Peggy Noonan

He got 51% of a modest turnout in a small state, but a win’s a win and a 30-point win is a landslide. Still, part of what we saw in Iowa was Donald Trump’s continual losing battle with himself. His Des Moines victory speech was unusually gracious and statesmanlike. The strategy was to reassure moderates and centrists and to undermine the coming argument against him in New Hampshire: that he’s a bad man who’s violent in his rhetoric because he’s violent in his heart.

“I really think this is time now for everybody, our country, to come together . . . whether it’s Republican or Democrat or liberal or conservative, it would be so nice if we could come together and straighten out the world,” he said. “I wanna congratulate Ron and Nikki. . . . They’re very smart people, very capable people.” “We’re going to rebuild the capital of our country, Washington D.C. We’re going to scrub those beautiful marble columns . . . and get the graffiti off them.” “We’re going to rebuild our cities, and we’ll work with the Democrats to do it. I’d be glad to work with the people in New York. We’re going to work with the people in Chicago and L.A. We’re going to rebuild our cities and we’re going to make them safe.”

He was trying to turn a page, but what followed the next day—late-night rants on social media, putdowns of Nikki Haley—marked a return to verbal incontinence. He can’t sustain normality. It makes him nervous. Something he said about Doug Burgum showed his assumption. The North Dakota governor, Mr. Trump said, didn’t succeed in his presidential bid because he didn’t gain “traction,” he wasn’t controversial. “Sometimes being a little controversial is good.” It is, but Mr. Trump is a poor judge of the line between controversial and destructive.

In New Hampshire, Ms. Haley may gain traction, may even triumph. Something good may happen for Ron DeSantis. Life is surprise. But it’s time: Ms. Haley should take Mr. Trump on directly and make the serious case against him. Not “I don’t like all the things he says,” but something deeper, truer, more substantive. She could ruminate on the Trump tragedy. He was a breakthrough figure, he did defeat a weak and detached establishment. But he can’t be president again because there’s something wrong with him. We all know this, we all use different words to describe the “something,” but we know what it produces: impeachments, embarrassments, scandal, 1/6.

Meanwhile three things cause unique disquiet among the non-Trump-supporting majority in America, especially after Iowa. One is that in 2016 Trump supporters didn’t know precisely what they were getting. Now they do. Eight years ago it was a very American thing to do, giving the outsider a chance. You never know in life, people grow in office, the presidency softens rough edges. That didn’t happen. They know what they’re electing now.

Second, when Mr. Trump first came in, in 2017, he didn’t know a president’s true and legitimate powers, he wasn’t interested in history, wasn’t up nights reading Robert Caro. He got rolled by a Republican Congress, was too incompetent to get a wall, was surrounded by political aides who were inexperienced and unaccomplished—the famous “island of broken toys.” This time he’ll go in with experience and can be more effectively bad. How long will it take before he starts saying the Constitution mandates a limit of two presidential terms, but his second term was stolen so that means he gets another term after this one?

Third, Mr. Trump shouldn’t be president, and neither should Joe Biden, because they aren’t what we need for the future. What do we need? Someone who feels in her or his gut the wound of the open border and will stop illegal immigration; someone who can cut through the knot of “globalism” vs. “isolationism,” a serious argument that is becoming a cartoon one (internationalists don’t really want to start wars all over; isolationists know we are part of the world and can’t just pull up the bridge). If we can cut through all that we’ll go some distance to forging a true national stance toward the world, and only then can we answer the proper strategy toward China, the responsibility of America in Asia and the Mideast. Someone who can take on identity politics, who knows we all must stand equal. Someone who can reiterate the idea that we do have national values.

Those few (but huge) things, if a leader got them right, would mark a national comeback, and not a further sinking into the mire of the dramas of the past decade.

G.K. Chesterton wrote: “What we all dread most is a maze with no center.” That’s what our national politics feel like now.

Eight years ago I wrote of the driving force behind support for political newcomer Donald Trump. America had devolved into a protected class of the socially and politically influential vs. regular people at the mercy of the protected class’s favored doctrines and political decisions. I think it still pertains, but eight years later I see new shadings. The distance between the elites and the non-elite has widened, the estrangement deepened. When the university presidents testified before Congress in December it became a catastrophe for the elites in part because viewers could fairly come away thinking: They don’t just live far away and have their own ideology, they have their own private language. Their minds seemed to work in a kind of self-satisfied robot loop: “It depends on the context. It depends on the context.” All this delivered with an honestly unconscious condescension.

Something else that I think has changed is—well, something I haven’t fully thought through, but I think the unprotected at this point do not only feel ignored and betrayed, they feel invaded. Twenty twenty, that epic, nation-changing year, tripped something off, began something new, a sense among regular people that some new ideology that doesn’t even have a name had entered their lives on all levels, in their intimate family and work space. The pandemic, with its protocols and regulations and vaccine mandates; the strange things taught in the schools, which were suddenly brought into your home by Zoom; the obsessions with gender and race, the redefinitions of the founding and meaning of America. At the office, the stupid and insulting race and gender instructions, and the index you have to meet when hiring to achieve what someone has decided is the right “diversity” balance.

I think people feel invaded by the ideology with no name. They know it is unhealthy for society, is in fact guaranteed to make us, as a people who must live together, weaker and more divided.

We are not sufficiently noting that this isn’t only a Trump election, it is also the first national election since the full impact of 2020 and its epochal changes sank in.

Voters are going to want more options. Talk will turn seriously to a third-party bid. The great unanswered question will be whether those mounting that party have enough imagination to understand what they could be this year.

Finally we vote. Iowa is Monday, New Hampshire a week from Tuesday. I refuse to see the story as over. “Nothing is written.” Both big parties look set on making a mistake, but there’s time to turn it around.

Democrats on the ground are making a mistake in not rebelling against the inevitability of Joe Biden. He’s no longer up to the job, the vice president never was, and this doesn’t go under the heading National Security Secret Number 379, everybody knows.

The problem isn’t the Biden campaign, however lame it may or may not be. It isn’t that the president’s most important advisers are in the White House, not the campaign. It’s him, and it’s not only his age. His speeches are boring, he never seems sincere, he seems propped up. He doesn’t have a tropism toward intellectual content and likes things airy; his subject matter isn’t life as most people are experiencing it but something many steps removed. He often seems like he just met the text.

His advisers would think, “Then we’ll do more interviews,” but he’s not good there either—hesitant, lacking the confidence you must have to express your own thoughts as they arrive in your head. This means we have a president who, in an election year, has no way of communicating effectively, in person, with the American people. He hasn’t provided the sentence that makes the case for his being kept in office, and he hasn’t painted what a second term might look like, what its Great Intention might be.

Democrats on the ground should raise a ruckus, issue a mighty roar. They can do better than this. To win, I think, they must.

Republicans similarly shouldn’t accept the inevitability of Donald Trump. On the debate stage Wednesday Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis were the Bickersons, and seemed smaller. On Fox, in a counterprogramming coup, the former president was Big Daddy with a sinister side, and seemed big. He’s riding high. He thinks he’s got this thing.

