Peggy Noonan

Chris Christie got a standing ovation from the Republican Governors Association this week after delivering fiery words that captured the inner views of audience members, including GOP officeholders from 50 states, donors, party figures and operatives. The former New Jersey governor told them voters in the midterms “rejected crazy.”

We spoke by phone after Donald Trump’s announcement Tuesday that he would run for the Republican presidential nomination.

Mr. Christie said the midterms were an actual change point in the history of the party: that its central struggle can no longer be avoided. That struggle is how and why to put Mr. Trump in the rearview mirror.

It can’t be dodged and can no longer be the problem that dare not speak its name: “We can’t lead and convince Trump folks if we’re unwilling to stick our necks out and say his name.” Over the next 18 months, leaders will have to take a side and go to Trump supporters to make the case against him. “There needs to be a fight out loud, in public. The only way it becomes a winning argument is transparent and public.”

The strongest argument: Mr. Trump can’t win, and if you truly seek to win you must disengage from him.

“This is a baseball country,” Mr. Christie said. “It’s always three strikes and you’re out.” Mr. Trump struck out in 2018, 2020 and 2022. He never came close to a plurality of the popular vote. When Mr. Christie ended his tenure as chairman of the RGA, in 2014, there were 31 Republican governors. Next year there will be 26. The reason, he said, is that Mr. Trump weighs the party down and picks candidates based not on issues or electability but personal loyalty. It is an electoral narcissism that is killing the party.

How to convince Trump supporters? “Give him credit for what he’s gotten done . . . but they need to be told again and again: A vote for Donald Trump is a vote for a Democratic president.”

In his announcement speech, Mr. Trump “called himself a victim. In the past his people saw him as a master, not a victim. It was the biggest moment of the speech. Republicans don’t vote for victims, they vote for leaders.” (Mr. Trump’s words: “I am a victim, I will tell you. I am a victim.” He was referring to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Steele dossier.)

Mr. Christie offered another argument: “Look, everything you hate about what Biden has done is ultimately Trump’s fault, and it will continue because he can’t win an election. You want eight years of Biden? Is that a risk you want to take?” Trump voters have always had a personal connection with him. “But in the end he put the people they feared the most in charge of the country—Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Biden.”

Mr. Christie sees the midterms as “a rejection of chaos: ‘Please, no more tumult.’ ” Democrats won independent voters by 2 points. That wasn’t expected in this year and these conditions. “That’s a plea of the people who say enough already, it’s about calm.” The country, he says, has been “traumatized,” not only politically but by the pandemic and its attendant struggles, tensions and loss.

Can the party hold together? “There’s gonna be some very tough fighting before there is a coming together.” But there are two reasons to think it can. “We are generally united behind a set of policy principles, and we are genuinely opposed to what the Democrats are doing. So that gives us the potential. But we have to have the internal family argument about the nature and character of our leadership.”

Afterward I thought there is another way of thinking about the Trump question. It is that countries make mistakes, sometimes big ones, and political parties do too. It’s not shocking, they’re conglomerations of people, forests full of crooked timber. But if you keep making the same one, it’s not the mistake you made, it’s who you are. After Jan. 6, 2021, this question became a deeper and more painful one, with broader dimensions and bigger implications.
In the next 18 months, the Republican Party will have to decide if Mr. Trump is the mistake it made or who it is. Complicating the answer, people don’t like to view their actions as mistakes. They think to renounce their previous, passionately held position is to renounce themselves. But most people do want to move on after debacles, and most, once they see something as a debacle, are open to arguments, facts and thinking it through.

As to Mr. Trump’s speech, it was a wan, deflated enterprise. But something in the media coverage was interesting. No broadcast network carried it, none of the major cable-news networks stuck with it to the end, and one didn’t take it at all. All covered the announcement or reported it, but it wasn’t treated as an epic event, only a news event. This suggests that this time the media will be judging Mr. Trump by normal candidate standards, not Special Phenomenon standards. But when you don’t treat Mr. Trump like he’s special, you marginalize him. I don’t think the cable networks will be giving him the oxygen they fed him so freely in 2016, in part because none of their executives want to be accused of what Jeff Zucker was accused of that year: giving him unlimited airtime to get ratings, and making him president.

Worse for Mr. Trump, those executives may simply doubt his audience is still a huge one.

For Republicans, the most deeply embittering break point was the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Without that moment, the pro- and anti-Trump split would exist and endure, but less passionately. Mike Pence writes it in his recent book: “I was angry at . . . how it desecrated the seat of our democracy and dishonored the patriotism of millions of our supporters, who would never do such a thing here or anywhere else.” Republicans of all kinds felt slimed by 1/6.

In the coming 18 months of the big argument, Trump supporters can fairly be asked to consider a thought experiment.

What if it had been Barack Obama in 2012 who refused to accept a democratic outcome to a presidential election? What if we later found out he probably knew he’d lost but didn’t want to accept it so he incited the Obamaites with accusations and false claims and made speeches insisting the election was stolen? What if he’d made a big outdoor speech and sent his forces, including some antifa chapters, to storm the Capitol in an attempt to thwart the Constitution and stop the counting of electoral votes? What if he refused to stop them once he saw on TV what they were doing?

What if Democrats had done that? Republicans would feel righteous rage. They would never forgive Mr. Obama, who’d have shown the worst of himself and his movement. He and his actions would make you feel democracy itself was in the balance, and you would pledge to never let him enter the White House as president again.

You’d feel as Liz Cheney does now: This must end.

It is rude of Arizona and Nevada to keep the country waiting to know the composition of its Senate. Why, days after the election, don’t we know which party controls the House? Why can’t the late-reporting states get their act together on vote counting? It’s the increase in mail-in ballots? So what? You roll with life and adapt. Florida, which spans two time zones, reports its tallies with professionalism and dispatch.

States have two jobs in this area. One is to create the conditions by which people can vote—polling places, machines that work, correctly worded ballots. The second is to count the votes. It’s not rocket science. Leaders keep saying we have to be patient. Why? How about doing your job? Get the mail-in ballots, count them, hold them in a vault until the polls close, and announce the numbers, along with the Election Day vote, that night.

Long counts are not only sloppy, they are abusive. It is in the delay between polls closed and outcome announced that the mischief begins. It’s where conspiracism takes hold. They stole the boxes with the ballots last Thursday—my cousin’s friend saw it.

It is looking for trouble. America isn’t a place where you need to look for trouble.

On the outcome as we know it: The MAGA movement and Donald Trump took it right in the face. Normal conservatives and Republicans fared well. Trump-endorsed candidates went down. Everyone knows the famous examples—Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania, Don Bolduc in New Hampshire, Tudor Dixon, who lost by 10 points in Michigan. All embraced Mr. Trump, some sincerely, many opportunistically, all consistently. A Hollywood director once said of pragmatic choices, and we paraphrase, that it’s one thing to temporarily reside up someone’s organ of elimination but it’s wrong to build a condo up there, people will notice and get a poor impression. That’s sort of what happened.

