Peggy Noonan

The great sin in what happened in Texas is that an 18-year-old with murder in his heart walked into a public school and shot to death 19 kids and two teachers. The great shock is what the police did—their incompetence on the scene and apparent lies afterward. This aspect has rocked the American people.

Uvalde wasn’t an “apparent law-enforcement failure.” It is the biggest law-enforcement scandal since George Floyd, and therefore one of the biggest in U.S. history. Children, some already shot, some not, were trapped in adjoining classrooms. As many as 19 cops were gathered in the hall just outside. The Washington Post timeline has the killer roaming the classrooms: “The attack went for so long, witnesses said, that the gunman had time to taunt his victims before killing them, even putting on songs that one student described to CNN as ‘I-want-people-to-die music.’”

Students inside were calling 911 and begging for help. The officers failed to move for almost an hour.

Everyone in America knows the story. Finding out exactly how and why it happened is the urgent business of government. We can’t let it dribble away into the narrative void and settle for excuses. “People are still shaken up.” “Probes take time.” “We’re still burying the children.” We can’t let the idea settle in that this is how it is now, if bad trouble comes you’re on your own. It is too demoralizing.

We can’t let it settle in that the police can’t be relied on to be physically braver than other people. An implicit agreement in going into the profession is that you’re physically brave. I don’t understand those saying with nonjudgmental empathy, “I’m not sure I would have gone in.” It was their job to go in. If you can’t cut it, then don’t join and get the badge, the gun and the pension.

The most focused and intense investigating has to be done now, when it’s still fresh and raw—before the 19 cops and their commanders fully close ranks, if they haven’t already, and lawyer up.

Those officers—they know everything that happened while nothing was done for an hour. A lot of them would have had to override their own common sense to stand down under orders; most would have had to override a natural impulse toward compassion. Many would be angry now, or full of reproach or a need to explain.

Get them now.

Within moments of the massacre’s ending, the police were issuing strange claims. They said the shooter was confronted by a school guard and shots were exchanged. Not true. They said the shooter was wearing body armor. He wasn’t. They said he was “barricaded” inside the classroom. Is that the right word for a guy behind a single locked door? They said a teacher left open the door the shooter used to enter. Videotape showed otherwise. They didn’t admit what happened outside the school as parents pleaded with the police to do something and tried to fight past the cordon so at least they could do something. The Washington Post had a witness who heard parents tell the police, “Do your f— job!” The police said they were. A man yelled, “Get your f— rifles and handle business!” Those parents were patronized and pushed around.

Even accounting for the fog of war there’s something next-level about the spin and falsehoods that occurred in Uvalde.

The commander on scene, school district police chief Pete Arredondo, hasn’t given a public statement on what went wrong. Why is he allowed not to tell the public what happened? He didn’t take reporters’ questions until cornered Wednesday by CNN’s Shimon Prokupecz. Mr. Arredondo was evasive. Reports he’s stiff-arming investigators are wrong, he said; he’s in touch with them and he’ll have more to say but not now. Then, in fatherly tones: “We’re not going to release anything. We have people in our community being buried. So we’re going to be respectful.”

A better form of respect would have been stopping the guy who left them grieving their dead children.

What I fear is a final report issued in six months or a year that will hit all the smarmy rhetorical notes—“a day of epic tragedy for our brothers and sisters in a small Texas town”—but fail, utterly, to make clear who was responsible for the lost hour.

All this has made Gov. Greg Abbott look particularly bad. He gave the imprimatur of his office to early police fictions. In his first news conference following the massacre he was strangely insistent on their sterling valor: “They showed amazing courage by running toward gunfire.”

Only after videos of the parents being pushed around by the cops made their way to social media did he make an about-face. In a later news conference he talked of free funerals and mental health resources. Pressed finally on what was already becoming a police scandal, he said he’d been “misled” by authorities and was “livid.” Glad he talked about his emotions. We don’t do that enough in America.

But who misled him? Do they still have a job?

You wonder what his first briefing was like.

Governor: “I need the truth: What went down?”

Burly police official in Stetson: “Within minutes we stormed the school like Iwo Jima—took out the enemy under a hail of fire, carried the women and children to safety. Fixed bayonets. Knives in our teeth. Trust me.”

Governor: “Got it, thanks!”

There is only one way to handle such a mistake: know it won’t disappear. Lead a swift and brutal investigation, talk about it every day, keep the heat on. When people know you’re playing it straight, they’re generous. When they know you aren’t—there’s an election in November and they’ll let you know.

I close with a thought tugging around my brain. I think I am seeing a broad and general decline in professionalism in America, a deterioration of our pride in concepts like rigor and excellence. Jan. 6 comes and law enforcement agencies are weak and unprepared and the U.S. Capitol falls to a small army of mooks. Afghanistan and the departure that was really a collapse, all traceable to the incompetence of diplomatic and military leadership. It’s like everyone’s forgotten the mission.

I’m not saying, “Oh, America was once so wonderful and now it’s not.” I’m saying we are losing old habits of discipline and pride in expertise—of peerlessness. There was a kind of American gleam. If the world called on us—in business, the arts, the military, diplomacy, science—they knew they were going to get help. The grown-ups had arrived, with their deep competence.

America now feels more like people who took the Expedited Three Month Training Course and got the security badge and went to work and formed an affinity group to advocate for change. A people who love to talk, endlessly, about sensitivity, yet aren’t sensitive enough to save the children bleeding out on the other side of the door.

I fear that as a people we’re becoming not only increasingly unimpressive but increasingly unlovable.

My God, I’ve never seen a country so in need of a hero.

We’re out of words because we’re out of thoughts because we said them all and spent them all after Columbine and Sandy Hook and Parkland. The shock was the lack of shock you felt when you heard. You indicted yourself: My heart has gotten cold. No, it hasn’t, but the past quarter century it’s been numbing up.

We underestimate how demoralizing these shootings are. They hurt our faith in America (why can’t we handle this?) and the future (what will it be like if this continues?). And there’s the new part of the story that is disturbing, this sense—we’ve had it before—that the police reliably come to the scene but they’ve got some kind of process or procedure that keeps them from fighting their way to the actual site of the shooting. Parents were massing at the school in Uvalde and screaming, “Go in, go in!” They themselves would have, and were possibly stopped. This aspect of the story is not yet clear but you can’t see the emerging videos and not think something went very wrong.

I love cops because I love John Wayne. (Joan Didion: “John Wayne was supposed to give the orders. ‘Let’s ride,’ he said . . .  ‘Forward ho.’” ) If they’re not John Wayne—commonsensical, gutsy, quick, able to size up the situation—I don’t think I love them. I don’t think anyone else does, either.

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Conservatives were quick to criticize President Joe Biden in his speech the night of the shootings, saying he didn’t “bring us together” and “heal the nation’s wounds.” But what exactly could he say, could any president say at this point, that will bring us together and heal the wounds? They were faulting him for the impossible. There isn’t a bag of magic-secret speechwriter words, you don’t pull them from a hat and throw the fairy dust on the listeners. A fair criticism is that Biden’s speech evoked a problem without offering a way through it.

