Peggy Noonan

We are talking about journalism this week, about newspapers and warring newsrooms and lost readership and what to do. At bottom, though this gets lost, all the arguments are really about what journalism is.

Here is what it is.

It is a dark night on a vast plain. There are wild sounds—the hiss of prehistoric cicadas, the scream of a hyena. A tribe of cavemen sit grunting around a fire. An antelope turns on a spit. Suddenly another caveman runs in, breathlessly, from the bush. “Something happened,” he says. They all turn. “The tribe two hills over was killed by a pack of dire wolves. Everyone torn to pieces.”

Clamor, questions. How do you know? Did you see it? (He did, from a tree.) Are you sure they were wolves? “Yes, with huge heads and muscled torsos.” What did it look like? “Bloody.”

As he reports he is given water and a favored slice of meat. Because he has run far and is hungry, but mostly because he has told them the news, and they are grateful.

Humans like news, need it, want it, will usually (not always) reward those who bring it. We need it to survive, to make decisions, to understand the world. We need it to live.

The purpose of journalism is to get the story and tell the story.

Now the cavemen turn to the tribal elder. “What should we do?”

“Short term, climb a tree if you see a wolf,” she says. “They don’t like fire and noise, so we should keep lit torches and scream. In the longer term, wolf packs are seen in the west, so we should go east to high ground.” That is the authentic sound of commentary, of editorials and columns. Advice, exhortation—they’re part of the news too. People will always want it, question it, disagree. “To the editor: You have it all wrong. We should go north, toward the water.” “To the editor: Has it occurred to your columnist the dead tribe may have provoked the wolves through farming practices that encroached on their habitats?”

But even cavemen who eat bugs and wear hides are not always grim. Man wants not only to be informed but to be amused, entertained. He wants humor, wit, mischief, a visual tour of the latest cave paintings. Cave man want cooking app. And word games and reporting on the richest tribes: “Most Expensive Cave Dwelling Sells in Malibu.” And he wants the story, the yarn, the tale that takes people into a reality unfamiliar to them and makes them want to share it, and in the sharing be less alone. “Martha, listen to this!” means you know Martha. What a serious purpose that is, to leave people less encased in themselves.

All that is the purpose of journalism, forever and now. It is what a newspaper is for, to serve the public by finding out what’s really going on in all sectors and telling them, clearly.

The great news for journalism is there will always be a huge market for this. The need for news is built into human nature. Tech platforms change, portals change, but the need is forever.

So what is the problem?

The past two decades, accelerating over the past four years, newsrooms have increasingly become distracted from their main mission, confused about their purpose. Really, they’ve grown detached from their mission. This has happened in other professions and is always hard to capture. But the journalistic product now being offered has become something vaguer than it was, more boring, less swashbuckling, more labored, as if it’s written by frightened people. There’s an emphasis on giving the story “context,” but the story doesn’t feel alive and the context seems skewed. Twee headlines: “What You Need to Know About Dire Wolf Intersectionality With Humans.”

I’ll decide what I need to know, bub.

It is as if journalism is no longer about Get the Story but about Meeting People Where They Are and helping them navigate through a confusing world. But do you really think current editors know where people are? Do you think they know how to navigate? It all feels presumptuous.

More disturbing, major stories go unreported because, the reader senses, they don’t relate to the personal obsessions of the editors and reporters, or to their political priors. Didn’t I say that politely? There’s a sense newsrooms are distracted by HR issues and how people treat each other. But the news doesn’t care if it is delivered by an especially collegial person, it just wants to be delivered. My FedEx package doesn’t care if it’s delivered by a nice person, and neither really do I. I just want it on time and in one piece.

More and more as I observe American journalism I miss the guys who were big TV news producers in the 1980s and ’90s. They were animals—real cavemen. They’d do anything to get the news. They yelled at people and pushed them around. But the people around them, they sure got the story.

Facebook and social media can’t get the story. They can amplify it, give an opinion, comment. But they don’t have the resources and expertise; they don’t have trained investigative journalists and first-class experienced editors and a publisher willing to take a chance and spend the money. Social media has opinions, emotions, propaganda.

And the great thing for newspapers is if you get the story—if you are known to get the story, like the Washington Post in the Watergate years—you will be read.

Because you will be needed. And if you are needed people will pay for you.

If you are just following along with some agenda, you will be read by those who share that agenda, but no one else. And readership will plummet.

In early 2023, Len Downie and Andrew Heyward, formerly executive editor of the Washington Post and president of CBS News, respectively, wrote a paper about how modern journalists see standards within their professions, and it seemed to me not only confused but a kind of capitulation. There had been a “generational shift” in journalism, and the many editors and reporters they interviewed think objectivity is more or less “outmoded,” a false standard created by the white male patriarchy. What was really striking was there was no mention, not one, of the thrill of the chase, of getting the story—of journalism itself. It was all about the guck and mess, not the mission, and made them look like news bureaucrats, joyless grinds, self-infatuated bores.

If that is who they are, who needs them? Who would pay hundred of dollars a year to read them?

They were obsessed with who’s in the newsroom when their readers are obsessed with what comes out of the newsroom. It is good and worthy and necessary to have reporters and editors who come from different experiences, different classes, different cultural assumptions. But current ways of encouraging diversity seem to yield a great sameness in terms of class and viewpoint, and in any case diversity is a mission within a mission, it isn’t the mission itself, which is: Get the story, tell the story.

“Something happened. The tribe two hills over . . .”

I suppose this is about being an honorable combatant in the middle of a culture war, which entails seeing the humanity of your perceived foe and, in the seeing of it, preserving your own.

The story, which you’ve already heard, is that a left-wing activist who calls herself an “advocacy journalist” went to the June 3 dinner of the Supreme Court Historical Society, a 50-year-old organization whose declared mission is to unearth and preserve the court’s history. During what appears to have been the drinks portion of the evening the activist, called Lauren Windsor, secretly taped private conversations with Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Samuel Alito and Justice Alito’s wife, Martha-Ann. Ms. Windsor dishonestly presented herself as a conservative Christian. She goaded and baited the Alitos, hoping to get them to say extreme and stupid things, which she would later disseminate on social media.

Mrs. Alito, as appears to be her way—she is commonly described by friends as “a pistol”—said some spirited things. She has been under siege. Her husband wrote the Dobbs decision; she is by extension a target of hatred; she has been verbally confronted in her neighborhood and accused of inappropriate flag flying. Half the accusation—that after words with a neighbor she flew the American flag upside-down—was legitimate. It was a weird choice for the spouse of a justice in a time of tension. The other half—that the old Appeal to Heaven flag was flown at her vacation home, secretly signaling allegiance with the rioters on Jan. 6—was absurd. People on 1/6 carried Bibles and Bic pens too. Should we ban them? Slime those who use them?

The tone of the edited six-minute tape of the conversation with Mrs. Alito is at variance with news reports. Ms. Windsor comes across as a pushy and vaguely hysterical fangirl meeting an idol. Clearly she was acting out her idea of a Christian and conservative, which is a revved-up nut. Mrs. Alito’s mistake was responding in an egalitarian manner and not breezing past the nut with a quick, false smile.

