Peggy Noonan

In a way Republicans have already won in Virginia. Democrat Terry McAuliffe, a former governor and longtime party mover, has been forced to fight for his life in a state Joe Biden won by 10 points. If Mr. McAuliffe pulls it out Tuesday, his not-so-Trumpy challenger, Glenn Youngkin, will still have come close in the age of Trump, and his campaign will have provided a rough pathway for how future party candidates can make their way through: 1. Be a respectable, capable-seeming person who focuses on legitimate local issues (schools, taxes). 2. Don’t say crazy things. 3. Don’t insult Donald Trump but do everything to keep him away.

If forced to wager I’d bet on Mr. Youngkin. I think he’s done something remarkable. But whatever happens Democrats should stay nervous and Republicans can feel some degree of relief: a template is emerging, at least as to states like bluish-purple Virginia.

This, with the anniversary of his election almost upon us has me thinking again about the president’s bad poll numbers.

Presidents get bad polls and columnists reflect on the reasons, there’s nothing new there. But there’s something different about this moment.

It’s early in the administration, and if the president can’t turn his position around America will likely know three more years of mess, murk and drift. At the same time it’s hard to imagine how he turns it around.

In the past, presidents in trouble always seemed at least potentially able to dig their way out. You were a fool if you wrote off Bill Clinton after missteps and scandals. That gifted and politically ruthless man would always find a way. You were foolish to write off Barack Obama after the tea-party uprising, the ObamaCare backlash and the drubbing of 2010. He too had extraordinary talent, and technological sophistication.

But Mr. Biden isn’t looking like a politician of deep natural gifts. He doesn’t show a lot of signs of the capability of turning his circumstances around. He’ll be 79 in November; he loses his train of thought and mistakenly sees big policy speeches as yet another opportunity to feed America’s hunger for more renditions of his personal story. His public persona is scattered, foggy. “Saturday Night Live” captured it last week. Current Biden looks at Past Biden and says, “How can you be me, you seem so happy . . . so, so, uh, what’s the word I’m looking for?” “Lucid,” says Past Biden. It got a big laugh.

His own people famously hide him from the press, which is not, early on in a presidency, reassuring.

Before Afghanistan people would see him and muse: Who’s in charge behind the scenes? Since Afghanistan they ask: What incompetents are in charge?

In the past when presidents floundered, at some point their supporters would say OK, we ride it out, and their gaze would turn toward the vice president. During Mr. Clinton’s doldrums there was Al Gore, who was perceived not to have Clinton’s gifts but not his problems, either. The party would rally around him or could be made to rally around him. But that is not Kamala Harris’s position. She commands no broad fealty. Her primary candidacy collapsed before the first votes. A Los Angeles Times poll this month had her favorable rating at 42%, unfavorable 51%. She’s polling lower than her four most recent predecessors at the same time in their terms. I have never heard a Democrat in my Democratic donor town say, “Wait a few years, Kamala will come in.” This adds to a brittle, unsettled feeling in the party. Nobody knows who’s in charge or in the ascendant.

To regain popularity politicians have to be agile. They have to be like the old pol who is supposed to have said: “I have many firm principles and the first is flexibility.” Mr. Clinton could read a poll, knew where the center was, and when he got in trouble he chased it.

Does Mr. Biden right now know where the center is? The White House gives no indication of adopting policies that will ease their problems. Illegal immigration is a daily and growing crisis, but what remedies can they seize on? As a party, during the 2020 primary, the Democrats came out for functionally open borders. They’re stuck unless they change.

Normally issues come and go but illegal immigration isn’t going to get better. When people hear on the news that they’ll be allowed to stay if they get here, they come. There’s no reason to think inflation won’t get worse. After Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen talked up Mr. Biden’s economic plans on CNN, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers tweeted, “I began my career when Paul Volker [sic] was taking over at the Fed and not since then have I been more worried. I am curious at what point in the last forty years Treasury thinks the risk of an inflation spiral are greater than they are now?” (The tweet was later deleted.) Jason Furman, head of Mr. Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, seemed to give him backup the next day in comments to the New York Times. Mr. Biden’s first spending bill, the American Rescue Plan, was “oversized” and “contributed to both higher output but also higher prices.”