He seems to have concluded the right response to the moment was to enact what he felt was the audience’s rage and indignation. So he emoted, demanding answers to questions. “When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?” He is “sick and tired.” “Where in God’s name is our backbone?”

But, if I can generalize, it is people of the left whose immediate response to the shootings at Uvalde was indignation and rage. Everyone else was feeling something different, depression and anxiety. Because they don’t see a way out, and they’re worried, and don’t have an illusion that attacking someone will make it better. When the president enacts what one part of the spectrum feels, which he also no doubt feels, everyone else will feel to some degree excluded.

He doesn’t mean to be divisive, he just doesn’t get the other guys anymore. “We have to do more.” What, exactly? What people needed that night was a kindly grownup plan from someone above the fray. And many would have wanted to be enleagued—marshal the troops unleashed by the trauma, let them be part of something that might make things better.

Normal Americans are not fixated on policy and don’t know the exact state of play on gun law. What bill might help?

Democrats should stop using the manipulative, scare-quote phrase “gun lobby.” The gun lobby is a ghost of itself, done in by internal and external forces, and everyone in Washington knows this. The problem is Americans who feel immediate aversion to gun control because they don’t trust those who would do the controlling. The challenge isn’t “standing up,” it’s persuading.

Pretty much everyone knows we have too many guns in America, more than we have people. Everyone knows too many are in sick hands. If deeper background checks and a longer waiting period after purchase might help, move. I don’t have to be persuaded, I’m for them, not because I think they will solve the problem but they might get us an inch on the yardstick, and that’s something. I suspect a lot of people would see it like that.

But persuade, do the work. It is always the hard work of politics. And yes, move to ban assault weapons again, those sinister killing-machine weapons of war. We have about 400 million guns in America, do we have to keep adding these? Why don’t we just stop.

Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas said Wednesday that Texas has a long history of letting 18-year-olds have long guns. That is true. He also said cops, after the shooting, told him they’re seeing a crisis in mental health in young people. That’s true too, it’s all around them, all around all of us.

But Mr. Abbott should listen to himself more closely. It is one thing to let an 18-year-old have a rifle to shoot rattlers in 1962. It is another thing to allow an 18-year-old in the middle of a mental-health crisis to buy an AR-15, which is what the sick Uvalde shooter bought on his 18th birthday.

Republicans, you are saying every day that there’s a mental-health crisis and, at the same time, that we shouldn’t stop putting long guns in the hands of young men. Policies must evolve to meet circumstances. You must evolve.

I end here.

I continue in a kind of puzzled awe at my friends who proceed through life without faith, who get up and go forward without it. How do you do that? I tell the young: I have been alive for some years and this is the only true thing, that there is a God and he is good and you are here to know him, love him and show your feeling through your work and how you live. That it is the whole mysterious point. And the ridiculous story, the father, the virgin, the husband, the baby—it is all, amazingly, true, and the only true thing.

Uvalde is a town of about 16,000 people and if I’m counting right about 40 places of Christian worship, all kinds, Evangelical, Catholic, Mainline. I keep seeing the pictures—a group of four middle-aged men in jeans and T-shirts, standing near the school, arms around each other, heads bent in prayer. And the women sitting on the curb near the school and sobbing, a minister in a gray suit hunched down with them, ministering. And the local Catholic church the night of the shootings—people came that night, especially women, because they know it’s the only true thing and they know they are loved, regarded, part of something, not alone. I don’t mean here “the consolations of faith,” I mean the truth is its own support. Consolation is not why you believe but is a fact of belief and helps all who have it live in the world and withstand it. I am so glad for the people of Uvalde this weekend for only one thing, that so many have that.

Once I saw a painting—outsider art, crude, acrylic, made by some madman. There were splayed bodies and ghost-blots above each body, which depicted their souls. They were shooting upward—happy, free of gravity, rising toward Heaven.

Haven’t seen the painting since, think of it a lot, want it to be how it was in that classroom, all the children’s souls free to go home.

The most heartening thing for Republicans in the past few weeks’ primaries, what carries the most long-term significance, was pointed out by the political scientist Yascha Mounk : A clear majority of GOP primary voters in Pennsylvania supported either a Muslim (Mehmet Oz, who has 31%) or a black woman (Kathy Barnette, 25%). The Republican Party “is surprisingly good at building a multi-faith and multi-racial coalition,” Mr. Mounk tweeted. Democrats had best take note.

I’m not sure it’s the party that’s building the coalitions and I’m not sure they’re coalitions exactly, but something new is being built, and it involves the widening of the Republican Party in terms of who wants to join and whom its voters will support. This shift began in 2016 and appears to be accelerating.

A second encouraging aspect is turnout. Henry Olsen in the Washington Post reports that in the 10 states that have held primaries, GOP turnout was substantially up from the last comparable year, while Democratic turnout was down in five and up only slightly in most others.

Donald Trump’s endorsements yielded, famously, mixed success. Nebraska gubernatorial candidate Charles Herbster, for whom Mr. Trump rallied, lost. Idaho Gov. Brad Little trounced his Trumpian challenger. But J.D. Vance broke through and won in Ohio because of Mr. Trump’s endorsement. If Mr. Trump had picked David McCormick in Pennsylvania, we wouldn’t be in recount territory; he would have won comfortably. Yet Mr. Trump’s backing couldn’t save the strange and hapless Rep. Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina.

Mr. Trump has real influence but it is not determinative.

I think the real headlines are elsewhere. Last August I argued that Mr. Trump is actually afraid of his base, the only entity in American politics he fears. That dynamic could be seen throughout this primary season. When you look at his endorsements you realize he was just trying to figure out where the base was going and get there first. Oz? He’s a TV celebrity—they love him! He was following, not leading, and they could tell. There were exceptions. Mr. Trump targeted Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp for reasons of personal spleen. Mr. Kemp refused to bend to the then-president’s pressure to falsify state results of the 2020 election, so he had to be squished. Mr. Kemp, ahead 32 points in a new Fox News poll, is expected to emerge fully unsquished next week.

Maggie Haberman and Michael Bender in the New York Times have it right: “Mr. Trump increasingly appears to be chasing his supporters as much as marshaling them.” They quote Ken Spain, a GOP strategist formerly of the Republican National Committee. “The so-called MAGA movement is a bottom-up movement,” he told them, “not one to be dictated from the top down.”

But there’s another, larger mood shift going on, and to me it’s the real headline. Something is changing among Trump supporters. It’s a kind of psychological moving forward that is not quite a break, not an abandonment but an acknowledgment of a new era. In Florida recently, talking with Trump supporters, what I picked up is a new distance. They won’t tell pollsters, they may not even tell neighbors, but there was a real sense of: We need Trump’s policies, but we don’t need him. They expressed affection for him, and when not defensive about him they were protective. But as a major backer and donor told me, it’s time to think of the future. Mr. Trump brings “chaos.”

They don’t want him to run again. If he does, they’ll vote for him against a Democrat. But as one said, wouldn’t it be good to have someone like Ron DeSantis?