In just the past seven days we learned that he refused to sign Illinois’s traditional candidate’s vow not to attempt to overthrow the U.S. government. Everybody signs it and always has. He warned of “bedlam” if he’s convicted in court and he loses the election. A few days before, Rep. Elise Stefanik, major MAGA mover, refused to say, on “Meet the Press,” that she would accept the outcome of the election. Is that all stubbornness and rhetorical posturing, or is it something more, something hiding in plain sight? If there is ever another day like Jan. 6, 2021, it will be led by people who were there the first time and are now better at it. Last time we didn’t wind up in full constitutional crisis, because systems held. Will they next time? Do we really want to find out?

Mr. Trump will say anything for attention; he wants the cameras on him. He says—again, confining ourselves to the past week—the Civil War could have been negotiated and avoided. Heroic figures in Congress for decades attempted precisely that, trying to thwart and limit the spread of slavery while keeping the nation together. Mr. Trump implied Lincoln wanted war: “If he negotiated it, you probably wouldn’t even know who Abraham Lincoln was.” Yes, Lincoln was a cynical, self-aggrandizing pol, not a genius deal maker like Mr. Trump. What an idiot he is.

What is behind a Republican voters’ decision to stick with him?

Hope—he’ll be better than Mr. Biden, he was good until the pandemic and 1/6, but he’s learned.

Pride—you took a lot of guff for past support, you’re not gonna back off now. Identification—he’s a nonelite. Anger—he’s a living rebuke of the system that has produced disorder. Cold calculation—“In a world full of animals, he’s our animal.”

Mischief, sheer humor—his antics make you laugh, and it isn’t a bad feeling to subvert things when you feel what you’re subverting is decadence.

Some other things, I think. Americans have long used political debate as a distraction from their real lives. Once Mr. Trump is in office again you have a job again. When he’s in power he dominates the stage, the national conversation. Everyone is forced to argue about Trump. Your job the next four years is to defend him. It’s a full-time job so you get to ignore your life and what needs fixing in it. These tend to be the hard parts—lost kids, loneliness, job problems. You can’t fix them, you’re too busy saving the nation! You have to avoid them!

The left does this too, maybe more so. But it all got turbocharged in the Trump era.

More seriously—most seriously—deep down a lot of hard-core Trump supporters, and many not so hard-core, think it’s all over. They love America truly and deeply but think the glue that held us together is gone. Religion and Main Street are shrinking into the past, and in the Rite Aid everything’s locked up. School shootings, mass shootings, nobody’s safe, men in the girls’ locker room, race obsessions, a national debt we’ll never control. China, Russia, nukes and cooked-up plagues. If they decide to do a mass cyberattack and take out our electricity for six months we’ll never get through it. Once we would.

I am always struck by how many jolly, kind, cheerful, constructive Americans hold this sense of impending doom in their hearts and go cheerfully through each day anyway.

But they figure if we’re at the end times, he’s the perfect end-times president, a guy who goes boom.

Some feel our problems are so deep that a democratic republic is maybe at this point just another form of governance, one of a variety, including various forms of autocracy, that might be adopted. Ours is the preferred one, to be sure. But different eras demand different governmental forms, and we don’t exist to serve the form, the form exists to serve us. An odd variation on this is an overconfidence about our democratic republic—we’ve had it since the Constitution was ratified in 1788, we’ll always have it, so stop manipulating people with “Democracy is on the ballot”; nobody’s threatening it, we can never lose it.

But of course we can’t know that. It has to be kept healthy and operating, which means at this of all times we have to be careful. We have to navigate in a sound and prudent way, we have to steer clear of the rocks.

A practical argument would be that whatever the nature or flavor of your conservatism, you surely want to make progress, urgently, with the next Congress. Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley would come in with the whoosh of the new, aim at conservative legislation, know how to use the levers of power, and get things done. Mr. Trump would come in a lame duck (provided he accepts Constitutional proscriptions), do his crazy-man antics, say his crazy-man things, and proceed with a mad blunderer’s imitation of sophistication.

If your intention is to stand and fight and make things better he’d be the least effective choice.

Ms. Haley is a steely, orderly lady, Mr. DeSantis a bull, Mr. Trump a malign screaming meemie.

The voting begins now. May Iowa prove the heartland of a sound and hopeful nation.

Thoughts arising from the incident at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport and the extraordinary exit:

On Tuesday Japan Airlines Flight 516, carrying 367 passengers, many of them revelers returning from the New Year’s holiday, collided on landing with a Japanese coast-guard plane that was carrying supplies for earthquake survivors of the Noto Peninsula. Five of the six on board the latter aircraft died as a fireball engulfed it. Flight 516, an Airbus A350, also quickly began to burn, its cabins filling with smoke so thick they turned pitch black and flight attendants had to use flashlights. In less than 20 minutes the jetliner was consumed by flames; it burned to a husk. Yet all 367 survived, as did the 12-person crew. It has been called a miracle.

From reporters Motoko Rich and Hisako Ueno in the New York Times: As smoke filled the cabin, “the sound of a child’s voice rose above the din of confusion onboard. ‘Please, let us off quickly!’ the child pleaded, using a polite form of Japanese despite the fear washing over the passengers as flight attendants began shouting instructions.” Order held. Attendants evacuated passengers through the exit doors that were usable. Of the factors that produced a good outcome—a well trained crew, a veteran pilot—“the relative absence of panic onboard during the emergency procedure perhaps helped the most.”

The Times quoted a 17-year-old passenger from Stockholm, Anton Deibe: “The cabin crew were very professional, but one could see even in their eyes that they were scared.” Still, “no one ran ahead to save themselves. Everyone waited for instructions.” It grew hot inside, and people yelled, but, Anton later told the Times, “there was a lot less commotion than I would have thought. The passengers were calm.” He and his family crawled to the door and made it down the emergency slide. “It was a long drop.”

From Journal reporters River Davis, Megumi Fujikawa and Alison Sider: As a blaze spread in the back of the plane, passengers understood “they had only minutes to save themselves from a fiery death.” They shouted to open the doors. Joseph Hayashi, 28, was in seat 27B. He said people screamed at the initial impact, “and then everything got eerily quiet.” The woman in the next seat seemed to know something about emergency procedures. “She started yelling, ‘Put your head down, keep your seat belts on, stay in your seat,’ ” he said. When some people tried to get their things, other passengers responded. “People were like, ‘What are you doing? Those things don’t matter.’ ” Hiroshi Kaneko, a 67-year-old philosophy professor, told the Journal no one around him panicked. “He was more scared when he got home and saw the footage on television.”

After the crash a friend visiting Kyoto wrote me to say he felt the primary reason no one lost their life is that the Japanese are “less individualist and more consensual.” They see themselves as a corporate entity; they are part of something, a nation with ingrained mores and ways of being.