The supply-chain crisis is in part an employment crisis connected to pandemic-era funding of broader benefits for those not working. You can look at this problem and try to solve it, or you can prattle on like Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg about how Americans are buying a lot and that’s the reason the ports are clotted. He then tried to switch the story into a debate on whether he should be on home leave with two new babies. But in a policy crisis no one cares about the personal struggles of a cabinet member; they just want to see the supply chain unscrewed.

The White House could still—still, even now!—reverse itself, take the big infrastructure deal that passed with 19 Republican votes in the Senate, and celebrate the win. This would produce something big and bipartisan, demonstrate baseline competence, reap establishment praise, and arguably benefit the country. Who doesn’t want stronger bridges and tunnels?

Instead, under pressure from progressives, he tied the infrastructure bill to the huge other spending bill, the famous formerly $3.5 trillion one. It was like tying something healthy to an obese corpse, throwing it into the sea and telling it to swim. The spending bill may well end up at a more modest number—Mr. Biden offered $1.85 trillion Thursday—but will that be a victory? There was too much mess around it, too much struggle, and the face of that struggle was the progressive caucus. The headline won’t be “Joe Biden got what we needed,” it will be “Biden’s huge and controversial plan had to be blocked and remodeled by moderate senators in order to make the final product seem even remotely sensible.”

The progressives of the Democratic Party have the only social-media voice, but centrists, moderates and independents have the greater numbers and their support is more crucial. The Biden White House should gain some distance from progressives and use them as a foil.

I know they’re not going to do this. They must have another plan. But what is it? Do they know they’re running out of time? They have to prove they can do something that works.

Condoleezza Rice tells a story that she wrote about this week in the Washington Post after the death of Colin Powell. We spoke about it by phone.

It was 2003, President George W. Bush’s first state visit to Britain, and there was a dinner in Buckingham Palace given by the queen. Ms. Rice, then White House national security adviser, found herself in a sitting room off the banquet hall with Secretary of State Powell and his wife, Alma Johnson Powell. It was very grand, the women in gowns, Colin in white tie and tails. Talk turned to the past. Condi and Mrs. Powell were daughters of the segregated South, raised in Birmingham, Ala. In 1963, when the 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed by white supremacists, Condi, blocks away in her home, heard the blast and learned that a little girl she played dolls with had been murdered, along with three others. Alma’s father had been principal of the largest black high school in Birmingham, and her uncle principal at the second-largest, where Condi’s father had been a guidance counselor. Colin, raised in the South Bronx, had served in the South in the 1950s, and knew Birmingham from courting Alma.

Now here they were in a palace. They drank a toast to their ancestors. “They never would have believed it,” Condi said. No, said Colin, “but they are smiling right now.” The Powells and Ms. Rice joined the procession into dinner.

“It was such an American moment,” Ms. Rice remembered.

Colin Powell lived a big life and was a great man. His accomplishments have been widely celebrated, but I find myself thinking of the world that made him, and the question we ask when we look at his life.

He was born in Harlem in 1937 and moved to the South Bronx before kindergarten. His father, Luther Powell, had immigrated to America from Jamaica and found work in Manhattan’s Garment District, rising from clerk to foreman. Powell’s mother, also a Jamaican immigrant, worked as a seamstress.

Colin grew up in Hunts Point, a neighborhood full of European immigrants, blacks and Hispanics. He didn’t know he was a member of a minority group, because “there was no majority. Everybody was either a Jew, an Italian, a Pole, a Greek, a Puerto Rican or, as we said in those days, a Negro,” he wrote in his 1995 autobiography, “My American Journey.”

He had nothing and everything: hardworking parents who loved him, extended family nearby, a church in whose life the family took part, ethnic pride—West Indians, he noted, are a highly self-regarding people. And there were the schools of New York City in the 1940s and ’50s, a jewel in the crown of American public education, and then City College of New York. “I typified the students that CCNY was created to serve, the sons and daughters of the inner city, the poor, the immigrant. Many of my classmates had the brainpower to attend Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. What they lacked was money and influential connections.” Yet they went on to “compete with and surpass alumni of the most prestigious private campuses in this country.”

As he grew, he found that race is complicated and race is real. When his sister fell in love with a white boy, there was disapproval—from Luther. The white boy’s parents were accepting—it turned out they were “a little more tolerant than the Powells.” The couple married, happily. Years later when Colin met the refined and self-possessed Alma, it was her father who protested. He didn’t think much of West Indians and now his daughter was bringing one into the family.

