Peggy Noonan

It is ugly and will get uglier. Vladimir Putin isn’t going to stop anytime soon. You don’t launch a full-scale military assault on another nation and two days later say, “Oh, I think I’ve made my point,” and go home. He was never interested in negotiations, he was never open to argument, he set this in motion and will follow through to the imagined victory point in his head.

He has shocked the West. He wanted to shock the West.

In doing so he has shattered the European peace, broken international law, and attempted to re-establish brute force as a primary political determinant of the future. All this constitutes a major upheaval.

We will find out if world leadership is up to it, and American leadership equal to the moment. So far the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, that fractious alliance, has held together, and the U.S. tactic of publicly sharing its intelligence proved wise.

People draw parallels to World War II, and there are some, but this isn’t 1938. The Speaker of the House, on returning Wednesday from the Munich Security Conference, said, “This is our moment. . . . This is a Sudetenland.” There was something bizarrely rah-rah and certainly half-baked about her statement.

Hitler’s annexation of Sudetenland took place in a prenuclear world. The world of 2022 has thousands of nuclear weapons of all sizes, weights, purposes and delivery mechanisms. Sudetenland occurred in a world of physicalness—big printing presses, hand-calculated bank balances. Our world is run by computers vulnerable to devastating cyberattacks. Sudetenland was a quick and largely unresisted invasion. Ukraine won’t be bloodless, and there’s no reason to believe it will be quick.

The point is we are not repeating history. This war is uncharted territory. So no, we’re not living through something you streamed on Netflix; you don’t know the end of the story; and if you’re in government you may or may not be Churchill, we’ll see.

When I was a kid they used to say a coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave man but one. In time I came to think no, the imaginative die a thousand deaths, the dullard but one. You have to maintain an eye for peril and see its implications. The world is in new peril.

On the unimaginative end of the spectrum there is J.D. Vance, a candidate for the Republican U.S. Senate nomination in Ohio, whose Theory of Enacted Populism apparently involves hearing the most careless thing a voter says in a diner and repeating it with an air of ingenuous self-discovery. “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” he said on Steve Bannon’s podcast. He cares about fentanyl coming over the border and killing our kids. So do a lot of us, but responsible people care about both. This is a lousy moment for mindless pandering.

You may not care about war but war cares about you. Russia isn’t Upper Volta with a gas station; it’s Upper Volta with a gas station, the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, and a furious owner. What he does may have repercussions. If you would lead, you don’t get not to care.

I see little profit in continuing to go over who blew it most since the collapse of Soviet communism. Did the West in its blithe triumphalism miscalculate by letting NATO move east? Did our diplomats, those Brooks Brothers smoothies, patronize the old apparatchiks in their boxy gray suits? Yes, they did. I’m where George Kennan was: It was a mistake to enlarge NATO by admitting former Warsaw Pact states; it fueled resentment, encouraged paranoia and embarrassed democrats in Moscow who’d pushed against communism at some cost.

But that debate shouldn’t freeze thought now. Argue later who was the biggest jerk 25 years ago. Whether the U.S. and the West were wrong or not, Mr. Putin is still wrong to invade Ukraine.

Is Mr. Putin mad? Are his actions the result of increasing instability?

“[Emmanuel] Macron noticed a change in Mr. Putin’s demeanor when speaking to him on the phone over the course of the pandemic. ‘He tended to talk in circles, rewriting history,’ a close aide to Mr. Macron said.” This is from reporters Ann M. Simmons, Noemie Bisserbe and Bojan Pancevski in their Wednesday front-pager in the Journal.

Mr. Macron, a French official said, found Mr. Putin “more rigid, more isolated” than in the past.

In his speech to the Russian people on Monday, Mr. Putin’s mind circled within a tightening narrative of grievance. Lenin and Stalin failed to make Ukraine’s standing clear, Khrushchev messed up Crimea. The speech has been called fiery but it wasn’t; it was preoccupied with the historically arcane and made no attempt to persuade anyone outside Vladimir Putin’s head. It had the wound-up particularity of the local grocer when he talks about his 30-year feud with the butcher down the street.