I asked Rahm Emanuel, the U.S. ambassador to Japan, what it is about the Japanese that saved the day. “It’s a society that places high value on personal honor, responsibility to community, and respect for authority,” he said. “No one in Japan would mouth off or be violent with a flight attendant trying to protect you and the rest of the flying public, for example.” He followed up, in a text: “Also, here five year olds walk to school unaccompanied, crossing busy streets for blocks. Cars stop and kids at walkways cross. It’s sublime.”

A question that I suspect crossed a lot of American minds: What if that had been a Delta flight at JFK full of Americans revelers home from holiday? Would it have gone in such an orderly way and ended so successfully?

My guess is that it would have been different. More every-man-for-himself. American individualism is a beautiful thing but can tip toward narcissism, and we’re tipping. The guy in seat 3A would be rummaging through the overhead looking for his bag and blocking the aisle. The 20-year-old woman would be standing on her seat and screaming as she live-streams on TikTok. The social-media influencer in 15B would be demanding someone come and lift her from her seat.

We less and less see ourselves as part of a large corporate endeavor, something with traditions and expectations. We have less expectation the other person will do the right thing. We spend a lot of time on social media watching Americans let other Americans down—robbing them, hijacking cars. We are demoralized by what we see of us. We haven’t absorbed in a long time a healthy sense of “we are the people of America, we stay calm.” Because the meaning of “we are Americans” has changed from “we come from something real and hold just pride in it” to “we come from a rapacious nation founded on wicked things.”

Who wants to be part of that, and carry on that way of being? This too has demoralized us. And since the internet and its constant images, we honor emotion more than thought; and if at the moment what people feel is wild fear, well, be true to your emotions. We don’t respect self-restraint so much, and wonder if it’s cowardice.

Our current virtues, off the top, right now in 2024? We are a people of wild creativity—it’s still there, though more and more feels latent. We are inventive—we find the latest in medical research and devices. We are involved—we’re always fussing about the world and trying, in sometimes dizzy ways, to improve it. We are ambitious: We mean to rise, we like money, fame and glamour, but more-serious attainment, too. We are by nature and tradition egalitarian, deeply so, always have been. Our religious faith, among those who feel it, is profound and unembarrassed, though they seem fewer each year. A lot of us wish to be artists—we’re writing scripts and songs, eager to perform. And we’re friendly: Everyone in the world still acknowledges that.

But we do need to work on our national style. In these areas: common courtesy, which doesn’t have to be an old-fashioned thing. A shown respect for others, an actual concern for them. Putting reason back up there with emotion. And yes, the adults being the adults in the room and on the plane. And looking around and spying the guy in 15F, who looks like an Army Ranger on vacation, who’s alert, focused and capable. And asking him to pick up the guy in first class who’s blocking the aisle while he rummages in the overhead bin. “Just pick him up and put him aside like he’s a piece of luggage.” And the Ranger does, and then announces, “OK, everyone, we’re walking forward. Follow.”

A sense of somebody in charge—that’s one of the things that we lack. A sense of someone taking responsibility.

Maybe I’m wrong, maybe we’d all be peerless on Flight 516. But it can’t hurt to ask: Who you would have been in that crash? What role would you have played?

Twenty-three skidoo. Goodbye, honey. A new year begins.

I’ve been reading the past 12 months’ work with the aim of doing a what-I-got-right-and-wrong column, but find I didn’t make many predictions. One, last month, was that Taylor Swift would be Time’s person of the year, which she was; another, in May, was that Donald Trump would skip the Republican debates, which he did. “He’s leading, his competitors are trailing; they need it, he doesn’t; he’s famous, they aren’t. One of them could land a shot and ding his mystique. Why expose himself?” On the other hand, in the spring I asserted that every one of the GOP primary challengers would beat President Biden with the exception of Mr. Trump, whose superpower is his ability to unite the opposition. Recent polls say that’s wrong, the Trump-Biden numbers are close, with Mr. Trump leading. I guess we’ll find out.

I want to say briefly what I think columnists are doing. “It’s not a column, it’s a pillar,” said the New York Times’s William Safire, half-seriously but only half. He respected his work and his thoughts and enjoyed telling them. He wasn’t afraid of getting in trouble; he liked a bit of trouble. What columnists do is attempt to give their honest thoughts in real time and under their own name. Often in this space the thoughts are anchored in current events, but sometimes they touch on history or literature, and sometimes there’s an attempt to capture things as they are in a more spacious and less particular way.

But a public writer is always trying to say something true and say it well. Like a baseball player you have hits and misses, but that’s what you’re trying for.

Safire once told me never to be afraid of saying a thing again and again, that’s how a thought breaks through. I’ve been rereading the great mid-20th-century columnist Dorothy Thompson, who also saw power in repetition. What I saw in my columns this year is the continual re-emergence of certain preoccupations and themes.

For instance: Adults have a particular responsibility to model and set a template for the young. It is a primary job of the adults in the room, wherever the room is, to show every day, in dress, speech and comportment, what being adult looks like. At least two generations have come up with no idea. Our national style has grown crude and vulgar; this entered Washington some years back, and that only made it worse. It’s a little sad. Washington used to be so old-fashioned, it was one of its charms, it was a throwback. Decades ago you smiled because female members of Congress, in their suits and high-button blouses, dressed like aspiring librarians. Now some dress like aspiring whores. Can I get in trouble for saying that? Let’s find out. Anyway, one of my favorite columns this year cuffed Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer for banishing the Senate’s dress code in a bow to the needs of Sen. John Fetterman, who finds it emotionally necessary to dress like a child. America likes the idea of its preeminence in the world, but that preeminence entails obligations. “You have to act the part. You have to present yourself with dignity.” (Mr. Schumer reinstated the dress code.)

A blooming preoccupation: artificial intelligence. I’ve been haunted by the first enduringly famous symbol of the age of technology: Apple’s logo, the apple with a bite taken out. Like Adam and Eve, who ate the forbidden fruit to become like God. AI can send us back to Eden, and the fall. “I believe those creating, fueling and funding AI want, possibly unconsciously, to be God, and think on some level they are God.” We are allowing this world-changer and life-changer to be pushed on us by people who, we know from a quarter-century of exposés, investigations and leaks, are loyal to their inventions but not to human beings, and certainly not to America. Their claimed idealism—We’re trying to advance mankind!—isn’t their true agenda, which is power and wealth and a place to hide when the world they’re inventing explodes.

Israel was of course an important subject this year. The terrorist attacks of Oct. 7 renewed and revived an old sympathy in me that had for years been dormant to the point of estrangement. If you didn’t mourn, if your heart didn’t hurt after what had occurred, then something is wrong with you. “I find I am reacting to everything—from the first day, with the slain and abused children, with the videotape of babies sobbing as they were grabbed and taken hostage—not as a thinker on politics, or one who has read a lot of history, or lived long in the world, but simply as a mother. All of the instincts of a parent, especially a mother, are protective: You want to keep the young from harm so everyone gets to go on and live.”

