Peggy Noonan

What do we learn from the George Santos story? Samuel Johnson observed that men more frequently need to be reminded than informed. The Santos story reminds us that the integrity with which we conduct our lives matters.

At first the lies of the newly elected congressman from Long Island, revealed in the New York Times, seemed comic. He sounded like Jon Lovitz’s “Saturday Night Live” character Tommy Flanagan, a member of Pathological Liars Anonymous. “Then my cousin died—Joe Louis. And I took it hard, maybe too hard. I tried to kill myself. Yeah, I did kill myself. I was medically dead for a week and a half. And then it was a woman that brought me out of it—Indira Gandhi.”

But as the story played out I realized Mr. Santos is Sam Bankman-Fried. He is Elizabeth Holmes. He is a 21st-century state-of-the-art fraudster—a stone cold liar who effectively committed election fraud, a calculating political actor who took advantage of voters’ trust. He wasn’t driven by inadequacy but entitlement. He’s less Tommy Flanagan than Patricia Highsmith’s Talented Mr. Ripley.

You can Google “Santos lies,” though you’re likely already familiar with them. He didn’t attend the schools he claimed or work at the prestigious firms he said employed him, didn’t own what he said he owned, do what he said he’d done. He said he was Jewish when he wasn’t. He tweeted in July 2021 that “9/11 claimed my mother’s life” and five months later that she died in December 2016.

The only good thing about what appears to be his reliably compulsive lying, the one good thing that would come of his being seated in the House, is this: When a vote is close and the conference ends and the congressmen spill out into the hall, the press gaggle will surround him and say, “Congressman Santos, who will you vote for?” And he’ll say, “I’m a yes—I’ll stand with Kevin,” and reporters will know immediately that they can run through the halls screaming, “Santos is a no, McCarthy’s margin is shrinking!” I admit this will contribute to the joy of nations.

It is interesting that most of his lies were tied up with money and status. He didn’t go to just any high school, he went to the tony Horace Mann. The real estate he owned wasn’t in Lodi, N.J., but Nantucket. He didn’t work in some dreary insurance brokerage in Hempstead, N.Y., but at Goldman Sachs. This is all Tom Ripley territory, and it tells you what he values.

Mr. Santos’s main answer to the accusations is what he told the New York Post: “My sins here are embellishing my résumé.”

They appear to go beyond that. Where did he get the $700,000 he loaned his campaign? When he ran unsuccessfully in 2020, he disclosed no assets and claimed a salary of $55,000 from a development firm. In the years leading up to 2020 he hadn’t been rising at Goldman; he’d reportedly been working at a call center in Queens. His 2022 filings, however, showed sudden wealth. He claimed he made between $3.5 million and $11.5 million at a company he founded in 2021. He told reporter Kadia Goba of Semafor that he did “deal building,” with “high-net-worth individuals.” If a client wanted to sell a plane or boat, Mr. Santos would go to his extensive Rolodex “and be like, ‘Hey, are you looking for a plane?’ ” He claimed a network of about 15,000 people and “institutions.” He quickly “landed a couple of million-dollar contracts.” He didn’t respond to Semafor’s request for names of clients.

It is to the credit of Tulsi Gabbard, sitting in for Tucker Carlson on his show Tuesday night, that she didn’t cover the Santos story as another act in the freak show of American politics. Grilling him in his first television interview since the accusations surfaced, she drilled straight down into meaning.

She asked what the word “integrity” means to him. Mr. Santos replied it was “very important” but suggested his lies were mere “embellishments.” Ms. Gabbard pressed: The meaning of the word integrity “actually matters in practice.” Mr. Santos said integrity “means to carry yourself in an honorable way,” then said, “I made a mistake. . . . We all make mistakes.”

Then his self-pity kicked in: “I’m having to admit this on national television for the whole country to see.” Then pride: “I have the courage to do so because I believe that in order to . . . be an effective member of Congress, I have to face my mistakes.” Then the self-pity returned: “I worked damn hard to work where I got my entire life. Life wasn’t easy. . . . I come from abject poverty.”

Ms. Gabbard wasn’t having any of it. Integrity, she said, includes “telling the truth.” Mr. Santos’s falsehoods weren’t “one little lie or one little embellishment, these are blatant lies. My question is, do you have no shame?”