I stress: These are passionate Trump supporters.

Here’s a sign of the evolution, the most important words spoken in the 2022 election cycle. When Ms. Barnette was asked in debate why, if she’s so Trumpy, Mr. Trump endorsed one of her competitors, she said, “MAGA does not belong to President Trump. . . . Our values never, never shifted to President Trump’s values. It was President Trump who shifted and aligned with our values.”

That was more than a clever response, it was a declaration of autonomy.

Ms. Haberman and Mr. Bender quote Diante Johnson, founder and president of the Black Conservative Federation, at Ms. Barnette’s election-night party: “The knife came to her and she didn’t back up,” she said. “Every Trump establishment individual that came after her, she stood there and fought.”

Trump establishment? That’s the sound of something shifting.

In the Washington Post, Marianna Sotomayor and Cory Vaillancourt quoted an elderly North Carolina Trump voter: “I think Trump is very busy, and I think he relies too much on his handlers to give him the scoop. . . . They didn’t give him the scoop on Madison Cawthorn.” The voter let Mr. Trump off the hook but with an excuse that dinged him. One hears that kind of thing a lot.

Endorsements aside, Mr. Trump has obviously changed the party’s culture, its understanding and presentation of itself. An unanswered question is what this means for policy. Mr. Trump never talks about it. For him, once, it came down to slogans (“America first”) and now it’s all grievance (“stop the steal”) Beyond that it’s—what?

It seems to me at least two-thirds of the base is in agreement on traditional Republican policy—taxes should be lower rather than higher, regulation too. Spending? The general view is “Hold where we are or cut but don’t go crazy.” They are for cultural normality and stability as opposed to lability and extremism. They want these things advanced through the party. They are serious about policy.

But the third or so of the base that is Trumpist, they’re a mix. Some don’t care about policy or party. They’re about attitude—politics is a blood sport and this era is the most fun they ever had.

Regular Republicans know they can’t win general elections without Trump supporters. Some not-insignificant number of Trump supporters don’t care if they lose without non-Trumpers. Because winning isn’t the point, because policy isn’t the point. Attitude is all.

What will be interesting as this evolves is what proportion of Trump supporters really do want to win for serious reasons and will make the compromises victory entails.

One Florida Republican hypothesized something my imagination hadn’t gotten to. It is that Mr. Trump will announce after November that he is running in ’24 and then do nothing. He’ll give some interviews, hold a few rallies, but not mount a full campaign. He’ll just talk. And freeze the field, keeping all other aspirants for the presidency pawing the ground and out of the show.

Week after week as rumors build that this is just another Trumpian stunt, past supporters will have to figure out what to do.

He will cause maximum chaos for as long as he can. At that point his biggest supporters would have to decide: move against him or jump on the golf cart and go along for the ride?

The unserious will go for the ride. The serious will start to push back. How? In what way? Backing whom? That would get really interesting.

This goes under the heading “Wouldn’t it be nice.”

When I’m on the road the biggest thing I hear about is the frustration of voters. The exact subject matter has evolved over the years (“When will they stop the wars?”) but I detect now a theme that Washington operates with a view only to itself, not us. It has its own internal conversations and exigencies, its own psychodramas. (Joe Biden’s domestic agenda was driven by his desire for a legacy: He must go big and be understood as a second FDR! Kevin McCarthy went to Mar-a-Lago and resurrected Donald Trump shortly after the Capitol riot because Kevin desires to be speaker!) It’s about political figures and their needs; everything else (is this good for the country?) seems like an afterthought. It has always been so, but it seems more so now.

All this gets distilled, among regular, intelligent, more or less centrist people on the ground, into a question: Is the next presidential election really going to be Trump vs. Biden again? Donald Trump will be 78 on Election Day 2024, Mr. Biden 81. Is this the best we can do? They’re old and they’re them; can’t we move beyond them and the worlds they represent?

There have been some good political histories and memoirs of the past few years, and the best speak to this sense of stuckness.

Most of those who worked with Mr. Trump have been unsparing: He was harebrained, selfish, knew nothing of history and didn’t feel enough respect for our institutions and arrangements to bother learning. These aren’t books that say Mr. Trump is “crass” or “uses the wrong fork,” or is “brash” or “uncouth.” They say he was wild and menacing. Former Defense Secretary Mike Esper, in “A Sacred Oath,” says Mr. Trump wanted to attack Mexican drug cartels with missiles, and then deny the missiles came from us.

None of these books seem to register because those who oppose Mr. Trump, already familiar with the principle (he’s mad), don’t need to hear of its numerous applications. Those who support him won’t listen or care. Their narrative is that fancy people will never understand Mr. Trump and criticize him only because he threatened their power and standing. What opponents dismiss as ignorance was originality and boldness, a search for breakthrough solutions to chronic problems. If he broke the establishment’s china shop, fine—the china was junk anyway.

But one recent history makes different points and has larger themes. “This Will Not Pass” by Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns captures the insularity of Washington and the closed-off nature of the conversations that consume it. It is deeply reported, with sourcing from both parties and criticisms of both, which is refreshing. It also captures both parties’ refusal to be honest with their own voters.

On the Republican side it revolves around Mr. Trump. Party leaders, officeholders, operatives and donors despise what he represents: the deterioration of everything. They say so in private, not public. They don’t try to persuade anyone, or say, “Try to see it my way”; they hunker down and hope it will pass. Mr. Trump has a hold on about a third of the party: You win or lose with that third. The Republican Party as an entity, and a solid portion of its own voters, is utterly divided.

On the Democratic side, what can’t be discussed is what the progressive movement is doing to the party and its prospects. Messrs. Martin and Burns report on a series of memos from Mr. Biden’s pollster during his first year. Early on the pollster sounds the alarm on what the administration is getting wrong, from illegal immigration to crime. No one pays him mind. They don’t want to upset party progressives, who are a small but significant part of the base.

The Republicans are afraid of the Trumpers. The Democrats are afraid of the progressives. Both parties fear large parts of their base. So they lie to them—“I’m with you!”—or mislead. This is self-corrupting and leaves a frozen field in which not enough gets done. Why compromise with Republicans if you’re trying to assure progressives you hate them? Why compromise with Democrats if it opens you to suspicion with the Trumpist part of the base?

And so, the “Wouldn’t it be nice” part.

Both parties would benefit in the long term from facing the issues they’re dodging. They must stop fearing their supporters and saying nothing. They should start trying to persuade.

I suggest the ridiculous, a series of Lincoln-Douglas-type debates that are tied not to an upcoming election but to the idea of the meaning of things.

For Republicans the subject would be: Let’s talk about Trump.

For Democrats: Let’s talk about the progressive movement.

Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas conducted seven debates in 1858, each about three hours long. They were intensely covered in national newspapers because they were talking about the meaning of the great issue then facing the country, slavery, and what to do about it. Also both Lincoln and Douglas were brilliant, Lincoln actually a genius, so it wouldn’t be dull.

Today’s politicians aren’t as gifted and eloquent as Lincoln or Douglas, but all parties have brilliant folk, so a few of them could do it.