At CCNY Powell joined ROTC and found a second home. “The discipline, the structure, the camaraderie, the sense of belonging” lit him up. He became a soldier.

Fort Bragg, N.C., was a revelation to him: He met whites who were not Poles, Jews or Greeks—“virtually my first WASPs.” When he was sent to Fort Benning, his ROTC colonel warned him he must be careful, Georgia was not New York.

It was the 1950s, before civil rights. What he saw shocked him. “I could go into Woolworth’s in Columbus, Georgia, and buy anything I wanted, as long as I did not try to eat there. I could go into a department store and they would take my money, as long as I did not try to use the men’s room.”

All his life he was protective of the U.S. military. Soldiering was the toughest, most dangerous profession, the one in which you swear to the Constitution and pledge your life to protect it. It was also a haven. Everyone lived the same; it was integrated. “Except for the rare couple with inherited wealth, there was scant room for snobbery, since most of us were bringing home the same paycheck and living the same standard.” It was “the most democratic institution in America.”

He came to regard military installations in the South as “healthy cells in an otherwise sick body.” One night in Fort Benning he drove off-post to a hamburger joint. He knew that as a black man he wouldn’t be served inside, so he went to the window to give his order. When the waitress finally arrived she looked at him uneasily.

“Are you a Puerto Rican?” she asked. “No.” “Are you an African student?”

“No,” he said. “I’m a Negro. I’m an American. And I’m an Army officer.”

“Look, I’m from New Jersey,” the waitress said, “and I don’t understand any of this. But they won’t let me serve you.” She offered to pass him a burger out the back window. He said no, he wasn’t that hungry.

He thought white supremacism a “lunatic code,” but he wouldn’t let it wreck him. “Nothing that happened off-post, none of the indignities, none of the injustices, was going to inhibit my performance,” he wrote. “I did not feel inferior, and I was not going to let anybody make me believe I was. . . . Racism was not just a black problem. It was America’s problem. And until the country solved it, I was not going to let bigotry make me a victim instead of a full human being.”

And of course he didn’t, and went on to everything. You gather that throughout his rise he had to balance two outside forces. One didn’t wish to see and celebrate his success because it undercut the urgency of their demands and damaged their business model. The other would seize on his rise as evidence there’s no real racial problem, it’s all exaggerated. He wouldn’t let anyone steal his life to make their point. He’d stick with the truth: America has a race problem but it is a slander that it is irredeemably racist, that progress is impossible.

Here is the question you ask as you look at his life, the question always in the back of your mind now as you consider the great ones who’ve passed: Are we still making their kind? Or have we got so many things wrong we aren’t quite producing them anymore? That’s what our fights about the schools are about: Are we still making these astonishing individuals built along classic American lines? Can we get back to the best parts of the lost world that made Colin Powell?

Captain Kirk was in space. “I hope I never recover from this,” William Shatner said after the capsule set down in scrub near Van Horn, Texas. He’d seen the blueness, the thin ribbon of earth’s atmosphere, the delicacy and majesty. “I hope I can maintain what I feel now, I don’t want to lose it,” he told Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos. What a triumph at age 90 to be still so hungry for life, to yearn to be in its thick, even its uncertainty. What a great man. I watched the launch and touchdown on TV, was surprised to be moved, and near the end walked toward the screen to miss nothing. “I got a little choked,” I said to a friend that afternoon. “I got choked,” she said.

The night before, in the theater for the first time in two years with a friend whose hand I hadn’t touched in 22 months, I saw “The Lehman Trilogy,” which surpassed all praise thrown its way. So spare and modest in its presentation—three actors, one set—and yet so theatrical and transporting. Over 3½ hours I checked my watch only once, at 10:05, hoping there was more time and it wasn’t about to end. I used to do that when “The Sopranos” first aired, hoping there were 20 minutes left and not eight. It’s a masterpiece when you don’t want it to end.

Art and human aspiration abide: autumn 2021.

Maybe this mood is having an impact on my thinking on what is actually my topic. But I think I see something good happening in the woke wars.

The past few years I’ve held two different and opposing thoughts in my head. One is that the woke regime cannot continue forever, it is unsustainable, it will fall of attrition and exhaustion. The suppression of thought and speech, the insistence on ideology when minds and souls aren’t ideological—all this is against human nature. So it will end. The other is that I cannot think out how it ends: I can’t explain to myself what that looks like, can’t translate what I believe to be inevitable into a story I can believe.