We were insistent that the deliberate and strategic rape of the Israeli women not be covered up, but seen and documented so that propagandists can’t lie and make it disappear. But Israel is vulnerable, surrounded by passionate enemies and ambivalent friends, and it should be rebuilding and re-girding, not launching a full scale invasion of Gaza. “Sometimes you must wait, build up your strength, broaden your resources, reach out to friends, let opportunities present themselves—everything shifts in life; some shifts are promising. But don’t get sucked into Gaza and spend months providing the world with painful and horrifying pictures of innocent Palestinian babies being carried from the rubble. (‘We told them to leave,’ isn’t enough. Some people can’t leave, they’re not capable, they’re old people in an apartment somewhere.)”

In August I finally read “War and Peace” after hiding from that behemoth for half a century. It was stupendous. For the first time in years I was freed of the compulsion to reach for a device and find out what’s happening. “I already knew the news. Pierre was in love with Natasha. Prince Andrei was wounded at Borodino. Princess Mary was saved by Nicholas’s intervention with the serfs. That was all I had to know and it was enough, it was the real news.”

To allow a past work of art to enter your mind is to be embarked upon a reclamation project, a rescue mission. “As you read, Nicholas and Sonya are alive, but Tolstoy himself is still alive. He isn’t gone, his mind is still producing, he continues in human consciousness. You are continuing something.”

The illustration accompanying this column is a rendering of my office, from a photo, by the artist Chad Crowe. It is where this column comes from and where right now I am thinking of my readers, whom I’ve known for many years. Thank you, sincerely, for reading me. What drives my efforts in this small corner—sorry, Bill, in this pillar—is the desire, which I know you share, to preserve and protect, to help keep things going and continuing and not falling apart. To feel part of that project is a great thing, and a privilege. And now on to 2024.

We are a polarized nation, we all know this. In that circumstance, as a matter of our continuance, we have to keep from pushing each other too hard, too roughly. We are a nation of 330 million people with different views. We can move forward and hold on only with patience and respect. When you’re extreme for your side you get an extreme reaction, and wind up living in a world of endless pushback.

Maybe you’re a nice and earnest public-school librarian eager to show identification with and sympathy for the marginalized. You are part of a sector, public education, that has grown more culturally progressive, and culturally insistent, and are immersed in the for-profit publishing world, which is even more so. So you order and put in your school library, to show your identification with and sympathy for the marginalized and different and lonely, some books highly focused on questions of sexuality, including one that’s a sort of LGBTQ how-to manual. The parents will find out, feel honest indignation—“I need my 14-year-old son to be taught math, not how to have oral sex!”—and in their anger, and having shown up at a school board meeting after working a second shift and been patronized as yahoos by board members, and not knowing what they’re doing because they haven’t lived lives focused on literature, come up with a long list of books to be “banned,” meaning available everywhere on earth but the school library. It’s long because they have no confidence in the good faith of the school board and know it will sneak some through. And on the list is not only “Gender Queer” but “To Kill a Mockingbird,” because it sounds unpleasant, and “Crime and Punishment,” because it sounds like something funded by George Soros. Then the big newspapers hear about it and assign reporters to write how stupid these local right-wingers are, and the parents see it and hate the fake-news media more than ever.

Does anyone ever win these things? I mean apart from left-wing and right-wing media infrastructures. Doesn’t it all just leave people more deeply entrenched?

American Continuance 101: Don’t troll the foe. Don’t indulge yourself, don’t provoke. It’s a dangerous world out there, we have dangerous foes, only the ignorant haven’t noticed. “We must all hang together or we will surely hang separately.”

That is my advice to all of us as we close the year and begin a new one that is sure to be interesting. Don’t you like how I said that? As we brace ourselves, let’s consider the big court case this week that was, in my view, a brilliant, high-end provocation that was not at all constructive.

The Colorado Supreme Court ruled, as you know, that Donald Trump engaged in insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, that this disqualifies him from the presidency, and therefore his name is barred from the state primary ballot in 2024. The Trump campaign will appeal, the U.S. Supreme Court will surely review the decision.

The court’s opinion is gravely yet calmly put, clear and highly literate. There are three problems with it in this layman’s view. On the charge of insurrection, everyone notes and is right to note that Jack Smith, the special counsel, has brought serious charges against Mr. Trump—conspiracy to defraud the country is one—but insurrection isn’t among them. And he is a famously careful, dogged man.

Second, Mr. Trump hasn’t been convicted of insurrection by a jury or judge. It seems to me that when and if he is, a state court might feel free to remove his name from a ballot. Until he is, they shouldn’t. Because without conviction, whether Trump committed insurrection is a matter of opinion and argument. With conviction it can be asserted as proven fact.

I wish we didn’t focus on the word insurrection. All the evidence presented of the events in and around 1/6 leaves me convinced that Mr. Trump attempted to overturn a democratic election outcome to hold on to power; that he deliberately and repeatedly lied to the country in furtherance of this aim; that he either directed or egged on a violent assault on the U.S. Capitol to halt the constitutionally mandated vote-counting process; that he attempted to pressure the state of Georgia to alter its final vote tally illegally; that he has never shown remorse for these things and would surely do it all again if returned to the presidency. I believe that in the court cases he faces he will be found guilty of many charges.

I’m not at odds with what might be called the animating spirit of the Colorado decision, but if allowed to stand it would create chaos, because once these things start they spread like a virus. If Colorado judges can knock a presidential candidate off its ballot, New York judges can do it too, and Mississippi ones, and so on.

Sometimes sheer old boring prudence has to have a place in things.

The southern border of the state of Texas is in functional collapse, with an unprecedented wave of illegal immigrants entering the U.S. The Washington Post this week likened the border area to a “Mad Max” world of cut-through barriers and debris. Fox News on Wednesday showed an order instructing a recently crossed migrant to report to U.S. immigration officials to make her case to stay in America. Fox showed the date on the order: January 2031. An immigration lawyer said it is proof of what illegal immigrants already sense: The administration is in effect granting back-door amnesty to all who come. And so they’re coming. Among them are—again the number is unprecedented—natives of China, India, Africa, Turkey. This is a challenge to our national security that most won’t begin to worry about until something bad happens. The Department of Homeland Security reported this week that 35,000 illegal immigrants with criminal convictions were encountered in fiscal 2023. That’s only the number caught. In October alone, Customs and Border Protection reported apprehending 13 people on the terrorist watchlist. Again, that’s only the number caught. What a disaster.

If Colorado is able to ban Mr. Trump from the ballot over charges of insurrection, can Texas ban Joe Biden from the ballot on grounds he has defied his constitutional responsibility to defend the country by securing its borders? There are politicians in Texas already promising to do just that.

So now the Colorado question surely goes to the Supreme Court. The justices take a lot of battering, some legitimate, some ideological and political. But I respect them, not only as an institution but individually, as serious human beings. And so our end-of-year prediction. The court will take the case and won’t uphold the Colorado ruling.

Not a prediction but a hope: that the decision be unanimous. That it not be open to suspicions of partisan hackery, that it show unity—a court of many pieces holding together when the stakes are high. That would be a gift to the nation and a hopeful way of beginning 2024. “Sail on, O Ship of State.”

