Peggy Noonan

I don’t know what’s coming in Ukraine or what the U.S. should do beyond think first of its national interests. The trick is defining those interests for this moment and with these players. We have to get it right and the stakes feel high, but there seems a paucity of new thinking. I find myself impatient with confidently expressed declarations that we have no interest in a faraway border dispute, that Russia and Ukraine have a long and complicated history, and in any case the story of man is a tale of organized brutality, so get a grip. That’s not . . . right. A major land war in Europe? The first since World War II? We have no interest in what might be the beginning of a new era of brute-force violations of sovereignty? One involving our allies, with which we have treaties?

The arguments on the other side sound careless, rote: Get tough, push back, ship weapons, show Putin who’s boss. That sounds like politicians saying what they’ve said for 70 years, and at this point not out of conviction but because they have no new moves, barely a memory of new moves.

None of our political leaders are thinking seriously, or at least thinking aloud in a serious way.

It is hard not to be skeptical of sanctions as a deterrent to Russia. Aren’t we sort of sanctioned out? Does Vladimir Putin really fear them? Hasn’t he already factored them in? And wary of other responses: U.S. troops on heightened alert, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization reinforcing Eastern Europe with ships and fighter jets. Doesn’t this carry the potential of a spark that turns into a fire? This is the moment a writer would add “especially in the nuclear age.” I’d say especially in this later and I fear less rigorous part of the nuclear age. Forty-five-year-old field commanders are 76 years removed from Hiroshima and have likely never read John Hersey. They don’t carry a natural and fully absorbed horror about a launch caused by confusion, miscalculation, miscommunication. I sort of explain life to myself by assuming everyone’s drunk. That could literally be true of any given Russian general marching through the steppes.

So let me say at least one constructive thing: that we don’t worry enough about nuclear weapons. We have lost our preoccupation with them. For leaders who remembered World War II, it was always front of mind. Now, less so. Which is funny because such weapons are in more hands now than ever before. The world we live in, including the military one, seems more distracted than in the past, less rigorous and professional.

We’re used to being lucky. Luck is a bad thing to get used to.

If I read Mr. Putin right, he wants the fruits of war without the war, in line with the leaders of the Soviet system whose end he still mourns. A difference is those leaders were impressed by us and factored that into their calculations. Mr. Putin isn’t. A lot of people aren’t impressed by us anymore. The long-term answer to that is not to beat our breasts and shout “USA!” but to become more impressive in terms of our economic strength, political leaders and character as a people. But we are in the short term.

Which gives rise to the question: Shouldn’t the United Nations be involved? “Major land war,” “violation of state sovereignty”—isn’t this what the Security Council is for? As I write I hear echoes of Adlai Stevenson in the Cuban missile crisis. Stevenson asked the Soviet ambassador to the council, Valerian Zorin, if Moscow had missiles in Cuba: “Don’t wait for the translation, yes or no?” Then his staff produced huge photos of the missiles, which convinced the world who was right and who was wrong.

If Mr. Putin is going to invade a sovereign nation, shouldn’t he at least be embarrassed and exposed in the eyes of the world? Shamed? Nikita Khrushchev was. The whole Soviet system was.

I want to close with something I’ve been thinking about. American presidents in crises always fear being called weak. They fear this more than they fear being called unwise. But recent years have given me a greater appreciation for a moment when a president in crisis didn’t fear it, or didn’t let his fear govern his actions, and it involves Ukraine.

It was August 1991. The Soviet Union was in its astounding day-by-day fall. George H.W. Bush had just met in summit with Mikhail Gorbachev and then went on to Kyiv, where he spoke to a session of what was still then the Supreme Soviet of Ukraine.

It was a great moment in the history of freedom. A totalitarian empire was falling; the Warsaw Pact nations had already broken free. Bush had some human sympathy for those like Mr. Gorbachev, who were seeing the system they’d known all their lives crash down around them. He had affection and respect for those reaching for democracy. But he had a deep and overriding concern: There were thousands of strategic nuclear warheads long ago placed by Moscow in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus, and more than 20,000 smaller tactical nuclear weapons. They had to be dealt with. So it was not only a joyous moment; it was a delicate, dangerous one.

In his speech, Bush said Ukraine was debating “the fundamental questions of liberty, self-rule, and free enterprise” and Americans followed this with “excitement and hope.” Become democratic, Bush said, and we will help and assist you. But don’t tear yourself apart with long-repressed internal resentments, or external ones. “President Gorbachev has achieved astonishing things, and his policies of glasnost and perestroika and democratization point towards the goals of freedom, democracy and economic liberty.” Bush urged Ukraine to appreciate what Russia was trying to do. Between the lines he was saying: History is already overcharged; don’t bust the circuit-breakers, don’t further destabilize what is already unstable. Don’t let “suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred” take hold. He was also signaling to Mr. Gorbachev: We’ll do everything we can to keep your dissolution as peaceful as possible. Unspoken, he was saying: We’ll help you with the missiles.

It was a thoughtful speech, sophisticated and inherently balanced save for one too-hot phrase—“suicidal nationalism.”

It got a standing ovation. Then the dread pundits descended, chief among them New York Times bigfoot William Safire, who thought Bush missed the revolutionary moment. Bush sounded unexcited about freedom, even “anti-liberty,” Safire wrote in November 1991, calling it the “‘chicken Kiev’ speech.”

With that memorable phrase Safire did real damage to Bush, making him look . . . weak. Fussily prudent. Less than a year later, Bush lost his bid for re-election. People found him not of the moment, out of touch.

I thought my friend Safire right then. Now I think we were mostly wrong. The Soviet republics did break off and forge their own paths, and with Western help the nukes were deactivated and sent back to Russia, where they were dismantled. It was one of the great and still not sufficiently heralded moments of the Cold War, and it was done by a political class that was serious, and even took a chance on speaking seriously.

The long news conference wasn’t a success, though it was daring (almost two hours, live) and probably worth the dare (nothing else is working). President Biden came out swinging, pushed back on critics, made big claims—it’s been “a year of enormous progress.” The White House seemed to want to show him thinking aloud, being reflective, at ease. He gave it his best, but it didn’t work. Unfinished sentences, non sequiturs; sometimes his thoughts seem like bumper cars crashing and forcing each other off course. I still don’t understand his defense of his comment equating opponents of his voting bill with historic Southern racists. Angrily: “No, I didn’t say that. Look what I said. Go back and read what I said and tell me if you think I called anyone who voted on the side of the position taken by Bull Connor that they were Bull Connor. That is an interesting reading of English. I assume you got into journalism because you liked to write.” A lot of things simply couldn’t be parsed. After the Afghanistan debacle he was defiant and defensive. You could see some of that on Wednesday also.

Asked what he will do different in the second year of his presidency he spoke of a “change in tactic.” He will get out of Washington more and speak to the people—“on the road a lot making the case around the country.”