Ms. Windsor introduces herself: “I’m a huge fan of your husband, and everything you’re going through, I just wanna tell you—”

“It’s OK, it’s OK,” Mrs. Alito says.

Ms. Windsor: “It’s not OK, though! It’s not OK!” Mrs. Alito offers a vow: “If they come back to me, I’ll get them. I’m gonna be liberated and I’m gonna get them.”

Ms. Windsor perks up. A threat! “What do you mean by ‘they’?”

Mrs. Alito answers: “The media.” The press made fun of her from the day she arrived in Washington, at the sparky confirmation hearings for her husband. She implies that when all this is over she’ll be giving them a piece of her mind. Everyone in Washington has this fantasy.

Ms. Windsor says the Appeal to Heaven flag flap was nonsense, and begins to swear excitedly. “Right,” says Mrs. Alito. “But, like, I have the same flag!” Ms. Windsor says. “Yes, I know,” says Mrs. Alito.

“But a lot of people fly that f—flag!” Ms. Windsor says. Mrs. Alito, in what sounds to my ears like a comforting tone: “Don’t worry about it, baby.”

Ms. Windsor says Mrs. Alito is being persecuted as “a convenient stand-in for anybody who’s religious.” Again Mrs. Alito says it will be OK—she’s German and tough. “You come after, me I’m gonna give it back to you.” This part had a “Real Housewives” flavor. “Don’t worry about it.” Mrs. Alito says, read Psalm 27.

Ms. Windsor changes tack, quoting something she had said to Justice Alito. “So I met him last year at this dinner. And I said to him, like, ‘This country is so polarized, how do we repair that rift?’ And he was like, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know, that’s not our role.’ And I told him this year, I’m like, ‘You know for the past year I remembered our conversation and I looked at what happened to you and your wife, and I’m like ‘How is there any negotiating with the radical left?’ ”

Mrs. Alito agrees there isn’t. “There’s not!,” says Mrs. Windsor. “You cannot negotiate with the radical left!” “You have to just win!”

It’s like Sean Hannity on meth.

Ms. Windsor: “No, but you have to win! And if we want to take this country back to, like, a godly place, to a moral place, that means that we actually have to just—”

By now Mrs. Alito is all in, blowing off steam. She’d like to put a Sacred Heart of Jesus flag up across from a pride flag. “Oh, please don’t put up a flag,” her husband says, and she won’t, but after he leaves the court, “I’m putting it up and I’m gonna send them a message every day. Maybe every week I’ll be changing the flags. They’ll be all kinds!”

One believes her.

The edited tapes made front-page news, which was odd in a mainstream media that regularly and rightly scorns the right-wing secret-sting-tape-maker James O’Keefe for deceptive reporting.

As to the contents of the Roberts and Justice Alito tapes, the chief justice didn’t take any bait or any nonsense. Of making America more godly, he said, “Would you want me to be in charge of putting the nation on a more moral path? That’s for people we elect. That’s not for lawyers. . . . It’s our job to decide the cases the best we can.”

Justice Alito gave Ms. Windsor more patience, but I agreed with the New York Post editorial that he seemed like someone gently trying to shake off a political obsessive. He agreed that polarization is real, and that for it to end, “one side or the other is going to win. I don’t know. I mean, there can be a way of working—a way of living together peacefully. But it’s difficult, you know, because there are differences on fundamental things that really can’t be compromised.” Still, the court can’t solve polarization. “We have a very defined role, and we need to do what we’re supposed to do.”

The Alitos and Chief Justice Roberts didn’t do or say anything wrong. But there was something quite inhuman in what the left-wing activist did. She treated human beings as if they were mere means to her end. She acted out admiration to perform reputational harm. She presented herself falsely to inflict damage. That the content she produced was disseminated by honest grown-up journalists is to their discredit.

She claims to oppose polarization but fans it, further alienating those who already lack trust in institutions like the court and professionals like journalists. She presents another warning to those who hold or are adjacent to high office: You can’t assume good faith on the part of fellow citizens who seek you out.

More than that, it is deeply Stalinist. In Stalin’s time private life was dead, and private comments too. Neighbor spied on neighbor and reported back subversive comments to the Central Committee. People became spies, rooting out ideological error.

And, if you’re serious, what does it even get you? You persuade nobody. Your ideological friends like it that you owned the cons. Your foes are hardened. You get attention for yourself. So what? You’ll always be the person who got attention that way.

Simi Valley, Calif.

I was to write on something else this week but an event in California sent me back in time. Friends of Ronald Reagan gathered to mark the 40th anniversary of his speeches at Normandy (June 6, 1984), and the 20th anniversary of his death (June 5, 2004). The dates remind me that Reagan first burst on the American political scene with his “A Time for Choosing” speech in 1964, and announced to the nation that he was suffering from Alzheimer’s in 1994. Somehow years ending in 4 marked significant occurrences in his life. Because I have been reading a biography of Carl Jung, I wonder if this might be an expression of synchronicity, in which circumstances that seem meaningfully related have no obvious causal connection.

Many of those who worked or got their start in Reagan’s White House came—Haley Barbour, Condoleezza Rice—and others traveled far to show respect, including Carol Thatcher, daughter of Margaret, and Ben Mulroney, son of Brian. Historians came.

Prime Ministers Thatcher of Britain and Mulroney of Canada, Reagan, Pope John Paul II—that quartet did great work together, for the benefit of humanity.

We at the Reagan Library felt there was a time when politics was sweeter, when big things got said in gentle ways, when geniality was a virtue and not a political faux pas. That time included the summer of ’84 and a day in Normandy. To have been able to work on the president’s remarks there was a privilege, and the past few days reminded me of a comment Reagan made in conversation. Now and then at night, relaxing in the White House, he’d channel-surf and come upon a movie he’d starred in 40 years before. He’d have the oddest sensation—he said it was like seeing a son you’d forgotten you had. I thought of it because in the library’s materials to mark the anniversaries I saw pictures of myself in meetings with him 40 years ago, and thought: the daughter I forgot I had.

We felt, and feel, that Ronald Reagan was the last unambiguously successful American president. He walked in, in January 1981, saying he would do two big and unlikely things, one domestic and one in foreign affairs, and walked out in January 1989 having done them. He revitalized the U.S. economy after decades of drift and demoralization, and he defeated the Soviet Union, the Berlin Wall falling months after he left the presidency. He did a third thing he hadn’t promised. He changed the mood of the country. We’d been depressed since JFK’s assassination and Vietnam, since Nixon and Watergate. Reagan said no, we aren’t a spent force, we aren’t incapable, we’ve got all this energy and brains. We’ve got this, he said. We did.

When presidencies are huge they are clear and you don’t have to finagle around with vague or technical language to cite their achievements.

To the D-Day speech at Pointe du Hoc. There’s something I always want to say about it.

The speech was a plain-faced one. It was about what it was about, the valor shown 40 years before by the young men of Operation Overlord who, by taking the Normandy beaches, seized back the Continent of Europe.

But there was a speech within the speech, and that had to do with more-current struggles.