Fareed Zakaria opened his CNN show last weekend with a commentary that seemed to me a signal moment in the DEI/woke/identity-politics wars. I don’t know how Mr. Zakaria would characterize his political views, but there was a quality of something building within him that finally came out. It was an earnest commentary that perhaps took some daring.

“When one thinks of America’s greatest strengths, the kind of assets the world looks at with admiration and envy, America’s elite universities would long have been at the top of that list,” he said. “But the American public has been losing faith in these universities for good reason.” He scored the three presidents who’d come under fire in the House for their “vague and indecisive answers when asked whether calling for the genocide of Jews would violate their institutions’ codes of conduct.” Their performance was understandable if you understand that our elite universities “have gone from being centers of excellence to institutions pushing political agendas.” Those agendas, “clustered around diversity and inclusion,” began in good faith, “but those good intentions have morphed into a dogmatic ideology and turned these universities into places where the pervasive goals are political and social engineering, not academic merit.”

“In the humanities, hiring for new academic positions now appears to center on the race and gender of the applicant, as well as the subject matter, which needs to be about marginalized groups. A white man studying the American presidency does not have a prayer of getting tenure at a major history department in America today. . . . New subjects crop up that are really political agendas, not academic fields.”

“Out of this culture of diversity has grown the collection of ideas and practices that we have now all heard of—safe spaces, trigger warnings and microaggressions.” Schools have instituted speech codes “that make it a violation of university rules to say things that some groups might find offensive. Universities advise students not to speak, act, even dress in ways that might cause offense to some minority groups.” When the George Floyd protests erupted, universities publicly aligned their institutions to those protests. “In this context, it is understandable that Jewish groups would wonder: Why do safe spaces, microaggressions and hate speech not apply to us? If universities can take positions against free speech to make some groups feel safe, why not us? Having coddled so many student groups for so long, university administrators found themselves squirming, unable to explain why certain groups (Jews, Asians) don’t seem to count in these conversations.”

The House testimony “was the inevitable result of decades of the politicization of universities. America’s top colleges are no longer seen as bastions of excellence but partisan outfits.” They should “abandon this long misadventure into politics . . . and rebuild their reputations as centers of research and learning.”

This was a realistic and straightforward assessment of where the universities are and what they should do. It would be helpful if all on the sane left would drop their relative silence, rise up and end the misadventure.

I make two points connected to Mr. Zakaria’s larger statement. He emphasized the decreasing number of Americans who have confidence in our elite universities. I have been reading Edmund Wilson’s 1940 classic, “To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History.” It famously offers a portrait of the groundbreaking French historian Jules Michelet (1798-1874), a father of modern historiography. The whole section reads like a tribute to the idea of learning, of understanding, of telling. It is not too much to say it is a kind of paean to the idea of the university.

What a scholar Michelet was, what a searcher for truth. His early life, in Wilson’s words, was “sad, poor and hard.” Natural brilliance drove him to and through the academy. He received honors, tutored princesses, but he was really a historian. He longed to know the facts of the past and to understand them. Appointed to the civil service, he was put in the Record Office. He was in charge of the archives of all of France. Wilson: “No one had really explored the French archives before; the histories had mostly been written from other histories” and by hired hands. Over the coming decades Michelet would write the first serious, documented, comprehensive history of France from its beginning through the 1789 revolution.

Michelet said there came to him in the archives “the whispers of the souls who had suffered so long ago and who were smothered now in the past.” His approach was rational and realistic, not romantic, though there was plenty of color and sweep in his work. The story of Joan of Arc interested him because her story was fully documented—“incontestable”—and because he saw her as the first modern hero of action, “contrary to passive Christianity.”

Michelet said the historian is one who, “taking history as something more than a game, makes the effort in good faith to enter into the life of the past.” He treated history as the crowded, jagged thing it is, Wilson observes, and he didn’t simplify. He saw the story of France, and history in general, as complex, braided, intertwined, and driven in the end more by the masses than their leaders.

The idea of this man—a true scholar who attempts to find the honest truth—seems inapplicable to the current moment. And the reason is the three words he uses—“in good faith”—to define how the historian must act. In the DEI/woke regime, the good faith of the scholar is sacrificed to political fashion. In going all in on the regime, those who run the universities negate their own worth. Faculty and professors, administrators and department heads lower their own standing. Because they are not now seen as people of the mind, of the intellect, but as mere operatives, enforcers. They thus give up their place of respect in the public imagination.

Regular people used to imagine what a university looks like—rows of gleaming books, learned professors, an air of honest inquiry. That isn’t now a picture the public can see. Now it’s something else, less impressive, less moving. Less important to our continuance as a people.

The elites who run our elite colleges are killing their own status. They are also lowering the esteem in which college graduates are held. Your primary job as a student is taking in. You read, learn, connect this event with that, apply your imagination, empathize, judge. It is a spacious act—it takes time to absorb, reflect, feel—which is why you’re given four whole years to do it. But if the public senses that few are studying like independent scholars in there, not enough are absorbing the expertise of their field, that they’ve merely been instructed to internalize a particular worldview and parrot it back . . .

Well, if that’s the case, who needs them? Is it even worth having them around in the office? The people of a country have a greater stake in all this than universities and their students understand. And the elite schools are lowering their own standing more than they know.

At first I didn’t understand. Among Hamas’s crimes of 10/7: little children and babies murdered, some burned to death; children forced to watch parents chased, beaten and shot. Old couples murdered in their homes; families who’d taken refuge in safe rooms burned out and killed. Hamas attempted to behead a kibbutz worker, and killed old women standing at a bus stop. Women were abused—raped, it seemed certain. But I didn’t understand why, from day one, the last received such emphasis. Defenders of Hamas kept demanding proof and claiming there was no evidence. It was as if they were saying: Sure we behead people and kill infants but raping someone, that’s crossing a line!

But now I understand what was done. It was grim and dreadful, but it was also systematic and deliberate. And since there’s going to be a lot of 10/7 trutherism—there already is—we have to be clear about what happened.

In the days after the attack, chaos reigned in the attack areas. At least 1,200 people had been murdered, their bodies scattered through kibbutzim and on the site of the Nova music festival. The crime scene was huge; the priority was identifying the dead and informing their families. Documentation of crimes was incomplete, forensic evidence not always recorded, evidence perishable. The testimony of witnesses, body collectors and morgue workers came in unevenly. It has built and is becoming comprehensive.

A stunning report appeared last weekend in London’s Sunday Times, by reporter Christina Lamb. Bar Yuval-Shani, a 58-year-old psychotherapist treating the families of victims, told Ms. Lamb she has been told by several witnesses of rape at the music festival. A police commander told Ms. Lamb, “It’s clear now that sexual crimes were part of the planning, and the purpose was to terrify and humiliate people.” Ms. Lamb quotes Yoni Saadon, 39, a father of four and shift manager in a foundry who was at the music festival. He said he hid as a young woman was raped, and saw Hamas fighters capture another young woman near a car. “She was fighting back, not allowing them to strip her. They threw her to the ground and one of the terrorists took a shovel and beheaded her.”