He is misdiagnosing his problem. It isn’t that his stands and decisions haven’t been fully understood and will be embraced if comprehended more fully. It’s that his stands and decisions the past year were basically understood and disliked. It’s not a communications problem, it’s a substance problem. It would be better if he spent his second year readjusting his positions. But politicians always think it’s a communications problem. Because that means the back office is blowing it, not you.

I’ve written of how the non-left experiences Joe Biden. The past week I’ve been thinking about Mr. Biden himself, whom we’ve gotten to know in a new way the past year. I turned back again—for the third time, actually—to “What It Takes: The Way to the White House,” the great classic of presidential politics by the late Richard Ben Cramer. Before I give it its due I’ll note its flaws. It is casually sexist—Cramer didn’t seem to think a lot of the women entering national politics and journalism in the late 1980s—and bitchily score-settling, especially against his journalistic competitors. Most seriously, what keeps it from being a masterpiece is that he failed to deal with or account for his political biases and predilections. Democrats are rather good, Republicans rather bad; Dems are serious about policy, Reps use policy as a tool for advantage, or ignorantly. Their stands are spoofed, often with a Southern accent—“sosh’lahzed medicine.”

And yet. It is for all that a very great work of political reporting, telling the tale of the 1988 campaign with real breadth and depth—with sprawl. His mastery of detail is simply stupendous. As for his prose, he wrote with a zest that was almost a kind of love, about the great game and those who choose to be part of it. He makes you see what he’s telling you.

Cramer focused on six candidates, but the one he most loved, the one in whom he seemed most invested, was Mr. Biden, who flamed out in his first presidential race after charges of plagiarism and lying about his record.

It’s a wonderful portrait. Cramer’s Biden is from childhood scrappy and proud, “with a grace born of cocky self-possession.” By college he knew he would go into politics. He was voluble, a talker who’d talk until you loved him. He was sensitive about his intelligence—in law school if someone said he wouldn’t make the cut, “well, Joe was ready to step outside and settle who was smarter.” All this caused him problems when he ran in ’88—he’d made inflated claims along the way that he’d graduated with three degrees, on a scholarship—and reporters found out.

In his first debate Tom Shales, television critic of the Washington Post, zeroed in on something that still pertains. “He comes across on TV as someone whose fuse is always lit.”

From the beginning of his political career Mr. Biden had deep faith in his own judgment. It wasn’t always well placed. Cramer: “Joe Biden had balls. Lot of times, more balls than sense.” He also had deep faith in his ability to persuade—anyone at any time, just get him in the room with them. He could make any deal once he had made what he called the “connect”—a mystical moment between him and the audience when he knew he had them, when some magic of emotion happened and they realized: He’s the one. He was good at it in that first presidential run. He brought union members to their feet.

But his gurus tore their hair out because he was “speech driven.” He didn’t know what he thought until he had to say it. He rode them to come up with the message of the campaign, its meaning. When they tried he was in response both irresolute and stubborn: Major speeches were torn apart and rewritten with only minutes to go. He had a high tolerance for chaos and created it. He usually ran an hour late. In the end he didn’t really have a message; what he had was hunger and a sense of destiny.

His national political career began exactly 50 years ago, in early 1972. He was an obscure Delaware county councilman, 29 years old, a dashing, charismatic nobody. Republican J. Caleb Boggs was running for his third term in the Senate. Boggs was beloved in Delaware, a former governor, a Republican moderate who voted for the 1964 and ’68 Civil Rights Acts and helped put Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court. Senate Democrats loved him too: His good nature and common touch helped make the place run.

No one would challenge Boggs, but young Joe Biden looked at him and thought: “He’s tired.” By which he meant: He’s old. Boggs turned 63 that year, which seemed older then than now. Mr. Biden ran against him vowing to be an “activist” senator, who’d put energy in the state, which needed “change.” At one point Boggs was ahead 30 points. Mr. Biden had no money or name recognition, but he had “a great radio voice,” and he ran not so much on policies as on a mood—fresh, vital youth must take its place. It was the first federal election in which 18-year-olds could vote.

In the biggest congressional upset of 1972, Mr. Biden beat Cale Boggs by 1.5 points, and his great career began.

Now he is the target of the kind of critique he used against Boggs, coming from his natural opposition but also from within his own party: he’s lost his bite, he’s not quite with it, he’s . . . old.

Themes repeat themselves in life. What goes around, comes around, and politics is a rough old business.

It is startling when two speeches within 24 hours, neither much heralded in advance—the second wouldn’t even have been given without the first—leave you knowing you have witnessed a seminal moment in the history of an administration, but it happened this week. The president’s Tuesday speech in Atlanta, on voting rights, was a disaster for him. By the end of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s answering speech on Wednesday you knew some new break point had occurred, that President Biden might have thought he was just crooning to part of his base but the repercussions were greater than that; he was breaking in some new way with others—and didn’t know it. It is poor political practice when you fail to guess the effects of your actions. He meant to mollify an important constituency but instead he filled his opponents with honest indignation and, I suspect, encouraged in that fractured group some new unity.

The speech itself was aggressive, intemperate, not only offensive but meant to offend. It seemed prepared by people who think there is only the Democratic Party in America, that’s it, everyone else is an outsider who can be disparaged. It was a mistake on so many levels. Presidents more than others in politics have to maintain an even strain, as astronauts used to say. If a president is rhetorically manipulative and divisive on a voting-rights bill it undercuts what he’s trying to establish the next day on Covid and the economy. The over-the-top language of the speech made him seem more emotional, less competent. The portentousness—“In our lives and . . . the life of our nation, there are moments so stark that they divide all that came before them from everything that followed. They stop time”—made him appear incapable of understanding how the majority of Americans understand our own nation’s history and the vast array of its challenges.

By the end he looked like a man operating apart from the American conversation, not at its center. This can be fatal to a presidency.

He was hardly done speaking when a new Quinnipiac poll showed the usual low Biden numbers, but, most pertinently, that 49% of respondents say he is doing more to divide the country, and only 42% see him as unifying it.

In the speech Mr. Biden claimed he stands against “the forces in America that value power over principle.” Last year Georgia elected two Democratic senators. “And what’s been the reaction of Republicans in Georgia? Choose the wrong way, the undemocratic way. To them, too many people voting in a democracy is a problem.” They want to “suppress the right to vote.” They want to “subvert the election.”

This is “Jim Crow 2.0,” it’s “insidious,” it’s “the kind of power you see in totalitarian states, not in democracies.”

The problem is greater than Georgia. “The United States Senate . . . has been rendered a shell of its former self.” Its rules must be changed. “The filibuster is not used by Republicans to bring the Senate together but to pull it further apart. The filibuster has been weaponized and abused.” Senators will now “declare where they stand, not just for the moment, but for the ages.”

Most wince-inducing: “Will you stand against election subversion? Yes or no? . . . Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace ? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor ? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?”

If a speech can be full of itself this speech was.

