armor, we take the field with the goal of bringing all of the blessings and prosperity of 'Rome' to the world. And, when we score a point on social media, see our candidate win an election, or divide our denomination and call it Good News, we automatically and ironically become bad news for someone else. In the pursuit of one goal, the opposite results. The consequences for both congregations and culture are devastating. In winning, we are losing.

The New Testament turns the gospel of empire on its head. The good news of God's kingdom isn't fashioned with might and power and wealth, but with sacrifice and surrender and utter humility. From the perspective of God's kingdom, a political, ideological, or theological victory wrought with the same old violent tools of empire (We Win! You Lose!) is no victory at all, but a total capitulation to the darkest, basest, and most sinister parts of our humanity.

In other words, the way we engage is as dear to God as what we engage. More so.

In light of this, let's call for a gospel of moderation. Not a moderation of our views -- as in, your view is too extreme, become more moderate. But rather a moderation of our nature, a tempering of the bloody fierceness with which we hold our views, a pulling back from the brink of war. Rather than assuming those who hold profoundly different perspectives or values than ourselves to be vile, evil enemies to be destroyed, a gospel of moderation would entail listening well, learning and understanding deeply, and recognizing our own perspective is valuable and useful but incomplete, part of the story, but not the entire script. This is true whether we are talking about climate change or road diets, local elections or national, worship music or the Second Amendment.

Communities and congregations that manage a gospel of moderation would certainly be welcome places of respite and good news in the contentious landscape of our current cultural moment. To do this, I (yes, emphatically, I) need to fight a battle indeed. But the battle is internal. It is a battle against my fears and ambitions and prejudices; a fight to die to myself rather than to kill the personhood of another. For local Christian congregations, in Jesus, we have both the model and the living resource to win this fight. Gospel. Good News! We all win.

Michael DeRuyter, lead pastor at the Midland Reformed Church, wrote this op-ed as part of the Daily News' Community Connections initiative.

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Community Connections: This is a lesson from the Gospel of Moderation - Midland Daily News