But the past week left me wondering if we aren’t inching toward Thermidor.

Thermidor was the moment France began to turn away from the violence and mayhem of the Terror that followed the French Revolution. (In this space the woke regime is the Terror; the French Revolution is something that’s been rolling over us and attempting to gain electoral traction since 2008. We have mixed feelings on the Revolution, but we hate the Terror.)

Dave Chappelle’s latest Netflix special debuted Oct. 5. In it he was, as is his way, avowedly antiwoke, especially on gender issues including the LGBTQ movement, which he has called “the Alphabet people.” He knew he’d get in trouble. He has in the past. “They dragged me on Twitter. I don’t give a [blank] because Twitter’s not a real place.” The special is a hit, and he seemed comfortable because he knows he is talking to regular people, not ideologues. The past week he has been castigated by LGBTQ activists inside and outside the company, and by social-media mobs.

Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos pushed back. The special won’t be pulled: “Chappelle is one of the most popular standup comedians today,” Mr. Sarandos wrote in a memo. “His last special . . ., also controversial, is our most watched, stickiest and most award-winning standup special to date.” The mob pushed back: Mr. Chappelle makes them feel unsafe. Mr. Sarandos doubled down. Next week Netflix employees and their allies plan a walkout.

It would have been more powerful and certainly less crass if Mr. Sarandos had hit harder, had hit solely, on the issue of artistic freedom, and not profit.

But he did push back. If he stands firm it will be progress: Free speech won and the mob lost.

In truth some people are probably too big to cancel—Mr. Chappelle is one, J.K. Rowling another. But standing firm helps those who aren’t too big—who know, for instance, that they’d be sacrificed by their employer in a nanosecond if trouble starts and the Twitter mobs come. But if the too-big-to-cancel grow in number and regularly start to avoid the guillotine, that becomes a story. Maybe in time the crowds that show up to cheer the blood being spilled (in the Place de la Concorde then, on Twitter now) will become less interested in that than in seeing who wins, the woke executioners or the swift prisoner who leaps from the tumbrel and escapes into the crowd. The whole event changes from the fun of a death to the fun of a race. Progress!

There was last week’s Ezra Klein column in the New York Times on the data analyst David Shor, who warns the Democratic Party it faces long-term disaster if it continues to press its progressive agenda. In Mr. Klein’s paraphrasing of Mr. Shor, the party is trapped in an echo chamber of Twitter activists and woke staff and consultants. None of this is precisely new, but this iteration of Mr. Shor’s argument carried an electoral charge and spread through the political class. Its relevance here is that Mr. Shor’s work allows Democratic politicians and operatives to work with their friends in media, the academy and the activist world to send the word: Cool it, you’re hurting the larger project. Robespierre, there’s too much blood, put the guillotines aside. Or we’ll kill you.

Bill Maher is still speaking truth through comedy and continues uncanceled on HBO; Substack brims with brilliant antiregime talent.

We have written in this space of how much people in the arts and entertainment hate the regime and its rigid and capriciously imposed censorship. They know a new McCarthyism when they see it; they know a new Hays Office when they see that too. But they have to be careful, and they tell their writers and artists to be careful. They’re all walking on eggshells because they can’t always anticipate what will be Bad Thought next month. Have you noticed a strange repetition in story lines and themes in what you watch, an over-rotation of material and subject matter? This is because executives and artists are hoping what was safe last time is safe this time, so they do it again.

The whole woke project changes artistic decisions and misshapes art.

They know it. But people in entertainment have the best jobs in America—they’re well-paid, work with creative people and invent what’s on the screens in a nation of screens. They don’t want to jeopardize their positions. They know no one really has their back. So they’re pliant.

And the woke brigades know, and push.

If I am right, if we are inching toward Thermidor, it will be a partial Thermidor, as Thermidor itself was not a wholesale renunciation of all that preceded it but a corrective. It signaled a new popular resistance to the excesses of the Revolution, but the general principles of the Revolution maintained. They entered France’s bloodstream in ways constructive and not. In the same way the revolution we’re living through will not fully disappear; it has entered the bloodstream. But it can be knocked from its most brutal phase, the Terror. And that would be good.