From the floor of the Senate the next day came Mr. McConnell’s rebuke. It was stinging, indignant to the point of seething. He didn’t attempt to scale any rhetorical heights. The plainness of his language was ferocious.

Mr. Biden’s speech was “profoundly unpresidential,” “deliberately divisive” and “designed to pull our country further apart.” “I have known, liked and personally respected Joe Biden for many years. I did not recognize the man at the podium yesterday.” Mr. Biden had entered office calling on Americans to stop the shouting and lower the temperature. “Yesterday, he called millions of Americans his domestic ‘enemies.’ ” That, a week after he “gave a January 6th lecture about not stoking political violence.”

“Twelve months ago, this president said that ‘disagreement must not lead to disunion.’ But yesterday, he invoked the bloody disunion of the Civil War to demonize Americans who disagree with him. He compared a bipartisan majority of senators to literal traitors.”

“Twelve months ago, the president said that ‘politics need not be a raging fire destroying everything in its path.’ . . . Yesterday he poured a giant can of gasoline on that fire.”

“In less than a year, ‘restoring the soul of America’ has become: Agree with me, or you’re a bigot.”

“This inflammatory rhetoric was not an attempt to persuade skeptical Democratic or Republican senators. In fact, you could not invent a better advertisement for the legislative filibuster than a president abandoning rational persuasion for pure demagoguery.”

American voters, said Mr. McConnell, “did not give President Biden a mandate for very much.” They didn’t give him big majorities in Congress. But they did arguably give him a mandate to bridge a divided country. “It is the one job citizens actually hired him to do.” He has failed to do it.

Then Mr. McConnell looked at Mr. Biden’s specific claims regarding state voting laws. “The sitting president of the United States of America compared American states to ‘totalitarian states.’ He said our country will be an ‘autocracy’ if he does not get his way.” The world has now seen an American president “propagandize against his own country to a degree that would have made Pravda blush.”

“He trampled through some of the most sensitive and sacred parts of our nation’s past. He invoked times when activists bled, and when soldiers died. All to demagogue voting laws that are more expansive than what Democrats have in his own home state.”

“A president shouting that 52 senators and millions of Americans are racist unless he gets whatever he wants is proving exactly why the Framers built the Senate to check his power.”

What Mr. Biden was really doing was attempting to “delegitimize the next election in case they lose it.”

Now, he said, “It is the Senate’s responsibility to protect the country.”

That sounded very much like a vow. It won’t be good for Joe Biden.

When national Democrats talk to the country they always seem to be talking to themselves. They are of the left, as is their constituency, which wins the popular vote in presidential elections; the mainstream media through which they send their messages is of the left; the academics, historians and professionals they consult are of the left. They get in the habit of talking to themselves, in their language, in a single, looped conversation. They have no idea how they sound to the non-left, so they have no idea when they are damaging themselves. But this week in Georgia Mr. Biden damaged himself. And strengthened, and may even have taken a step in unifying, the non-Democrats who are among their countrymen, and who are in fact the majority of them.

I was not as impressed as others by the president’s speech Thursday in the Capitol. I wanted him to take on a kind of broad-gauged gravity that spoke of the attack of 1/6/21 in a way that didn’t make Trump supporters and many Republicans lean away from the first moments but start to lean forward, however reluctantly, even painfully, knowing that what they were hearing was wisdom.

A lot of people have a lot of admitting to do, most spectacularly Republican lawmakers on the Hill, but you’re not likely to win admission by a great public damning, and asserting in the most heightened language, on an anniversary. Wisdom, and a kind of high modesty that doesn’t seek to win the moment, was what was needed.

There’s too much wanting to win the moment in politics. It never adds up and doesn’t help you win the war. Here I’ll be Irish: A little sweetness can elicit a lot of guilt.

Anyway President Biden won the moment Thursday but I think to little effect.

What I think will be much more important in the excavation of what happened on 1/6/21—and who was behind it—is the January 6 Committee, set to continue hearings in the early spring. There are reports they may be televised in prime time. If they’ve got the goods, and I hope they do. Only stark facts, not words, will break down the walls of denial that need to be broken.

But that isn’t the subject of this column, which is on another crisis. We have reached the Gobsmack Point in the American part of the pandemic. The current moment is much like 20 months ago. It is no triumph of government that this is so. Covid tests are too few and hard to come by. We are all at-home epidemiologists again, up nights studying online data, then from China and Italy, now from South Africa and London. Friends bring each other home tests and debate whether the nose swab should really be used on the throat.

Public-health advisories are confusing and contradictory and their spirit seems not to be “We must fully inform the people” but “We have to say something, let’s try this.” All public-health pronouncements now feel like propaganda.

The president spoke to the nation about Omicron on Tuesday, but that speech was thin, reheated gruel.

“Get vaccinated. Get boosted. There’s plenty of booster shots. Wear a mask while you’re in public. . . . We have booster shots for the whole nation, OK? . . . There is no excuse—no excuse—for anyone being unvaccinated. This continues to be a pandemic of the unvaccinated.”

On testing: “I know this remains frustrating, believe me it’s frustrating to me, but we’re making improvements. . . . Google—excuse me—‘Covid test near me’ on Google to find the nearest site where you can get a test most often and free.”

I did this. The page that came up was cluttered with the propaganda we’ve all grown used to—the first words you see are “COVID-19 tests are available at no cost nationwide at health centers and select pharmacies.” No admission of any difficulties. The first link offered for testing was a private company that barked in its automated message that walk-ins cannot be guaranteed service, and you cannot come if you are showing signs or symptoms of Covid or have experienced them in the past 10 days. The earliest test offered was in seven days. Omicron seems often to last about seven days.

Of rapid tests, the president said “drugstores and online websites are restocking.” Of course they are, and they’ll probably be fully stocked by the time the wave passes.

It all seemed so old, especially when the virus itself has taken such a dramatic turn, a new variant spreading faster than ever, yet weaker than ever. How does herd immunity figure in here, what does it mean at this point, how is it defined? I hoped to hear.

This may be the time to stop picking at the scab that is the vaccination wars. At a certain point you cannot patronize and scold people into changing their minds. Persuade but don’t bark and accuse. From the beginning the government should have sent pro- and anti-vaxxers out all over to debate each other—the pro-vaccine argument would have won. I still don’t understand why humor and warmth were never used in government vaccination campaigns, only bland and incessant hectoring from doctors in white jackets telling you it’s safe, it’s right, do it. Which came across as mere and heavily subsidized propaganda.

The president often sounds to me like a man trying to perceive what the public wants and deliver it, which in fairness is what most politicians do. But he and his people are not necessarily good perceivers. On the pandemic, he isn’t sure if they want reassurance or an acting out of shared indignation or a stirring Churchillian vow—“I’m gonna shut down the virus, not the country,” he said during the 2020 campaign. But people know when you’re telling them what you think they want to hear, and they experience it as talking down to them. They wouldn’t mind that so much if they thought the politician talking down was their intellectual or ethical superior, but they don’t often get to feel that way.

