Peggy Noonan

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.

We’re in a funny place with the Covid pandemic. It feels like it’s ending. Its ability to govern our lives is, certainly. Lockdowns and shutdowns ran out of steam; people have returned to life or are returning. At the same time we know we’re not at the end. We read the headlines—infections flare here, hospitals suddenly overwhelmed there. Covid isn’t leaving, it’s sticking around. The subject of mandates is an ever-changing blur; no one knows exactly what’s officially allowed, and where.

Great books will be filled with all we learned and how the pandemic changed us and our society. We’ll grapple with it for decades.

If you watched the state directives and rebellions, the arguments over treatments, the vaccine wars, you know in a whole new way what a wild country we are—rascally, oppositional and full of fight. Contradictory too: anarchic and hungry for order, zealous of our rights and suddenly careless with them, resentful of authority and flying to the courts.

But for that country, the wild, contradictory one, we’ve kind of done OK. One hundred ninety-six million Americans, and 71% of adults, have been fully vaccinated; 228 million and 82% partly. That’s impressive.

Most of us also came to realize that the Covid shot is far less effective than many vaccines, such as those for polio and measles. It doesn’t completely protect you from infection.

What it does is crucial: It seriously reduces the chance you will become ill, and if you do, it dramatically reduces the chance you will be hospitalized or die. That is an achievement, and a blessing for the aged, who’d been slaughtered by the illness. If you don’t get the shot you are, in my judgment, foolish, and if you don’t fear long Covid and its effects, you are not paying attention.

But the number of breakthrough cases is something most of us have begun to factor in. A few months ago such cases were surprising—“Joe got the virus and he was vaccinated twice!” Now it’s a fairly common occurrence. ABC News this week reported that Vermont, which has the highest vaccination rate in the country, is seeing a surge in new cases. Breakthrough cases among vaccinated residents were up 31% in a week.

The state health commissioner said there was no single answer to why. The Delta variant is hardy and ever on the prowl for new people to infect. People are gathering again. And we are seeing waning immunity among those who were vaccinated early in the year.

I think people are coming to terms with the realization that the Covid vaccine is similar to the flu shot. That shot offers a moderate to high degree of protection against influenza. You have to get it every year. It doesn’t eliminate the chance you’ll get the flu; it lowers it.

Nobody calls it the flu vaccination, though technically that’s what it is. It’s the flu shot. And what we call things matters because it reflect our understanding and expectations. People and institutions are already signaling without saying that they understand the limits of the Covid shot. At the theater in New York they closely, carefully check everyone’s vaccinated cards and phone apps, and then underscore that everyone must wear a mask. If you have a roomful of people you know are vaccinated, and vaccination means they are immune from Covid, masks would be irrelevant. At two recent shows, one on Broadway, the other Off-, they reminded you of the rules charmingly. An usher would tap her nose once, softly, while showing the crinkled eyes of a smile when he or she saw you accidentally-on-purpose let the mask fall below your nose. At a recent wedding the hosts required two vaccinations plus proof of a Covid test within three days. It was a prudent and realistic request, but you wouldn’t do the latter if you had full confidence in the former. Which none of us at this point do.

Where does wisdom lie the next few months? In this space we’re not in love with federal mandates on vaccines and masking. Such powers are best held by those governmental entities closest to citizens. Let businesses, schools and institutions make their decisions and carry them out; let states fight things out within themselves.

The federal government would be better off using its endless resources to persuade, persuade and persuade people to get the shots and boosters. Mandating from that level will only prove more divisive in an already divided country, and be experienced by people as Washington pushing them around. Don’t force the moment to its crisis. Be patient and make the case.

People who don’t want the shots are often painted as right-wing nuts, but they are a various and broad swathe of the population. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a leading anti-vaxxer. His latest book, released this week, “The Real Anthony Fauci,” accuses Dr. Fauci, Bill Gates and big Pharma of being partners in a $60 billion global vaccine scheme that flooded the world with propaganda exaggerating Covid’s dangers. It was an instant Amazon bestseller. When I checked Wednesday it was outselling books by Jordan Peterson, Jonathan Karl and Dale Carnegie. It may be nut stuff, but anti-vaxxers are a movement, and they are dug in.