This is a good time to be brave, to be hungry for life and its uncertainties, like Captain Kirk.

Washington

Our capital is greatly diminished compared with its old crackling pre-pandemic, pre-George Floyd self. It is quieter, less bustling, drabber. A lot of government employees are still working at home, and you can feel it in the air, the sense that the federal government is coming out of everyone’s dining room.

It was my first visit since January. Things look better than they did then, but Washington has grown worn and less authentically itself. The bronze statue of Andrew Jackson in Lafayette Square, once brazenly heroic, has an air of retreat. There is a homeless encampment in a little copse of wood where Georgetown starts. Big buildings looked empty.

One place that seemed to retain its old mystique was the U.S. Senate, which still has the shine of the old marble and brass. The Facebook hearings were down the hall in the Russell Office Building, the press in full gaggle. Senators and staff were dressed as adults, suits and ties, heels and hose. I mentioned it to a staffer. “Yeah, today was like the old days,” he said.

Leaving my hotel one morning I saw security men hustle a man in a sharply cut suit into the back seat of a gleaming black SUV. He looked like a European diplomat. The world is still coming to Washington, still having its meetings, and making its calculations based in part on what it sees on the street.

Washington needs a new coat of paint. Stand up, feel your stature. “Remember who you are.” You are the capital of a great nation. Look like it, act like it.

We segue with the idea that Washington’s outer reality reflects its inner political life, where things are a murk, but not the usual one.

I’m not a huge respecter of polls (only snapshots, not a measure of greatness or consequence) but when polls put numbers on what you’re sensing you pay attention. And so the Quinnipiac poll this week on the president. Joe Biden had a 38% overall approval rating, with 53% disapproval. Those are Trump numbers. On the issue of the border, 23% approve of the job Mr. Biden is doing and 67% disapprove. The economy: 39% approve, 55% disapprove. Asked if the administration “has been competent in running the government,” 42% said yes and 55% no.

Democrats, this “I’m a big ol’ progressive and we’re rewriting spending and taxing along left-wing ideological priorities and isn’t this dynamic and exciting?” thing isn’t working. The whole “You think I’m Joe Biden but if you squint you can see I’m really Lyndon Johnson ” thing isn’t working. Ideological aggression isn’t working.

Mr. Biden is showing a lot of it. “Get out of the way,” he tells Republicans, on the debt limit. “If you don’t want to help save the country, get out of the way so you don’t destroy it.” He’s more rhetorically hostile to the unvaccinated than he is to the Taliban: “We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us.” His statement on Sen. Kyrsten Sinema being harassed in a ladies’ room by activists who hissed like the devil’s imps was wan and passive-aggressive: “I don’t think they’re appropriate tactics, but it happens to everybody. . . . It’s part of the process.” It doesn’t happen to everybody and to announce it is part of the process is to make it part of the process. It was as if he were saying: Yeah, she’s got me mad. Hound her some more.

This is not the sound of bring-us-together; it’s not forbearance and grace. The tone is off in the White House, and the strategy on the Hill is off. I don’t think they understand who their progressives are.

People compare the progressives to the tea party and the Freedom Caucus, which drove successive Republican House speakers mad, but that’s not right, they’re not alike. The tea party and Freedom Caucus weren’t about getting something done, they were about portraying a mood: conservative resistance. They made a great show of fighting those compromised lackeys in the GOP leadership, but they never got anything done. They didn’t have a serious legislative strategy. They threw snares and did cable TV hits.

The progressives are serious. They are ideologues. They know what they want; they have serious legislative aims and worked-through strategies; they are socialists and mean to change America in its fundamentals.

They are not the usual politician driven by traditional exigencies, the usual “I need this” of politics. They are playing a different game.

And I think this has not been fully understood. You look at the infrastructure bill and how they are stopping it. You say, “They wouldn’t thwart the speaker in the culminating achievement of her political career.” They would. “They wouldn’t humiliate their new president in his first year, on his signal domestic effort, as his poll numbers wobble.” But they would.

I don’t understand why the speaker and the White House didn’t play hardball, put the infrastructure bill on the floor and get it passed with moderate Democrats, Republicans, and some frightened progressives who’d cave because they didn’t want to face the 2022 election after tanking it.