A problem for the president is that when he tries to convey resolution or strength he often takes on tics—a lowered voice, a whispering into the mic, an overenunciation—that in his political youth were charming, but in old age are less so. I always thought in the 2020 campaign that his age was an unacknowledged benefit: the assumption was he must be moderate, old people are, what else is the point of being old? As he came in his first year to seem less moderate his age became less a benefit.

You know what would move the needle in terms of his pandemic leadership? “I believe schools should remain open,” he said Tuesday, and that’s nice but not enough. The biggest single thing he could say to convince American parents that he was on their side, being serious and trying to end this pandemic well is to put himself and his party in some jeopardy by finally, late in the game, going forcefully against the most reactionary force in American public life, the teachers unions. The selfish, uncaring attitude they weren’t ashamed to show regarding the closing of schools, their fantasies about how uniquely vulnerable they themselves now are, and their pleasure in flexing political muscle—they covered themselves in shame the past two years. Their relationship with parents won’t recover for a long time, if ever.

If the president firmly and uncompromisingly stood up for Chicago, where the teachers this week refused to work, it would be some kind of moment. It would startle the nation’s parents into real appreciation: Someone is helping. And in the end and in time the unions would have to forgive him; they don’t really have another party to go to.

I don’t suppose that will ever happen. And too bad, because that really would move the needle and help the public much more than the furrowed brow and quivering voice and the acting out of . . . whatever.

Amjad Masad came to America in January 2012. He was from Amman, Jordan, and 24. He came because his father, a Palestinian immigrant to Jordan and a government worker, bought him a computer when he was 6. Amjad fell in love and discovered his true language. He studied the history of the computer and became enamored of the U.S. and Silicon Valley. He imagined the latter as a futuristic place with flying cars and floating buildings. He saw the 1999 movie “Pirates of Silicon Valley,” about Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, and decided America was the place he must be.

His memory of arriving at John F. Kennedy International Airport is a jumble, but what he saw from the bridge going into Manhattan was unforgettable—the New York skyline gleaming in the distance. It was like a spiritual experience. He was here.

He settled in New York, worked at a startup, then moved west—he needed to be in Silicon Valley. Five years ago he became co-founder and CEO of Replit, a company that offers tools to learn programming. It employs 40 people full-time and 10 contractors.

On Tuesday afternoon Mr. Masad, who became a citizen in 2019, thought about the 10th anniversary of his arrival. He was so grateful for three things: a company, a family, a house. He and his wife and business partner, Haya Odeh, also from Jordan, started talking about America. At 3:56 p.m. ET, he posted a Twitter thread.

“I landed in the United States 10 years ago with nothing but credit card debt. After one startup exit, one big tech job, and one unicorn, I genuinely believe that it wouldn’t have been possible anywhere else in the world. Here are 10 things that I love about this country:

“1. Work Ethic. First thing I noticed was that everyone regardless of occupation took pride in doing a bang-up job, even when no one looked. I asked people: ‘why do you pour everything into a job even when it is seemingly thankless?’ And it was like asking fish ‘what is water?’

“2. Lack of corruption. In the 10 years in the US, I’ve never been asked for a bribe, and that’s surprising. When you know that you predictably get to keep a sizeable portion of the value you create and that no one will arbitrarily stop you, it makes it easier to be ambitious.

“3. Win-win mindset. People don’t try to screw you on deals, they play the long game, and align incentives in such a way that everyone wins. This is especially apparent in Silicon Valley where you can’t underestimate anyone because one day you might be working for them.

“4. Rewarding talent. From sports to engineering, America is obsessed with properly rewarding talent. If you’re good, you’ll get recognized. The market for talent is dynamic—if you don’t feel valued today, you can find a better place tomorrow.

“5. Open to weirdos. Because you never know where the next tech, sports, or arts innovation will come from, America had to be open to weirdness. Weirdos thrive without being crushed. We employ people with the most interesting backgrounds—dropouts to artists—they’re awesome!

“6. Forgiveness. Weird and innovative people have to put themselves out there, and as part of that, they’re going to make mistakes in public. The culture here values authenticity, and if you’re authentic and open about your failures, you’ll get a second and a third chance.

“7. Basic infrastructure. Americans take care of their public spaces. Parks are clean, subways and busses run on time, and utilities & services just work. Because life can be livable for a time without income, it was possible for us to quit our jobs and bootstrap our business.

“8. Optimism. When you step foot in the US there is a palpable sense of optimism. People believe that tomorrow will be better than today. They don’t know where progress will come from, but that’s why they’re open to differences. When we started up even unbelievers encouraged us.

“9. Freedom. Clearly a cliche, but it’s totally true. None of the above works if you’re not free to explore & tinker, to build companies, and to move freely. I still find it amazing that if I respect the law and others, I can do whatever I want without being compelled/restricted.

“10. Access to capital. It’s a lot harder to innovate & try to change the world without capital. If you have a good idea & track record, then someone will be willing to bet on you. The respect for entrepreneurship in this country is inspiring. And it makes the whole thing tick.”

I was sent the thread by email and thought: Beautiful. So much on the list is what I see. Hardworking: In my town everyone from bicycle deliverymen to masters and mistresses of the universe work themselves like rented mules. And, somehow most moving, that we’re open to weirdos: We always have been; it’s in our DNA; it explains a lot of our politics and culture; it’s good that it continues. “This Is Us.”

At the end Mr. Masad said he was speaking generally, that character limits don’t invite nuance, that there’s no call to sit back self-satisfied, that everything can be made better. But he added a warning: “Many of the things that I talked about are under threat, largely from people who don’t know how special they have it. America is worth protecting, and realizing that progress can be made without destroying the things that made it special.”

The thread went viral and he was engulfed in feedback. The reaction, he said Wednesday by phone from his Palo Alto, Calif., home, “was overwhelmingly positive.” Tellingly, “the majority of the real positive, heartwarming, excited feedback has been from other immigrants. They add to the list what they appreciate.” He noted the number of native-born Americans telling him, “Wow, this is an outside perspective that I don’t have.”

Mr. Masad got the most pushback on infrastructure. He stood his ground. When he got to New York, Central Park was a beautifully maintained gem, and on the streets he appreciated “the music, the arts, free concerts, random popups—all for free and open to all.” By infrastructure, he also meant our system of laws and arrangements. “When we started the company, we got our health insurance through ObamaCare,” to keep costs down. It worked.

Anyway, the thread was a breath of fresh air.

The past few years, maybe decades, we’ve become an increasingly self-damning people. As a nation we harry ourselves into a state of permanent depression over our failures and flaws and what we imagine, because we keep being told, is the innate wickedness of our system, which keeps justice from happening and life from being good.

Maybe we got carried away. Maybe we have it wrong. Maybe those who are new here and observe us with fresh eyes see more clearly than we do. As long as our immigrants are talking like this, maybe we’ve still got it goin’ on. What a welcome thought. Thank you, Amjad Masad.