The federal government should put its emphasis not on restriction but creation. Continue to focus on the availability and production of the therapeutics that already exist, such as monoclonal antibody treatments, and those that are coming. Every drug company in America is trying to create new therapies, antiviral drugs that keep viruses from multiplying, and immunomodulators that attempt to tamp down the body’s immune reaction so it doesn’t turn on itself. It’s exciting when you read about them. Pfizer just announced it’s racing to develop an antiviral pill. Weeks before, Merck said its experimental antiviral might cut in half the chance of those infected dying or being hospitalized. The federal government should be leaning hard into therapeutics.

Nurses in hospitals work brutal shifts, and many are burned out after the past 20 months. A lot of them are leaving. All medical professionals are burning out. It would be good if the federal government focused on ideas for public policy that might ease the situation—more time off, or shorter shifts with higher wages. (Maybe prioritize English-speaking foreign-national medical professionals who are trying to immigrate?)

*   *   *

There are so many domestic troubles America has to work on, it just doesn’t feel right to focus on those most guaranteed to divide. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported this week that between April 2020 and April 2021, 100,000 Americans died of opioids. It was a record high, up 29% from the previous year. There are many reasons—isolation, limited services, fentanyl mixed into everything. And Americans like drugs. We have a deep and profound addiction crisis in our country and we’ve had it so long we forget to see it.

It is hitting every family in the country. We see it in homeless encampments and in the mentally ill on the streets. And nobody’s talking about it because nobody has a plan. Not everything is Covid.

I want to look at the woke education agenda and the Democrats. They can still push away from the woke regime and improve their prospects for survival in the next election, but they must move quickly and be clear. Our bias in this column is that it’s good for America if there are two strong parties duking it out—they may not mean to but they function as a unifying, stabilizing force in this broken-up country—and it would be a great national good if the woke regime were disrupted. Nobody likes it but the extreme cultural left, including the teachers unions. It did famous harm to the Democrats in the latest election.

The debate over nomenclature—why, critical race theory isn’t even taught in third grade!—is mischievous and meant to obscure. The woke regime rests primarily on a charge that racial evil was systemically and deliberately embedded long ago, by the white patriarchy, in the heart of all American life, and that this ugliness thrives undiminished, which justifies all present attempts at eradication. We are not individual persons with souls; we are part of identity groups marked by specific traits. We hate each other and must fight each other. This regime is variously compared to China’s Cultural Revolution, the French Revolution’s Terror and Puritanism. It is an ideology. A philosophy bubbles up from lived experience and emerges in time; an ideology is forced down into people’s heads from above, and its demands are always urgent.

An important piece appeared in the Washington Post this week by Virginia public school mothers Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich. They wrote that the antiwoke movement among parents is driven by many things—mask mandates, reading materials, critical race theory—but is about something “more profound.” When parents “were suddenly within earshot” of online classes, they became alarmed that children were “being fed lessons on highly divisive topics of questionable academic benefit.” But when parents began to push back, they discovered who really runs the schools: unions, school boards whose members are often handpicked by unions, and businesses that sell curriculums and textbooks. “None of them put students’ interests first.”

The public-education system is a cartel. It’s a big thing when people discover this, and the movement against it will continue, powered by two other dynamics. One is that when parents heard indoctrination during the kids’ Zoom classes, they’d heard it before. They knew it from work, from endless human-resources antiracism and gender-bias sessions. They didn’t know the kids were getting it too, and didn’t like it. Second, when parents were home they had time to master the arduous process by which government documents are requested. That’s how a parent in Loudoun County, Va., found out the system was paying consultants to instruct teachers, among many other things, in the difference between “white individualism” and “color group collectivism.”

I’ve been meaning for a long time to mention the seminal piece on this subject, the one that pierced through and made liberal parents in my liberal town sit up and take notice: “When the Culture War Comes for the Kids,” by George Packer, published in October 2019 in the Atlantic. “The organized pathologies of adults—sometimes known as politics—find a way to infect the world of children,” he begins.

“Around 2014, a new mood germinated in America,” then rapidly spread. “This new mood was progressive but not hopeful.” It came to take on “the substance and hard edges of a radically egalitarian ideology.” In New York City’s public schools, which Mr. Packer’s children attended, the battleground was “identity.” Grade-school “affinity” groups were formed “to discuss issues based on identity—race, sexuality, disability.” The city was spending millions in “antibias” training for school employees. One slide was titled “White Supremacy Culture” and included such traits as “individualism,” “objectivity” and “worship of the written word.”