The infrastructure isn’t solely a Democratic drama. It affects the whole country. It got 19 Republican votes when it passed the Senate. Lawmakers want to say it made our roads and bridges stronger, our electrical grid fortified. Both parties could and should pass it. And the president would still get credit: “My God, something big got passed, he brought us together.” It was crazy to put this bill’s future in the hands of AOC and friends.

Democratic leaders are letting progressives push them around. Mr. Biden may want to create LBJ-sized history but he lacks LBJ’s electoral mandate and his tactical brutality. Would LBJ have allowed a caucus within his caucus to keep him from passing a popular, bipartisan bill that would have won him greatly needed praise? I don’t think so. He didn’t just know how to count, he knew how to kill.

The president and the speaker look as if they’re caught in the same dynamic that has seized almost every major institution in American life, including mainstream journalism and corporations. Progressives, who trend young, are pushing around moderates, who tend to be older. They’ve pushed to change the mission of the institution, to make it more woke, more reflective of the ideology of racial and gender identity, of social-justice wars. The older professionals, mostly longtime liberals, disagree with the progressives yet steadily lose. The progressive are winning, the institutions changing.

Are people seeing some of this same dynamic in Congress, with the young progressives knocking off the more moderate liberals? A lot of American voters who feel pushed around by the same forces might be seeing the parallels. And not liking what they see.

It is now almost a year since the election. America saw Joe Biden as a moderate liberal who, as his party went left, and its center went left, also went left, as a practical pol would. But not that far.

Or maybe that far. Maybe he was more to the left than he always let people think, more ferocious in his aims than he portrayed. I suspect America is coming to see this. And not liking it. Thus the polls.

The White House should be feeling alarm. It hasn’t been a good summer for the president, and it isn’t looking to be a good fall. The manner and timing of the withdrawal from Afghanistan was a catastrophe that left Americans infuriated and ashamed. The president’s statements and interviews in the aftermath were highly unsuccessful. The testimony of his top military leaders that they advised him to leave 2,500 troops to keep the process safe made him look dodgy. The whole thing was a botch from beginning to end, and it will stick in history. The images it yielded (kids running to the planes, 13 Americans killed as they tried to bring order) seemed to sum up the political moment, making this seem not like merely a bad event for the president but a definitional one.

The White House pandemic response has been uneven to the point of baffling. Inflation is going up (in June the Federal Reserve estimated it at 3.4% for the year; by September, 4.2%.) Immigration is not a problem but a crisis, and there appears to be no administration plan to deal with the reality that those from other countries who want to come here approach our border as if there is no border. What the crisis requires, at a bare minimum, is a sense of urgency, of something being done. There is no such sense. Their only plan seems to be hoping Border Patrol agents will do something wrong, or at least something that looks bad, so White House officials can lay blame with indignation and performative compassion.

On Capitol Hill, months of fighting in the Democratic caucus, with liberal moderates versus progressives, has gone on just long enough that it looks not like the inevitable jostling in a divided party but like disarray and an absence of leadership.

All this makes Mr. Biden look unimpressive. And eight months is long enough for an impression to take hold. If I were a Democrat I would be starting to think Joe Biden’s historical purpose was to get rid of Donald Trump, but beyond that he is the answer to no political question.

FiveThirtyEight.com’s tracking poll has Mr. Biden underwater (49% disapprove, 45% approve). The Gallup poll has his approval down 13 points since June. An ABC News/Ipsos poll out this week shows his support eroding on a range of issues, most of the decline fueled by independents and Republicans but with numbers down among Democrats too.

This White House has been pretty good at keeping its secrets. The public has heard very little of what used to be called “Who shot John?”—details about what was said in the Oval Office when the decision got made, who made what argument, who steered things, whose view was decisive. That will come—it always does.

For now, some essentials seem obvious. The sheer size and scope of Mr. Biden’s economic proposals show he is operating with a certain daring. His bills are mandate-size. But he didn’t have a mandate-size victory in 2020 when he was up against the most divisive and controversial president in modern history. Donald Trump got more votes than any Republican ever had. Mr. Biden in turn received more votes than any Democrat. He won by seven million of 159 million votes cast. A good solid win (51.3% to 46.9%), but not a mandate. His party won the House but only by a handful of seats. The Senate is 50-50.