Imagine an anti-Trump person speaking with eloquence and reason, in good faith, with good nature. Imagine someone who would concede what can honorably be conceded about policy achievements in the Trump era but also speak of why the former president, with his nature, doesn’t and can’t fit the future. “Let’s talk about what the GOP establishment did that left their own voters so eager to sweep them away. Let’s talk about what was good about that. Let’s talk about what was built in its wake, and what now must be reconstructed.” Address everything, including conspiracism, and explain why it is just another way of quitting, of choosing an alternative world to get lost in. “Make this world better.”

And then hear a thoughtful reply.

Democrats: Speak honestly of what your progressives are doing to your party and its reputation. Everything—socialist economic policy, woke cultural extremism. What are they getting right, and what wrong? What would progressives change and what preserve? Should the party detach itself from alignment with people who insist mothers don’t exist but “birthing persons” do, that women don’t exist but “cervix havers” do? Why is it that progressive solutions often seem to emerge from a keyboard as opposed to lived experience? Is life really so abstract? Why does progressive feeling always seem cold, lacking in feeling toward those with whom you share a nation?

Challenge the progressives directly: Do you love America? Why? Why don’t you talk about this? Do you approach the vulnerable with a feeling of protectiveness? Is there some discrepancy between your claims of higher sensitivity and your tendency to push people around? Why should you gain control of one of America’s two great parties?

Neither party has such conversations. But I have never met a human being yet who was completely impervious—completely—to a sincere, respectful appeal to reason.

And anyway it’s good, always, to talk about the meaning of things.

This is what C-Span is for.

Let’s start with true anger and end with honest hope. The alarm many felt at the leaking of an entire draft Supreme Court decision shouldn’t be allowed to dissipate as time passes. Such a thing has never happened. Justice Samuel Alito’s preliminary opinion being taken from the court, without permission or right, and given to the press was an act of sabotage by a vandal. It hardly matters whether the leaker was of the left or right. It reflected the same spirit as the Jan. 6 Capitol riot—irresponsible destructiveness. As the book has been thrown at the rioters, it should be thrown at the leaker.

The justices can’t sit around and say oh no, we’re just another victim of the age. If they have to break some teacups to find who did it, break them. Chief Justice John Roberts worries, rightly, about the court’s standing. This is the biggest threat to it since he joined. At the very least it might be good if the justices would issue a joint statement that they are appalled by the publication of the decision, don’t accept it, won’t countenance it.

Apart from the leaker, here is what I always want to say when the issue is abortion. The vast majority of human beings on both sides are utterly sincere and operating out of their best understanding of life. Yes, there were plenty of people the past 50 years who used “the issue” to accrue money and power. But this long life tells me the overwhelming majority of people held their views for serious reasons. They sincerely saw the prohibition of abortion as a sin against women; they sincerely saw abortion on demand as a sin against life.

And you have to respect that as a wound, the Roe v. Wade decision never healed, never could. Josh Prager, in his stupendous history of that decision, “The Family Roe,” noted the singular fact of this ruling: Other high court decisions that liberalized the social order—desegregation of schools, elimination of prayer in the schools, interracial marriage, gay marriage—were followed by public acceptance, even when the rulings were very unpopular. Most came to have overwhelming support. But not Roe. That was the exception. It never stopped roiling America. Mr. Prager: “Opposition to Roe became more hostile after its issuance.”

Why? Because all the other decisions were about how to live, and Roe was about death. Justice Alito seems to echo this thought in his draft opinion, which would turn the questions of legality and illegality over to each state. This is not a solution to the issue, it is a way of managing it—democratically.

Some states, New York and California for instance, have already passed their own liberal abortion laws. Some states, such as Texas and Utah, will ban most or all abortions within their boundaries. It will be uneven, a jumble. But the liberal states will have their liberal decision, the conservative states their conservative ones, and that is as close to resolving the dilemma as we, as human beings in a huge and varied nation, will get.

I respect and agree with the Alito draft, didn’t think Roe was correct or even logical, and came to see the decision as largely a product of human vanity. Of all the liberal jurists who have faulted it, the one who sticks in the mind was Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who after questioning Roe’s reasoning said, in 1985, that it appeared “to have provoked, not resolved, conflict.” It did.

I am pro-life for the most essential reason: That’s a baby in there, a human child. We cannot accept as a society—we really can’t bear the weight of this fact, which is why we keep fighting—that we have decided that we can extinguish the lives of our young. Another reason, and maybe it veers on mysticism, is that I believe the fact of abortion, that it exists throughout the country, that we endlessly talk about it, that the children grow up hearing this and absorbing it and thinking, “We end the life within the mother here,” “It’s just some cells”—that all of this has released a kind of poison into the air, that we breathed it in for 50 years and it damaged everything. Including of course our politics.

It left both parties less healthy. The Democrats locked into abortion as party orthodoxy, let dissenters know they were unwelcome, pushed ever more extreme measures to please their activists, and survived on huge campaign donations from the abortion industry itself. Republican politicians were often insincere on the issue, and when sincere almost never tried to explain their thinking and persuade anyone. They took for granted and secretly disrespected their pro-life groups, which consultants regularly shook down for campaign cash. They ticked off the “I’m pro-life” box in speeches, got applause and went on to talk about the deficit. They were forgiven a great deal because of their so-called stand, and this contributed, the past 25 years, to the party’s drift.

Abortion distorted both parties.

Advice now, especially for Republican men, if Roe indeed is struck down: Do not be your ignorant selves. Do not, as large dumb misogynists, start waxing on about how if a woman gets an illegal abortion she can be jailed. Don’t fail to embrace compromise because you can make money on keeping the abortion issue alive. I want to say “Just shut your mouths,” but my assignment is more rigorous. It is to have a heart. Use the moment to come forward as human beings who care about women and want to give families the help they need. Align with national legislation that helps single mothers to survive. Support women, including with child-care credits that come in cash and don’t immediately go to child care, to help mothers stay at home with babies. Shelters, classes in parenting skills and life skills. All these exist in various forms: make them better, broader, bigger.

This is an opportunity to change your party’s reputation.

Democrats too. You have been given a gift and don’t know it. You think, “Yes, we get a hot new issue for 2022!” But you always aggress more than you think. The gift is that if, as a national matter, the abortion issue is removed, you could be a normal party again. You have no idea, because you don’t respect outsiders, how many people would feel free to join your party with the poison cloud dispersed. You could be something like the party you were before Roe: liberal on spending and taxation, self-consciously the champion of working men and women, for peace and not war. As you were in 1970.

Or, absent the emotionally cohering issue of abortion, you can choose to further align with extremes within the culture, and remain abnormal.

But the end of Roe could be a historic gift for both parties, a chance to become their better selves.

And if Roe is indeed overturned, God bless our country that can make such a terrible, coldhearted mistake and yet, half a century later, redress it, right it, turn it around. Only a thinking nation could do that. Only a feeling nation could do that. We’re not dead yet, there are still big things going on here.