Mr. Santos pivoted: He’s no bigger liar than the Democrats. “Look at Joe Biden. Biden’s been lying to the American people for 49 years. . . . Democrats resoundingly support him. Do they have no shame?”

Ms. Gabbard cut him off. “This is not about the Democratic Party, though. This is about your relationships” with voters who put their faith in him. She cited specific lies. He said, “Everybody wants to nitpick at me.”

Ms. Gabbard said his sincerity about policy is “called into question when you tell blatant lies.” One of the biggest concerns is that “you don’t really seem to be taking this seriously.” Blatant lies aren’t “an embellishment on a résumé. . . . It calls into question how your constituents and the American people can believe anything that you may say when you were standing on the floor of the House of Representatives supposedly fighting for them.”

Mr. Santos said his accusers can “debate my résumé.”

Ms. Gabbard: “Is it debatable or is it just false?”

Then Mr. Santos did make a mistake. His résumé, he said, is “very debatable. . . . I can sit down and explain to you what you can do in private equity . . . and we can have this discussion that’s going to go way above the American people’s head.”

“Wow,” Ms. Gabbard said. “You’re saying that this discussion will go way above the heads of the American people, basically insulting their intelligence.” Mr. Santos ended by saying, “Everybody just wants to push me and call me a liar.” Ms. Gabbard wound it up: She’d given him all this time because she felt it was owed to the people of his district: “It’s hard to imagine how they could possibly trust your explanations when you’re not really even willing to admit the depth of your deception to them.”

George Santos should step down, cooperate with all investigations and come clean about his past. Assuming that won’t happen, his local party should disavow him and call for a special election. Republicans in the House should end their silence, formally oppose his entry and close their conference to him.

They have a close margin in the House and believe they can’t afford to lose even one. But Mr. Santos will be the focus of investigations from day one and will be used to pummel the GOP each day for looking past his fraud. They can’t afford to keep him. He is a bridge too far. He is an embarrassment.

There is a sense in which last month’s election can be seen as America trying to return itself to its previous settings. The outcome was inherently moderate, and those who seemed extreme didn’t prosper.

One way the country could return to normalcy is not to have a repeat of Biden vs. Trump in 2024. Nobody wants that. It’s a race that would depress the whole country. There’s so much hunger to turn the page, begin a new era. Could we?

It is certain that Donald Trump will never again be president. The American people won’t have it. This was demonstrated in November: Independents and moderate Republicans rejected GOP candidates who supported him, not trusting them to be responsible in power. It is possible Mr. Trump will get the presidential nomination, but it’s no longer likely.

He’s on the kind of losing strain that shows we’re at the ending of the story. Next summer it will be eight years since he went down the escalator. Time moves—what was crisp and new becomes frayed and soft. His polls continue their downward drift. He is under intense legal pressures. This week the Jan. 6 committee put more daggers in: Only the willfully blind see him as guiltless in the Capitol riot. He will be 78 in 2024 and is surrounded by naïfs, suck-ups, grifters and operators. That was always true but now they are fourth-rate, not second- or third-rate.

He has lost his touch. Remember when you couldn’t not watch him in 2015 and 2016? Now you hear his voice and give it a second before lowering the volume. At his occasional rallies supporters wait for him to pause so they can cheer; they aren’t really listening to the words. Video of the crowd that gathered at Mar-a-Lago to hear him announce showed them trying to leave before he’d finished. There are streaks and slumps in politics as in life, but Mr. Trump’s slump won’t end, because it’s not a slump; it’s a losing season.

The party he’s left on the ground seems to be trying to regain its equipoise. November’s results will speed the process. The GOP in Congress is a mixed bag. There are more than a handful in the House who try to out-Trump Mr. Trump, and they will no doubt continue to batter the party’s reputation. In the Senate only two members really try to out-Trump Mr. Trump, Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz. The top-ranking Republican in Washington, Mitch McConnell, on Jan. 3 surpasses Mike Mansfield as the longest-running Senate party leader. (Mansfield, a Montana Democrat, was majority leader for 16 years, 1961-77; Mr. McConnell has been minority or majority leader since 2007.) On Jan. 6, 2021, he went at Mr. Trump sharply and publicly. He has since demonstrated that you can survive Mr. Trump’s verbal assaults and be understood to stand against him, without letting the subject dominate the daily conversation.