It was Mr. Putin’s speech the night the war began that had real menace. In an unscheduled statement on Russian television, he warned those nations that might “consider interfering” with Russia’s actions that they “will face consequences greater than any you have faced in history.”

That was some kind of threat from a man with a nuclear arsenal and a talent for malware. It was followed by the sound of explosions in Kyiv. He is trying to scare the world.

Sometimes leaders are mad. Sometimes they want you to think they’re mad. Sometimes both.

What is important from the West is unity and strength—not “toughness” but strength. You don’t have to make a great show of determination if you’re really determined, you just have to be who you are.

Mr. Putin is alone, not that he cares; everyone knows who the bad guy is in this drama. No country has said he is in the right, not one, not even China. He is alone, burnishing his credentials as a junior monster of history.

The opinion of the world matters and has a force of its own.

Wars are expensive, occupations extremely so; it costs money to keep an army on the ground, to fuel and feed it. There is the human cost: young men will die. This will all cost Mr. Putin and the cost will increase with time. He knows this, he’s factored it in, but the West should make it costlier wherever possible.

All the West is going to have to play a long, cool, careful game. Leaders and officials should do nothing to provoke. In Europe they should speak in one voice to the extent possible: define, describe, be precise, no histrionics. Don’t taunt. Britain’s defense minister, Ben Wallace, said Wednesday said they’d “kicked the backside” of the Russians in the Crimean war in the 1850s, and “can always do it again.” That war is mostly remembered for the Charge of the Light Brigade. Sometimes it’s good to quiet your rousing voices and concentrate on not letting this become World War III.

The West is on the right side. It should keep its height, keep its nerve and hold together. Be cool, press hard, resist.

Let the world see what happens to a man who does what Vladimir Putin is doing. Show gravity. Because it’s all very grave.

It was a landslide. That’s the important fact of San Francisco’s school-board recall election: There was nothing mixed or ambivalent about the outcome. Three members were resoundingly ejected from their jobs: 79% voted to oust Alison Collins, 75% to fire Gabriela López, the board president, and 72% to remove Faauuga Moliga, the vice president.

This was a vote against progressive education officials in the heart of liberal San Francisco. It is a signal moment because of its head-chopping definitiveness, its clarity, its swiftness and its unignorable statement by parents on what they must have and won’t accept. It was a battle in the Democratic Party’s civil war between liberals and the progressive left. And it marks a continuation of the parents’ rebellion that surfaced in November in Virginia’s upset gubernatorial election.

It is in the way of things that Democratic leaders in Congress won’t feel they have an excuse to crack down hard on the progressive wing of their party until the entire party loses big in the 2022 elections. But Democratic voters on the ground aren’t waiting for permission. They are taking a stick to wokeness whether the party’s leaders do or not.

You know most of what was at issue. During the height of the pandemic, when San Francisco’s schools were closed, parents were increasingly frustrated and newly angry. They saw that remote learning was an inadequate substitute for children being in the classroom. Many sensed that a year or two out of school would leave their children with an educational deficit that would not be repaired. The teachers unions balked at reopening and the Board of Education approached the problem with what seemed muted interest. Although they did a lot of word-saying featuring impenetrable jargon, as school boards do, they didn’t have a plan and the schools didn’t open.

While the board was failing to open the schools it was doing other things. It produced government by non sequitur. The board focused on issues of woke antiracism and oppression. The problem wasn’t whether the kids were getting an education, it was whether the boarded-up schools had unfortunate names. They spent months researching the question and proposed renaming a third of the system’s 125 schools. Many were named for previously respectable people like Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Francis Scott Key and Robert Louis Stevenson. Their names were “inappropriate” because their lives and actions could be connected with charges of racism, sexism and colonialism. From the San Francisco Chronicle: “The move shocked many principals and families, who questioned whether changing a name was a mid-pandemic priority when their children cannot physically attend the school in question.”

The public rose up—stop this stuff, get our kids back in school! The backlash intensified when it was revealed some of the board’s historical research was dependent on cutting and pasting from Wikipedia.

So it wasn’t only government by non sequitur, it was inept. The board backed off and said, essentially, that the matter needed more study.