Sometimes a thing keeps nagging around your brain and though you’ve said it before you have to say it again. We factor in but do not sufficiently appreciate the real possibility of nuclear-weapon use by Russia in Ukraine. This is the key and crucial historic possibility in the drama, and it really could come to pass.

And once it starts, it doesn’t stop. Once the taboo that has held since 1945 is broken, it’s broken. The door has been pushed open and we step through to the new age. We don’t want to step into that age.

The war is in its third month. Diplomatic solutions are less likely than ever; war crimes and atrocities have hardened the Ukrainians, and in any case they’re winning and the world is on their side. British intelligence this week reported Russia has lost around 15,000 troops, 2,000 armored vehicles and 60 aircraft. The ground invasion force has lost an estimated 25% of its combat strength. Russia is grinding through a disaster.

We aren’t worried enough about Russian nuclear use in part because we imagine such a thing as huge missiles with huge warheads launched from another continent and speeding through space. We think: That won’t happen! It has never happened! But the more likely use would be not of big strategic nuclear weapons but smaller tactical ones on the battlefield. Such weapons have a shorter range and carry lower-yield warheads. America and Russia have rough parity in the number of strategic nuclear weapons, but Russia has an estimated 10 times as many tactical nuclear weapons as the U.S. and delivery systems that range from artillery shells to aircraft.

Why would Vladimir Putin use tactical nuclear weapons? Why would he make such a madman move?

To change the story. To shock and destabilize his adversaries. To scare the people of North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries so they’ll force their leaders to back away. To remind the world—and Russians—that he does have military power. To avoid a massive and public military defeat. To win.

Mr. Putin talks about nuclear weapons a lot. He did it again Wednesday: In a meeting with politicians in St. Petersburg, he said if anyone intervenes in Ukraine and “creates unacceptable threats for us that are strategic in nature,” the Russian response will be “lightning fast.” He said: “We have all the tools for this that no one else can boast of having. We won’t boast about it, we’ll use them, if needed.”

He’s talked like this since the invasion. It’s a tactic: He’s trying to scare everybody. That doesn’t mean the threat is empty.

There are signs the Russians are deliberately creating a historical paper trail, as if to say they warned us. On Monday Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the risk of nuclear conflict is “serious” and “should not be underestimated.” Earlier, Anatoly Antonov, Russia’s ambassador to Washington, sent a formal diplomatic note to the U.S. saying it was inflaming the conflict. The Washington Post got a copy. It said shipments of the “most sensitive” weapons systems to Ukraine were “adding fuel” to the conflict and could bring “unpredictable consequences.”

The U.S. at the same time has become rhetorically bolder. This month President Biden referred to Mr. Putin as a war criminal. In March Mr. Biden called for regime change; the White House walked it back. This week Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters the U.S. aim in Ukraine: “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree it can’t do the kinds of things it’s done in Ukraine.” The original American aim was to protect Ukraine’s sovereignty and independence. Has the U.S. strategy changed, or has its officials’ talk simply become looser? What larger strategic vision is the administration acting on?

In my experience with American diplomats, they are aware of but don’t always grasp the full implications of their opponents’ histories. Mr. Putin was a KGB spy who in 1991 saw the Soviet system in which he’d risen crash all around him. He called the fall of the Soviet Union a catastrophe because it left his country weakened, humiliated and stripped of dominance and hegemony in Eastern Europe. He is a walking, talking cauldron of resentments, which he deploys for maximum manipulation. He isn’t secretive about his grievances. In his 2007 speech to the Munich Security Conference he accused the U.S. of arrogance, hypocrisy and having created a “unipolar world” with “one center of authority, one center of force, one center of decision making,” headed by “one master, one sovereign.” As for NATO, “we have the right to ask: Against whom is this expansion intended?”

Antagonism to the West has been the central intellectual organizing principle of his life. America is an object of his life’s obsession.

So let me make an argument for my anxieties: For this man, Russia can’t lose to the West. Ukraine isn’t the Mideast, a side show; it is the main event. I read him as someone who will do anything not to lose.

In October he will turn 70, and whatever his physical and mental health his life is in its fourth act. I am dubious that he will accept the idea that the signal fact of its end will be his defeat by the West. He can’t, his psychology will not allow it.

It seems to me he has become more careless, operating with a different historical consciousness. He launched a world-historic military invasion that, whatever his geostrategic aims, was shambolic—fully aggressive and confident, yet not realistically thought through. His army wasn’t up to the task. It seemed thrown together, almost haphazard, certainly not professional.

Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, often notes that Mr. Putin has killed all the institutions in his country, sucked the strength, independence and respectability from them, as dictators do. They take out power centers that might threaten them but might also warn them of weaknesses in their own governments. All dictatorships are ultimately self-weakening in that way. But this means Mr. Putin has no collective leadership in Russia. It’s all him. And he’s Vladimir Putin.

When I look at him I see a new nihilistic edge, not the calculating and somewhat reptilian person of the past.

People who have known Mr. Putin have told me I am wrong in my concern about his potential nuclear use in that he knows if he makes one move with such a weapon, Moscow will in turn be reduced to a smoking ruin. But I am reading Mr. Putin as someone who’s grown bored of that threat, who believes he can more than match it, who maybe doesn’t even believe it anymore. In any case the Americans would not respond disproportionately.

No one since 1945, in spite of all the wars, has used nuclear weapons. We are in the habit, no matter what we acknowledge as a hypothetical possibility, of thinking: It still won’t happen, history will proceed as it has in the past.

But maybe not. History is full of swerves, of impossibilities that become inevitabilities.

For the administration’s leaders this should be front of mind every day. They should return to the admirable terseness of the early days of the invasion. They should wake up every day thinking: What can we do to lower the odds?

Think more, talk less. And when you think, think dark.

I want to talk about Joe Biden and his unique problems presenting his presidency. You’re aware of his political position and the polls. The latest from CNN has him at 39% approval. Public admiration began to plummet during the Afghanistan withdrawal. That disaster came as it was becoming clear the president was handing his party’s progressive caucus functional control of his domestic agenda, which fell apart and never recovered.

James Carville the other night on MSNBC amusingly and almost persuasively said Democrats in the 2022 congressional elections should hit Republicans hard on their weirdo content—candidates who are both extreme and inane, conspiracists in the base. But the Democrats too have their weirdo quotient—extreme culture warriors, members of the Squad—and last summer the president appeared to have thrown in with them. That and Afghanistan were fateful for his position, and then came inflation.

But what struck me this week was a little-noticed poll from the New Hampshire Journal. It’s always interesting to know what’s going on in the first presidential primary state, but the Journal itself seemed startled by the answer to its question: If the 2024 election were held today and the candidates were Joe Biden vs. Republican Gov. Chris Sununu, who would you back? Mr. Sununu trounced the president 53% to 36%. Mr. Sununu is popular and that unusual thing, a vigorous moderate conservative who appears to have actual intellectual commitments. But Mr. Biden carried New Hampshire in 2020 with 53%. He’s cratering.