“We didn’t understand at first,” Ms. Lamb quoted Cochav Elkayam-Levy, a Hebrew University expert on international law, who heads a commission into the Hamas crimes. She said survivors arriving at hospitals weren’t asked about sexual abuse or given rape kits, but those who volunteered to collect bodies started reporting that many of the women were naked and bleeding from the genitals. The commander of a unit of a volunteer religious organization that collected the remains of the dead told Ms. Lamb they collected 1,000 bodies in 10 days from the festival site and the kibbutzim. “No one saw more than us. . . . It seemed their mission was to rape as many as possible.”

Israel Defense Forces sources told the paper that Hamas fighters caught in Gaza reported in police interrogations that they had been instructed by superiors to “dirty” and “whore” the women.

A few days after the Sunday Times report came one on the mounting evidence of violent sexual abuse from BBC correspondent Lucy Williamson. Several of those involved in collecting and identifying the bodies of the dead told the BBC that they had seen “multiple signs of sexual assault, including broken pelvises, bruises, cuts and tears, and that the victims ranged from children and teenagers to pensioners.” Video testimony of an eyewitness to the music festival, shown to journalists by Israeli police, “detailed the gang rape, mutilation and execution of one victim.” The BBC saw “videos of naked and bloodied women filmed by Hamas on the day of the attack.”

The gallant gents of Hamas were filming their own war crimes.

Israeli police have privately shown journalists filmed testimony of a woman at the music festival. She describes Hamas fighters gang-raping a woman and then mutilating her. The last of her attackers shot her in the head. She said the men cut off parts of the woman’s body during the rape. In other videos, Ms. Williamson writes, women carried away by the terrorists “appear to be naked or semi-clothed.”

Reuters on Dec. 5 quoted an Israeli reservist who worked at a makeshift morgue. “Often women came in in just their underwear,” she said. “I saw very bloody genitals on women.” Reuters spoke to seven people, first responders and those dealing with the dead, who attested to the sexual violence. Reuters quotes written testimony from one volunteer, who said he saw dozens of dead women in shelters: “Their clothing was torn on the upper part, but their bottoms were completely naked.”

This Monday a meeting at the United Nations laid out proof of the violent abuse. In the New York Times
, reporters Katherine Rosman and Lisa Lerer quoted the testimony of Simcha Greinman, a volunteer collector of remains at the kibbutzim. He said the body of one woman had “nails and different objects in her female organs.” A person’s genitals were so mutilated “we couldn’t identify if it was a man or a woman.” Other women had mutilated faces. The head of the International Crime Investigations Unit of the Israeli police was asked how many women were abused. He said, “I am talking about dozens.”

If half of this testimony is true, then what was done to the women at the music festival and in the kibbutzim wasn’t a series of isolated crimes. It happened at scale, as part of a pattern, and with a deliberateness that strongly suggests it was systematic. The rape, torture and mutilation of women looks as if it was part of the battle plan. Hamas used sexual violence as a weapon.

Why has the progressive left in the West, for two months now, been disbelieving, silent or equivocal about what Hamas did to women? One answer is that the progressive left hates Israel and feels whatever is done to Israelis is justified. Another is that the sick brutality of Hamas’s actions undercuts its position in the world, undercutting too the cause they falsely claim to represent, that of the Palestinian people. Why have women’s groups of the progressive left been silent? Because at bottom they aren’t for women; they are for the team.

All of this makes more remarkable the exchange between Dana Bash of CNN and Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Seattle. Ms. Bash pressed Ms. Jayapal on why she wasn’t condemning what had been done to women on 10/7. Ms. Jayapal was evasive, tried to redirect, said rape is “horrific” but “happens in war situations.”

“However,” she said, “I think we have to be balanced about bringing in the outrages against Palestinians.”

Balanced? How do you balance a story like the horrors of Oct. 7? You don’t, you just find and tell the truth. Some stories don’t have two sides. This is one of them.

Why is it important? Because it happened. Because it reveals something about the essential nature of Hamas and reflects its ultimate political goals. Progressives admiringly quote Maya Angelou’s advice that when people show you who they are, believe them. Oct. 7 was Hamas showing you who they are. Believe them.

Recently while sharing a meal an acquaintance said something arresting. We were speaking, as happy pessimists do, about where the 21st century went wrong. We’re almost a quarter-century into it, it’s already taken on a certain general shape and character, and I’m not sure I see much good in it beyond advances in medicine and science. He said he was working on a theory: The 21st century so far has been a reverse Y2K.

By 12/31/99 the world was transfixed by a fear that all its mighty computers would go crazy as 23:59:59 clicked to 0:00:00. They wouldn’t be able to transfer over to 2000. The entire system would have a hiccup and the lights go out. It didn’t happen. Remedies were invented and may have saved the day.

It is since 2000, the acquaintance said, that the world’s computers have caused havoc, in the social, cultural and political spheres. Few worried, watched or took countering steps. After all, 2000 turned out all right, so this probably would too. We accepted all the sludge—algorithms designed to divide us, to give destructive messages to kids, to addict them to the product—passively, without alarm.

We are accepting artificial intelligence the same way, passively, and hoping its promised benefits (in medicine and science again) will outweigh its grave and obvious threat. That threat is one Henry Kissinger warned of in these pages early this year. “What happens if this technology cannot be completely contained?” he and his co-authors asked. “What if an element of malice emerges in the AI?” Kissinger was a great diplomat and historian, but he had the imagination of an artist. AI and the possibility of nuclear war were the two great causes of his last years. He was worried about where this whole modern contraption was going.

I’ve written that a great icon of the age, the Apple logo—the apple with the bite taken out of it—seemed to me a conscious or unconscious expression that those involved in the development of our modern tech world understood on some level that their efforts were taking us back to Eden, to the pivotal moment when Eve and Adam ate the forbidden fruit. The serpent told Eve they would become all-knowing like God, in fact equal to God, and that is why God didn’t want them to have it. She bit, and human beings were banished from the kindly garden and thrown into the rough cruel world. I believe those creating, fueling and funding AI want, possibly unconsciously, to be God, and think on some level they are God.

Many have warned of the destructive possibilities and capabilities of AI, but there are important thoughts on this in a recent New Yorker piece on Geoffrey Hinton, famously called the godfather of AI. It is a brilliantly written and thought-through profile by Joshua Rothman.

Mr. Hinton, 75, a Turing Award winner, had spent 30 years as a professor of computer science at the University of Toronto. He studied neural networks. Later he started a small research company that was bought by Google, and he worked there until earlier this year. Soon after leaving he began to warn of the “existential threat” AI poses. The more he used ChatGPT, the more uneasy he became. He worries that AI systems may start to think for themselves; they may attempt to take over human civilization, or eliminate it.

Mr. Hinton told Mr. Rothman that once, early in his research days, he saw a “frustrated AI.” It was a computer attached to two TV cameras and a robot arm. The computer was told to assemble some blocks spread on a table. It tried, but it knew only how to recognize individual blocks. A pile of them left it confused. “It pulled back a little bit, and went bash,” knocking them all around. “It couldn’t deal with what was going on, so it changed it, violently.”