The board soon moved onto another item on the progressive wish list. It homed in on academically elite public high schools that based admission on testing and grades. For people who can’t afford a $40,000-a-year private-school tuition, such schools are a godsend; they were designed long ago to offer demanding course study to students with limited money but demonstrable gifts.

The board decided too many Asian-American and white students were accepted in the schools. So they voted to scrap testing and replace it with a permanent lottery system for admission at Lowell High, one of only two campuses in the district to use merit-based admissions. (The decision was later overturned by lawsuits.)

Now parents exploded, very much including the Asian community. It got more heated when it was discovered Ms. Collins had an old tweet accusing Asian-Americans of using “white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead.’” She seemed rather a creepy and bigoted person to have in a position of such authority.

Even aside from that, parents who were up nights helping their children with homework, seeing that schoolwork was done and discipline learned, felt their effort was being discounted and their children abandoned to abstract notions of equity. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. Kids have to be taught to earn their way through effort. Lotteries don’t teach them that; lotteries teach them it’s all luck.

Now the recall process took off.

It did not help that just before the pandemic, in 2019, the board had famously turned to censorship. There was a big, colorful series of Depression-era frescoes in a local high school. They’d been there since the 1930s and were commissioned by the Works Progress Administration of the New Deal, a stylized depiction of the founding of America that included slaves and American Indians. The board decided it was racist, cruel, reductive; there was the implication it was right-wing art. In fact the frescoes were the work of a Russian immigrant to America, Victor Arnautoff, who was a communist and trying to bring attention to the cruelty present in some of America’s history. No matter, it was offensive, so the board decided to paint over the murals.

Art-sensitive San Francisco rose up: This is akin to book burning, you don’t lay waste to art. The board then decided it wouldn’t paint over the frescoes, merely conceal them behind barriers of some sort.

What was astonishing as you followed the story is what seemed the board members’ shock at parental pushback. They seemed so detached from the normal hopes of normal people. They seemed honestly unaware of them. It was as if they were operating in some abstract universe in which their decisions demonstrated their praiseworthy antiracist bona fides. But voters came to see their actions as a kind of woke progressive vandalism that cleverly avoided their central responsibility: to open the schools.

School boards somehow always seem to think they are immune from pushback, that their pronouncements will never be opposed because they can barely be understood.

But people have a way of seeing. If, during a pandemic lockdown, board members speak often and thoughtfully of the increased likelihood of the abuse of neglected children, one will get a sense of their motivation and heart. If instead they dilate on political issues that deflect, one will get a different, darker view of their motivation and heart.

That’s why the three in San Francisco were fired.

What happened shows again that there is a real parents movement going on, and it is going to make a difference in our politics.

Democrats dismiss these issues as “culture-war distractions.” They are not; they are about life at its most real, concrete and immediate. That easy dismissal reveals the party’s distance from the lives of its own constituents.

To think parents would sacrifice their children for your ideology, or an ideology coming from within your ranks that you refuse to stand up to, is political malpractice at a high level.

Joe Biden received 85% of the vote in San Francisco in 2020. Those board members just lost their seats by more than 70%. A cultural rebellion within the Democratic Party has begun.

Simi Valley, Calif.

The Reagan Foundation and Institute inaugurated a series of speeches last spring on the future of the Republican Party. It is called “A Time for Choosing” and has been a great and lively success, with speakers from all corners of the party. Monday night I spoke, at the Reagan Library, and this week’s column is adapted from my remarks:

America is in a crucial, high-stakes moment. Since 2020 we have been roiled over the pandemic, wokeness, crime, inflation, the schools, illegal immigration. The Democratic Party has stood for, or failed to oppose, many unpopular policies. The Republican Party seems poised to rise.

So what is the job of the Republican Party at this time?

It is to be sane. It is to stand against excess. It is to put itself forward as worthy of leadership. It has to be centrist in its mood and attitudes, and in its internal understanding of itself.

Thirty-two years ago, in my first book, “What I Saw at the Revolution,” I addressed the party and said: “This is the future. You’re a working-class party.” I still believe this but would no longer cast the argument in the language of class. It is too limited and has an aggressive undertone. The Republican Party should see itself too as the party of parents, who in the face of bullying and indifference need someone to stand with them. It should be the party of the unprotected, of regular people—the party of strivers who don’t want to be oppressed, creators who don’t want to be thwarted, store owners who shouldn’t feel constantly afraid of crime or regulation or governmental fees.