The country is closely split. Mr. Biden’s governing margin is precarious. Yet his economic proposals are quite sweeping, as if he’d won the Great Society mandate of 1964. Lyndon Johnson’s landslide was huge—61% to Barry Goldwater’s 38.5%. Johnson came in with 68 Democratic senators and a 295-140 House majority.

At the same time Mr. Biden acts as if he has a mandate, he seems strangely absent from Hill negotiations. Rep. Debbie Dingell (D., Mich.) said Wednesday on MSNBC that Democratic members “need to know exactly where the president stands and what the president wants them to do, and they’re getting mixed signals depending on who you talk to.” They are told they have to be with the president, but “what is it that the president wants?”

He is letting progressives play the part of conscience of the party. They appear to be calling the shots, and he’s ceding to them the idea they’re not part of the party; they’re the heart of the party. But Mr. Biden didn’t run as a progressive—he beat the progressives in the primaries. In a party going left, he played the role of the middle’s man. What happened to politics as the art of the possible?

This looks like a late-life conversion to progressivism. Maybe that’s what the abrupt and decisive withdrawal from Afghanistan was about, doing what others had failed to do, Barack Obama had failed to do—and what progressives wanted. Show them who their real hero is. The economic part of his agenda would be of a piece with that—show them what Mr. Obama, with his distance from the more progressive wing of his party, refused to show.

I’ve got a feeling there’s more to the Obama competition angle than we understand.

There’s already been a lot of spending since the pandemic began. Mr. Trump was a high spender. Mr. Biden is a high spender. But when the federal government, which is far away from life on the ground in America, creates mammoth spending bills, a sense of targeting gets lost, of workability and intention, of trade-offs and long-term implications. It all gets lost unless you’re careful. We spend so much as a country now, we’re starting to make some workers believe they don’t really have to work. Some renters would be starting to think they don’t necessarily have to write the monthly check.

Does the spending in the big reconciliation bill look careful? It is almost 2,500 pages long, it’s not clear anyone has read it, and no one seems precisely sure what’s in it. It is simply understood as a bill that while not necessarily pertinent to current crises provides the societal changes progressives wish to see in such areas as climate and taxation and beefing up the Internal Revenue Service and free community college.

I think the common wisdom on the right that if this economic program passes it will be bad for the Democrats (huge, messy, inflationary) and if it fails it will be bad for the president (he’s hapless, they don’t have their legislative act together) is correct.

I think Mr. Biden got himself in a fix. The past eight months he could have been gradual and incremental in his approach—a few months slower with a lot more planning in Afghanistan, less appetite and maximalist in economic matters. Old fashioned, undramatic, stable governance from a longtime liberal Democrat.

Not everything has to be big, bold and transformational. Especially when you don’t have a mandate for those things. In political figures it is often vanity and ego that make them insist on being transformational.

Or competitiveness.

Or ideology. But ol’ Joe from Delaware didn’t use to have all that much ideology, and wasn’t chosen to have it.

Two days after the Jan. 6 Capitol assault, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, placed an urgent call “on a top secret, back-channel line,” to his Chinese counterpart, Gen. Li Zuocheng. This is from Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s new book, “Peril.” Gen. Milley believed Gen. Li and others in the Chinese leadership had been rattled by what had just happened in America. Gen. Li asked Gen. Milley if the U.S. was politically collapsing. No, Gen. Milley said: “We are 100% steady,” but democracy can seem “sloppy sometimes.”

It wasn’t their first such conversation. Four days before the 2020 election, according to Messrs. Woodward and Costa, Gen. Milley had called Gen. Li after U.S. intelligence reported the Chinese were on high alert and feared that President Trump, desperate to win, might create a military crisis and present himself as its hero. “We are not going to attack or conduct any kinetic operations against you,” Gen. Milley assured his counterpart. “If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time.” Gen. Li, who’d known Gen. Milley for five years, said he’d take the American at his word.

Soon after the Jan. 8 call, Gen. Milley summoned senior Pentagon officers to his office to discuss the steps involved in a nuclear launch. Only the president could give such an order, but Gen. Milley said he’d have to be involved: “No matter what you’re told, you do the procedure. You do the process. And I’m part of that procedure.”

Since the publication of “Peril,” Gen. Milley has been criticized in some quarters: As head of the Joint Chiefs he’s not in the chain of command. Messages to foreign military leaders should be delivered by civilian officials such as the defense secretary. Who is this guy to take it on himself?