It’s a brilliant, early piece, full of arguments on why one should have reservations about the new regime.

It didn’t start during the pandemic; it continued during the pandemic and accelerated after the murder of George Floyd. Almost as if ideological opportunists coolly observed an opening—a nation in paroxysms of grief and shock—and exploited it.

Back to the Democrats. This ideology is of the left. You are the party of the left, not the right. If you do not kick away from the woke educational agenda you will own it. Republican operatives who don’t have a clue about the implications of woke ideology, or why it is so damaging, or how to answer it in the schools, will deftly hang it around your neck. Parents will demand you take a stand, for or against, and if against what will you do about it—tell the unions that fund and support you to knock it off?

Do that. You’ll look like you have some seriousness, some guts. You’ll look like you care about parents. And it would actually be sincere: I’ve never, ever met a moderate Democrat who personally approved of the woke education regime.

Moderate Democratic officeholders fear party progressives, who might challenge them in a primary. But the fight between the party’s energetic extreme and the majority of moderate Democrats can’t be managed or dodged anymore. The election of Joe Biden papered it over. Three months ago the battle was engaged in Washington, over economic issues. It will spread back home.

It won’t work to deny there is a problem in the schools. That is what Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did this week, denying there was any “woke problem.” It’s all made up, she insisted: “‘Woke’ is a term pundits are now using as a derogatory euphemism for civil rights & justice.”

It was classic AOC. Deny a thing exists, accuse those who say it does of using racial coding, then come up with new ways to define the thing. Some progressives are trying: We’re just trying to make sure the reality of slavery is taught in the schools! It worked for Terry McAuliffe!

She’s foundering on this issue. She is not a stupid woman; she does not, as they say on social media, think Daylight Saving is a bank. She is cunning, with a naturally political spirit. A former Democratic lawmaker said dismissively of her that she’s not a congresswoman, she’s a social influencer. True enough, but in the current moment that’s a powerful thing to be. Yet she and other progressive politicians are out of touch.

One indicator: Jacobin, the American socialist magazine, this week issued a study done with YouGov saying the socialist project needs the working class and can get those voters by focusing “on bread-and-butter economic issues.” Then, carefully: “Certain identity-focused rhetoric is a liability.” In the study, “candidates who framed [opposition to racism] in highly specialized, identity-focused language fared significantly worse than candidates who embraced either populist or mainstream language.”

They shade the problem as a rhetorical one as opposed to what it is, a substantive one. But they admit there’s a problem.

Even socialists are telling progressives to knock it off. If they can, a moderate Democrat can.

‘Took my first DC trip yesterday since pre-COVID. Union Station mostly deserted, hardly any stores/restaurants open. 2 homeless guys hanging out & begging in the seating area at Sbarro’s. Real ‘decline of the republic’ vibe in the building. The election results didn’t surprise me.”—the Week columnist Damon Linker on Twitter Wednesday

“What a weird thing it will be if Donald Trump has done less harm to the Republican brand than Robin DiAngelo has done to the Democratic brand.”—the Atlantic’s David Frum on Twitter Tuesday

“Nobody elected him to be FDR, they elected him to be normal and stop the chaos.”— Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D., Va.) on Joe Biden, quoted in Thursday’s New York Times

These quotes leapt out in a week of listening and reading. A widespread sense of national deterioration, increasing resistance to the woke cultural regime, and Democratic leadership’s misreading of the nation’s mood and needs yielded Tuesday’s remarkable returns.

Some big pushback is going on. It’s not over and might only have begun. In the broadest sense it was propelled by a desire to reclaim the nation’s footing, to push away from disorder and things worse than disorder, and to regain our poise as a nation. Sometimes elections begin things; less frequently do they end them, but I think Tuesday marked a kind of psychic endpoint to the past terrible two years—an end to pandemic dominance, to pandemic thinking and all that came with it, from lockdowns to social and cultural unrest.