Reagan wished to laud the reunited U.S. Rangers before him, so he simply described what they’d done: “At dawn, on the morning of the 6th of June, 1944, 225 Rangers jumped off the British landing craft and ran to the bottom of these cliffs.” Their mission was one of the hardest of the invasion, to climb the cliffs to take out enemy guns.

“And the American Rangers began to climb.” They shot rope ladders, pulled themselves up. “When one Ranger fell, another would take his place.” Two hundred twenty five Rangers had come there. “After two days of fighting, only 90 could still bear arms.”

“Behind me is a memorial that symbolizes the Ranger daggers that were thrust into the top of these cliffs. And before me are the men who put them there. These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs.”

The “boys,” in the front rows, began to weep. They had never in 40 years been spoken of in that way, their achievement described by an American president, who told all the world what they’d done. Nancy Reagan and others, as they looked at them, were moved, and their eyes filled. Reagan couldn’t show what he was feeling, he had to continue. But afterward, in the Oval Office, he told me of an old Ranger who, before the ceremony, saw some young U.S. Rangers re-enacting the climb, and the old vet joined in and made it to the top. Reagan’s eyes shined: “Boy, that was something.”

The speech within the speech was about the crisis going on as Reagan spoke. The Western alliance was falling apart. Its political leaders were under severe pressure at home. British, West German and Italian peace movements had risen and gained influence in 1982 and 1983, pushing to stop the U.S.-Soviet arms race. The Soviets had placed SS-20 missiles in Eastern Europe. In response, in late 1983, the U.S. put Pershing II and cruise missiles in Western Europe. Arms talks continued but went nowhere, and the Soviets often walked out. In New York, a million antinuclear protesters had marched from Central Park to the United Nations. In Bonn, hundreds of thousands protesters took to the streets in what police called the largest demonstration since the end of the war.

It was one of the tensest moments of the Cold War.

Reagan hated nuclear weapons but believed progress couldn’t be wrung from the Russians with words and pleas. More was needed, a show of determination.

He understood the pressure the political leaders of the West were under, and at Pointe du Hoc he was telling them, between the lines: Hold firm and we will succeed.

That’s why he spoke at such length of all the Allied armies at D-Day, not only the Americans. It’s why he paid tribute to those armies’ valor—to remind current leaders what their ancestors had done. It’s why he talked about “the unity of the Allies.” “They rebuilt a new Europe together.”

He was saying: I know the pressure you’re under for backing me, but hold on. They pretty much did. And in the end the decisions of 1983 and ’84 led to the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, signed in 1987 by Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, a turning point in the Cold War.

If you hear that speech, be moved by the Rangers who climbed those cliffs and the country that sent them there. Care that Ronald Reagan became the first public person to capture and laud the greatest generation, but delicately, because it was his generation and he couldn’t self-valorize. (Yes, a sweeter time.) But he was telling the young: That guy you call grandpa, see him in a new way. See his whole generation for who they were.

And hear, too, a message that echoes down the generations: Good people with a great cause must stand together, grab that rope and climb, no matter what fire.

I’m seeing something and maybe you are too.

We talk in our country about political polarization and it’s real: We’re split into a thousand pieces within two big camps of left and right. We decry the harshness of our political discourse, particularly online, where outrageous and dehumanizing things are said.

But what I’m seeing is that we don’t mind disliking each other now. We like it. That’s the new thing, that we’re enjoying the estrangement.

Nobody’s trying to win anybody over. The biggest recent example of this is the story about the Supreme Court justice’s wife who didn’t understand that flying the American flag upside down outside her home during a crisis might be experienced by others as unhappily weird and possibly alarming, and her neighbor who didn’t understand that when engaged in a political dispute it’s not really nice to spew lewd and ugly epithets unbidden, or put them on lawn signs.

That was a local and particular expression of a larger trend we’re all witnessing. Bill Maher wrote of it in an essay last month: “Would anyone ride the New York City subway wearing a MAGA hat, or go to a NASCAR race in a Biden T-shirt? That’s where we are now: Other parts of the country are seen as no-go zones.”

It’s shocking that that’s true, but it is.

When was the last time you saw anyone try to address the other side with respect and understanding, and venture something like, “I think you’re seeing it this way, but I want to explain why I see it so differently, and that way we might both understand each other and proceed with respect.” Instead we accuse each other and put each other down and it doesn’t feel merry and high-spirited, like political business as usual, it feels cold.

Both sides have an equal but different sense of superiority. Both sides enjoy looking down on the other.

The left leans toward condemnation. It is going from “Trump is a criminal” to “Trump supporters are criminal.” They understand things the other dopes don’t. Class is involved. I have quoted the friend who said recently, with no bitterness, that Democrats see Trump voters as toothless, smelly Walmart shoppers. The left does look down, sometimes from a privileged economic position, which makes it the more shameful.

Trump supporters lean toward manipulation. They charge the other side are bad human beings—selfish elites who have no feeling for, no affiliation with, the common man. They’re coastal elites who look down on flyover states as they sip martinis in first class. Some Trump voters say his foes oppose him to go to “Georgetown cocktail parties” or similar gatherings in New York and Los Angeles. This started about a quarter-century ago but sped up with Donald Trump, and I thought at the time: Are cocktail parties still going on? I knew they existed in the 1930s and 1940s, because they were featured in the old movies I watched on television as a child. Nick and Nora Charles threw them! In my town the elites who oppose Mr. Trump don’t have cocktail parties, they doggedly attend fundraisers for hospitals and libraries and go to professional events. The most establishment Trump foes are among the hardest-working people in America. They are earnest. They run the institutions you’ll rely on if you have a heart attack on the sidewalk or a story that needs exposing or a court case that needs taking. And they drink water. At least cocktail parties make them sound glamorous and carefree.

But it really is something that we’re so estranged we know nothing of the other side’s lives, and because we know nothing even our insults are lame and need updating.

The class aspect of the big estrangement portends nothing good. America has been navigating its way through issues of class since its beginning; it is text or subtext of the country’s great novels. Now it is emerging in a new way in our politics, one more laden with meaning and encouraging of unashamed judgment.

I said I sensed people are enjoying their political hatred now. Why would that be?

Some of it is human and has been around forever. People enjoy hating—it feels so vigorous. Some enjoy their hatred because they are by nature shallow and see the implications of nothing. Some enjoy it because they see politics as an extension of sports—booing the other team is part of the fun of being at the game. Some enjoy it because it lets them feel immersed in a warm bath of righteousness: I’m not immoral like a Trump supporter; I’m not a mindless snob who drove the country into a ditch like a Democrat.

But some enjoy their hatred—this is the new part, and I think pretty widespread—because it helps them avoid seeing that they are involved in a tragedy.

The tragedy is that one of two old men, neither of them great, neither of them distinguished in terms of character or intellect, who are each in his way an embarrassment, and whom two-thirds of voters do not want as presidential candidates, will be chosen, in this crucial historical moment in which the stakes could not be higher, to lead the most powerful nation on earth.

One will likely fail physically in coming years—he’s failing now—and be replaced by a vice president who is wholly unsuited for the presidency because she is wholly unserious, who has had four years to prove herself in a baseline way and failed to meet even the modest standards by which vice presidents are judged. The other may, on being elected or even before then, be thrown into the slammer for one of the felony charges against him, including those connected to attempting to overthrow a democratic national election.