The party should retain its ancestral beliefs—for power being held closest to the individual and the family, and radiating out from there to county, state and nation. In the century-old formulation the party was meant to be Main Street, not Wall Street or any other center of concentrated power—big business, big tech. Really anything that begins with “big.”

But an enduring party’s stands must reflect and address the needs and demands of its era. The pressing challenges America now faces aren’t those of 1970 or 1980. A great party must be in line with the crises of its time.

Be prudent stewards, keep your eye on the long run, cultivate economic growth, defend free markets, but make peace with the welfare state. Your own voters did long ago.

Make peace with programs that support the poor and middle class. Appreciate and respect that members of your party, and potential supporters, rely on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security—the whole edifice created in the past century by both parties to help people feel more secure and with a steadier foothold in the world. These programs have been a positive good. Make them stronger; undergird them.

Republican congressmen enjoy receiving credit for damning such spending while not cutting it. They think this the best of both worlds. It isn’t. It leaves voters afraid that once in power you’ll revert to type and pull the rug out from under them, when the past few years they’ve had too many rugs pulled from under them—the end of U.S. manufacturing, a tottering culture.

It should be said of the Republican Party of the future what was said long ago of the Catholic church: “Here comes everybody.”

You saw the funeral last month of Jason Rivera at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. He was 22, a New York City policeman from a Dominican immigrant family, gunned down and killed with another cop, Wilbert Mora, 27, who was also from a big immigrant family. Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York buried those men the way you bury a president—in the presence of dozens of priests and officiants, a choir, a certain liturgical solemnity and grace. The cathedral was packed, filled with family, friends and colleagues of the fallen—the immigrant community, members of minority groups, all of them Americans, normal people there in affiliation with one of their own. It was beautiful. And when the service was over and the mourners walked out of the cathedral, what they saw for blocks, downtown and uptown, was a sea of police in full regalia, come to honor their own. A street full of flags.

It was a statement, it was a show of cultural force, and it was a question: Who will stand with us?

The Republican Party should come to understand it is the answer to that question.

Many of those men and women are new here, work hard, fled something bad, and want America to work. They are invested in it. And they are the big center. As America tries to cohere and regain its cultural and societal balance, it is the job of the Republican Party to be the party of the big center, to stand for normal, regular people in all their human variety—all races, ethnicities, faiths—against the forces of ideology currently assailing them.

It is your job to see this moment for what it is and be serious. It is not your job to be extreme—to pose for Christmas photos with your family including little children fully armed with guns in order to troll the libs, as two members of Congress did. It is not your job to call the events of Jan. 6, the riot in the Capitol, “legitimate political discourse.” That is a lie the cops and their families in the cathedral can see right through, that everyone can see through.

If you knew how high the stakes are you wouldn’t be so frivolous.

(I add here: The Jan. 6 committee carries a gift for the Republican Party. It can fully, formally resolve what was done in the Capitol that day. It can reveal and expose who goaded it, guided it, encouraged lawbreaking. Once these things are fully known there can be an endpoint to that day. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has it right: It was a violent insurrection meant to stop a constitutionally mandated process. Investigate, air, absorb, understand, vow—and walk forward into better history.)

The Republican Party should stand against excess on all fronts—excessive regulation, excessive controls, excessive rejiggering of cultural norms. The Democrats right now are in love with excess—spending new trillions without care, even when that gives rise to inflation.

A great party can’t be a cult. Cults are by definition marginal, not of the majority. Donald Trump brought new voters in, it’s true, and the party would do well to hold them by taking good stands. But don’t forget the votes he lost. He never came close in two tries to winning the popular vote, he lost once-Republican suburbs, in 2020 he lost Arizona and Georgia, dooming Senate candidates and giving control of the chamber to the Democrats. As long as he dominates the scene the party will not succeed nationally.

How sad that would be when the problems we face are piled so high.

To his friends and followers I would say, put America first. Don’t be a cultist, be a patriot. Help your country, let go of old obsessions. Go forward with a spirit of repair and lead this wounded country.

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.