To some degree it was a pushback against smugness, too, which has become a primary behavioral tic of many, not all, on the progressive left. I am thinking of unions and school boards that act as if they own the schools and you little mommies had better pipe down, and those in the professional classes who say, “I believe in science” to dismiss critics and alternative arguments. There is the smugness of the woke regime itself. On PBS James Carville, after the election, blamed “stupid wokeness” for the party’s losses. It went beyond Virginia and New Jersey: “I mean, this ‘defund the police’ lunacy, this ‘take Abraham Lincoln’s name off of schools,’ . . . People see that.” It had a “suppressive effect all across the country on Democrats. Some of these people need to go to a woke detox center or something.”

A consideration of Tuesday’s context must include the shock of Afghanistan. There was already plenty of political and cultural uneasiness, the administration was new, and this sudden and dramatic failure seemed to reveal three terrible words: no baseline competence. It shook certitudes: Maybe it wasn’t good enough not to be Donald Trump. And when President Biden didn’t follow the example of JFK after the Bay of Pigs, taking the fault on himself, but instead was consistently defiant and defensive, his numbers went down and never came up. It was too telling. It was damaging.

“The Blob” is what they call the foreign-policy establishment, but it might also be used as a name for the Democratic domestic-policy establishment. The Blob rarely does anything helpful culturally because it’s blithely unaware of the country’s cultural problems. It tends to turn a blind eye when its constituent groups become extreme.

It likes to spend and doesn’t worry about raising taxes. I take the current American feeling on spending to be an Italian mother’s response when I was a child when her husband informed her she was spending too much on the family. “It takes money to live,” she said, silencing him. It does. A lot of people need a lot of help; a nation needs public works. But when the spending reaches multitrillions and almost nobody seems to bother keeping an eye on it, seeing it isn’t wasted or abused or wrongly funneled, applying limits to moderate it, or admitting any potential downside, such as inflation, then people get anxious. And when they get anxious they get mad, and push back.

Terry McAuliffe had one kind of race in Virginia, Phil Murphy had another in Jersey, but neither seemed to have a program beyond: The Blob continues.

When Republican Glenn Youngkin mentioned trouble in the public schools, Mr. McAuliffe called it a “racist dog whistle.” But the trouble in the schools is real. Two months ago an education activist told a small group in Virginia that people don’t yet understand that Americans’ relationship with public schools changed during the pandemic. For the first time ever, on Zoom, parents overheard what is being taught, how, and what’s not taught, and they didn’t like what they heard. The schools had been affected by, maybe captured by, woke cultural assumptions that had filtered down from higher-ed institutions and the education establishment. The parents were home in the pandemic and not distracted. They didn’t want their children taught harmful nonsense, especially at the expense of the basics. The education activist said: None of this is fully appreciated, but it will have profound implications.

On Tuesday it did. The pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson, in the Washington Examiner, backed up the argument. Her polling had Mr. Youngkin ahead by 15 points among parents of K-12 children. “Those saying ‘education’ is simply a proxy for racism, and that this result is proof that white or conservative parents really don’t want schools to teach about topics like slavery or give a complete picture of American history, have misread the full picture of parents’ anxieties.” She found 77% of Republicans and 96% of Democrats alike agreed “we should acknowledge the terrible things that have happened in our nation’s history regarding race so students can learn from them and make the future better.” But parents were “alarmed” by “anything that seems to be deterministic about race, such as telling children their skin color will shape their future.” They are uncomfortable “with anything that feels like it is separating children by race.” They’re “also alarmed” by the learning loss that happened during the pandemic, and “upset” over efforts to gut gifted-and-talented education in the name of equity.

Democrats have allowed themselves to be associated with—to become the political home of—progressive thinking. They thought they had to—progressives would beat them to a pulp if they didn’t get with the program. They thought it would play itself out. This was a mistake. You can’t associate a great party with cultural extremism and not eventually pay a price.

Were voters, Tuesday, saying, “Gee, we’re all Republicans now!” No, and it would be foolish for Republicans to think so. It means more voters than usual saw Republicans as an alternative, and took it. It means what a crusty political operative told me decades ago. He had no patience for high-class analyses featuring trends and contexts. When voters moved sharply against a party he’d say, “The dogs don’t like the dog food.” Tuesday they vomited it up.

For Democrats everything depends on how they understand the reasons Tuesday happened, and whether they are agile, supple and humble enough to admit and readjust.

For Republicans the challenge is to prove that they are worthy of the bounty that came and may be coming their way—that they can do something with it.