This is a tragedy—that this is what we’ve got, these are our choices.

When you’ve got a major hate on, you don’t have to notice.

What we should be doing is asking each other: How are we going to make our way through this constructively?

Instead, people prattle about a coming civil war. But what are they talking about? Neither side is going to raise an army and fight in the streets, the most Trump-supporting state in the country is not going to fire on a Fort Sumter, and even if anything like that happened, who gets custody of the nuclear arsenal? Who’s left sending out the Social Security checks?

Normally in a column like this you give a suggestion or two on how to turn things around. I don’t know, but I suppose it at least starts with understanding that the people we’re so harshly judging are our countrymen. They share the country with you. We have to go forward into the future together, because if we don’t we won’t have a future.

We have to ease up, we have to slow down our desire to look down, we have to be a little more generous, we have to stop enjoying our hate so much. And we’ll have to come up with thoughts that are better than that, because we can’t go on indefinitely like this.

Some Memorial Day thoughts on the importance of love:

Children don’t need to be taught to love their parents. From the moment they come out you are everything to them. They seem to arrive with a certain amount of love built in and fix it on the mother who holds them and looks into their eyes and the father who delights them by making them laugh. It really is something, this natural force that comes prepackaged. (In this corner we believe God did this, implanting the love; we believe God in fact invented love, for his and your pleasure.)

But after parents, family and nature—children are especially sensitive to and undefended against the idea of the miraculous within nature—children have to be taught to love certain things. Such as their country.

Parents, teach your children to love America, either as an extension of your own love or as a simple kindness to them.

We live in an age—I’ll say this part quickly as we all know it—in which children are instructed in 100 different ways through 100 different portals that America is and always was a dark and scheming place, that its history is the history of pushing people around, often in an amoral quest for wealth but also because we aren’t very nice. And we never meant it about the Declaration.

Ideology and idiocy imposed this view, shallowness too. It began some decades ago but has speeded up and became more extreme the past 10 years.

What does this atmosphere of unlove for America do to kids? To little ones 5 and 10 but also 15—what is its impact on them?

To kids from difficult circumstances it means there is no hope; you won’t escape a violent or unhappy family into a better place, the world outside, because it isn’t better. The world outside is America, which brutalizes the minority, the woman, the different. Inside is scary, outside is scarier. What a thing to do to vulnerable kids.

To kids from easier circumstances it does nothing good and carries a subtle bad effect. It means the thing you’re part of is, at its heart, corrupt, so you might as well be corrupt. The ugliness of America becomes a permission structure: We are amoral and you can be, too.

Kids live on dreams. Have the adults who’ve created this atmosphere forgotten that as they pursue their own resentments and make their accusations?

To kids in all circumstances, it denies a dream of a good thing you can make better. It undercuts the idea the people you came from were brave and hardy and did marvelous things. It robs you of a sense you’ve got this within you, and can go on and be a marvel too.

It denies kids a secure sense that they’re part of something sound and healthy. It subtly discourages them from trying to make things better—you can’t right something whose sicknesses are so structural. This isn’t a good way to bring up the future.

You have to start kids out with love. Irony and detachment will come soon enough, but start with love, if only to give them a memory of how that felt.

I’ve spent the past few days reading an old book, one that couldn’t possibly be published today because it’s so full of respect for America. “Manual of Patriotism: For Use in the Public Schools of the State of New York,” runs 461 pages of text and was published in 1900. The flag that illustrates this column is from its frontispiece.

The manual was written after the Legislature passed an 1898 law requiring public schools to display the American flag and “encourage patriotic exercises.” Organized veterans of the Civil War and of the Women’s Relief Corps, who were nurses on the battlefield, pushed for it to “awaken in the minds and hearts of the young” an “appreciation” for “the great deeds” of their nation.

Memorial Day meant a lot to those old veterans, but more was needed. Their generation was passing; they’d given everything to hold the nation together; they wanted the young to understand why.

Unsaid but between the lines: America at the turn of the 20th century was being engulfed by waves of immigrants; they too needed to understand what America is and means to be, so they would love it too.

What a book the manual is, what a flag-waving old classic.

How do you encourage love of country among schoolchildren? You let them have fun. You hold pageants and parades, have them read poems and learn songs. Let them dress up as figures in history and enact great events. This need not be costly: “An old-time coat or dress found in a garrett or unused drawer at home may serve all needful purposes.”

Tell the story of the American flag. The Continental Congress in 1777 said we need a national banner. Here enters the heroic Mrs. Elizabeth Ross of Philadelphia, known as Betsy, who, on the personal request of General Washington, started sewing. The stars and stripes from her hand, “were unfurled at the battle of Brandywine, in 1777. . . . They sang their song of triumph over defeated Burgoyne at Saratoga. . . . They saw the surrender of the enemy at Yorktown; they fluttered their ‘Goodbye’ to the British evacuating New York.”

Have children memorize and recite Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride.” Have them enact the battle of Lexington and Concord and read aloud Emerson’s “Concord Hymn”:

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.

Tell the story of the Mayflower, of the making and meaning of the Compact, of the landing on Plymouth Rock: Quote an old poem: “Here, on this rock, and on this sterile soil, / Began the kingdom, not of kings, but men; / Began the making of the world again.”

Remind children, as Sen. James G. Blaine once said, that the U.S. was long “the only country with a known birthday. All the rest began they know not when, and grew into power, they knew not how.” America wasn’t just some brute force that pushed up from the mud; we announced our birth with a Declaration that was “a revelation”: All men are created equal.

The manual includes a lot of opinions on historical events. One I liked was the assertion that the Civil War ended the day Ulysses S. Grant was buried in 1885. Why? Because America saw who his pallbearers were: “Johnston and Buckner on one side of his bier, and Sherman and Sheridan upon the other.” The first two were generals of the Confederate army, the last two of the Union Army. Henry Ward Beecher wrote that their marching Grant to his tomb was “a silent symbol that liberty had conquered slavery, and peace war.”

You come away from that vignette thinking not only “what men,” but “what a country” that could tear itself in two, murder itself, forgive itself, go on.

Parents, help your children love this country. It will be good for them, and more to the point this country deserves it.

Also when you don’t love something you lose it. We don’t want that to happen.

I have a friend who lives in western New Jersey near a lake. Dee is middle aged, works in sales in a service industry, had been a politically independent moderate most of her life, voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and, less fervently, 2020. When I last saw her, in February, she and her husband felt drawn to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. but that feeling has cooled. She didn’t like it that his family endorsed Joe Biden: “That was weird.” She has also concluded the 2024 election will be close. “I think I’m not willing to take a chance, to experiment at this point.” So they are back to Donald Trump, with revived enthusiasm.

Last Saturday she attended her first Trump rally, on the beach and boardwalk of Wildwood. That rally fascinates me because it has been the biggest of the 2024 presidential cycle, drawing 80,000 to 100,000 people in a Republican area of a deep-blue state, according to a local official’s estimate. From all the coverage the crowd looked raucous and entertained as Mr. Trump played his greatest hits. “We want strong borders, not open borders, we want the American dream, not the Biden inflation nightmare. . . . We want safe communities, not defund the police.” He led the crowd in chants of “Bulls—!” and insulted his foes in the usual manner. He spoke for an hour and a half, and in every video of the event the crowd seemed to stay with him and listen, not drift off.