We’re watching the Trump story end before our eyes and can hardly believe it because we thought it was ending before and it wasn’t. But it is now.

As for Joe Biden, all indications are he will run for re-election. He likes being president, thinks he’s good at it, and apparently doesn’t think he’s slipping with age.

But the brilliant move would be to surprise the world and not run again. Second terms are always worse, fraught and full of pain; even your own party starts jockeying to take your place. He’s showing age and it will only get worse, and he will become more ridiculous, when he’s deeper into his 80s.

He’s freezing his party in a way that will likely hurt it. When Democrats were sure Mr. Trump would get the Republican nomination, it justified a Biden run, no matter how frustrated they were. He had beaten Mr. Trump before and would do it again. But a great many Democrats believe that if Mr. Trump isn’t the Republican nominee—and they are starting to think he won’t be—then that nominee will go forward without Mr. Trump’s deficits, and may even be a normal Republican, which will mean he or she will squish the eternally underwater Mr. Biden like a peanut.

They want him to step aside.

A trusted Biden intimate with an eye on the party’s fortunes would be wise to urge the boss to rethink things dramatically:

Mr. President, you have a perfect opening to cement a stunning legacy. You kept every promise you made to the party in 2020. You got rid of Donald Trump. You got us out of Afghanistan. You passed huge FDR-level bills that transformed the social safety net. History threw you a curve with Ukraine, but you warned it would happen, defined the struggle, built the coalition, and defended the rule of international law.

Boss, what a triumph! You did your job in history. You fulfilled your role.

And now you should go out an inspiration. Don’t stick around, it will never be this good again. Do the brave, hard thing and relinquish power. Tell the party, “I always said I would be a bridge. And friends, the past four years we built that bridge. It is big, strong and can carry all traffic. Now, with complete faith in my party, I am declaring the bridge open. The past year I’ve come to have faith that my Republican friends won’t nominate that bad and unpatriotic man. And I’ll be frank, I will turn 82 in 2024, and though I can still take you in arm-wrestling, that is, I admit, an advanced age. We need the leadership of minds forged and matured in the 21st century. So I will not run for re-election. Nor will I put myself behind any one candidate. Let the party decide. We have a good bench. I will watch this process with confidence.”

My God, what people would say. “What a great man.” Your reputation will be raised high forever—you actually walked away from the limelight in order to ensure that power stay in the party that stands for the better things. What a legacy.

Could he do this? Yes. Should he? Yes. Will he? Well. He likes being president. He likes the whole thing, the house, the salutes, the state dinners, the centrality to all events, the cynosure of all eyes, being taken seriously after a career of being considered a cornball glad-handing pol, a guy who wasn’t that bright but had a huge ego . . .

People tend not to leave what they like. And it’s hard to imagine a Biden intimate telling him his age is a factor and he should leave. They surely saw that aging in 2019 and 2020. But they too wanted the White House. They wanted power, they wanted the glamour and importance. They thought they could make it work, while saving the party from Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

All signs are Mr. Biden will stay and run again. The coming year will be interesting in part because we’re going to see the central realities of 2024 arrange themselves, the election line itself up.

Georgia’s Republican Gov. Brian Kemp won re-election last month by 7.5 points. Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger won re-election by 9.2. Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker lost his Tuesday runoff by 2.7. Neither Mr. Kemp nor Mr. Raffensperger was a Donald Trump ally; both resisted his demands to alter the state’s 2020 election tally. Mr. Walker was handpicked by Mr. Trump, and all in on his issues.

The GOP is strong in the Peach Tree State; its turnout in November was high. But the party is full of Republicans and conservatives who won’t back strange and unqualified candidates simply because they have the Trump imprimatur. Some were repelled by that imprimatur.

Mr. Trump has looked bad since his weak and formless presidential announcement last month—dining with anti-Semites and white supremacists, meeting with Q supporters, calling for the Constitution to be waived to return him to office. He appears to be deliberately marginalizing himself. There is a debate whether we are witnessing the end of Mr. Trump. But here is the truth: Only the voters can crush Mr. Trump.

It’s good if senators come forward and deplore his latest antics, if party operatives cast doubt on his viability and writers and thinkers on the right deplore him. But it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that voters on the ground turn away from him. That is how it ends. Any other way and he says the swamp did him in. Voters have to show no, it was us, and we’re not the swamp.

