But still, there's something worth cheering here. In the past decade, political upheaval has strained, even broken, political institutions in America, Australia, Britain and other countries. It can be hard to respond nimbly to those challenges, because we have tied so many of our core values to them.

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Take the impeachment debate now happening in the US. On Thursday, the House of Representatives voted on a formal impeachment inquiry into President Trump's decision to withhold foreign aid from Ukraine in exchange for a personal political favour. Though an official vote and public hearing have been things Republicans have demanded for weeks, every single Republican representative voted against the motion.

As a result, the Republican Party has spent the past 24 hours dismissing the inquiry as partisan and therefore tainted. They're right about one thing: it is partisan. But they're wrong to assert that, because it is partisan, it is therefore illegitimate. The refusal of Republicans to take up the duties of their office is on them, not on Democrats.

But Democratic leadership does bear some of the blame. For decades, they have made a virtue of bipartisanship, arguing that something has more legitimacy if members of both parties agree on it. While that perhaps made sense in an earlier era when the Democratic and Republican parties each represented a wide range of political views and a shared commitment to some kind of national good, that is no longer the case.

Nor is this solely a function of the Trump era. President Obama held up bipartisanship as a guiding principle of his presidency, an idea best captured in his electrifying 2004 speech in which he denounced the idea that America could be carved up into red states and blue states.

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Democrats viewed this unifying message as a clarion call. Republicans saw it as a chance to cripple his presidency. Despite modelling his health care reforms on a plan dreamed up in a conservative think tank and passed into law by a Republican governor, Obama failed to draw any Republican votes for his bill. The partisanship of the final bill was not a result of the Democrats' failure to compromise; it was a result of the GOP's unwillingness to budge.

With one party unwilling to come to the table even for its own policies, efforts at bipartisanship are futile. Bipartisanship may have been a sign of good legislation in the past. Now it carries no moral or ethical weight.

Other core democratic values have also come under pressure in recent years. Take the notion of objectivity. It still holds sway in journalism. How could it not? It's been a central value of reporting for a century. But certain aspects of objectivity have been badly abused in recent years, leading reporters to serve up false equivalence between, say, climate change scientists and climate change deniers, or a presidential candidate with sloppy email practices and one who was credibly accused of several sexual assaults and regularly invited foreign interference in a national election.

As a result, we've seen news outlets grappling with their core values as well. The Washington Post (where I've been an editor since 2017) has carried forth under the tagline "Democracy dies in darkness", recommitting itself to a tradition of investigative journalism that favours oversight over balance. Other newspapers have dedicated themselves to an even more scrupulous commitment to non-committal reporting.

That same divide now exists between Twitter and Facebook. Reasonable people can disagree about which is better: a devotion to abject neutrality or to a sense of shared - but not universal - morality. Both risk alienating people in a divided time. But their struggles remind us that we are a critical moment of transition, one that requires grappling not just with the questions of the day, but with our ethical commitment and core values, which, while they may have served us well in an earlier era, may not be suited to the crisis of our time.

Nicole Hemmer is an associate research scholar at the Obama Presidency Oral History Project, Columbia University, New York.