I asked Dee what she saw and experienced. This is what I heard:

Trump may scare you, but he makes her feel safe. “It was like he made you feel everything’s gonna be OK. The economy’s gonna get better; everybody’s freaking out about the border, but he’ll get it stopped.”

At the rally she felt part of a rebel army, yet she also thinks the rallygoers represent the mass of regular Americans so maybe they’re not the rebels but the majority.

She finds him hilarious. When he riffs about Al Capone and Hannibal Lecter he’s goofing with the crowd and being comical because he’s an entertainer. “He’s very funny and sarcastic,” Dee says. “It’s like a husband sometimes.”

She does not trust the press, nor does she hate them. She just thinks they lie because they have preconceived notions and agendas: “They think we are smelly Walmart shoppers with no teeth.” She says this not with bitterness but as a dry descriptor.

Why did she go? “I thought no matter what happens, it’s history. I was curious. I get to tell my grandkids.”

It went all day. “You’re on line at 8 a.m. for a 5 p.m. start. There were thousands on line with us. We made a bunch of friends. Everyone was friendly, peaceful.” A 17-year-old Hispanic kid named Andrew and his single mother, a nurse, sat nearby and posed with Dee for a picture. His T-shirt said “Jesus is my savior and Trump is my president.” Dee: “It’s not just white people were there—a total mix, also in the speakers.”

“Secret Service was fantastic—they weren’t jerks to us, they checked bags, wanded you, metal detector, but all very respectful.”

Most politically significant, it seemed to me: Dee lives in an affluent suburban community with little crime, but “I have a lot of concern for my safety.” She locks the door when her husband puts out the garbage. At the rally, “there was no drugs, no people smoking weed, no violence.”

Late in the afternoon Mr. Trump flew over the crowd in his plane. “It was spectacular. He flew low enough for you to see it close. Everyone freaked out.” She thinks he landed in Atlantic City. His motorcade arrived at the rally late. “When he came out everybody went crazy.”

The message she took from his speech: “Everything’s going to go back to the way it was. He’ll put things back in order.”

She doesn’t see Trump as an evangelical Christian might, a fallen sinner redeemed in Christ and transformed in leadership. “We grew up with him in the East,” she says. “He’s a celebrity—TV, real estate.” Now he’s a politician. “It’s a rough-and-tumble business. . . . At this point most people don’t care about all the insanity—Stormy, Michael Cohen. It’s so tawdry and disgusting, yuck.”

I asked her to characterize previous figures of the Republican Party, such as both Presidents Bush. She said, “A bunch of uptight white guys, not necessarily honest. Them, Obama—I don’t think Trump is better or worse than any of them. They don’t have the moral high ground, not in hindsight.”

When the crowd started to build, people went online to see how big it was. The press seemed to be low-balling it. “A lot of us think a lot of the news is fake,” Dee says. TV cameras showed Trump on the stage and the people behind him but not the size of the crowd. Trump accused them of bias. “We started chanting, ‘Turn around, turn around!’ for the cameras to scan the crowd. So the Trump campaign put drones up, and later on social media we saw the video.”

Dee says: “I noticed—in the crowd you get these crazy people in their over-the-top outfits. The press flocks to them, to make us all look like white trash.”

I asked about Jan 6. Why didn’t that change her view of Trump? I, and many others, understand it as a singular event. Breaking in, smashing doors and windows, beating cops, threatening the vice president’s life—this was a violent assault on an institution that was also an assault on the Constitution. Doesn’t it threaten or imply something about the future?

She said she understood but sees it differently.

In Wildwood, “we had a bunch of Jan. 6 people in the crowd around us. Middle-aged white women—grandma. . . . The thing about Jan. 6 is we see it as a two-part story. His speech that day was a Trump speech, the crowd was a Trump crowd, it was kind of normal. Part 2 was the people up at the Capitol. But the people just at the speech, they quietly left, they got on the bus, they went home. There was the speech and the insanity up the street. We talked, I heard people say, ‘We left.’”

“There were some bad people and some agitators. They shouldn’t have gone in there. Some people broke windows, shouldn’t have happened. And some old ladies go to jail!”

“A lot of what happened at the Capitol—a lot of that was created. A constant narrative to make Trump look as bad as possible at all times.”

I mentioned the testimony under oath of people around Mr. Trump in the White House that day who said he enjoyed it, thought Mike Pence deserved it, refused for hours to tell the rioters to stop, watched it on television, did nothing.

We were on the phone but I could feel her shrug.

“Jan. 6 wasn’t even on our radar,” she said of the people at the rally. “The only thing that made us a little nervous—if there was any trouble, it would be some pro-Hamas thing would cause trouble.”

She thinks Mr. Trump will carry New Jersey and win the election. What will happen the day after? She sighed: “I don’t know. Gonna be bumpy.”

Six months to election day and things feel sort of fatalistic. There seems little to discover and nothing new to say about each of the candidates. It’s not going to dawn on you suddenly that Joe Biden is too old and infirm or Donald Trump too crazy. You’ve factored that in. You know what you think of both and have a sense of what compromises you’ll make within yourself to vote for either.

Voters can still be nudged, it’s not over, but Mr. Trump is ahead in most if not all of the battleground states, and I’m struck by the number of political operatives, veterans and thinkers now asking, honestly, if there is anything the president can do to pull it out.

Someone will suggest a “Sister Souljah moment” in which the president distances himself from the cultural left. Then they’ll shake their heads: too late, and who would believe it?

A veteran Democratic officeholder gives the bottom line: “A pro-Biden coalition does not exist, but an anti-Trump one does.” Mr. Biden must stop making the election a referendum on his record. “Instead make it a referendum on Trump’s. When people are this negative, make it about your opponent.”

The past month’s campus demonstrations will hurt Mr. Biden, at least marginally. They reveal his party’s split. People don’t like violence and screaming and the antisemitism bubbling up from the universities. The veteran political consultant Alex Castellanos said the other night, on Mark Halperin’s “Wide World of News,” that for parents with kids in high school and college, what’s happening on campus isn’t abstract and faraway, it’s personal. Afterward he elaborated: parents have seen their children not only radicalized but left unfit and unprepared for a productive future. Parents are “stunned to see that trusted educational institutions have captured their children and engrossed them in naive fantasies about the world.” When voters object to a situation, they kick against the incumbents who reign over them.

The Trump criminal cases seem a bust. The stolen-documents case is delayed; the Georgia election-tampering case done in by the arrogance and ill-judgement of prosecutors. The one that’s gone ahead, in New York, is the case of least national significance and no news: Donald Trump is a pig with women and a financial finagler. Stormy Daniels, on the stand, was more descriptive than required, and it actually isn’t nice to see a former president embarrassed in this way. On the other hand news reports reminded me of Oscar Wilde on the death of Little Nell: One would have to have a heart of stone to read it and not laugh.