All politics grows from policies, and policies are announced and argued for through presentation, including, crucially, speeches. Joe Biden has a presentation problem. This is worthy of note because his entire career has been about presentation, specifically representing a mood. In 50 years he has cycled through Dashing Youth, the Next JFK, Middle-Class Joe and Late-Life Finder of His Inner Progressive. But the mood he represents now isn’t a good one. It’s there in the New Hampshire poll. Asked if they thought Biden was “physically and mentally up to the job” if there’s a crisis, “not very/not at all” got 54% and “very/somewhat” 42%. Here we all use euphemisms: “slowing down,” “not at the top of his game.” If Mr. Biden’s policies were popular, nobody would mind that he seems to be slowing. But they aren’t.

So to the presentation problem. Here are some difficulties when he speaks.

When he stands at a podium and reads from a teleprompter, his mind seems to wander quickly from the meaning of what he’s saying to the impression he’s making. You can sort of see this, that he’s always wondering how he’s coming across. When he catches himself he tends to compensate by enacting emotion.

But the emotion he seems most publicly comfortable with is indignation. An example is his answer to a reporter’s question in November about the administration’s plans to compensate illegal-immigrant parents who’d been separated from their children at the border. Suddenly he was angry-faced; he raised his voice, increased his tempo, and started jabbing the air. “You lost your child. It’s gone! You deserve some kind of compensation, no matter what the circumstances.” Then, catching himself, he added mildly, “What that will be, I have no idea.” He was trying to show presentness, engagement. But there’s often an “angry old man yelling at clouds” aspect to this.

There are small tics that worked long ago. He often speaks as if we are fascinated by the family he came from and that formed him. Thus he speaks of the old neighborhood and lessons. And my mother told me, Joey, don’t comb your hair with buttered toast. This was great for a Knights of Columbus pancake breakfast in Rehoboth Beach, Del., but not now. For all the mystique of the presidency, people hired you to do a job and want you to be clear and have a plan. They aren’t obsessed with your family, they’re obsessed with their family.

Mr. Biden tends to be extremely self referential: “I’ll give it to you straight, as I promised that I always would.” Because I’m such a straight shooter. It’s better to shoot straight and not always be bragging. He should lose “Lemme say that again.” When you speak to America you don’t have to repeat yourself for the slow. I don’t think he’s aware he often seems to be talking down. People will tolerate this from a politician when they think he’s their moral or intellectual superior, but they push back when they don’t, as in the polls.

The larger problem for the president is that in his most important prepared speeches there’s a lot of extremely boring faux-eloquence, big chunks of smooth roundedness, and nothing sticks. Last April to a joint session of Congress: “America is on the move again, turning peril into possibility, crisis into opportunity, setback into strength.” This sounds as if it means something—it has the rhythm and sound of good thought—but it doesn’t, really. It’s the language of the 60-second advertising spot, and America tunes it out. Not from malice but from Alice. It’s the sound of the past 40 or 50 years, meaning it’s had its day.

Mr. Biden has an opportunity to do something new, reinvent his rhetorical approach. Why not, nothing else has worked. He should commit, when speaking, to Be Here Now. He should be straightforward and modest.

When I think of what is needed at this moment in history, my mind goes to the brisk factuality, the lack of emotionalism, of Oct. 22, 1962. John F. Kennedy from his desk in the Oval Office offering 18 minutes of fact and thought. “Good evening, my fellow citizens. This government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military buildup on the island on Cuba. Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island. . . . Having now confirmed and completed our evaluation of the evidence and our decision on a course of action, this government feels obliged to report this new crisis to you in fullest detail.”

It was down to the bone, stark and completely compelling. The military response he explained was persuasive because it was based in fact and clearly put interpretation. He provided complicated information: “The characteristics of these new missile sites indicate two distinct types of installations.” You talk only to the intelligent this way; his listeners were aware of the compliment. He didn’t stoop to them but assumed they’d reach to him.

He wasn’t self-referential: He didn’t say “as I promised,” but “as promised,” because putting himself in the forefront would be vulgar. It was “this government,” not “my government.” He said, “This nation is opposed to war. We are also true to our word.” He was declaring the American position while putting the virtue of it on America, not himself.

You say: Well, that was a crisis, you cut to the chase in crisis. But our political moment is pretty much nonstop crises, and there are more than enough national platforms for emotionalism.

All politicians could learn from this approach. They have no idea how refreshing it would sound, how gratefully it would be received: “I’m not being patronized by my inferiors!” How people might listen again.

It was the Easter of epochal events. All that Holy Week history came like a barrage. It was April 1865, the Civil War. No one touched by that war ever got over it; it was the signal historical event of their lives, the greatest national trauma in U.S. history. It would claim 750,000 lives.

Everyone knew the South would fight to the end, but suddenly people wondered if it was the end. Gen. Robert E. Lee’s army was trapped and under siege in the middle of Virginia. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant was bearing down, his army going from strength to strength.

The two exchanged letters under flag of truce. Grant to Lee: Did the general not see the “hopelessness” of his position? Lee sent a roundabout response, Grant a roundabout reply, but he was starting to see: Lee knows he is beat.

On the morning of April 9, Palm Sunday, Lee sent word: He would discuss terms of surrender. They met that afternoon in the Appomattox home of Wilmer McLean.

Lee got there first. Allen C. Guelzo, in his masterly “Robert E. Lee: A Life,” quotes a reporter from the New York Herald who had joined a crowd outside. He was bowled over by the bearing of the imposing Lee, in full dress uniform with “an elegant sword, sash and gauntlets.”

In truth, Lee didn’t know what to expect. He’d told his staff, “If I am to be General Grant’s prisoner to-day, I intend to make my best appearance.” His close friend Gen. James Longstreet thought Lee’s fine dress a form of “emotional armor,” an attempt to conceal “profound depression,” according to Ron Chernow’s superb, compendious “Grant.”

Grant, who at 42 was 16 years Lee’s junior, arrived a picture of dishevelment—slouched hat, common soldier’s blouse, mud-splashed boots. He was painfully aware of how he looked and feared Lee would think him deliberately discourteous, Mr. Chernow writes. Later, historians would think he was making a political statement, but he’d simply outrun his supply lines: his dress uniform was in a trunk on a wagon somewhere.

But he projected authority. Joshua Chamberlain, hero of Gettysburg, wrote that he saw Grant trot by, “sitting his saddle with the ease of a born master. . . . He seemed greater than I had ever seen him,—a look as of another world around him.”

The armies of the North and South, in blue and gray, were massed uneasily beyond the house. Neither Lee nor Grant wanted them to resume the fight. Some of Lee’s officers had urged him not to surrender but to disband his army and let his men scatter to the hills and commence a guerrilla war. Lee had refused. The entire country would devolve into “lawless bands in every part,” he wrote, and “a state of society would ensue from which it would take the country years to recover.”

The generals sat in McLean’s parlor and attempted conversation. But of course it is the surrender agreement, on whose terms they quickly agreed, that will be remembered forever. Lee’s army would surrender and receive parole; weapons and supplies would be turned over as captured property. Officers would be allowed to keep their personal sidearms.