Less noticed so far: In Michigan, Democrats flipped both chambers of the Legislature. Republicans lost the state Senate for the first time in almost 40 years. Trump-backed candidates lost big races. The nonpartisan Bridge Michigan said the election should be “a wake-up call for the GOP to move on from Donald Trump’s obsessive quest to re-litigate his 2020 loss.” Jason Roe, a former head of the state party, said the GOP can continue to tilt at windmills or win elections, and if it does the former, “it’s gonna be a rough decade ahead of us.”

Ronna McDaniel, head of the Republican National Committee, lives in Michigan. Think she noticed?

On the other hand Team Normie pretty much flourished east to west. Gov. Chris Sununu in New Hampshire won by 15 points, Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia by more than 7, and of course Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida by nearly 20.

The weirdness of the Trump candidates—their inexperience and fixations, their air of constant yet meaningless conflict, their sheer abnormality—asked too much of voters, who said no.

On Mr. Trump himself, everything has been said, including in this space for a long time. An esteemed Tory political figure summed it up succinctly in London in August: “Donald Trump ruined the Republican Party’s brand.”

It will now stick with him or not. It will live free or die.

If, in 2024, Republicans aren’t serious about policy—about what they claim to stand for—they will pick him as their nominee. And warm themselves in the glow of the fire as he goes down in flames. If they’re serious about the things they claim to care about—crime, wokeness, etc.—they’ll choose someone else and likely win.

The night before the election I watched Mr. Trump’s rally in Ohio. It was the usual until the end, when, as he spoke, some “Phantom of the Opera”-ish music came from out of nowhere. It was like some deformed giant named Igor was playing an organ as the sound track of the speech. It was like going back to the eerie weird zone of 2015-20, only darker, weirder and less competent. Mr. Trump didn’t know how to coordinate his words with the music, and the words were all dark—America in decline, grrr grrr. There was a deep darkness behind him, and beyond that his big plane. When Gov. Mike DeWine was asked to speak, he mumbled approximately 3.5 words and scrammed. Trump invited another statewide candidate to the podium and he shook him off: No, that’s OK.

I watched and thought: What I am seeing is the end of something. I am seeing yesterday. This is a busted jalopy that runs on yesteryear’s resentments. A second term of this would be catastrophic, with him more bitter, less competent, surrounded by collapsed guardrails. He and his people once tried to stop the constitutionally mandated electoral vote certification by violently overrunning the U.S. Capitol. If America lets him back, he will do worse. And America knows.

The policy positions of Trumpism always had constructive elements. He helped bust the party from its mindless establishment rut, broke the party from its recent always-up-for-a-war impulse and from the condescension of its political strategists toward the working class.

But the man himself poisons his own movement. That’s what became obvious this week.

For almost seven years my email has been full of Republicans who disapprove of Mr. Trump, support many of his policies, see no wisdom in the policies of the left, and are stuck with him.

But they are no longer stuck. This week’s epic loss—a landscape of pro-Republican issues and a repudiation of Republican candidates—should jar them loose. He is nowhere near the only game in town. It’s time for a jailbreak.

There will be other candidates for president, including Mr. DeSantis, who turned Florida red. If Mr. Trump goes forward and Mr. DeSantis does too, it will be one of the great political brawls. Mr. Trump is already essentially trying to blackmail the governor—“I know more about him than anybody other than perhaps his wife.” Mr. DeSantis has wisely refrained from responding.

He should continue holding his fire, not try to laugh it off or respond in kind. He should concentrate on governing and reaching out. If he decides to run, at that point he should answer—in a cool and deadly way, not a personal way. A way that acknowledges Mr. Trump was a breakthrough figure, changed the party in some healthy ways, but got lost in obsessions and bitterness, in petty feuds—in an All About Me-ness that came at the expense of policy and party. All About Me is a losing game, because politics is all about us.

Trump supporters will say, “Well, Trump’s been insulting him a long time, he’s got a right to answer. He’s got a right to insult back, and he didn’t.” Many of them will hear. They’ll think.

Meantime there’s a gift for Republicans in what happened this week. “Every victory carries within it the seeds of defeat, every defeat the seeds of victory.” If Republicans had just won, they never would have learned a thing.

They can learn now. The old saying is there’s no education in the second kick of a mule. This is the third kick, after 2018 and 2020. Maybe they will learn now.

William F. Buckley once received a postelection letter from an elderly liberal saying that she wished it were not only the number of votes counted but the weight and worthiness of each. Surely the votes of the thoughtful and informed should be counted more heavily than those of the frivolous and knee-jerk. If we did it that way, she said, the Democrats would have just won in a sweep and not gone down to defeat. Buckley replied that he too wished the votes of the more knowledgeable were given greater weight as this would ensure conservative victories for generations. My goodness they joked around in those days.

My modest hope as Tuesday approaches is that all ballots be cast only after much thought. It’s almost touching to talk this way, to want the quality of each vote to be high, but every time I hear “Vote!” or “If you don’t vote you don’t get the sticker that says you voted,” I realize that the pressure to vote is high, especially among the young. We say that voting is our right and duty and it certainly is our right, enshrined in that old Constitution, but our duty is to take a serious interest in our country, state and city, and be part of an informed citizenry. And then vote.

Maybe you feel pressure to vote, maybe your friends or associates will tease or embarrass you if you don’t, but I don’t know. If at this point in your life, for whatever reason, you don’t care that much and haven’t bothered to learn much and get a sense of the candidates—if in your heart you know you’re not as committed and informed as the neighbors, who are always going out to meetings and helping local groups—then I say it would be honorable to hold off and spend the next few years studying. This would be an act of humility. Democracies can’t continue without at least someone being humble.

So if you’re serious and take our political life seriously, please go Tuesday to the polls. And if not, admit it to yourself and try to become a better citizen so you can vote in good conscience next time.

May Serious Person turnout be historically high.

I wrote last week of where I think we’re going, and why: a very good night for Republicans, with both houses of Congress won and some surprising governorships taken. The wave we are in has been building since the spring and summer of 2020 and the protests and riots sparked by the killing of George Floyd. That period has never been fully appreciated as the time of trauma and disorder it was, with small businesses going up in flames and some downtowns turning into war zones. It was just about that point the Democratic Party made it obvious they’d gone far left on issues of crime and punishment. Then Afghanistan, illegal immigration, inflation and wokeness in the schools. Those things would leave voters turning against a ruling party, and taking from it some of its power. It should be remembered in all the excitement that Congress will still likely be close in both houses, that neither party will have an overwhelming majority. America is still divided.

On Wednesday evening the president made his hastily called closing argument. It was aggressive and sloppily divisive. Immediately at the beginning he painted the attack on Paul Pelosi, then went to 1/6 and Donald Trump’s Big Lie. All these things were and are terrible and deserve continued thought and attention. But Joe Biden deployed them politically, as a dodge to keep the mind from issues working against the Democrats. His speeches seem tired and pre-masticated. He never seems to think aloud seriously or follow any particular line of logic. He just describes things over and over in what he thinks moving language that will break through. It doesn’t because it isn’t moving. The path to most hearts is through the brain.