I begin most days with John Ellis’s reliably brilliant daily newsletter, Political News Items. Six months ago he sensed that voters weren’t sold on the idea that what stands between them and the end of democracy was Joe Biden. He advised Democrats to offer “a variation on the theme”: “Trump is a one-man anxiety-creation machine.” He all but promises chaos with his late-night Truth Social screeds and menacing behavior. “Chaos is a feature, not a bug, of Trump’s idea of his re-election campaign. It will continue because he enjoys it; enjoys testing the boundaries of acceptable behavior and seeing what happens when he does.” Democrats should hit hard there. “If the issue is Biden, defeat is certain.”

This week Mr. Ellis advanced the idea that Democrats home in not on Mr. Trump or his supporters but on MAGA-world. He may be half mad, but there’s often method to his madness. MAGA-world is just crazy, and dumb. Highlight the clown car with its “three stooges—Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert.” Not many people want them in the driver’s seat.

Mr. Ellis sees Mr. Biden struggling because “the two pillars” of his re-election effort are “tenuous at best.” The first is abortion. Mr. Ellis cites a CNN poll showing only 23% of voters say that a candidate must share their views on abortion. Abortion polled way down at 5% when respondents were asked the nation’s most urgent issues. The issue helps him, but not decisively.

As for the second pillar: “Is there anyone who believes that defending democracy can only be entrusted to an 82-year-old man of halting gait and declining ‘mental acuity,’ whom three-quarters of the American electorate view as incapable of serving effectively as president if re-elected?” That issue too can help him in November, but not decisively. “The Biden campaign needs a larger argument.”

Mr. Ellis writes that for Mr. Trump, his choice of vice president could be decisive.

My read on that question is that Mr. Trump tends to do what Mr. Trump does. In 2016 he picked Gov. Mike Pence because he needed a veteran officeholder who was demonstrably sane. Mr. Trump has since acquired his own political experience but still needs sane. He is said to want someone who would put personal loyalty over other loyalties, which limits the list. And as Mr. Biden has more donor money, Mr. Trump would want someone with lots of cash.

I saw the vice presidential choice as important but not crucial. Mr. Ellis sees otherwise. “One of the strongest (implicit) arguments for voting for Trump is the not unimaginable possibility that Biden will have a stroke or be otherwise brain-damaged (or dead) and thus be replaced by . . . Vice President Harris.” People regardless of political affiliation see her as not competent. She is far less a liability to Biden if Trump picks a running mate such as Gov. Kristi Noem, “a dog murdering nitwit.”

Mr. Trump needs someone with gravitas and stature.

Mr. Ellis puts forward Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, “a proven vote-getter in a blue-ish state,” who became wealthy in the private sector. “He’s personable and untainted by scandal. He’s not crazy but “steady and sturdy as they come.” This might impress those among “the roughly 300,000 voters in the seven or eight battlegrounds who’ll swing the election.”

I end with a word to Trump foes who hope he’ll be found guilty in the New York case and sentenced to prison time. They think this will finish him off. It will not.

Donald Trump doesn’t know it, but he will love prison. He’ll be the most specially treated convict in American history, better than the mob bosses in “Goodfellas.” He’ll be in his cell with his phone—he’ll get one—live-streaming and live-Truthing; he’ll be posing thumbs up in his uniform surrounded by gangbangers and white collar hoodlums. He’ll philosophize about how a lot of people in prison don’t deserve to be there, the system’s rigged, he’ll consider pardons. All convicts tell you that they were railroaded, but this will be new to Trump, he’ll believe them.

He’ll be the king of Rikers. He’ll say he’s learned a lot and the guards are all for Trump and he’s going to get out and reform the justice system. It will be fabulous for him. He’ll put himself as Martin Luther King and he’ll be writing Truths From the Birmingham Jail.

People forget: He loves this, loves the game, the drama, and the devil takes care of his own.

I wish to protest the current ugliness. I see it as a continuing trend, “the uglification of everything.” It is coming out of our culture with picked-up speed, and from many media silos, and I don’t like it.

You remember the 1999 movie “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” from the Patricia Highsmith novel. It was fabulous—mysteries, murders, a sociopath scheming his way among high-class expats on the Italian Riviera. The laid-back glamour of Jude Law, the Grace Kelly-ness of Gwyneth Paltrow, who looks like a Vogue magazine cover decided to take a stroll through the streets of 1950s Venice, the truly brilliant acting of Matt Damon, who is so well-liked by audiences I’m not sure we notice anymore what a great actor he is. The director, Anthony Minghella, deliberately showed you pretty shiny things while taking you on a journey to a heart of darkness.

There’s a new version, a streaming series from Netflix, called “Ripley.” I turned to it eagerly and watched with puzzlement. It is unrelievedly ugly. Grimy, gloomy, grim. Tom Ripley is now charmless, a pale and watchful slug slithering through ancient rooms. He isn’t bright, eager, endearing, only predatory. No one would want to know him! Which makes the story make no sense. Again, Ripley is a sociopath, but few could tell because he seemed so sweet and easy. In the original movie, Philip Seymour Hoffman has an unforgettable turn as a jazz-loving, prep-schooled, in-crowd snob. In this version that character is mirthless, genderless, hidden. No one would want to know him either. Marge, the Paltrow role in the movie, is ponderous and plain, like a lost 1970s hippie, which undercuts a small part of the tragedy: Why is the lovely woman so in love with a careless idler who loves no one?

The ugliness seemed a deliberate artistic decision, as did the air of constant menace, as if we all know life is never nice.

I go to the No. 1 program on Netflix this week, “Baby Reindeer.” People speak highly of it. It’s about a stalker and is based on a true story, but she’s stalking a comic so this might be fun. Oh dear, no. It is again unrelievedly bleak. Life is low, plain and homely. No one is ever nice or kind; all human conversation is opaque and halting; work colleagues are cruel and loud. Everyone is emotionally incapable and dumb. No one laughs except for the morbidly obese stalker, who cackles madly. The only attractive person is the transgender girlfriend, who has a pretty smile and smiles a lot, but cries a lot too and is vengeful.

Good drama always makes you think. I thought: Do I want to continue living?

I go to the Daily Mail website, once my guilty pleasure. High jinks of the rich and famous, randy royals, fast cars and movie stars, models and rock stars caught in the drug bust. It was great! But it seems to have taken a turn and is more about crime, grime, human sadness and degradation—child abuse, mothers drowning their babies, “Man murders family, self.” It is less a portal into life’s mindless, undeserved beauty, than a testimony to its horrors.

I go to the new “Cabaret.” Who doesn’t love “Cabaret”? It is dark, witty, painful, glamorous. The music and lyrics have stood the test of time. The story’s backdrop: The soft decadence of Weimar is being replaced by the hard decadence of Nazism.

It is Kander and Ebb’s masterpiece, revived again and again. And this revival is hideous. It is ugly, bizarre, inartistic, fundamentally stupid. Also obscene but in a purposeless way, without meaning.

I had the distinct feeling the producers take their audience to be distracted dopamine addicts with fractured attention spans and no ability to follow a story. They also seemed to have no faith in the story itself, so they went with endless pyrotechnics. This is “Cabaret” for the empty-headed. Everyone screams. The songs are slowed, because you might need a moment to take it in. Almost everyone on stage is weirdly hunched, like a gargoyle, everyone overacts, and all of it is without art.