Lee suggested Confederate soldiers be allowed to take home a horse or mule for “planting a spring crop,” Mr. Guelzo writes. Grant agreed, and Lee was overcome with relief. Lee then asked Grant for food for his troops. They had been living for 10 days on parched corn. Grant agreed again and asked how many rations were needed. “About 25,000,” Lee said. Grant’s commissary chief later asked, “Were such terms ever before given by a conqueror to a defeated foe?”

Grant asked his aide Ely Parker, an American Indian of the Seneca tribe, to make a fair copy of the surrender agreement. When Lee ventured, “I am glad to see one real American here.” Parker memorably replied, “We are all Americans.”

Grant would write in his memoirs “What General Lee’s feelings were I do not know.” His own feelings, which had earlier been jubilant, were now “sad and depressed.” He couldn’t rejoice at the downfall of a foe that had “suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.”

Now the door to the parlor was opened, and Grant’s officers were introduced to Lee, including “a newly minted captain, Robert Todd Lincoln, the twenty-one-year-old son of the president,” Mr. Guelzo writes.

Grant and Lee shook hands; Lee stepped onto the porch and signaled his orderly for his horse. An Illinois cavalry officer, George Forsyth, remembered every Union officer on the porch “sprang to his feet . . . every hand . . . raised in military salute.”

Lee looked to the east, where his army was in its last encampment. As he turned to leave, Grant came out to the steps and saluted him by raising his hat. Lee reciprocated and rode off slowly to break the news to the men he’d commanded. Mr. Guelzo: “He spoke briefly and simply, as to a theater company after its last curtain.”

They had done their duty, Lee said: “Leave the result to God. Go to your homes and resume your occupations. Obey the laws and become as good citizens as you were soldiers.”

Grant had something Lee didn’t have. Lee couldn’t act under instructions of his government because it had effectively collapsed when Richmond fell. Events had moved too quickly for Grant to receive specific instruction from Washington, but he knew the president’s mind. In the last year of the war he and Lincoln had become good friends, and in their conversations Grant had been struck by the president’s “generous and kindly spirit toward the Southern people” and the absence of any “revengeful disposition.”

Days before the surrender Lincoln had visited Grant’s headquarters at City Point, Va. The president spent a day at a field hospital, where in “a tender spirit of reconciliation” he “shook hands with wounded confederates,” in Mr. Chernow’s words. A Northern colonel who described Lincoln as “the ugliest man I ever put my eyes on,” with an “expression of plebeian vulgarity in his face,” spoke with him and found “a very honest and kindly man” who was “highly intellectual.”

The mercy shown at Appomattox is a kind of golden moment in American history, but history’s barrage didn’t stop. America exploded with excitement at the end of the war, and all Washington was lit with lights, flags, bunting.

On Good Friday, April 14, Lincoln met with his son Robert to hear of what he saw at Appomattox, and then with his cabinet, including Gen. Grant, where he happily backed up Grant’s generosity. Grant, he said, had operated fully within his wishes.

Lincoln was assassinated that night, died Saturday morning, and for a long time the next day would be called “black Easter.”

But what is the meaning of Appomattox? What explains the wisdom and mercy shown? How does a nation do that, produce it?

As you see these past weeks, I have been back to my history books. You learn a lot that way, not only about the country and the world and “man,” but even yourself. Would you have let your enemy go home in dignity, with the horses and guns? And not bring the law down on their heads? And the answer—what does that tell you about you?

Journalists and people who think aloud for a living are often invited to gatherings where experts in various fields share what they know. These meetings often operate under Chatham House rules, in which you can write of the ideas presented but not directly quote speakers. At such a gathering this week I was especially struck by the talks on Big Tech, and since Congress is considering various regulatory bills I want to say what I gleaned.

First and most obviously, nobody understands the million current aspects of social media sites. They raise questions ranging from the political (misinformation, disinformation, deliberate polarization, ideological bias) and the technological (hidden data harvesting) to the legal (antitrust law, First Amendment rights) and the moral and ethical (deliberately addicting users, the routine acquisition and selling of private information, pornography). It’s all so big and complex. Mark Zuckerberg, who invented the social-media world we live in, appears to have thrown in the towel and fled to the metaverse, where things will no doubt become even more complex and bizarre. But what he calls a visionary next step looks very much like an escape attempt.

The breakthrough event in public understanding of social-media problems was the congressional testimony, last fall, of Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen. She said Instagram, owned by Facebook parent Meta, was fully aware it was damaging the mental health of children and teenagers. She had proof, internal documents showing Instagram knew of studies showing increased suicidal thoughts and eating disorders among young girls who used the site. Big Tech had failed what Google, at the turn of this century, famously took as its motto: “Don’t be evil.” That wouldn’t seem the most demanding mission, yet they all failed.

One thing that was strange and unreal about her celebrated testimony is that it was a revelation of what everybody already knew. Professionals in the field knew, think-tank observers knew, Big Tech knew it had addictive properties, they were put there deliberately to be addictive. It was part of the business model. Attentive parents knew as they watched their kids scroll. Ms. Haugen spoke of what she called “little feedback loops” in which “likes and comments and reshares” trigger “hits of dopamine to your friends so they will create more content.” But now at least everyone else knows.

The difficulty at the heart of all Big Tech debate is how hard it is to get the facts, and how the facts keep changing. Transparency and disclosure are urgently required—how much information is being gathered about you each day, to whom is it sold, and for what purpose? The social-media sites don’t want to tell you, or tell each other. The nature of the beast is opaque and fluid. How do you audit an algorithm? It’s a moving river changing all the time. And the algorithms are proprietary. But constructive regulation must be based on clear information.

I asked a speaker if I was thinking correctly when I imagine algorithms: I see them as a series of waves, not necessarily in sequence, different in size, pushing my small skiff in this direction or that. No, she said, the algorithm isn’t the wave, it’s the water. It’s the thing on which you sail. To go to a site is to choose to cast off.

Another speaker: When we speak of the internet we speak of “privacy rights.” Companies are taking information they glean from your use of tech and without your permission selling it for purposes that aren’t fully clear. This violates your privacy, but there’s another way to look at it. Many of the devices you carry with you are pinging out exactly where you are. They know you got out of a car at 23rd and M. But your current location should belong to you. It is a private property issue when someone takes it from you. Because you belong to you. Making it an issue of property rights makes things clearer.

No one among the experts or participants had faith in Congress’s ability to understand adequately or to move in a knowing and constructive way to curb Big Tech. The previous hearings have shown how out of their depth they are. The heads of Big Tech had been hauled in a few years ago and were supposed to break out in a sweat under heavy grilling, but they were pressed on petty irrelevancies and sucked up to, along the lines of: You started your business in a garage—only in America! Does Facebook charge for membership? No, Senator, we’re totally free! Why doesn’t my page load? The hearings were a signal moment—the stakes were high and the inventors of Big Tech walked out more arrogant than ever. Because now they knew their opposition, their supposed regulators—the people’s representatives!—were uninformed, almost determinedly so, and shallow. Big Tech had hired every lobbying shop in Washington, made generous contributions to organizations and candidates.