His strategy, I suppose, was to light a fire under the Democratic base. A broader strategy would have been better: Talk to the American people candidly, acknowledge what’s not working, don’t treat crime and inflation like a third rail you can’t touch. At least say, “I hear you, the problems you are facing are real, and I am asking for the right to turn them around.”

Would that have worked? No! Nothing will work right now, it’s a midterm and voters are mad. So just be as constructive and realistic as you can. There’s nothing wrong with seeming beleaguered when you are, or asking for help when you need it.

Here is what is coming: The dread Democratic circular firing squad. Everyone in the party fighting about whose fault it was.

Progressives mostly stayed off the national trail because voters noticed their policies were a large part of the problem. Those policies and their promoters will face some internal fire. So will individual campaigns, and faulty candidates. If, against such odds, a Republican wins the New York governorship for the first time in 20 years, Democrats will accuse the state party of complacency and blindness.

But after a few days most of their wrath will be turned on Mr. Biden, first in sharp, hot not-for-attribution quotes and then very-much-for-attribution quotes. In the coming weeks and months it will become clear the 2024 presidential cycle has begun, and the party’s attempt to replace its incumbent. All those Democratic Senate candidates who wouldn’t answer the question: Do you want him to run again? They knew what’s coming.

Final point: California Gov. Gavin Newsom has it exactly wrong about his party’s problem right now. He insisted this week that the Democrats’ problem is they got their communications and messaging wrong. “We’re getting crushed on narrative.” No, you’re getting crushed on facts. You’re getting crushed by unpopular policies. The answer is to change them, not how you talk about them. How you communicate your feelings about the facts isn’t the issue—suburban women don’t care about your feelings. They care about real-world things. If you don’t understand this you won’t be able to dig your way out.

And here a small thought on what we are doing Tuesday, which is choosing political leaders. Politics is a profession, a serious one for serious people, and, for its successful practitioners, one closer to art than we know. Artists try to apprehend the big picture quickly and, at the same time, get to the heart of it. My fear of current leaders now, many of them, is that they came to full adulthood in the past 30 years, in the internet age, and are more about the picture and the video than the book. They are strategic but not reflective. They don’t read. They see feeling as more important than thinking. They Instagram their breakfast. They go to the gym a lot and are buff in their skinny suits.

Those serious, thoughtful voters I pine for? I hope those elected next week are worthy of them.

I think we all have a sense of where this is going.

People are alarmed at the cost of things. They are afraid of crime. They don’t like what they see of the schools. These are personal, intimate issues. They have to do with how you live your life. You don’t want to be the parents who can’t buy the kids what they need and the other kids make fun of them. You don’t want the emotional mood of your house dictated by your fear that you can’t make rent. You don’t want to be hit on the head on the way to the store—what would you do if you were carjacked, what’s the right way to act?—and you don’t want to be constantly doubting your kids are safe. And the schools are swept by weirdness of all kinds. Just teach them math and history so they can go on and get a good job and not always be afraid of the rent.

These three things, plus illegal immigration, will defeat a lot of Democrats on Nov. 8, as will one other factor: The Democrats don’t have a plan. This leaves voters thinking: We can’t turn it around with them. Their party is committed to ideologies that are causing or contributing to these problems, and they’re afraid to break free of those commitments because the leftward edges of their base won’t vote for them if they do. So they’re stuck talking doubletalk.

With the Republicans, maybe their plans will work, maybe not, but at least they’re talking about what you’re thinking about, at least there’s a possibility they’ll come through.

I want to talk about crime and New York. The other day this newspaper ran an editorial recalling some recent mayhem. A 62-year-old grandfather was punched in the head at a Bronx subway station and propelled onto the tracks. Last week a man was pushed onto the tracks in Brooklyn, and another onto the tracks in the Bronx. In September, a father of two was fatally stabbed on a Brooklyn train. The suspect was a homeless man who’d been arrested for a subway stabbing last year and was out on “supervised release.” As if we supervise them.

The New York Post reported an 18-year-old woman was stabbed in the hip on Wednesday by a “deranged stranger” at 10 a.m. on a Brooklyn street. A police source told the Post: “It looks like an EDP”—an emotionally disturbed person.

Democrats have long replied that crime statistics are in fact lower than they were decades ago. But decades ago New York was in a sustained crime wave and trying to crawl its way out. The trend lines now are going the wrong way. So when Democrats respond this way, it sounds like, “Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?”

Professional criminals and gang members know they have the upper hand: changes in procedure mean they likely won’t be charged; revisions in bail law mean if they are, they’ll be out by lunch.

And there are the mentally ill, who are pretty much dumped on the streets in America. Back in the 1960s and ’70s the forces of modern thinking argued not only that mental hospitals were scandalously run and often Dickensian, but that we had it all wrong: Society itself is so crazy that a “crazy” response was a hallmark of a kind of higher sanity. The insane were our thought leaders. It is true that institutionalization was usually terrible, but the answer can’t be that the insane are left to roam the streets and build tent cities on sidewalks. The answer is to devote more resources to broadening and improving institutionalization. Most politicians know this but feel they can’t turn the ship around, so they ignore the issue and just do press conferences where they say moving things about the little girl who was murdered.

Meanwhile, the mentally ill often go off their meds when they’re in the mood. Manic depressives miss the high of the manic episodes, schizophrenics miss their visions. So they go off, and go crazy, and grandpa winds up on the subway tracks.

You can calculate what a street criminal will do, and factor it in. Don’t walk on the empty street at night; don’t wear the gold Rolex when dining at an outside restaurant, the scooter gangs will get you. It’s harder to predict what an insane person will do, which is why everyone feels at their mercy.

People have no confidence—none—that “the authorities” will do anything to make the situation better. The district attorneys’ offices are in the grip of a legal ideology that views inequity and racism as the primary and essential problem, and once we solve them we can then focus on street crime.

This ideology owns Twitter, the Slack channels of major media companies and the departments of all major universities and their law schools. So it is formidable. It has been winning since the 2010s. But in sheer numbers its advocates punch way above their weight. What anticrime voters need to realize is they have mass. They are the overwhelming majority—in both parties. They can fight back. This Election Day I think they will.

That is the context of New York’s startling gubernatorial race, with Republican Rep. Lee Zeldin up against incumbent Democrat Kathy Hochul. Ms. Hochul held a comfortable lead in a state where Democratic registration is twice that of Republicans, and Mr. Zeldin long ago wrapped himself around Donald Trump’s engine and voted not to certify Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral votes. This was in line with feeling in his district but not the state, which Mr. Trump lost by 23 points.