In a populist movement especially, it’s the populace that has to turn.

In 2024 Mr. Trump will have to be crushed in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina and on Super Tuesday, if that is still the Republican schedule. If that happens, he is revealed as without clout or muscle, and disappears as a force.

For those who wish the continuance of the Republican Party there are two big jobs ahead.

For party elders, to the extent they still exist, and for donors and operatives and professionals, that means doing everything you can to make sure the 2024 primary field isn’t a crowded one. In 2016, there were 17 candidates for the GOP presidential nomination. In early contests Mr. Trump consistently won with about a third of the vote, more than enough to dominate a field that size. He won New Hampshire with 35%, Vermont with 33%, Virginia with 35%. He had a tight moment in Iowa, with 24% to Ted Cruz’s 28%. But not until April did Mr. Trump get to 50% in any state’s primary.

A year ago, Mr. Trump still scared people out of the field. Now he doesn’t. They’re starting to line up. Responsible candidates should come forward only if they satisfy two requirements. One is that they have a real shot, a significant base of support. The other is that they are saying something so singular, so necessary to the debate, so pertinent to the moment that their absence would be a form of dereliction.

Candidates for president are notoriously bad at judging their own motives and prospects. They’re gamblers looking to win; gamblers tell themselves stories. “They start with belief and end with hunger,” the veteran New York political strategist David Garth said to me once of politicians. Donors, however, can be cooler. This year they should function as clear-eyed political cops and not let a crowd form.

The job of state and local party leaders is to persuade Trump supporters on the ground to turn their energy toward candidates who can win. Trump supporters are proud people who are protective of their despised champion, but they are by definition politically engaged, and the vast majority love their country. The party divide between Trump and not-Trump is a human problem and must be solved by humans.

Tact never hurts in a tight spot. Local leaders should go, regularly, to Trump people—asking for their time, conceding they are a significant part of the base, emphasizing areas of policy agreement.

The spirit should be “acknowledge, don’t avoid.” Republicans can’t win on their issues if they don’t do it together. The independents of America, the suburbs, the moderates by thinking and temperament—they won’t vote for Mr. Trump again, if they ever did. His numbers are sinking; he can’t put wins on the board. If both sides don’t drop their anger and resentment, they’ll wind up living together in Loserville, like the Hatfields and McCoys spending all their time shooting at each other from behind boulders while the Democratic Party thrives.

Mr. Trump undid a party establishment nobody liked, stomped it and threw it out the window. Acknowledge that. The Democrats and Republicans together played with illegal immigration as an issue, while Mr. Trump treated it with respect, at least up to a point. He appointed conservative judges. Twenty sixteen can fairly be called a policy breakthrough time, but now the party is gearing up for a presidential election that is eight years beyond it. History moves only forward. If you want progress on the border, you can get it—by voting for the person who succeeds Mr. Trump. Trump supporters need to hear they can be a constituent group within a party, or they can be a death cult hurtling down a highway in the dark.

The conversation needs to be had and the above doesn’t begin to cover it. It will be a long, person-by-person, group-by-group slog, precinct to precinct, internet site to internet site. Not-Trump party officials have to speak the truth as they see it, and explicitly speak the logic of unity. They should take all questions and comers and laugh when they make fun of you, which they will.

But it’s a necessary slog.

I end with the observation that it is still a matter of belief among Mr. Trump’s followers that he was a transformational figure in the Reagan mold. Of the differences between them—fidelity to the Constitution, seriousness about and knowledge of the issues, and personal dignity among them—the most obvious is this: Reagan transformed the party without splitting it. He changed its nature while uniting it. He took a party that had grown vague and formless and, to put it in broadest terms, split between New England Yankees and Southern California right-wingers and blended them together.

He made what endured for two generations: a united conservative party. He didn’t kill the liberal New Englanders; he blended them in. He didn’t kill the Birchers; he allowed them to blend in as if they had no recourse but to join him. He did this in part through temperamental moderation—he was a person you could cut deals with, who’d understand your starting principles. But he did it primarily through electoral force—two historic landslides, including a 49-state sweep. Every politician realized: You better jump aboard the Reagan Express because your own voters already have.