Mr. Hinton says he doesn’t regret his work, but he fears what powerful people will do with AI. Vladimir Putin might create “an autonomous lethal weapon”—a self-directing killing machine. Mr. Hinton believes such weapons should be outlawed. But even benign autonomous systems can be destructive.

He believes AI can be approached with one of two attitudes, denial or stoicism. When people first hear of its potential for destruction they say it’s not worth it, we have to stop it. But stopping it is a fantasy. “We need to think, How do we make it not as awful for humanity as it might be?”

Why, Mr. Rothman asks, don’t we just unplug it? AI requires giant servers and data centers, all of which run on electricity.

I was glad to see this question asked, because I have wondered it too.

Mr. Hinton said it’s reasonable to ask if we wouldn’t be better off without AI. “But it’s not going to happen. Because of the way society is. And because of the competition between different nations.” If the United Nations worked, maybe it could stop it. But China isn’t going to.

I found this argument, which AI enthusiasts always make, more a rationale than a thought. If China took to hunting children for sport, would we do it? (Someone reading this in Silicon Valley, please say no.)

What is most urgently disturbing to me is that if America speeds forward with AI it is putting the fate of humanity in the hands of the men and women of Silicon Valley, who invented the internet as it is, including all its sludge. And there’s something wrong with them. They’re some new kind of human, brilliant in a deep yet narrow way, prattling on about connection and compassion but cold at the core. They seem apart from the great faiths of past millennia, apart from traditional moral or ethical systems or assumptions about life. C.S. Lewis once said words to the effect that empires rise and fall, cultures come and go, but the waiter who poured your coffee this morning is immortal because his soul is immortal. Such a thought would be familiar to many readers but would leave Silicon Valley blinking with bafflement. They’re modern and beyond beyond. This one injects himself with the blood of people in their 20s in his quest for longevity; that one embraces extreme fasting. The Journal this summer reported on Silicon Valley executives: “Routine drug use has moved from an after-hours activity squarely into corporate culture.” They see psychedelics—Ketamine, hallucinogenic mushrooms—as “gateways to business breakthroughs.”

Yes, by all means put the fate of the world in their hands. They’re not particularly steady. OpenAI’s Sam Altman, 38, the face of the movement, was famously fired last week and rehired days later, and no one seems to know for sure what it was about. You’d think we have a right to know. There was a story it was all due to an internal memo alerting the board to a dangerous new AI development. A major investor said this isn’t true, which makes me feel so much better.

We are putting the fate of humanity in the hands of people not capable of holding it. We have to focus as if this is Y2K, only real.

Right about now Time magazine would be choosing its Person of the Year, a designation I’ve followed from childhood because their choices tend to vary from sound to interesting. Also I almost always know who they’ll choose and enjoy finding out if I’m right. Here I tell you who it will be and must be or I will be displeased.

Miss Taylor Swift is the Person of the Year. She is the best thing that has happened in America in all of 2023. This fact makes her a suitably international choice because when something good happens in America, boy is it worldwide news.

I have been following her famous Eras tour since it began in March. Everyone says she’s huge, she’s fabulous, but really it’s bigger than that. What she did this year is some kind of epic American story.

Here are the reasons she should be Person of the Year:

Her tour has broken attendance and income records across the country. She has transformed the economy of every city she visits. The U.S. Travel Association reported this fall that what her concertgoers spend in and around each venue “is on par with the Super Bowl, but this time it happened on 53 different nights in 20 different locations over the course of five months.” Downtowns across the country—uniquely battered by the pandemic and the riots and demonstrations of 2020—are, while she is there, brought to life, with an influx of visitors and a local small business boom. Wherever she went it was like the past three years didn’t happen.

When Ms. Swift played Los Angeles for six sold-out nights in August she brought a reported $320 million local windfall with her, including 3,300 jobs and a $160 million increase in local earnings. From Straits Research this month: Ms. Swift’s tour is “an economic phenomenon that is totally altering the rules of entertainment economics.”

When the tour became a bona fide record-breaker Ms. Swift gave everyone in her crew—everyone, the dressers, the guys who move the sets, the sound techs and backup dancers—a combined $55 million in bonuses. The truck drivers received a reported $100,000 each.

Bloomberg Economics reports U.S. gross domestic product went up an estimated $4.3 billion as a result of her first 53 concerts.

The tour made her a billionaire, according to Forbes the first musician ever to make that rank solely based on her songs and performances.

When Ms. Swift made a film of the ongoing tour she reinvented how such things are financed and marketed, upending previous models, and when the film opened, on Oct. 13, it became the most successful concert film in history.

Foreign leaders have begged her to come. One said, “Thailand is back on track to be fully democratic after you had to cancel last time due to the coup.”

All of this is phenomenal, groundbreaking, but it’s just economics. Ms. Swift brings joy. Over the summer I was fascinated by what became familiar, people posting on social media what was going on in the backs of the stadium as Ms. Swift sang. It was thousands of fathers and daughters dancing. When she played in downtown Seattle in July, the stomping was so heavy and the stadium shook so hard it registered on a seismometer as equal to a magnitude 2.3 earthquake.

People meaning to compliment her ask if she’s Elvis or the Beatles, but it is the wrong question. Taylor Swift is her own category.

Here I wish to attest personally to the quality of her art but honey, I’m not the demo, I’m Porgy and Bess, the American Songbook and Joni Mitchell. She writes pleasing tunes with pointed lyrics. They’re sometimes jaunty, sometimes blue, and famously have a particular resonance for teenage girls and young women. She has said she sees herself primarily as a storyteller. They’re her stories and those of her audience—breakups, small triumphs, betrayals, mistakes. Her special bond with her audience is that for 17 years, more than a generation, they’ve been going through life together, experiencing it and talking it through. It’s a relationship.

Nine years ago, in an interview with CBS’s Gayle King, Ms. Swift coolly self-assessed. “My life doesn’t gravitate towards being edgy, sexy, or cool. I just naturally am not any of those things.” Pressed for what she is, she said: “I’m imaginative, I’m smart and I’m hardworking.” She was only 24 but all that seems perfectly correct. She’s focused, ambitious, loves to perform, loves to be cheered, loves to strut. Great careers are all effort. She works herself like a rented mule.

In the Atlantic magazine, the writer Spencer Kornhaber captured her opening show. Over more than three hours she played an amazing 44 songs in Glendale, Ariz. “Somehow seeing her up close made her seem more superhuman.” She has “the stamina of a ram.” She was fearless and inventive. “At one point she induced gasps by seeming to dive into the stage and then swim to the other side, as if it were a pond.”

Friends, this is some kind of epic American thing that is happening, something on the order of great tales and myths. Over the past few months as I’ve thought about and read of Ms. Swift my mind kept going back to phrases that are . . . absurd as comparisons. And yet. “When John Henry was a little baby . . . ” And a beautiful lyric I saw years ago that stayed with me. “Black-eyed peas asks cornbread/ ‘What makes you so strong?’/ Cornbread says, ‘I come from/ Where Joe Louis was born.’ ”

There is just something so mightily American in Taylor Swift’s great year.