On the way in, staffers put stickers on the cameras of your phone, “to protect our intellectual property,” as one said.

It isn’t an easy job to make the widely admired Eddie Redmayne unappealing, but by God they did it. As he’s a producer I guess he did it, too. He takes the stage as the Emcee in a purple leather skirt with a small green cone on his head and appears further on as a clown with a machine gun and a weird goth devil. It is all so childish, so plonkingly empty.

Here is something sad about modern artists: They are held back by a lack of limits.

Bob Fosse, the director of the classic 1972 movie version, got to push against society’s limits and Broadway’s and Hollywood’s prohibitions. He pushed hard against what was pushing him, which caused friction; in the heat of that came art. Directors and writers now have nothing to push against because there are no rules or cultural prohibitions, so there’s no friction, everything is left cold, and the art turns in on itself and becomes merely weird.

Fosse famously loved women. No one loves women in this show. When we meet Sally Bowles, in the kind of dress a little girl might put on a doll, with heavy leather boots and harsh, garish makeup, the character doesn’t flirt, doesn’t seduce or charm. She barks and screams, angrily.

Really it is harrowing. At one point Mr. Redmayne dances with a toilet plunger, and a loaf of Italian bread is inserted and removed from his anal cavity. I mentioned this to my friend, who asked if I saw the dancer in the corner masturbating with a copy of what appeared to be “Mein Kampf.”

That’s what I call intellectual property!

In previous iterations the Kit Kat Club was a hypocrisy-free zone, a place of no boundaries, until the bad guys came and it wasn’t. I’m sure the director and producers met in the planning stage and used words like “breakthrough” and “a ‘Cabaret’ for today,” and “we don’t hide the coming cruelty.” But they do hide it by making everything, beginning to end, lifeless and grotesque. No innocence is traduced because no innocence exists.

How could a show be so frantic and outlandish and still be so tedious? It’s almost an achievement.

And for all that there is something smug about it, as if they’re looking down from some great, unearned height.

I left thinking, as I often do now on seeing something made ugly: This is what purgatory is going to be like. And then, no, this is what hell is going to be like—the cackling stalker, the pale sociopath, Eddie Redmayne dancing with a plunger.

Why does it all bother me?

Because even though it isn’t new, uglification is rising and spreading as an artistic attitude, and it can’t be good for us. Because it speaks of self-hatred, and a society that hates itself, and hates life, won’t last. Because it gives those who are young nothing to love and feel soft about. Because we need beauty to keep our morale up.

Because life isn’t merde, in spite of what our entertainment geniuses say.

Most politics is day by day, and certainly we consume it that way. But the thought that presses on my mind has distant horizons.

The criminal trial of Donald Trump, de facto Republican presidential nominee, commenced Monday in Manhattan Criminal Court. The case revolves around charges that he directed hush money payments to Stormy Daniels, the adult-film performer, to stop her from speaking publicly of what she alleges was their sexual relationship. Witness lists not yet released are expected to include David Pecker, the former publisher of the National Enquirer said to have been involved in a “catch and kill” scheme to bury Ms. Daniels’s claims in 2016, and Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model. Days before the 2016 election this newspaper reported Ms. McDougal had told friends of an affair with Mr Trump, and also received money and blandishments from the Enquirer.

In the first days of the trial the judge refused to recuse himself and refused to allow into evidence the famous “Access Hollywood” videotape, in which the defendant claimed his fame was such that he could grab women by the genitals because “when you’re a star, they let you do it.” Mr. Trump was admonished for seeming to mutter menacingly toward a prospective juror, and the New York Times’s Maggie Haberman reported that he fell asleep at the defendant’s table: “His head keeps dropping down and his mouth goes slack.” CNN’s Jim Acosta joked Mr. Trump might call such reports “fake snooze.”

All of this is part of the fabulous freak show that is American politics, but we’re getting too used to scandal, aren’t we? We’ve become blasé.

The quality of our leaders is deteriorating, and we’re so used to it it’s not alarming us anymore.

I often read the memoirs of contemporary British politicians. Once I read weighty biographies by serious historians of the greats—Gladstone, Disraeli, Churchill, Harold Macmillan—but current leaders don’t seem great, and don’t last. They often write memoirs, however, and I read them to horrify myself.

Nadine Dorries’s “The Plot,” her memoir of her tenure as secretary of state for digital, culture, media and sport under Prime Minister Boris Johnson, is quite wild. (In 2012, as a member of Parliament, she appeared on the reality TV show “I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here!” which, almost touchingly, offended some people.) She calls her book a “shocking tale of corruption and unaccountable power.” It’s gossipy and score-settling: “Lee Cain was [Dominick] Cummings’ creature.” “Dominick hated Carrie,” Mr. Johnson’s future wife.

A source tells her of an incident in which a member of Parliament had sex on a billiard table as four other members watched. Another tells her of Tory sex parties. Another source—Ms. Dorries isn’t a historian or journalist, and we must trust that these are real sources and not third brandies—says of government in Westminster, “It’s all broken. Like, all the parameters that kept things in place—respect, values, public service—it’s all gone.” He tells her a member of Parliament gave a young female a date-rape drug.

In Rory Stewart’s more thoughtful and textured “How Not to be a Politician,” the former lawmaker diplomat reports the brains of Westminster politicians “have become like the phones in our pockets: flashing, titillating, obsequious, insinuating machines, allergic to depth and seriousness, that tempt us every moment of the day from duty.” Mr. Johnson is “a chaotic and tricky confidence artist, almost entirely unfit to be prime minister.” His successor, Liz Truss, confuses caution with cowardice: “Everything she did . . . had the flavour of a provocation.” (I haven’t yet opened Ms. Truss’s memoir, published this week, but the Guardian reports she contributes to the history of political insults by labeling party members who didn’t back her sufficiently “Chinos”—Conservatives in Name Only, who I guess tend to wear chinos. The Times of London said that for whole chapters the book is “readable only in the most literal sense of the word.”)

Back to Mr. Stewart. He was approached by an aide to the wealthy Russian Evgeny Lebedev, who invited him to stay for a weekend at Mr. Lebedev’s castle in Italy. A celebrity model who posed topless in the Sun would be there, she said; it would be fun. “I said as politely as I could that this was a joke, ‘I’ve just become a foreign minister. There’s no way I can possibly go. . . . The man’s father was an officer in the KGB.’ ” Also an oligarch. “ ‘Oh don’t worry about that,’ she replied. ‘Boris Johnson is coming and he is Foreign Secretary.’ ” Mr. Stewart didn’t go. Mr. Johnson did, and later put his host in the House of Lords.

The thing about these books is they’re almost all so tatty, so seamy. There’s a smallness to the preoccupations revealed, as if the authors are proud to be immature. They’re political leaders in the business of making history, yet they evince no particular interest in it. The American court case with the porn star, the shallow, frivolous British memoir—they seem to me of a piece, and part of the unseriousness of the West’s leaders.

Why is this worth mentioning, since everyone seems to have noticed a deterioration in their quality? Because our foes know. The character of our leaders seems to me a national-security issue.