Yet suddenly it’s a real race, and the reason is crime. In the debate this week, Mr. Zeldin talked about it as if he cared. When Ms. Hochul mentioned gun control, Mr. Zeldin lit up. No, he said, it’s not only guns: “You have people who are afraid of being pushed in front of oncoming subway cars, they’re being stabbed, beaten to death on the street with hammers. Go talk to the Asian-American community and how it’s impacted them with the loss of lives. . . . We need to be talking about all of these other crimes, but instead Kathy Hochul is too busy patting herself on the back, ‘Job well done.’”

He said he’d declare a crime emergency from day one, as we did with Covid, and remove progressive district attorneys.

It was electric. Watch that race.

There was nothing endearing about Mr. Zeldin, who is deliberately growly and grim. He has this in common with a lot of the male post-Trump-presidency generation of GOP politicians: There is a sense of unease in them, something at once aggressive and furtive. They glower and simmer, grrr grrr, as if it’s a concession to your fancy ideas of civilization to be personable. Here an angry conservative will say, “Our country’s a dumpster fire and you want charm? You want winsome?”

No, I’d like normal. Politics is a game of addition. Attract those who don’t equate a glower with wisdom. What does good nature cost you?

Half a century ago William F. Buckley wrote a small gem of a book called “Cruising Speed,” about a single action-packed week in his life as an editor and writer. I’ve just had a Buckley-like week—at Purdue University in Indiana to speak with students, then back to New York to interview Henry Kissinger for the White House Historical Association, and then on to make the main speech to the Al Smith Dinner, the Archdiocese of New York’s big annual bipartisan charitable fundraiser. In all these venues the same theme emerged. People are worried about America and the world.

Purdue has a strong sense of community and its students are quick, affable and penetrating. I met with about 70 of them Monday for questions and answers in a political-science class at Beering Hall, and almost all their questions betrayed a perplexity about America. They were worried that our political polarization might prove fatal, that we might lose our democracy. They see signs of it. A student asked how Trump supporters can believe, after all the investigations and judicial decisions, that Joe Biden lost and he won. I said there are a lot of parts to that. Americans have always loved conspiracism, it’s in our DNA. When I was a kid it was the CIA killed JFK, Dwight Eisenhower is a communist, fluoride in the water is a plot. In our time this tendency has been magnified and weaponized by the internet, where there’s always a portal to provide you proof.

Part of it is American orneriness—people enjoy picking a fight, holding a grudge, being the only person who really gets what’s going on. Part of it is the sheer cussed fun of being obstinate. Some of it is committed and sincere—an ineradicable belief that established powers like to pull the wool over our eyes, a belief made more stubborn because sometimes they do. In the case of politicians it can be a mystery how sincere they are and how much is opportunism. If the locals say Trump won and I’m running for office, then Trump won! The only thing I could think of to help was keeping lines of communication up and the conversation going.

Later, in a “fireside chat” with Purdue’s president, Mitch Daniels, a student asked about something I’d written years ago—that presidential nominees always look alone up there on stage, like lone cowboys acting out some kind of personal destiny. I said yes, it had been a while since a candidate looked as if he had an ideological movement behind him, a fully thought-through political philosophy that propelled supporters. Such a movement implies mass, a force that came up from the people. Mr. Daniels said movements get things done; they will political change into being. He threw up a quote from my first book, 32 years ago, that said liberals in the media don’t dislike conservatives.

That was true when I wrote it, I said, but it seems less true now. In the seven years since Donald Trump came down the escalator, mainstream media has changed its nature. I understand why they thought they had to stop Mr. Trump—our big media come largely from New York, which had known him for more than 30 years and saw him not as the commanding presence on “The Apprentice” but as a con man who always seemed to operate one step ahead of the law. They felt they had to oppose him, but that very opposition left them not “reporting” but becoming what only some of them wanted to be, openly activist and of the left. This too contributed to polarization: people who more or less used to trust them to throw the ball straight no longer do, and find other news sources, some of which are specious indeed.

I went home to New York and, on Wednesday night, to interview Mr. Kissinger. With a book out and crises brewing he’s on the scene and, at 99, treated as what he is, a legend. I think here Henry’s friend Bill Buckley might have fun and call him the biggest thing since Bismarck. Mr. Kissinger is grave about the current moment. The evening was informally off the record, but I don’t think he’d mind my saying I asked him about broad feelings of anxiety about the world. Is it unrealistic to be experiencing this moment as uniquely dangerous? During his answer—no, he doesn’t think it unrealistic—he reflected that he’s been thinking a lot about World War I and how the leaders of the nations engaged in that conflict had no idea, at the beginning, the magnitude of the losses coming, that they just stumbled in and stumbled on.

His advice seemed to echo what we discussed at Purdue: In tough times, keep all lines of communication up and operating. You never know what might come in on the wires. Keep the conversation going.

On Thursday night, I gave the main speech at the Al Smith Dinner. A little more than 600 people gathered in the Park Avenue Armory, every politician of note in the state and city, and business figures and philanthropists, many on the broad dais in white tie and tails or gowns. The trick at the dinner is to be funny as possible while training your fire equally on both parties. The assumption is everyone’s better when they’re laughing. I did my best. Chuck Schumer’s been in Congress so long that medically he’s considered a pre-existing condition. Kevin McCarthy told me at the last national prayer breakfast that Jesus loves America best, that’s why the Bible is in English.

Will President Biden run for re-election? He’s showing telltale signs of aging. Held a state dinner and insisted it start at 5 p.m. so he could get the early-bird special. Afterward he invited the visiting prime minister to go upstairs and watch “Hogan’s Heroes.” Then he spent a half hour trying to rewind Netflix. A month from now he turns 80 but the White House has been playing down any celebrations. Internal memos about it have such a high security classification that copies have been found at Mar-a-Lago. But personally I prefer age to some of the younger congressmen and -women, who are, basically, airheads. I’ve interviewed them. They think Machiavelli is a clothing designer. They think bilateral and trilateral are muscles you work in the gym.

And there’s Ted Cruz. When Ted ran for president, he called me and asked me for advice. I said, “Ted, just be yourself.” That was mean of me.

Then there’s Mike Pence, a good man. But hearing him give a speech is proof that the dead are trying to contact us.

And so my Buckley-like week: the questioning young at Purdue, the wisdom of a great statesman in New York, and on to the Park Avenue Armory for the Catholic Church raising money for kids and immigrants by teasing itself and others. A good thing in life is not to get jaded but to see that even in a world of trouble life is moving, stimulating, even splendid, that you’re lucky to be here and doing what you’re doing. I think Bill Buckley would have enjoyed himself.

Public pronouncements aren’t commensurate with the gravity of the Ukraine situation. They’ve gotten too informal, off-the-cuff and shallow.

Russia continues its missile barrage against Ukrainian cities. The Crimean bridge was daringly taken out, delivering Vladimir Putin a real blow, and within hours Ukraine was tauntingly unveiling a postage stamp depicting the ruined span. The Nord Stream pipeline has been sabotaged. Each side blames the other, but either way Europe is braced for a long dark winter. And both sides are either threatening or speculating aloud about the use of nuclear weapons.