Mr. Trump had no interest in unifying, never saw its purpose—never won a landslide or attracted broad public support. He broke the party with an adolescent glee. See what I destroyed! But he never built anything that would last in its place.

The next two years is about rebuilding.

I want to talk about three separate things that to me aren’t separate.

We are in a crisis on the southern border. It is a disaster. El Paso, Texas, is the latest city to be overwhelmed. This Monday, from the New York Times: “After nightfall on Sunday, hundreds of migrants stepped across the Rio Grande . . . a caravan of people mainly from Nicaragua whose crossing was among the largest in recent years along the West Texas border.” More than 50,000 illegal immigrants from Central and South America came in October alone. Some are sent to detention centers or shelters for a short time; most are released to disappear into America. In Del Rio, Texas, last year, 9,000 illegal immigrants, mostly from Haiti, camped under a bridge. Rural counties are declaring a “local state of disaster.”

It’s all so dangerous. The fentanyl the drug cartels are bringing over the border is killing more Americans each year than we lost in Vietnam. Anyone can cross. In the year ending Sept. 30, Border Patrol has stopped 98 people on the southern border who were on the U.S. terrorist watch list. How many were missed?

We’re on a holiday from history again.

The Democratic Party is committed to doing nothing. The party made its position clear in the 2020 presidential primaries, when candidates ignored border security and debated only who would guarantee broader social services for migrants. The Biden administration has shown energy in only one area, changing the subject.

The Republican Party is at least rhetorically committed to stopping what’s happening at the border, but do they mean it? Are they serious? If they were they’d be trying to win support in America for broad, coherent action, right?

Here we jump to Manhattan, to the already famous Saturday night dinner of the New York Young Republican Club. Gowns, tuxedos, important national speakers, a special night. Donald Trump Jr. said Republicans must finally investigate Hunter Biden. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, in the prime speaking spot, received the club’s Richard M. Nixon Award, “given to a citizen who exemplifies the fundamental ideals of Americanism.” She spoke of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol: “I want to tell you something, if Steven Bannon and I had organized that, we would have won. Not to mention we would’ve been armed.” She took other strange turns—“defund the FBI,” Kamala Harris dresses in boring colors. Not a “single penny” should go to “a country called Ukraine whose borders are far away and most of you couldn’t find it on a map.” She charged, “You can pick up a butt plug or a dildo at Target nowadays.” I’ve never noticed that at Target. I guess it depends on what you’re looking for.

My point isn’t that she’s an idiot, though that appears to be true—she once called Hitler’s secret police “the gazpacho”—or that the audience, which laughed and applauded, were idiots. It is that you don’t talk like this and applaud if you are trying to win anyone over to your side. And if you are serious about making America better, you try to win people over to your side.

If the speakers at that dinner were even a little sincere about controlling the border, they wouldn’t be swanning about or beating their chests like chimps but reaching out to those who share their alarm but aren’t Trumpist. Instead, they stick with their own club, one that, at least in this instance, involves comparative wealth, a certain conception of glamour, and an insider feel. They seem to proceed as if they are all on the winning side, the side of what they all call the base. But they haven’t won a big election since 2016.

There is one way in which they very much are winners—they changed the policies and attitudes of a great party, making it more populist in domestic and foreign affairs. This was a huge win!

But they couldn’t absorb it intellectually or consolidate it politically. If you are a Trump candidate, you would do this by showing voters—not only Republicans but Democrats, independents, centrists, moderates—that a vote for you isn’t a concession that they have grown radical or extreme or drawn to peripheral issues. No, a vote for you is a vote for a regular normal person of intelligence and good faith. A vote for you is a vote to address the issues that bedevil us, in a truthful and constructive way. A vote for you is a reassertion of a preference for normality.

The Trump wing of the party can’t seem to do that. Maybe because they don’t want to win, really; they just want to feel good and have parties and say outrageous things and feel like truer Americans.

And my third item, which the New York dinner left me thinking about. It has to do with the old Republican Party of New York. I saw that party up close in the early 1990s. I would go to events at its clubs, sign books, sometimes speak. I did this because I felt sympathy for them and a tug of old loyalty. In one club the demographic skewed older and female. The women wore hats and they knew Rocky and Happy and they’d been friends with Jack Javits, and time had passed them by. They were 1960s moderate liberals who had been replaced and supplanted by people like me—Reaganites, Kempites.