We’ll see what happens on Capitol Hill. It would probably be best for America’s worried parents to assume the cavalry isn’t coming and take matters into their hands.

A participant suggested an at least partial solution that doesn’t require technological sophistication and could be done with quick and huge public support.

Why can’t we put a strict age limit on using social-media sites: You have to be 18 to join TikTok, Youtube, Instagram? Why not? You’re not allowed to drink at 14 or drive at 12; you can’t vote at 15. Isn’t there a public interest here?

Applying such control would empower parents who face “all the other kids are allowed,” with an answer: “Because it’s against the law.”

When we know children are being harmed by something, why can’t the state help? In theory this might challenge economic libertarians who agree with what Milton Friedman said 50 years ago, that it is the duty of companies to maximize shareholder value. Instagram makes massive profit from ads and influencers aimed at teenagers. But a counter and rising school of conservative thought would answer: Too bad. Our greater responsibility is to see to it that an entire generation of young people not be made shallow and mentally ill through addictive social-media use.

The nature and experience of childhood has been changed by social media in some very bad ways. Why can’t we, as a nation, change this? We all have a share in this.

A participant here told a story of a friend, the mother of a large Virginia family who raised her kids closely and with limited use of social media. The mother took her children to shop for food. The woman at the checkout counter, who had been observing the family, asked the mother, “Do you homeschool your kids?” The mother wasn’t sure of the spirit of the question but said, “Yes, I do. Why do you ask?” The checkout woman said, “Because they have children’s eyes.” And not the thousand-yard stare of the young always scrolling on their phones.

There were many different views expressed at the meetings but on this all seemed to agree, and things became animated.

This extended moment of history reminds me of Washington in the years before and during the Civil War. There was a kind of hysterical intensity among our political class in those days, on all sides. The instability was so dramatic—Rep. Preston Brooks caning Sen. Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate in 1856, poor Mary Todd Lincoln with her rage and manias, and her husband telling her that if she continues like this she’ll wind up in the asylum. Those are famous examples, but you can’t pick up a book about those days and not see what looks like real and widespread personal destabilization. There was a lot of self-medicating, as they say. The journals and diaries of Mary Chesnut, who resided in the heart of the Washington establishment as the country broke apart and in capitals of the Confederacy as it formed, tell constantly of the officers and politicos coming to her home to drink into the night, and the ladies and their laudanum. Something strange had been let loose as things broke apart.

I started thinking things were entering Civil War territory during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings in 2018 and the demonstrations around it—the hissing mobs in a Senate office building, where 293 were arrested; the screams as the Judiciary Committee chairman began his opening statement; the harassing of senators on elevators; the surrounding of the Supreme Court and scratching on its big bronze doors. I know the charges against Justice Kavanaugh were grave, I know they incited passion on both sides, but this looked to me not like activism, which to achieve anything must have at its core seriousness, maturity and discipline, but like untreated mental illness.

And then of course the insurrection of Jan. 6, the prime example of this new, strange era.

Connected are Ginni Thomas’s texts to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in the days after the 2020 election. They capture two characteristics of radicals on both sides, now and maybe forever. The first is that they have extreme respect for their own emotions: If they feel it, it’s true. The other is that they tend to be stupid, in the sense of having little or no historical knowledge or the sense of proportion such knowledge brings.

The texts were revealed last week by Bob Woodward of the Washington Post and Robert Costa of CBS News, and you have seen them. In the days after the election, Mrs. Thomas warned Mr. Meadows of “the greatest Heist of our History.” There’s proof: “Watermarked ballots in over 12 states have been part of a huge Trump & military white hat sting operation in 12 key battleground states.” There will be justice: “Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators . . . are being arrested & detained for ballot fraud right now & over coming days, & will be living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition.” “Do not concede,” she warned him. “It takes time for the army who his gathering for his back.”

This is a person who lives in the heart of the Washington establishment and had no proof for any of the wild things she is saying. But when you’re a conspiracist, every way you look there’s a grassy knoll. Naturally the chief of staff wrote back. “This is a fight of good versus evil.” “Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight continues.” He appears to be patronizing her and speaking in a way thoroughly in line with Sinclair Lewis and the great American tradition of hucksters wrapping their con in the language of Christian faith.

But it’s worth noting the focus of their obsession, the continued belief in some quarters that Donald Trump really won the 2020 election. Joe Biden won not closely but by seven million votes, and every challenge was thrown out of court, including by Trump-appointed judges.

Here we should remember the man who may well have had a presidential election stolen from him, but who ended a stop-the-steal movement before it could take off. It was 1960, Vice President Richard Nixon vs. Sen. John F. Kennedy. It was the closest popular vote in the 20th century, with Kennedy receiving 34.2 million votes and Nixon 34.1 million, a margin of barely one-sixth of a percentage point. Widespread fraud was suspected in Illinois and Texas, which had enough electoral votes to be decisive.

Nixon’s biographers haven’t usually agreed with his political views—they’ve mostly been fascinated liberals—but virtually all speak with respect of this chapter in his life. The best treatment is in John Farrell’s very fine “Richard Nixon: The Life.” “In Chicago, election fraud was a work of art,” Mr. Farrell writes. On that nail-biting election night Mayor Richard J. Daley called Kennedy in Hyannisport and said, “Mr. President, with a little bit of luck and the help of a few close friends, you’re going to carry Illinois.”

As for Texas, everyone knew what Robert Caro later established, that Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy’s vice presidential nominee, had the state wired, with credible charges of ballot-box fraud going back to 1948.

Theodore White, the journalist who helped invent the mythos around JFK, wrote in 1975 that no one will ever know who won in 1960, but in Illinois and Texas, Democratic “vote-stealing had definitely taken place on a massive scale.”

Nixon believed the election was stolen. President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen wanted him to challenge the results. Nixon thought it could take months and might not succeed, but his thoughts went deeper than that. In the Cold War, the nuclear age, unity at home and abroad was needed. Young democracies looked up to us. If they thought our elections could be stolen it would hurt the world’s morale.

The New York Herald Tribune had launched an investigative series, but Nixon talked the reporter into stopping it: “Our country cannot afford the agony of a constitutional crisis.”

In Evan Thomas’s brisk “Being Nixon: A Man Divided,” he reports that the GOP wise man Bryce Harlow urged Nixon to challenge, but Nixon said no: “It’d tear the country to pieces. You can’t do that.”

So he didn’t. On Jan. 6, 1961, Nixon presided over the formal certification of his opponent’s election. “This is the first time in 100 years that a candidate for the presidency announced the result of an election in which he was defeated and announced the victory of his opponent,” he said. “In our campaigns, no matter how hard-fought they may be, no matter how close the election may turn out to be, those who lose accept the verdict and support those who win.”

For once his colleagues gave that complicated man his due, with a standing ovation that wouldn’t stop until Nixon took a second bow.

History went on and took its turns. Nixon came back and won the presidency in 1968. But when you read all this you wonder: Why can’t self-professed patriots love America like that now—maturely, protectively? And: How important it is to know something of history, to know it so well you can almost trust it. Instead of just feeling what you feel and making a hash of things.