President Biden has taken to publicly comparing the current moment to the Cuban Missile Crisis. From reported remarks at a New York City Democratic fundraiser: “We have a direct threat of the use of the nuclear weapon if in fact things continue down the path they are going. . . . We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy.” Vladimir Putin is “not joking.”

If we’re facing Armageddon, that should be taking up all the president’s time. JFK wasn’t at fundraisers in October 1962, and when he spoke it was in a studied, careful way, and to the entire nation.

Since the tanks first moved in February, one of this column’s preoccupations has been the tone, volume and swiftness of the declarations, tweets, one-liners and ad libs that followed. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, at the beginning, had to establish that he and his country would fight: “I need ammunition, not a ride.” The West in turn had to make clear it would resist this brute violation of international law, the violent invasion of a sovereign nation. If it didn’t, it would be accepting the idea that the law counts for nothing; the world is a jungle where the feral have the upper hand.

Since then, and as the stakes got higher, leaders have become all too casual—unserious and sloppy. Part of it is social media, on which the whole world is hooked. Ambassadors launch taunting tweets like rockets and get high-fives instead of irradiated craters. I can’t get the phrases “possible nuclear war” and “let’s do snark” to go together in my head. Many others can.

What’s needed is a serious, weighty, textured document that reflects the gravity of the moment we’re in, a full Oval Office address that doesn’t emote but speaks rationally to a nation of thoughtful people. A big definitional statement. Where are we? Are we communicating with the Kremlin? How should the American people be thinking about all this?

There are times in life and diplomacy when silence must be maintained as circumstances evolve and new options emerge. But we’re not maintaining silence. As for the efficacy of thoughtfulness, sometimes it can cool things down or slow them down. If we’re traveling toward Armageddon the slow route is best.

Here I jump to Mr. Putin himself. It’s hard to imagine a peaceful resolution while he retains power. It is possible conversations have begun among members of the institutions that might most effectively move against him—the state intelligence apparatus, the military, even the cabinet. If they are talking, it would be going like this: Mr. Putin himself drove the war, which was a bad idea badly executed; it likely can’t be won by conventional means; the use of nuclear or chemical weapons would create a physical danger to, and reputational disaster for, Russia; the Ukraine adventure has stressed the Russian economy and strained its political stability; the people don’t want it—not the elites seeing their worlds constrict, the middle seeing their aspirations disrupted, the hinterland folks whose sons are being sacrificed.

A veteran observer this week said Mr. Putin is a strongman who is now a weak man. That sort, he implied, can’t continue.

When Nikita Khrushchev was deposed in October 1964, his adult son, Sergei, was keeping a diary. Twenty-four years later, when the diaries were published, Sergei spoke to Felicity Barringer of the New York Times.

Khrushchev, who was 70 in 1964, had embarrassed the Kremlin in the Cuban Missile Crisis, when his aggression and bluster were followed by retreat. He first caught wind of a plot when a bodyguard for a former Politburo member phoned and warned Sergei that the bodyguard’s boss, the head of the KGB, the communist party secretary and two current Politburo members were planning a coup. Nikita Khrushchev didn’t believe it but asked that his friend President Anastas Mikoyan be told. Later, at his dacha on the Black Sea, he received a call: There would be an emergency meeting in Moscow, his presence was necessary. Khrushchev suddenly realized he’d been seeing odd things—a ship hovering near his beach, bodyguards outside his usual detail.

At the Politburo meeting the coup leaders accused him of mismanagement, nepotism and tactlessness. He admitted he was rude but disputed the other points. At a second meeting he accepted his fate. The official news agency Tass reported he was retiring due to poor health and advanced age. He lived out his life gardening, airbrushed from historical photos, and died in 1971. In time, almost perversely, he told Mikoyan what happened was proof of the progress he’d instituted. Would anyone have dared tell Stalin to resign? “There wouldn’t be anything left of us.”

More recently, in August 1991, was the coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev. He was at his Black Sea house when his communications were cut off and he was placed under arrest. The Warsaw Pact countries were starting to break free. The KGB and the military didn’t like Gorbachev’s approach and said they feared the Soviet Union was next. They rolled tanks into Moscow, seized state television and announced Gorbachev was leaving for health reasons. Massive crowds gathered in the streets opposing the coup, and the pro-democracy figure Boris Yeltsin took to the top of a tank to urge resistance. The army broke, the KGB backed down, and Gorbachev returned to Moscow. But Moscow was Yeltsin’s now. A few months later, on Christmas Day, Gorbachev stepped down. Yeltsin declared the Soviet Union over. It would be Russia now, Russia again.

In his farewell speech Gorbachev said he opposed the “dismembering” of what had been the previous Soviet state, and warned of danger ahead for the countries carved away. Six years later Yeltsin appointed a new head of the domestic arm of the intelligence service, a young man named Vladimir Putin.

Mr. Putin has dismantled or defanged some of the institutions that might go up against him. He likely has things pretty tightly wired. Unlike the KGB when it faced the protests of the Gorbachev coup, he wouldn’t likely shrink from bloodshed. Khrushchev was a fully rational actor, as was Gorbachev, as apparently were those who opposed them. We cannot be certain Mr. Putin is.

And Mr. Putin has the benefit of knowing how the two previous coup attempts ended. He’s probably made a deep study of both. And of course he lived through Gorbachev in 1991, as a KGB officer, though later he insisted he resigned when it began.

We’ll be helping dissidents only if we show now seriousness and sobriety and gravity, and repeat again the old Cold War distinction: We are against the Russian government’s actions but feel only respect and regard for the people of Russia, with whom we only want peace.

If you have been observing the Georgia U.S. Senate campaign closely and you are unusually straightforward and eloquent you would say of Herschel Walker what John Ellis said Wednesday in his newsletter:

“Walker shouldn’t be a candidate for the United States Senate. He’s not qualified. He won’t know what to do when (and if) he gets to Washington. He’s only on the ticket because former President Trump endorsed him. The moment he becomes a liability for Trump, Trump will cut him loose. So will everyone else. No one cares about Herschel Walker in GOP circles. . . . If Georgia Republicans could replace him on the ballot today, they would do so in a nano-second. They can’t. It’s too late.”

Mr. Ellis believes, however, that Mr. Walker could still win: energy prices up, inflation untamed, an out-of-control southern border, and a federal debt that this week reached a historic and somewhat harrowing $31 trillion. People fear recession. They won’t want to back the current cast of political characters, they’ll want to throw them out.

I’d add that voters don’t expect much. They’ve had their own imperfect lives, and they long ago lost any assumption that political leaders were more upstanding than they. We are in the postheroic era of American politics. What voters want is someone who sees the major issues as they do. Conservatives especially see America’s deep cultural sickness and wonder if the country is cratering before our eyes. In such circumstances personal histories don’t count as once they did.

But I see the Walker story differently and expect a different outcome.