Someone’s always being replaced and supplanted in politics, but those old ladies in hats—in their time they had shown some guts, swimming against the tide, not becoming Democrats in a Democratic city, an increasingly left-wing city, but staying true to their basic principles. And you have to be human, even in politics, and show respect. The Trump forces took over by about 2017 and they were brutal in their triumph—graceless, rubbing their foes’ faces in it. Some of the old ladies joined them. Some just disappeared into the city. It was all very French Revolution, a thousand Marats and Dantons overwhelming 10,000 weak and ridiculous aristos. It was also Manhattan losing to the forces of the outer boroughs and the suburbs—a whole rising wave of scrappy, comparatively less sophisticated voters who felt they’d been ignored (they had) and excluded (they had) and would now take over (they did).

But unlike those old ladies in hats, they have no idea what is important to independents, moderates, centrists and non-Republicans, and no idea how to talk to them. So they can’t win a thing statewide.

And they don’t seem to care. Because they have great parties and they’re right and they’re the real people, not big phonies in hats.

The old ladies in hats were practical. Their entire project was driven by the simple insight that politics is a game of addition. You have to reach out and persuade. They didn’t always know how to reach out; they were awkward in 10 different ways; but they knew reaching out was necessary. They weren’t dizzy and glamorous, they had dignity and were serious. And when they lost their fights within the party, they didn’t bolt, they stayed and joined the younger conservatives.

They didn’t seem it, but they were tough, and they knew how to win. Those who’ve replaced them, much less so.

It is my impression we’re making more psychopaths. I can’t back this up with statistics because doctors don’t write “total psycho” on the diagnosis line. Psychopathy isn’t a diagnostic category and is largely viewed as part of a cluster of antisocial personality disorders. But doctors commonly use the term and it has defined characteristics. The American Psychological Association calls it a chronic disposition to disregard the rights of others. Manifestations include a tendency to exploit, to be deceitful, to disregard norms and laws, to be impulsive and reckless, and, most important, to lack guilt, remorse and empathy. The APA has reported 15% to 25% of prison inmates show characteristics of psychopathology, far more than in the general adult population.

But that’s where I see growth. Subtle psychopaths, the kind who don’t stab you, are often intelligent, charming and accomplished. I believe two are currently in the news. (I confine myself to the business sphere, leaving out the equally rich field of politics.)

Elizabeth Holmes was just sentenced to 11 years in federal prison for defrauding investors in her famous Theranos scam. People used to ask why she did it. By now that’s clear. She did it to be important. She wanted to be admired. She wished to be thought a genius, a pioneer. She no doubt wanted money, though part of her con was to live relatively modestly—she wore the same black turtleneck and trousers most days. She wanted status, then and now as Tom Wolfe said the great subject of American life. And she seemed to think she deserved these things—that she merited them, simply by walking in. One thing you pick up as you read John Carreyrou’s great reporting, in these pages and his book, is that she seemed not at all concerned with the negative effects of her actions on others. She didn’t seem to care that investors lost hundreds of millions, people lost jobs, the great men she invited on her board were humiliated.

Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency-trading firm, FTX, collapsed last month. We’re still in the why-did-he-do-it phase—Was it deliberate deception? Untidy bookkeeping? Visionaries often leave the details to others! We make mysteries where there aren’t any. He had a great life while it worked! He made himself famous, rich, admired—friend of presidents and prime ministers, the darling of a major political party. To the Democrats he was the biggest thing since George Soros.

But somehow a valuation of $32 billion was, in a matter of weeks, turned into, or revealed as, nothing. FTX filed for bankruptcy on Nov. 11, and FTX’s new CEO, John Ray, said he believed gross negligence was involved and a “substantial portion” of FTX customers’ assets may be “missing or stolen.” Soon after, the crypto firm BlockFi filed for bankruptcy in New Jersey and Bermuda.

A peculiarity of subtle psychopaths is that while they don’t seem to feel shame, they are preoccupied with being thought of as highly moral. Ms. Holmes was simply trying to help sick people get their blood tested more easily. This was part of her origin myth—a relative’s illness made her sensitive to the needs of the suffering. Mr. Bankman-Fried gave away millions and became the public face of a movement called effective altruism. He was just trying to help the less fortunate live better lives! And he was so modest about it, eschewing material things, clad in rough sandals, a thin T-shirt, shorts. Like the young St. Francis, stripping himself naked that his robes might be sold for the poor.