My concern is that history will see it this way: At the exact moment America’s foes decided to become more public in their antipathy and deadlier in their calculations—“back to blood,” as Tom Wolfe said, in terms of the nature of peoples’ future loyalties—at that same moment our leaders in the West were becoming more frivolous and unfocused, more superficial, than ever in modern times. I suspect our foes notice this. It is perhaps part of why they have become more aggressive.

Harry S. Truman and Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, whatever else they were, no one ever thought they were buyable or shallow in their advancement of America’s meaning and interests. Their successors seem to lack a comparable internal stature. We’re too quick to accept the idea they’d let their family use their name to get money—from the company in Ukraine, or the one in China, or the Saudi sovereign-wealth fund.

I’m not saying once we had Henry Clay and now we have Marjorie Taylor Greene but—well, I guess I am saying that. And I think it’s dangerous.

The unseriousness of our leaders isn’t a small and amusing tabloid story but a reality that ought to startle us. Leaders of other nations extrapolate from our leaders, whom they know. They think that as they are, we are. It contributes to the power of the argument, in their councils of state, that the West has lost its way.

Sometimes serious national goals have to be long-term. In the daily press of events we don’t think enough about the character of those we’re putting forward to represent us.

One particularly good man here, one exceptionally good woman there, could begin to turn it around, or might at the very least startle foreign leaders and make them reappraise. That would be a good long-term project for us as citizens: Get a better class of humans to go into the business of leading us.

Our crazy country. The O.J. Simpson case was the beginning of knowing we were crazy and admitting it. It was 30 years ago this June, the murder followed by the Bronco chase, and I find myself wanting to tell those who weren’t there what a sensation it was, what an amazement.

Everyone over 40 this weekend will be saying, “I’ll never forget when I heard the verdict,” and, “Did you watch the Bronco?” The case burned itself into our retinas; everyone in the country was in the path of totality.

As much as anything and more than most, the story was the beginning of the modern media age. It was the beginning of hypercelebrity and marked by the emotionalism of crowds. Crowds ran to California freeway overpasses on June 17, 1994, to see the Ford Bronco containing Simpson roll by, surrounded by police cruisers. They cheered and pumped their arms. They didn’t see it as a tragedy, the story of the beautiful young woman and mother, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her 25-year-old friend, Ron Goldman, who had been brutally stabbed to death. They saw an exciting drama unfolding before their eyes, like Al Capone shooting his way out of a bank heist surrounded by cops. Simpson was a guy everyone liked. So they cheered. And people watching thought: Whoa, what are we seeing, what is this?

Some new kind of fame was being presaged. A close friend of O.J.’s, Los Angeles lawyer and businessman Robert Kardashian, an apparently quiet fellow no one had heard of, was thrust into the case from the beginning. At a news conference he read a public letter from O.J., just before he turned himself in. The letter said he had nothing to do with Nicole’s murder. “I loved her. . . . If we had a problem, it’s because I loved her so much.” It was classic abusive-husband patter.

Kardashian, like other O.J. attorneys, would become famous, and the fame would be a lesson to many. After fame comes wealth and power and everyone gives you a good table. It is probably true that none of this was lost on his former wife, Kris, who had been one of Nicole Simpson’s best friends, or on his children, Kourtney, Kim, Khloe and Rob. Their show, “Keeping Up With The Kardashians,” debuted in 2007. They were the first reality-TV family, famous for being famous. They are billionaires now.

“It marked the end of cozy, afternoon soap opera entertainment and ushered in a tabloid culture of Kardashians, Jenners, and lesser beings,” former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter said by email. “Also, it made, for a time, Dominick Dunne the most recognized print reporter in the world.” Dunne’s colorful and breathless reports each month in Vanity Fair covered the case like a blanket—who snubbed whom in the courtroom, who said what at Brentwood’s glittering dinner tables.

The O.J. case didn’t create mass celebrity, Hollywood did, in the 1920s. At that time a young teenager named Bette Davis went, on a lark, to a fortune teller in her small New England town. She recounts in one of her memoirs that the fortune teller read her palm and was puzzled: Your face will be famous in every corner of the earth, she said.

Davis thought that was silly, you can’t be famous everywhere. Then, in 1930, at 22, she walked onto her first Hollywood sound stage. Her mind immediately flashed back: This is what the fortune teller meant.

But that kind of fame took art or gifts or a talent. Now you could be just another crazy American and become a worldwide name.

If the signal moment was the Bronco chase, it was the court case that would have lasting significance. It was a prime example of how our legal system got bogged down in distractions, inanities, and poor police and legal work. It dragged on nine months. The judge, Lance Ito, also became a celebrity, and apparently liked it. He kept three open computers on his bench. No one had ever seen that before. Jay Leno on “The Tonight Show” had a regular sketch, the “Dancing Itos.” There were endless, meandering objections. The prosecutor, Marcia Clark, had to get her hair and makeup done, and a new wardrobe.

And the cast of characters! Kato Kaelin, the house guest who never left. Mark Fuhrman, the police detective who seemed solid on evidence and then was torn apart for having once used racial epithets and was accused of planting evidence.

And the phrases that bubbled up from the courtroom and entered the national consciousness: “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”

And, of course, the terrible and historic moment when the jury announced its verdict.

The trial felt like it had gone forever but the verdict came in within a day. No one in America did a bit of work from the moment it was announced that the jury had a verdict. Everyone ran to a TV set. From Robert D. McFadden’s O.J. obit in the New York Times: “Even President Bill Clinton left the Oval Office to join his secretaries. In court, cries of ‘Yes!’ and ‘Oh, no!’ were echoed across the nation as the verdict left many Black people jubilant and many white people aghast.” Exactly true.

A friend wrote Thursday afternoon: “Trial as spectacle has been with us for a long time (think Lizzie Borden), and so have juries doing unusual things. But this seemed to take it to a new level. If memory serves, the volume of the New York Stock Exchange went down to basically nothing for a few minutes as the verdict was announced. That’s real.”

Reaction famously fell almost completely along racial lines. It was one of those 20th-century moments when you realized race is here to stay as an unending factor, an unyielding actor in American life. White and black saw two different realities. Whites: All the evidence points to his guilt, he’s one of the most admired men in America, race isn’t the story here.

Blacks: This is what you do to black men, you railroad them on cooked-up evidence, there’s plenty of room for doubt.

It showed in some new and unforgettable way the divided country. The verdict itself didn’t divide the country; it revealed it, again and not for the last time, as divided. Reaction was called shocking, revelatory. But what it was, was simpler. It was painful. It left you with a tight and mournful feeling in your throat.

Before O.J., American blacks lacked confidence in the legal system. After O.J., everyone lacked confidence in the legal system. It looked cynical, performative, agenda-driven, not on the level.

I would say he got away with murder because I believe he was guilty. But in a way he didn’t get away with it; it stalked him the rest of his life. And that is tragedy, too, because he’d been such a hero, a winner of the Heisman Trophy, a football star, a man of great accomplishment whom everyone admired.

That’s all.

The O.J. case revealed so much and started a new age. Within a few years the internet would become ubiquitous, and at that point the new age would become more so.