Here I must tell you what you know, that the avowedly pro-life Senate candidate is accused of paying for the abortion of a former girlfriend, whose identity has not been revealed but who provided the Daily Beast substantiating evidence. Mr. Walker denied it, said he doesn’t know the woman and he sends checks to lots of people. The woman soon after came forward and said he should remember me, I gave birth to one of his children.

Explosive. But I think Republican strategists misunderstand the scandal, or miss the heart of it. It isn’t really about abortion or hypocrisy. It is about children born and the father says to the mother: You can raise it by yourself or you can abort it but I won’t help you raise it and act as a father. That is the story, that Walker is accused of abandoning his little kids, and it came from his son, Christian, 23, a conservative activist, who made the furious videos that blew the story up. That is the aspect Christian focused on: “My father . . . had all these random kids across the country, none of whom he raised. . . . Family values people: He has four kids—four different women—wasn’t in the house raising one of them. He was out having sex with other women. . . . You have no idea what me and my mom have survived.”

Voters who would easily forgive abortion or running around or bad breakups or divorce are less likely to give a pass on that, on four children left alone by their father, the rich handsome former football star and candidate for Senate. Christian Walker’s pain is a common one. The U.S. Census Bureau found in 2021 that 25% of American children are raised in households without their father. In Georgia there are more than 261,000 households with children under 18, a female head and no spouse or partner present.

That’s a lot of people. All of them would likely take this part of the story more to heart.

Republicans can say it’s an October surprise, a well-timed oppo drop. Mr. Walker himself says it shows how desperate Democrats are to hold the seat, they’ll smear you with anything. His supporters note the incumbent, Sen. Raphael Warnock, has had his own personal embarrassments, with an ex-wife who accused him of trying to run over her foot in an argument. He’s just a “great actor,” she says. But that’s the kind of thing that impresses people who want to stick with you anyway. I’m not sure it moves anyone else.

Donald Trump is the reason Herschel Walker won the primary, but the Republican establishment in Washington was part of it. They looked at Mr. Walker and thought: fame, football star. He’ll raise tons of money. He will need a lot of help—he’s a political neophyte—but that will mean more jobs for high-priced consultants. Nothing wrong with that! And there were the maybes. Maybe he could help heal the Trump rift in the party. Maybe establishment support itself helps heal the rift. Maybe Mr. Walker could become the candidate who can seal the deal with minority voters, a guy who says by his very presence, “You have a home in this party.” Republicans actually do want to reach out, to include, to expand their base. But in this case it made them insane, it made them ignore what was obvious. Only a year ago the Associated Press was reporting Walker’s ex-wife Cindy Grossman, Christian’s mother, feared that he’d kill her and had to get a protective order against him. He had been accused of stalking and making violent threats against ex-girlfriends. Ms. Grossman said he’d held a gun to her head and threatened to blow her brains out. All this was known when everyone decided to back him.

Mr. Walker has spoken and written of his mental-health struggles, and he deserves sympathy. No one takes a sarcastic tone when noting that football-related brain injuries may have played a role in his adult life.

The Washington Post reported this week that national GOP leaders are behind Mr. Walker, but local leaders in Georgia feel “unease.” He gave a rousing speech for Mr. Trump at the 2020 GOP convention and maybe it took some guts, because it’s never been easy to be black and conservative. But he is a wholly untested newcomer to professional politics. The Post quoted former DeKalb County GOP Chairman Lane Flynn, who bottom-lined it: “The question going forward is how transactional is the average voter going to be?” If you’re sincerely pro-life, how does the Walker story reflect on the pro-life movement?

Seth Weathers, a longtime Georgia GOP strategist and state director of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, said, “I warned everyone I knew that this was a dumb idea,” referring to Mr. Walker’s nomination. Then, poignantly, “We could have had Gary Black.” Mr. Black was the state’s veteran agriculture commissioner, and before the Senate primary he mostly won landslides. He was a farmer, and he backed Mr. Trump. But he wasn’t the exciting choice, he wouldn’t blow up the money machine, and there was nothing dramatic about him. Why not throw the long ball?

It was political malfeasance all the way down. I understand why Republicans want to win back the Senate, and I hope they do. But they need to learn, again, that you need to be more serious than this, you can’t be so lacking in gravity when it comes to someone who may help decide Ukraine policy. You can’t be so frivolous and lacking in weight.

My hunch is they’re about to learn a lesson. Maybe it’s ultimately better that they learn it, again, and unmistakably.

In October it will be 60 years since the Cuban missile crisis, which has been called the most dangerous crisis in recorded history. The Soviet Union had secretly placed missiles in a base in Cuba; the U.S. discovered them through secret aerial photographs. What would President John F. Kennedy do, less than two years into his presidency and 1½ since the botched Bay of Pigs invasion? It is a famous story told in books, movies and monographs, but it bears another look and deeper reflection as Vladimir Putin threatens nuclear use in Ukraine.

Weeks ago Ukraine’s top military chief warned that there is “a direct threat of the use . . . of tactical nuclear weapons by the Russian armed forces.” Gen. Valery Zaluzhny wrote: “It’s also impossible to completely rule out possibility of the direct involvement of the world’s leading countries in a ‘limited’ nuclear conflict, in which the prospect of World War III is already directly visible.”

What can we learn from what happened 60 years ago? The JFK Library website has transcripts, tapes and documents of White House deliberations as the crisis played out. What strikes you as you read and listen is the desperate and essential fact that they were groping in the darkness to keep the world from blowing up.

From the transcript of a White House meeting the morning of Oct. 16, the first day of the 13-day crisis:

Secretary of State Dean Rusk: “Mr. President, this is a, of course, a [widely?] serious development. It’s one that we, all of us, had not really believed the Soviets could, uh, carry this far.”

JFK asked why the Russians would do this. Gen. Maxwell Taylor suggested they weren’t confident of their long-range nuclear weapons and sought placement of shorter-range ones. Rusk thought it might be that Nikita Khrushchev lives “under fear” of U.S. nuclear weapons in Turkey and wants us to taste the same anxiety.

U.S. officials knew where most of the missiles and launchers were in Cuba, but not where the nuclear warheads were, or even if they’d arrived.

Should the U.S. attack the bases? If so, should it warn the Soviets first?

JFK: “Warning them, uh, it seems to me, is warning everybody. And I, I obviously—you can’t sort of announce that in four days from now you’re going to take them out. They may announce within three days they’re going to have warheads on ’em. If we come and attack they’re going to fire them. Then what’ll we do?”

You can hear the tension in the voices, and you can hear them because JFK secretly taped the deliberations, as he taped many conversations. No one knows why; historians have evinced a pronounced lack of interest in the question.

But it’s good he did, because it allows us to see decision-making played out at the highest level and with the highest possible stakes. Seemingly small things tell you worlds about general mood and approach. When JFK called to brief Harold Macmillan, the British prime minister said it might encourage the Soviets to withdraw the weapons if actions were taken to “help the Russians save face.” He offered to “immobilize our Thor missiles here in England” temporarily. JFK said he’d bring the idea forward. This was the West working to defuse things and encourage constructive action. Conceivably, were it discovered, Macmillan could have paid a political price for this at home; he never mentions that.