I don’t know if Elon Musk fits in this category. I hope he’s an eccentric genius with a moral core and not a psychopath. We’ll find out! It’s good he’s in space. His buying Twitter has excited lots of people, frightened others. If he merely changes that public square from an entity of the left to an open entity, good. We’ll see how content moderation goes. But many conservatives see him as a kind of savior. Is he? Saviors by definition save others.

Does he strike you as preoccupied by the needs of other people? Evince an old-fashioned interest in the public weal? He offers to buy the site, changes his mind, tries to back out, is forced to honor his agreement, takes over. In the ensuing chaos he tweets out memes of a whore tempting a monk, to illustrate, strangely, his invitation to Donald Trump to rejoin the site. He tweets out photos of his bedside table—two life-size handgun replicas and scattered cans of Diet Coke. It looked as if a school shooter lived there.

“He stands for free speech.” Mr. Bankman-Fried stood for selflessness and “responsible” regulation of crypto. Ms. Holmes stood for thinking outside the box and breaking through false limits. They all believe in something.

My fear with Mr. Musk is that if a scientific paper came out saying eating baby parts will add half a century to your life, he’d tweet: We can grow the babies in discarded ship containers and eat them—for the squeamish, God didn’t make them, I did so there’s no soul or anything.

But again, most interesting in psychopaths is the lack of remorse. They don’t like being caught—that upsets them—but they don’t mind causing others harm. It’s their superpower. They’re not hemmed in by what limits you.

Which is a conscience. People often refer to their consciences—they say things like “My conscience is clear.” It’s not an unknown entity to them. But they seem to think it’s something they were born with, like a sense of smell. When actually a conscience has to be formed and developed or it doesn’t work.

Every major faith in the world has thoughts here. In Catholic teaching, says Father Roger Landry, Columbia University’s Catholic chaplain, the traditional definition of conscience is “a judgment of the practical reason applying moral principles to concrete circumstances leading to the conclusion to do or not do something.”

“Many people today confuse their conscience with their opinion or even with their feelings about what is the right thing to do or avoid,” he said in an email. “Many think that if their intentions were good, and they desired a good outcome, then the action would be morally fine. But, as is obvious, sometimes we will feel good about doing something wrong (‘I stole, but he was rich’; ‘I insulted her, but she deserved it.’)” A conscience must be informed “with the truth that comes from God—the Ten Commandments, the Beatitudes, corporal and spiritual works of mercy, other passages in Sacred Scripture, the moral teachings of the Church.” These things “illumine our eyes so that we may see things more clearly.”

“Conscience can make erroneous judgments, either because it identifies wrong principles (e.g., personal autonomy as the supreme value), or has the right principles in a disordered rank (prioritizing not hurting others’ feelings over helping the person give up drugs.)” But to form a conscience we have a duty “to tune into God’s frequency rather than our own echo chamber, or the confused noise that can come from culture.”

We need better consciences. If we got them, we’d have fewer psychopaths.

From a speech last month at the Al Smith Dinner at the Park Avenue Armory in New York.

Words of thanks to someone I knew well as a child:

I had an old great-aunt. She was my grandfather’s sister. Her name was Mary Jane Byrne but we called her Jane Jane. When I first encountered her, in the 1950s, I was a little child and she was ancient—about 60.

She lived in New York and went to a local parish, St. Vincent Ferrer. When I was little she told me it was the pennies of immigrants that made that great church. I asked why they did that. She said, “To show love for God. And to show the Protestants we’re here, and we have real estate too.”

She came to America about 1915, an Irish immigrant girl of around 20 from a rocky little patch in the west of Ireland. She came by herself, landed at Ellis Island and went to Brooklyn like everyone else. She settled in a neighborhood near the old Navy Yard, where relatives put her up on the couch.

She dropped her bags and went straight to Manhattan, where the jobs were, and became a maid for a family on Park Avenue. She lived in a little room on the side. In time she became a ladies’ maid, learning to care for a wardrobe and jewelry and brush the lady’s hair. She respected her work and came to love the finer things. When they got thrown away she’d bring them home and we’d have them. I remember a cracked hairbrush, made from real tortoiseshell, with beige bristles.