God bless all Americans, old and new, here by birth, belief or both, as we arrive together in an unknown place called 2022. Let’s keep our eyes fresh, shall we?

In New York we feel back where we started. It’s like 2020, with everyone in a mask and canceling gatherings and scrambling to find a test. Covid is everywhere. For the moment we appear to be the epicenter again, with 38,835 new cases reported in the state on Thursday, a record. I know many people who got sick in the past two weeks, but it’s not a terrible version of the illness. It’s a milder one, and hospitalization isn’t part of the equation. Early data seems to suggest this also. I am not an epidemiologist, and it’s foolish to make predictions in such a fluid and unknowable environment, but it’s Christmas, so I offer a purely instinctive reading:

Everything living wants to live, including this stupid little virus. It will shape-shift, find new entry points—anything to stay alive. But what we’re seeing now is the pandemic in its death throes. It’s going at everyone’s throats, in a frenzy, but it’s weaker than it was and knows it. It’s desperate where it used to be discerning (targeting the old). In its dying frenzy it will reach everyone; in the end we’ll all have had some variant. And then it will give up and slink away. Because while it got weaker, we, with vaccines, boosters, therapeutics and natural immunity, got stronger.

Yes, there will be more variants. The virus will not fully disappear from the news or our lives, but this third winter will be the last hard one. And then we’ll go on to what passes for normal life in America having learned, and changed, a great deal.

From the beginning I thought: This pandemic, long anticipated by science and surprisingly late in coming, is a chance to understand, at some grave cost, what we will need to survive future pandemics. A lot didn’t work this time; we have to learn what we need to do with medical and scientific establishments and practices, including increased research. At the very least we need to warehouse medical supplies built to last.

Republicans, for when you’re in charge: This isn’t the place to cut. We have to stay on the problem. We’re not at the end of an era but the beginning of one, and it’s going to take more.

Back to New York. Walking through once-empty Midtown Manhattan, I saw nonstop Christmas bustle, not as big as the old days but big, including something I hadn’t seen in a while and didn’t see last year: families with kids from out of town jostling along Fifth Avenue. There were lines at some stores. I returned from an excursion to read in this paper that there are indications the U.S. economy is booming. Early output estimates from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta put the annualized growth rate expected for this quarter at 7%, compared with 2% last quarter. It put America at a much better rate than the eurozone, with an expected 2% growth, and China, at 4%. The Journal reported that analysts expect the U.S. economy will have grown about 6% in 2021, most of it fueled by demand. “U.S. consumers, flush with trillions of dollars of fiscal stimulus, are snapping up manufactured goods and scarce materials.”

Six percent growth, if that turns out to be the final number, is pretty fabulous. But I’m not aware, and the polls don’t show, that the American people themselves experience the economy as going gangbusters. The obvious and primary reason is inflation—prices of the things that you need to live each day, groceries and gas, are way up. If you’ve been ordering food gifts for friends online, you have entered the world of the hundred-dollar ham. Economic growth and good employment numbers don’t feel like good news if inflation keeps pace with or exceeds wage growth.

But the cause would be more than inflation. If people think the economy is heating up because the system is pumped full of cash from two years of government spending they’ll experience any resulting growth as temporary and provisional, not organic but somehow unreal. They’ll stay wary of good data, especially when they believe high government spending itself tends to inflate the currency.

And I wonder if a lot of people aren’t worrying that there’s been some quiet but fundamental shift in expectations set in place during the pandemic—that you don’t really have to work anymore, or if you don’t like your job you don’t have to stay until you get a better one; you can just leave and one way or another get the support you need through benefits, programs and government assistance. People are wondering right now about the implications of the Great Resignation. More freedom, more enjoyment of life, less scrambling in a rat race—maybe that’s the right direction. But is it sustainable in the long term? Will it have some effect on what used to be called the national character? As a people we’ve always known how to grit through and suffer when history takes a turn. What will we be like when we don’t, and history gets more demanding?

These questions connect to the most fateful domestic decision of the Biden administration, which was to turn so far left domestically, with huge, dense, ideologically sprawling spending bills. The apparent collapse of their legislative agenda reflects the big political fact of 2021, which is the low popular standing of President Biden.

The decision to align with progressives was a miscalculation—destabilizing for Democrats and damaging to the president—but also a mystery. Did it spring from a single decision marked by a memorable sentence that we’ll be reading about in memoirs down the road? Something like, “You think it’s 2021, but it’s 1933, and this is our moment to complete the New Deal.” Was it a series of decisions made over weeks in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, a matter of grunts and nods as people ate lunch at their desks? Did anyone say, “The energy in our party is on the left, to hold together as a party and win on the Hill we must bring the left in and let it help drive the car”?

Or—in what really would have been the most consequential political statement of 2021—did anybody stand up and say, “My friends, big ambition is admirable but we don’t have the margins. We don’t have FDR’s House and Senate, our control is razor thin. The path for us is easy does it, day by day, smaller bills and plenty of outreach to Republicans, whose increasingly populist base doesn’t mind spending as long as it doesn’t seem insane. The progressives won’t like it, the Squad will hate it, but we can use them as a foil, as a useful illustration of what we’re not. We’ll use their criticism to underscore our centrism. We don’t need them. All we need to be popular is a) not to be Donald Trump, b) to provide steady leadership that delivers modest but regular improvements, and c) to do this in a way that leaves people saying, ‘My God, someone made Washington work again.’ That’s the path.”

Did anyone inside say that?

Is there still time to change tack?

That will be a great political question of 2022.

The new “West Side Story” is, so far, a box-office flop. Steven Spielberg’s much-anticipated remake of the landmark 1961 musical received rave reviews and has been called a masterpiece. Yet its first weekend theatrical release yielded only $10.5 million, which Variety called “a dismal result for a movie of its scale and scope.”

What happened? The entertainment press has offered possible explanations. With new coronavirus variants emerging, people don’t feel comfortable in theaters. The audience for musicals skews older, the demographic with most reason to be timid. It’s the casting: No one’s ever heard of the stars. Ticket prices are too high. People are out shopping. Who wants to see a remake of a classic? Maybe the audience for movie musicals is simply over.

There’s probably something to all of these. Two additional thoughts:

One is that some who’d be part of the movie’s natural audience might not have gone because they assumed it would be woke because most of what comes out of Hollywood is woke, and they experience wokeness as a form of intellectual and moral harassment. People don’t want to see something they love traduced, so they’d stay away.

But I think there’s a larger and more immediate reason. Mr. Spielberg plus great old American film should equal huge blockbuster. “West Side Story’s” unsuccessful release tells us that we have undergone a fundamental shift in how we watch movies in America. And the entertainment industry should see it for what it is. Many thought as the pandemic spread and the theaters closed that it would all snap back as soon as the pandemic was over. People would flock back to do what they’ve been doing for more than a century, not only out of habit but tradition: They’d go out to the movies. But a technological revolution came; the pandemic speeded up what had already begun, just as it speeded up the Zoom revolution that is transforming business and office work.