As the political scientist Graham Allison has noted, JFK was focused on big, strategic nuclear weapons. He didn’t know and couldn’t have known that Khrushchev had already sent smaller, tactical nukes to Cuba, under a Soviet commander who was on the ground there. If JFK had bombed the missile sites instead of using naval blockades and creative diplomacy, he might have unleashed what he was trying to prevent.

In the end, of course, Khrushchev withdrew the missiles. JFK, who had previously admitted to him that the Bay of Pigs was a mistake, repeated a promise not to invade Cuba. He secretly promised, too, that the U.S. would get its missiles out of Turkey.

But the story doesn’t end there. Eight months later, in June 1963, Kennedy gave a speech in which he described how the crisis had convinced him that the entire Cold War must be rethought. His speechwriter, Ted Sorensen, told me years later it was the “most important” speech he’d ever worked on. I saw in his eyes he meant the greatest, and he was right.

The nature of war has changed, Kennedy said. We can’t continue with great powers having huge nuclear arsenals and possibly resorting to their use: “A single nuclear weapon contains almost 10 times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War.” A major nuclear exchange could extinguish the world.

To believe peace is impossible is to believe war inevitable, and if that is so then mankind is doomed. “We need not accept that view.” No government is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in every virtue. America and the Soviet Union are “almost unique among the major world powers” in that “we have never been at war with each other.”

If we can’t resolve all our differences, we can at least turn to common interests. “For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”

Importantly, there was this: “Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war.” Choosing that path would be evidence of a “collective death-wish for the world.” That is why U.S. military forces are “disciplined in self-restraint” and our diplomats “instructed to avoid unnecessary irritants and purely rhetorical hostility.”

He said talks would soon begin in Moscow toward a comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty. He vowed to act as if it were already in place.

Kennedy’s insight that nuclear weapons changed the facts of human history was shared by Ronald Reagan. Like Kennedy, he respected Russia’s nuclear arsenal. Reagan said, privately and publicly, that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” He had been shocked, years before his presidency, to spend a day at Norad and absorb all the implications of the doctrine of mutual assured destruction. As president his way would be stark candor coupled with increased strength and no sudden moves. Between 1982 and 1985 three Soviet leaders died, but when Reagan got a partner he could work with, Mikhail Gorbachev, he attempted, at Reykjavik in 1986, to abolish nuclear weapons outright. Later they achieved a historic arms-control agreement.

What lessons might diplomats infer from all this? Don’t be afraid of groping your way in the darkness. Stay fearful of—and focused on—nuclear weapons. Take chances. And don’t be so sure of continued good luck. We’ve been lucky for 77 years. We’re used to the worst thing not happening. But it could, and may.

You have to keep trying. You can’t rest on luck built by others.

Vladimir Putin’s threat to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine must be received soberly, if for no other reason than that leaders occasionally do what they say they’ll do. There are reasons beyond that. He has lost hardware, soldiers, ground and face. He is cornered and escalating, increasing the odds of mistake and miscalculation.

Great care is needed now, the greatest possible. Wednesday this week came the famous (though not first) threat of nuclear use. In a rare speech to the nation from the Kremlin, Mr. Putin said: “If the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, we will use all available means to protect Russia and our people—this is not a bluff.” He announced referendums in occupied areas that will presumably result in declarations that they are Russian territory. Ukraine’s attempts to push back Russian troops can then be defined as an invasion of Russia, which Mr. Putin must defend by any and all means.

He also called up 300,000 reservists. There is reason to doubt this will appreciably improve Russia’s position. The motley new troops will be blended over months into an army that doesn’t work. This is one reason we can’t be certain Mr. Putin will lean most heavily on conventional methods of war.

Russia is long thought to have about 10 times as many tactical nuclear weapons as the U.S., with delivery systems ranging from mobile ground-based launchers to ships. These weapons are smaller than strategic weapons, with shorter range and lower yield. The Times of London provided a map with concentric circles to show potential blast radiuses if a tactical nuke were trained on London—it was like something out of 1958. Such weapons are built to take out specific targets in specific areas without widespread destruction. But yes, radioactive debris in Ukraine would waft this way or that with wind currents, possibly west toward Poland, possibly toward Mr. Putin’s own troops. Not that he’d care; not that they’d think he’d care.

American diplomats have believed Mr. Putin will never use tactical nukes because he’d fear the price. But they can’t know that, especially if they’re unclear what price they’d exact. They hope Russian officials in the command structure would thwart such an order, but they can’t be certain of that either. They believe they can’t bow to nuclear blackmail because that would bring a whole new order of international chaos with it, and that’s true. All the more reason the greatest care is required now.

The atmosphere around Mr. Putin appears increasingly fevered. His enemies keep falling from windows and boats. This week the former head of the Moscow Aviation Institute, an erstwhile Putin supporter, reportedly fell down “a series of flights of stairs,” resulting, according to the announcement on Telegram, in “injuries incompatible with life.” Antiwar demonstrations broke out in 37 Russian cities, according to the Associated Press. “Send Putin to the trenches,” they chanted in Moscow. Wednesday’s address was scheduled for Tuesday, postponed and given 13 hours late. Airline seats out of Moscow are famously full and not round trips. There are reports Mr. Putin himself is bypassing his generals and sending direct orders to the field.

Maybe he’s finding that fewer of his countrymen than he’d supposed share his mystical vision of a greater imperial Russia restored; maybe it’s just him and 50 intellectuals. Maybe that will intensify his bitterness and nihilism.

But all this speaks of growing disorder around him. His most eloquent critics and foes in the West call him a liar and murderer, and he is, but it’s worse now than they think. This isn’t Syria; it’s not the joy of poisoning your enemies or jailing dissidents. Ukraine is the ballgame for him. The whole meaning of his adult life is his war with the West, and this is the battlefield. He is about to turn 70, closer to the end than the beginning. He alone drove this thing and he’ll drive it into the ground because, I believe, he doesn’t care anymore, and he can’t lose.

All this is apart from other unconventional means of trouble at his disposal, from cyber and infrastructure attacks to fighting near nuclear reactors, as has already occurred. There is the economic and political turmoil that will follow his cutting natural-gas supplies to Western Europe.

I spent the spring and summer reading about World War I, all the big, classic histories, but drilling down even into the memoirs of the tutor of the czarevitch in the last years of Romanov rule. I’ve done such regimens before. I like reading about epic catastrophes: It’s encouraging. We got through that. We’ll get through the next thing.