On days off she’d visit us in Brooklyn, and later on Long Island, in Massapequa, where my family moved and I went to public school. She’d sleep on the couch in our living room. As is often true with immigrant families, ours was somewhat turbulent, but Jane Jane was peaceful and orderly. If we were together on a Sunday, she took me to Mass. I loved it. They had bells and candles and smoke and shadows and they sang. The church changed that a bit over the years, but we lost a lot when we lost the showbiz. Because, of course, it wasn’t only showbiz. To a child’s eyes, my eyes, it looked as if either you go to church because you’re nice or you go and it makes you nice but either way it’s good.

Jane Jane carried Mass cards and rosary beads—the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Blessed Mother, the saints. She’d put the cards on a mirror, hang the rosary beads on a bedstead. I look back and think, wherever she went she was creating an altar. To this day when I am in the home of newcomers to America, when I see cards, statues and Jesus candles, I think: I’m home.

She didn’t think life was plain and flat and material, she thought it had dimensions we don’t see, that there were souls and spirits and mysteries.

She came from rough people but she had a natural love for poetry, history, and politics. She wasn’t ideological—ardent Catholics don’t need an ideology, they’ve already got the essential facts. But she was, like all the Irish and Italian Catholics and European Jews of Brooklyn, a Democrat. I don’t think they ever met a Republican. I think they thought Republicans were like Englishmen with monocles.

But the poetry—she’d walk around day and night declaiming, with a rich Irish accent, popular poems she’d read in the newspapers. The one I remember best was a poem written in 1909 called “America for Me.” It’s about seeing the great cities of the world but knowing where you really belong. Its refrain: “So it’s home again, and home again, America for me!”

She loved Franklin D. Roosevelt, but most of all she loved Woodrow Wilson and the Fourteen Points, his principles for the world after the Great War. She would walk around reciting them: “Freedom of the seas! An end to armaments! Sovereign nations living in peace!”

I’ve never known anyone like her. Sometimes life overwhelmed her. She’d disappear for a while, I’d hear she’d been hospitalized, she’d come back joking about doctors. There’s a lot of turbulence in any life, in all families, but for recent immigrants I think it can be hard in ways we don’t see. Because they let go of a lot when they left, and there was no one to keep them there, which can make it harder to gain purchase in the new place.

She passed away when I was a teenager, unchanged, the same mystical force. But what she did for me—she gave me a sense of the romance of life, the romance of politics and history, the sense that history’s a big thing and has glory in it. Great causes, acts of valor. And she was in love with America because it could be the stage of the love and the valor. America reminds you: Life is dynamic, not static, it moves, and there’s something magical in this.

Years later, when I was grown and a speechwriter in the Reagan White House, the president was coming back from a foreign trip and had to give brief remarks on returning to U.S. soil at an air base in Alaska. I got the assignment. I was new and nervous, but as I worked an old memory tugged at my mind, and I knew what Reagan would say. He’d say “And it’s home again and home again, America for me.”

And so he did. And that was my tip of the hat to Mary Jane Byrne of County Donegal and Park Avenue.

She would have loved being here tonight, loved being with you. She would have looked at the dais—the men in white tie and tails, the women in flowing gowns. She’d want to brush your hair with a tortoiseshell brush. She would have been awed to be in the same room with a prince of the church, and awed when I said, “Jane Jane, this is my friend Cardinal Tim.”

We’ve all got great stories, everyone in this room, and it’s good to keep in mind the romance of it. All of you here have responsibilities in a world very far from Jane Jane’s. A lot of what you carry is a great burden. Whatever your pressures—whether it’s trying to safeguard the investments that people have made with you, or to maintain the trust of those who voted for you, or to raise the funds for the charity that depends on you, or to keep the faith of those who have prayed with you—whatever the pressure, I think she’d hope that you not become jaded, that you maintain a sense of the mystery of it all, the unseen things, the feats of love and valor.

A few weeks ago Aaron Judge hits 61 and stands on the field to make eye contact with Roger Maris’s family, and my son texts me: “How can you not be romantic about baseball?” Jane Jane steals into me for a moment and I think: How can you not be romantic about life?

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?