People got streaming services and watched movies at home. They got used to it. They liked it. They’d invite friends and stream new releases together. Or they stayed in their pajamas and watched it.

I never thought movie theaters would go out of style, but I see that in the past few months, since New York has loosened up and things are open, I have gone to Broadway and Off-Broadway shows five times and to a movie not at all, except this week for this column. Like all Americans, I really love movies. But I can watch them at home.

The old world of America at the movies, of gathering at the local temple of culture, the multiplex, is over. People won’t rush out to see a movie they heard was great but that’s confined to theatrical release; they’ll stay home knowing it will be streaming soon.

Movie theaters won’t completely go out of business; a good number will survive because people will fill them to go to superhero movies and big fantastical action films. People will want to see those on the screen together and hoot and holler. But it will never again be as it was, different generations, different people, coming together on Saturday night at the bijou. The bijou is at home now, on the couch or bed, streaming in ultrahigh definition.

In thinking about this I hearken back to James Agee’s little masterpiece, “A Death in the Family,” a novel published posthumously in 1957. He was America’s first great movie critic, but in the book he remembered his boyhood in Knoxville, Tenn., in 1915, and his father saying at the dinner table, “Well, spose we go to the picture show.” They’d walk to the movie house and the whole town was there. “And there was William S. Hart with both guns blazing and his long, horse face and his long, hard lip, and the great country rode away behind him as wide as the world.” Then the screen was filled with a city—and there was Charlie Chaplin. “Everyone laughed the minute they saw him,” and as they left his father’s face was “wrapped in good humor, the memory of Charlie.”

You lose something when the whole town isn’t there anymore. It’s better when the whole town is gathered. The move to streaming strikes me as yet another huge cultural change, and I don’t know the answer or remedy to this change and others will have to find it. Because not all movies can be superhero movies, and not all movies should be.

As to “West Side Story”: It’s lovely. It’s beautiful, beautiful, and tender about America. The music is even lusher, fuller than in the original and the look of the movie is more colorful and sweeter. It’s beautifully cast; every young star is gifted and believable, and you have an honest sense of witnessing the beginning of brilliant careers—the guy who plays Riff, the guy who plays Bernardo, and the young woman who plays Maria.

It’s not woke, it’s wonderful. “America,” that most American of songs, so knowing but not jaded, is done differently from the original but better, more communally, and it’s just as joyous and comic.

The Journal’s Joe Morgenstern used exactly the right word to describe this movie: “Exultant.”

It’s good that this story, this music and these lyrics, enter the world again.

The whole thing makes you feel that America has a chance.

If I were a middle or high school teacher I’d take my class to see it and say, “The music and lyrics are very great and you must know them to be culturally literate; also America was kind of like this once.” I’d take a college class after having them read Jane Jacobs to understand better what was lost in the slum clearance that made way for Lincoln Center.

There are flaws, but so what? The cultural framing of the Jets and the Sharks is a little tidy and not quite on the mark. It made me think of Clifford Odets signaling the immutable socioeconomic forces that propelled the anguished working-class boxer who’d rather be a violinist. Not everything has to be explained, and some things were too heightened. The slum-clearance sets were a little too war-torn Berlin and looked like outtakes from “Saving Private Ryan.” New York didn’t look like that even in the age of urban renewal. And the end somehow takes a little longer than you want. But again, so what?

A closing note on the audience. I saw it in the AMC theater on 68th and Broadway at 12:30 p.m. on a weekday. That’s pretty much where the action of the story took place, in 1957. The theater was about 10% full. A mix of ages, but more skewed over 50. Here’s what struck me. Nobody left at the end. They stayed in their seats throughout the closing credits, and applauded individual names. Mr. Spielberg got the heartiest but everyone got some.

My thought is maybe only 10% are seeing excellence in America right now but when they do they’re so appreciative and want to show it. Ten percent of 330 million people is 33 million, and that is quite an audience. Someone will have to find out how to fully serve them in the revolution we’re in, and it won’t be with superheroes.

President Biden’s poll numbers are bad and Vice President Kamala Harris’s are worse. A survey this week from conservative-leaning Rasmussen had her at 39% favorable, 57% unfavorable.The number that stuck in the public’s mind came last month, from a USAToday/Suffolk poll that put her approval at 28%, disapproval at 51%.

The past few weeks she’s been hammered by bad news. There’s been an exodus of high-level staffers. The Washington Post had a sweeping, searing piece that described a “dysfunctional” and chaotic office full of bitter enmities. A consistent problem: Ms. Harris refuses “to wade into briefing materials prepared by staff members” and would “then berate employees when she appeared unprepared.” A former staffer said she’s not “willing to do the prep and the work.” There had been a similar, heavily sourced report from CNN. In the San Francisco Examiner an aide to Ms. Harris when she was California’s attorney general, Gil Duran, wrote a column saying such tales of chaos have a familiar ring.

All this leaves people uneasy. The president is old and his judgment questionable; she seems out of her depth. We will have another three years of this? It is also dangerous: We don’t want their weakness to become America’s weakness.

And so some thoughts on how she might improve her situation.

First, the good news. The Harris Is Incompetent stories are played out, at least for the next few months. More would be overkill. The good thing about having been killed is nobody expects anything from you because you’re dead. Expectations are low. Ms. Harris can use the time of her deadness to focus on why she’s failing. Those who know her doubt she is capable of deep change, and a reset would have to deal not with surface matters but those more fundamental. Still, she’d be staring into the abyss right now, and perhaps seeing this is her last chance to correct a bad impression.

I trace her decline to when she went to Guatemala and Mexico in June for meetings on immigration. Near the end in what should have been a highly prepared meeting with the press, she launched into a sort of mindless ramble in which she kept saying we have to find out the “root causes” of illegal immigration. She said it over and over. “My trip . . . was about addressing the root causes. The stories that I heard and the interactions we had today reinforce the nature of these root causes. . . . So the work that we have to do is the work of addressing the cause—the root causes.”

There is no one in America, including immigrants, who doesn’t know the root causes of illegal immigration. They’re coming for a better life. America has jobs, a social safety net, public sympathy for the underdog. Something good might happen to you here. Nothing good was going to happen at home.

That’s why immigrants have always come. Studying “root causes” is a way of saying you want to look busy while you do nothing.

She seemed unprepared, unfocused—unserious.

Her supporters grouse that she is criticized because she is a woman of color. Axios’ Jonathan Swann quoted some in August. They see “sexist overtones” and “gendered dynamics in press coverage.” This was echoed in this week’s Washington Post piece: Her defenders say criticism is steeped in “racism and sexism”; she faces a double standard “for women who are ambitious, powerful or simply unafraid to appear strong in public.”

But she doesn’t seem strong in public; she seems scattered and unprepared. And as Mr. Duran wrote in the Examiner, what prejudice there is, is “baked into our politics,” and a competent politician doesn’t blame bigotry but beats it.