Am I getting carried away? Oh yes, I am. And yet I think, isn’t it great that somebody’s shown such excellence you get carried away?

We end with her recent purported famous romance with football star Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs. Is it real, everyone asks. Who knows? Maybe they don’t know. I don’t understand the argument that they’ve come together for publicity. That’s the one thing she doesn’t need more of and could hardly get more of. As for Mr. Kelce, as J.R. Moehringer noted this week in the Journal, his mug is all over too. Whatever it is they owe no stranger an answer.

But here are reasons people would like it to be real. Because it makes life feel more magical—the prince meets the princess. Because it’s sweet. Because if it’s real then not everything is media management, which is the thing that deep down we always fear. Because it’s fun. Marilyn and Joltin’ Joe made America more fun, more a romantic place where anything can happen and glamour is real. Also if it’s real it adds to the sum total of love in the world, literally increases its quantity, and the love enters the air and the world breathes it in and, for a moment, becomes: better.

Onward to further greatness, Taylor Swift. Onward Travis Kelce. Win the Super Bowl this year, make an impossible catch, jump a man’s height to snatch the ball from the air with 10 seconds to go, score the winning touchdown, hold the ball up to your girl in the stands as the stadium roars and the confetti rains down.

Leave a 100 billion memories. Remind everyone: It’s good to be alive.

Because it is.

And Happy Thanksgiving weekend to the great and fabled nation that is still, this day, the hope of the world.

The crisis of comportment on Capitol Hill is getting worse. Two months ago it was an argument over whether senators should be allowed to wear children’s play clothes on the floor, because one senator felt this was emotionally necessary for him. His emotions were overridden and the old dress code restored. Now it is how members feel free to act in public. If you follow the news you’re familiar with most or all of the instances.

The former House speaker, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.), was walking through the halls with his security team when he was charged with elbowing a kidney of Rep. Tim Burchett (R., Tenn.), who’d been part of the successful effort to remove him as speaker. NPR’s Claudia Grisales was there and saw it all. “Have NEVER seen this on Capitol Hill,” she tweeted. “McCarthy walked by with his detail and McCarthy shoved Burchett.” Mr. Burchett lunged forward, and a chase ensued, followed by a verbal confrontation.

Did this happen? Of course. Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R., Ill.), in a memoir published earlier this year, wrote that Mr. McCarthy had twice gotten physical with him in almost exactly the same way. “As he passed with his security man and some of his boys he veered towards me, hit me with his shoulder and then kept going.” Mr. McCarthy denied Mr. Burchett’s charge, at first allowing that “I guess our shoulders hit or something,” and later growling, “If I kidney-punched someone, they would be on the ground.”

Mr. McCarthy is someone who’d want to avenge himself on a foe, and what’s he going to use, his wit? He is an odd man in that as soon as he became a figure of some height and sympathy, after wrongfully being taken down last month, he decided to remind everybody why nobody liked him.

Also this week, in a public hearing, Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R., Okla.) challenged Teamsters President Sean O’Brien to a fight. Mr. O’Brien had gotten lippy on Twitter, calling Mullin a “moron” and “full of s—.” Why not fight it out here, at the hearing? Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) stopped it—“God knows the American people have enough contempt for politics, let’s not make it worse.” Afterward Mr. Mullin told an Oklahoma podcaster how he fights and what we missed. “By the way, I’m not afraid of biting.” “I’ll bite 100%. In a fight, I’m gonna bite. I’ll do anything, I’m not above it. And I don’t care where I bite, by the way.”

The same day in the House, Rep. James Comer (R., Ky.) called Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D., Fla.) a “Smurf” and “a liar” after Mr. Moskowitz accused Mr. Comer of personal corruption. And Rep. Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) said Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.) lacks the “maturity” to understand the implications of her political actions, which prompted her to reply with a tweet saying Mr. Issa lacks—and here she posted emojis of a football, a basketball, a baseball and so on. In June she was picked up calling one of her competitors, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R., Colo.), “a little bitch” on the House floor.

Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D., N.Y.) didn’t do anything at all this week, which is amazing because he is a one man death-of-comportment unit, but two weeks ago he pleaded guilty to falsely pulling a fire alarm in a Capitol Hill office building, which had to be evacuated. Earlier he had denied it and likened his Republican critics to Nazis. In March he distinguished himself by standing in the halls and screaming, of Republicans, “They’re freaking cowards, they’re gutless.”

What is wrong with these people? Why do they do act this way?

Some part of it is surely psychological—a working out, in public, of the fact that they have low regard for the institution because it is populated by people like them, and no regard for the political process because it allows people like them to rise. Here is a rule of life: Deep down mooks always know they’re mooks, the shallow know they’re shallow, the dumb know they’re dumb. Their constant attempts not to let you see what they know leads to much bad behavior.

A larger part would be that they’re certain the people back home like it. Mr. Mullin was sharply dressed, in a crisp white shirt camera-ready for his moment. He didn’t expect to be outfaced by the union guy: “You stand your butt up.” Mr. Mullin was showing his base how rough, tough and macho he is. He’s not gonna let any fancy deep-state rules on decorum dictate to him; he’s real, authentic, a man. Which he can show by punching and kicking people. Here, watch! I wonder if he’s right that the people of Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain, like that sort of thing. It isn’t really a compliment to them that he thinks they would.

I think the biggest reason for Congress’s behavioral deterioration may be simply that all Americans now, especially people in politics, are media-addled. Lawmakers don’t experience themselves as political figures doing the business of the nation but as actors in a streaming series called “Populism!” on some tacky cable network, and they have to keep it lively and keep the action going. They are celebrities back home, like Real Housewives, famous for being famous and eager to do selfies to show how salt-of-the-earth they are. Once I talked to the producer of a weekly TV drama and told him I found it interesting that his actors, in their scenes, always seem to show they’re thinking. Before answering a question they linger and take time, as if they’re trying to show how thinking looks. He smiled and said no, it’s just an actor’s trick, they’re trying to keep the camera on their face.

That’s what the members are doing, keeping the camera on their face.

Here we point out why all this is bad for America. It makes democracy look cruddy and small, like something shrinking before our eyes. It makes our leaders look second rate and insubstantial. It disheartens parents, who are trying to create rules for the road for their children. It disheartens normal Americans who are worried for their country and see in its increasing wildness and lack of dignity a sign that we may not be able to hold together in the long term.

And of course it pleases our competitors in the world. They think we’re a sinking nation, poorly educated, riven by race, seeking refuge in drugs. The embarrassing behavior of our political leaders is, to them, more evidence of our breakup. Do you wish you knew Chinese president Xi’s thoughts this week as he traveled through a San Francisco bedecked in Chinese flags? I’ll tell you. He thinks we are on a long slide, our time is over, America was the 20th century but this is the 21st.

We have to look at ourselves here. Why do we accept this? Do we think this is all just a show called “Populism”? How’s it going to end? Aren’t these questions earnest? It’s embarrassing to be earnest, isn’t it?”