It reminded me of the obvious, that peacetime governments rarely know exactly what to focus on in real time. They don’t like to think imaginatively about the worst. The leaders of the nations that would go to war in August 1914 were certain in July that there wouldn’t be a war—there couldn’t be, because everyone had too much to lose. Tensions had risen in the past and been soothed. There was the sense of sleepwalking toward war, and indeed a great modern history of the era is called “The Sleepwalkers.” They stumbled in. Paul Fussell, in “The Great War and Modern Memory,” wrote of the horror of the trenches and the hopeless charges into the new weapon called the machine gun, and saw irony. “Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected.” The means are always “melodramatically disproportionate” to the presumed ends.

I hope our leaders are groping toward something, some averting process, maybe along the lines of French President Emmanuel Macron’s urging for a negotiated peace. What shouldn’t fully settle in is the idea that conceding the need to pursue every avenue is somehow letting down the side, and showing insufficient fervor for the Ukraine, that has so moved the world.

I sense people are afraid of looking afraid. But when a bad man who’s a mad man says he’ll do something terrible, it’s not wrong to think about every way you can to slow or stop him.

We live in a funny world that’s at bottom anxious and sad and yet insists on a carapace of cheer, or at least distraction. We’re losing a sense of tragedy.

The other night the great British playwright Tom Stoppard spoke movingly, in New York, of how nations often don’t get the governments they deserve. Russia, he said, is a landmass alive with history and literature and occupied by a people whose suffering and endurance echo through the ages. And look what they’re stuck with. Tolstoy biographer A.N. Wilson, in his recent autobiography, says something similar, describing Russia as an ancient “God-bearing” people whose meaning is located in survival.

If you think of it this way, it’s all the more tragic. Good people all around, bad trouble here and looming.

I’m not a prophet, and I don’t know what to do. But I know the size of this war and this time in history. It’s not the same old, not the usual. It feels like a turning point. We have to get serious in some new way.

“For the British people, Victoria was more than an individual, more even than the queen,” Robert K. Massie wrote in “Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War.” “She was—and had been as long as most of them could remember—a part of the fabric of their lives. She embodied history, tradition, government, and the structure and morality of their society. They trusted her to remain there, always to do her duty, always to give order to their lives. She did not disappoint them. In return, they gave her their allegiance, their devotion—and their esteem.”

We all knew it was coming yet it feels like a blow. A mighty presence has passed, one who meant more to us perhaps than we’d noticed.

The reign of Queen Elizabeth II surpassed Victoria’s (1837-1901) in September 2015. For the vast majority of her people, she was the only monarch they had ever known. Her life spanned almost a century, through wars, through empire and its decline, through every cultural and political shift. And in all that time she was a symbol of continuity, stability and soundness.

There will be, mostly but not only in Britain, a surge of sentiment as if a big page has been turned and we very much don’t want it to turn—we don’t want to get to the end of that book, don’t want to close it.

Her virtues were old-school virtues.

• She accepted her life with grace. When she became queen at 25 she recognized it as her duty and destiny. She was a member of a particular family and the heir to a particular throne. She had a duty to the people of her country and would sacrifice a great deal—privacy, leisure, some faint sense of control of one’s life—to meet it. She represented the permanent over the merely prevalent.

Sally Bedell Smith, in her great biography “Elizabeth the Queen: the Life of a Modern Monarch,” quoted the British journalist Rebecca West, who observed that the monarch is “the emblem of the state, the symbol of our national life, the guardian of our self-respect.” But it was more than that, too; you didn’t have to be English to appreciate what she was doing.

• She did what she said she’d do. After her father’s death, she met with the leaders of Britain at St. James’s Palace. In a clear voice she declared: “By the sudden death of my dear father, I am called to assume the duties and responsibilities of sovereignty. . . . I shall always work, as my father did throughout his reign, to advance the happiness and prosperity of my peoples. . . . I pray that God will help me to discharge worthily this heavy task that has been lain upon me so early in my life.” She did, and everyone watching over the years could see it.

• She gave it everything she had. She was conscientious, serious-minded, responsible. Every day but Christmas and Easter Sunday and wherever she was, she directed her energies to the red leather dispatch boxes of official government papers, Foreign Office cables, budget documents, intelligence reports. She was deskbound as long as needed, often working into the evening. After that the private audiences, public events, consultations. She didn’t flag.

• It wasn’t about her. The important thing was the institution, the monarchy, and its responsibility to its subjects. She wanted to be a queen the country adhered to and was proud of, so she maintained dignity. She knew her role. She didn’t show moods or take sides, never tried to win the crowd, didn’t attempt to establish a reputation for wit or good nature. She was in her public dealings placid, as a great nation’s queen would be. “She has been, as someone once said, the light above politics,” Ms. Smith said Thursday on CNN. “Even when I’d watch her at royal events she would hesitate to clap or smile because she didn’t want to show favoritism. She has wanted to be a force for everybody and a glue for the nation, and that sort of exterior has been important.”

• She was a woman of faith. At her 1953 coronation in Westminster Abbey, the most important moment happened outside of television range. It was when the archbishop of Canterbury poured holy oil and anointed the new queen, “making a sign of the cross on the palms of each of her hands, her forehead, and exposed upper chest,” Ms. Smith wrote. (Victoria hadn’t allowed her archbishop to touch her chest.) Elizabeth felt the anointing “sanctified her before God to serve her people.” Her friends said it was the anointing, not the crowning, that made her queen.

• She understood her role. She was the longest reigning monarch in British history, a continuous thread to the past. Decades passed but the thread remained and never broke, which suggested things would hold together, and everything in the end would be all right. She understood that in the tumultuous 20th century the idea of continuity itself was a gift to her country. She had to be reliable, and was.

• Because of all this, when she entered the room, Britain entered the room. Majesty entered, something old and hallowed and rich in meaning, something going back to tribes that painted themselves blue and forward to the Magna Carta. It was mysterious, but I saw it once: She entered a hall full of voices and suddenly, silence. It was only a few years ago, but I realized that in a time when personal stature is mindlessly thrown off or meanly taken, hers had only increased.

There is something so touching in the way she had begun in the past few years to laugh and smile so much, to show her joy, her simple pleasure in being there. You saw it in pictures taken this week, which showed her seeing off an old prime minister and seeing in a new one, wearing a plaid skirt and long gray cardigan, holding her cane and laughing merrily. I think of how moved I was by the clip a few months ago of the queen and Paddington Bear, in which she divulged what she kept in her purse—a marmalade sandwich. The royal band outside struck up Freddie Mercury, and she kept time with a spoon on her teacup. I didn’t know when I saw it why it moved me so much, and realized: because my mind was saying don’t go old friend, we’ll miss you.

The great of Britain have been talking for years about how sad it will be when she departs. They’re about to be taken aback by how deep and pervasive the mourning is. Britain is braced for hard times; people won’t easily lose such a figure of stability and continuity. “King Charles” will sound strange on the tongue.

And they loved her.

Now I am imagining the royal funeral, the procession, the carriages of state going slowly down the mall, the deep crowds on each side. The old will come in their chairs and the crowd will kindly put them in front, the best view, to wave goodbye to their friend, with whom they had experienced such history together.

Requiescat in pace, Elizabeth Regina.