Her real problems look more like this: She loves the politics of politics too much, and not the meaning. When people meet with her they come away saying that what she cares about is the politics of the issue, not the issue itself. But even as she’s obsessed with the game of national politics she’s not so far particularly good at it. When she sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, she spectacularly flamed out.

She came from a generation of California Democrats who never even had to meet a Republican, so great was their electoral dominance. It was too easy for them. She only had to speak Democrat, only had to know how they think and put together party coalitions. But half or more of the country is conservative or Republican. She never had to develop the broad political talents to talk to them too.

What can be done? First she must come to terms with her job. John Adams, the first vice president, called it “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.” Every cliché about it is true. Including: Today you are nothing, but tomorrow you could be everything.

The reason people watch Ms. Harris so closely isn’t that she’s a woman of color or a breakthrough figure, but that she could become president at any moment the next three years.

They want to have some confidence. They don’t want to have to worry about it.

We face grave challenges—China, Russia, the endurance of the American economy. Who leads us matters. Ms. Harris should set her mind primarily on the deep and profound responsibilities of the job she may have to fill. She should do this as an act of will. Only secondarily should she be thinking about her political prospects.

She seems to have the order confused. And when that is true everybody can tell.

Second, she must make herself useful. She’s there to help the president. Recent vice presidents who were good at their job and evaded this kind of criticism were longtime Washington hands who made their experience useful to the president, helping him navigate the town, find old levers, forge new relationships. George H.W. Bush did this for Californian Ronald Reagan ; Al Gore knew things that benefited Bill Clinton, former governor of Arkansas.

The Washington insider path is closed to Ms. Harris because she’s relatively new to town and her president’s experience dwarfs hers.

But here’s something she could do for Mr. Biden to be useful to his larger project. She could lend what skills she has to the public presentation of the administration’s stands. Mr. Biden isn’t strong there; he’s uneven in his attempts to explain and advance policy thinking.

To do this Ms. Harris would have to decide to become serious—to inform and immerse herself, meet with party thinkers, study her briefing books. Her current strategy, to the extent it exists, appears to rely on her sense of her own personal charisma—delighted laughter, attempts to connect personally, to convey zest.

She should speak instead with sincerity and depth. She shouldn’t confuse Happy Warrior with Hungry Operative.

Ms. Harris has never seemed especially earnest. This would be a good time for earnestness.

Would a new and serious Kamala Harris be spoofed? Yes, but it would be a better kind of spoofing. Let them say you look chastened: People would be relieved to see you look chastened. Let them snidely suggest you had previously hidden your serious side. You did. Let them say you’ve been humbled. You should be. So far you’ve got a lot to be humble about.

Get your mind off yourself, give America a break, get this thing turned around.

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments Wednesday in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. On Friday, under the court’s usual procedure, the justices would meet to hold a preliminary vote on their decision. A member of the majority will be assigned to write it. The court will review and amend that document and is expected to hand down its decision at the end of its term, in late June or early July.

This will be an intense and dramatic time for the court, which will likely decide one of two things. It may overturn 1973’s Roe v. Wade decision. That wouldn’t make abortion illegal in the U.S. but would revert the question to each state legislature. Some, through legislation designed to be triggered at the overturning of Roe, will guarantee full abortion on demand, as New York and California already have. Some will apply limits—15 weeks in the case of the Mississippi law the justices are considering. Some will likely ban all or nearly all abortions within their boundaries.

Overturning Roe would mean returning a furiously contested national issue of almost 50 years standing to the democratic process. This wouldn’t “solve” the problem or “end” the struggle. It would bring the responsibility for solving and ending it closer to the people. In the short term it would cause new disruption and renewed argument, as Roe itself did when it negated abortion statutes in 46 states and the District of Columbia. Deep-blue states will go deep blue, red ones will go red, and purple states will tend toward more moderate laws. It will take time to play out. Politicians who stray too far from true public opinion, as opposed to whatever got burped up in a recent poll, will fairly quickly face backlash at the polls.

It won’t be settled for a few years. But then it will settle. This path—overturning—is the closest America will get to justice and democratic satisfaction on this issue.

Or the court may vote not to overturn Roe but in effect to pare it back, allowing state limits such as Mississippi’s while letting stand some constitutional right to abortion. The court would be saying, in effect: We cannot end the national abortion argument, but we can manage it. This decision would be, in a court maintaining a conservative majority, a gradualist approach that will guarantee future cases.

I believe there is a general view among the conservative justices that Roe was wrongly decided, a bad decision that should be overturned. But they will be under pressure to hold to precedent, based on the understandable argument that it is a very big thing to overturn such a momentous decision—especially in a divided country, especially in a time of wavering faith in institutions and especially with a case as famous as Roe. They will be tempted to choose narrower and less dramatic path.

It is not unrealistic for the court to fear undermining its image. Every overturning of precedent involves at least some hypothetical damage to the court’s credibility: You got it wrong last time, maybe you’re wrong now too. On the other hand, as the justices well know, precedent has been overturned before in important and dramatic cases, and one could as well argue that a serious, well-ordered decision grounded in law and history might leave a significant portion of the country—half of it, which disapproves of abortion—with renewed respect for the court. They would see it correct a decision that has been faulted by stalwart legal minds of left as well as the right. Archibald Cox wrote in 1976 that it had failed to consider “the most compelling interest of the State in prohibiting abortion: the interest in maintaining that respect for the paramount sanctity of human life.” Ruth Bader Ginsburg also questioned its reasoning and observed in 1985 that Roe appeared “to have provoked, not resolved conflict.”

Some would experience overturning as aggressive and extreme, but to others it will look like an honest grappling with error that is long overdue.

Foes of overturning make the argument that such a decision would make the court look hopelessly political. Justice Sonia Sotomayor made that charge during oral arguments: the court might not “survive the stench” of a ruling perceived as “political.”

But the court is a political body, because it is a human body that inevitably reflects reigning political currents. Roe too reflected them: Justices wanted a thing to happen in the name of justice for women and found a way to do so by spying previously unseen “penumbras, formed by emanations” (a clause from an earlier case) from the law.

It can be argued that it would increase our faith in our institutions to see that serious objections that lasted half a century, and would have lasted longer, were finally heard.

Here it is good to ask: Why has abortion so roiled this country for half a century? In other cases, when courts saw a new constitutional right or liberalized the social order in some way, the public acclimated. Brown v. Board of Education was accepted over the years, gay marriage was followed by public acceptance—the court had spoken. When the court took prayer out of the public schools in 1962 and held that interracial couples had a right to marry in 1967, high public disapproval on those issues immediately began to decline. “But abortion was different. Opposition to Roe became more hostile after its issuance,” writes Joshua Prager in his history of Roe v. Wade, “The Family Roe.”

There are many reasons, but I think the biggest is that all those other rulings are about how to live. Roe involved death, inescapably and at its heart. We have spent 40 years looking at sonograms and carrying in our wallets or phones the black-and-white copy of the ultrasound that, when you first saw it, you thought: “This is real.” “She’s already got my feet.” It’s hard to ignore the meaning of that: She’s there.

It speaks well of America that Roe was the struggle that wouldn’t end.

Mr. Prager’s book is stupendous, a masterwork of reporting. Over 11 years he tracked down almost everyone involved in the case, and tells how it came about.

We can’t shake the picture of the wholesome 1950s and ’60s as a time of American innocence. But no country is “innocent,” and so many of the central players in the drama came from some kind of deep dysfunction—sadness, family chaos, sirens in the night. Norma McCorvey, the Roe in the case, was a remorseless, compulsive liar who variously claimed to have been raped, gang-raped, beaten, shot at, preyed on by lesbian nuns. As I read her she was a sometimes charming, often funny sociopath, always uninterested in the effect on others of her decisions.

There is the brilliant lawyer who brought the first case and wound up destitute in a heatless house in East Texas; the prickly, eloquent pro-life leader who wound up unappreciated, alone and a hoarder. There is the writing of the Roe decision itself. And there is the idealism of many on both sides who were actually trying to make life more just.

Mr. Prager is pro-choice, and some of his analysis reflects that, but the power of his reporting overwhelms any bias.

If you want to understand Roe more deeply before the coming decision, read it.

On this family holiday weekend, a look at a study of the American family. It’s called “The Divided State of Our Unions: Family Formation in (Post-)Covid America” and comes from the Institute for Family Studies, the American Enterprise Institute and the Wheatley Foundation. It’s based on two surveys conducted by YouGov for IFS and Wheatley.

When the pandemic came, marriage and fertility rates in America had already been falling steadily. Last year the marriage rate fell to 33 per 1,000 of the unmarried population, and the lifetime fertility rate to 1.64 per woman—“levels never seen before in American history,” as per the study. (Fertility has been below the “replacement rate” of 2.1 for more than a decade.)

The authors considered three possibilities. One was that marriage and fertility would simply continue downward. Another was a “renaissance scenario”—the loneliness, dislocation and existential questioning of the past year and a half would produce a new appreciation for the idea of family, a longing for and desire to make them. The third was that “economic, religious, and partisan divides in family formation” would “deepen” in Covid-19’s wake.

The report found most evidence for the third scenario. The desire to marry among single Americans ticked up 2 points since the pandemic, but 17% of Americans 18 to 55 reported their desire to have children had decreased, while only 10% said it had increased. And Covid might have “poured fuel” on the fissures. Interest in family formation varies by income, religion, even partisan affiliation. The rich, the religious and Republicans have a “relatively greater propensity” to marry.

There was one area of convergence. Historically the poor and less educated have been more likely to have children. “But childlessness is rising among less-educated, lower-income men and women, a trend that COVID seems likely to amplify. This would bring childbearing trends among the poor closer to those of more educated and affluent Americans.”

The conclusion: “As the pandemic lifts, the nation is likely to see a deepening divide between the affluent and everybody else, between the religious and the secular, and between Republicans and Democrats in their propensity to marry and have children.”

Interest in family formation is higher among the religious. This has been true for a while, and the pandemic sharpened the divide. The desire to marry increased by 8 points overall among unmarried Americans who regularly attend religious services. The desire to have children fell a little among those who attend religious services at least once a month and by a net 11 points among those who never or seldom attend services.

The desire to marry increased by 5 points among unmarried Republicans and 3 for Democrats—but it fell by 4 points for independents. The net desire to have children rose 1 point overall among Republicans but fell 11 for independents and 12 for Democrats. (The study includes data from Gallup indicating that religious Americans navigated the trauma and challenges of the pandemic better than those with no ties to organized religion. For many, faith was a lifeline.)

Yuval Levin, director of social, cultural and constitutional studies at AEI, wrote of the study this week in the Dispatch, focusing on the larger picture of declining family formation. He believes we haven’t fully come to terms with a deeper meaning of the long-term data. In the past when we thought of social disorder, we approached the subject in terms of restraining passions. Humans have appetites for pleasure, status, power; when these things aren’t well-directed and joined to human commitments they can leave lives deformed. Maybe now we must begin to see a different kind of disorder, one that looks less like ungoverned human desire and more like desire’s diminishment—“an absence of energy and drive leaving people languishing.”

Many bad things in our society are abating. The divorce rate last year hit a 50-year low; teen pregnancies are at their lowest rate since the 1930s; out-of-wedlock births reached their height in 2008 and are declining. The abortion rate may be lower than it was when the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade in 1973. But, Mr. Levin notes, positive behaviors are also declining: “There are fewer divorces because there are fewer marriages.” “Fewer teenagers are dying in car accidents because fewer teenagers are getting driver’s licenses.” It isn’t only teen sex that’s declining, it’s teen dating. “There is less social disorder, we might say, because there is less social life.”

Normal human misbehavior hasn’t gone anywhere, but it’s being joined by a more profound and fundamental problem: “disordered passivity—a failure to launch, which leaves too many Americans on the sidelines of life.” Restraint and self-discipline chip away at wildness, “but what if we fail to act on our longings to begin with?”

Are many of the young failing to “get on with life”? If so, why?

The new passivity is global, and further along in parts of Europe and Asia. “Social inertness,” Mr. Levin writes, is surely a response in part to the breakdown of the traditional social order itself: the waning of “life scripts” provided by family, religion and traditional norms. Younger Americans are “less sure of where to step and how to build their lives.” They have probably received, too, an exaggerated sense of the material challenges presented by marriage and parenthood: “Many younger Americans now think it was much easier than it really was for their parents to live on one income or have that additional child.”

We are seeing “a rising generation acutely averse to risk, and so to every form of dynamism,” and this trend isn’t confined to the young. “Excessive risk aversion” is deforming other areas of American life, from child rearing to work and public leadership. And it seems intertwined with a more general tendency toward inhibition and constriction—we see this in speech and conduct codes, which leave Americans “walking on eggshells around each other in many of our major institutions.” This new ethos “stifles the public arena while denying us recourse to private arenas and tells us how not to behave without showing us how to thrive.”

And of course the internet, which turns a personal life into performance, “where we display ourselves without really connecting.” More people are “functional loners.” Erotic energies are dissipated into substitutes, such as pornography, which has grown into “a hideous, colossal scourge that our society has inexplicably decided to pretend it can do nothing about.” That part should be underlined.

A change in the character of social breakdown doesn’t require arguments for self-discipline but a case for exertion and activity—for gambling on life and joining it. “We have to make a deeper, warmer argument—a case against giving up that is rooted in what we have to gain not just by living but by living well.”

It would be an argument “for the good of life.” We must “persuade human beings to overcome passivity and paralysis and jump into life.”

This is all true.

We are all pilgrims. At some point you must trust life, trust God, and push off.

This is offered just in case you run out of things to talk about at the table.