But I see it this way: In a fluid, high-stakes situation, lines of communication are best kept open. Generals of different nations know each other and talk to each other, and it’s good they do. Wars are as likely to start through miscalculation and misunderstanding as bloodlust or reasons of state. The world is preoccupied with ground combat, but this is a nuclear world. Big players, not all of them fully stable, have arsenals. It’s good to establish: No sudden moves.

After Jan. 6, Gen. Milley thought Mr. Trump was mentally deteriorating—manic, scattered, even more unpredictable than usual. Trump supporters say Gen. Milley fundamentally misunderstood Mr. Trump’s nature: His impulses were to end wars, never start them; his moves weren’t martial. True. But Mr. Trump never incited his followers to move with physical force on the U.S. Capitol either, until he did. After that anything seemed possible.

I find myself supportive of Gen. Milley’s actions as described in the book. Yet I come down to a negative view of Gen. Milley after reading it, for two reasons.

One is that it does nothing to enhance America’s position in the world to make it known that the Joint Chiefs chairman found it necessary to call China to tell them Bonkers Man only thinks he’s in charge; if you’ve got a problem, call me. Gen. Milley shouldn’t be talking about all this. He should have kept it to himself, told the next head of the Joint Chiefs and a few historians down the road.

I’ve read the books on the 2020 election and the end of the Trump administration, and Gen. Milley appears to have provided major information in almost all of them. With the caliber of reporters he was dealing with, this would have taken major time—gathering and providing information data, documents and readouts of conversations to substantiate and corroborate his account; interviews, follow-ups, transcripts. The portraits of such a cooperative source would inevitably be driven in a positive direction.

In “I Alone Can Fix It,” by the Washington Post’s Carol D. Leonnig and Philip Rucker, Gen. Milley is decrying systemic racism one day, telling aides that listening to Mr. Trump is like reading Orwell’s “1984” on another. In “Frankly, We Did Win This Election” by the Journal’s Michael C. Bender, Gen. Milley is a street-wise Ivy Leaguer well versed in the Constitution. He instructs Mr. Trump on the nature of the George Floyd protests. “That guy had an insurrection,” he says, pointing to a picture of Lincoln. “What we have, Mr. President, is a protest.” In “Peril,” Gen. Milley constantly saves the republic. He is “burly and ramrod straight,” his shoulders broad, his persona outgoing. Yet there’s a cerebral edge. “One large bookcase in his hallway at Quarters 6 held hundreds of thick books just on China.”

All of it comes across as believable, factually accurate. But one detects a highly enthusiastic primary source.

This is what I thought as I read: Gen. Milley seems to have spent large parts of the past year building the reputation of Mark Milley. (He had marched in fatigues alongside the president at Lafayette Park during the 2020 street protests; he no doubt concluded reputational rehab was in order.) It would have been better if he’d given that time and energy to avoiding the calamitous disaster that was America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. Instead of seeing to his standing he should have been putting his job on the line to keep Bagram Air Base open.

Top U.S. military officers tend always to have their eye on the media, and how they’re being perceived, which brings us to a larger point. The services are at a hinge point. They have been through 20 years—an entire generation—of war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Now it is officially over. They need to take time to review and reflect on that experience in a kind of service-by-service after-action report. Part of that should include this question: While the wars were being fought, did top brass keep the military a step apart from the damaging cultural and political swirls that have swept the nation?

It looks to me as if they have been too eager to prove they have all the right cultural and political predicates, that they want the media and political class to see this. That they’re desperate for them to see it.

But the U.S. military is the most respected institution in the country in part because its members aren’t like the country. They are understood to have exceptional discipline, rigor, clear and uncompromised standards. They have teamwork and their teams cohere because they have a higher purpose and higher expectations. They are called on to preserve and protect the Constitution. They’ll die for you. They don’t make you swear to that at Oberlin.

If the military doesn’t stay true to its mission, it will become just another institution in a country that carelessly destroys institutions.

The military isn’t a fortress and doesn’t have a drawbridge it can pull up. It comes from us and will reflect us. That’s good. The services should be bringing in everybody—women, sexual minorities—gathering all the talent they can, because only our talent will give us the edge in future wars, which will come. Talent comes from all quarters.

But that doesn’t mean adopting the ideologies and assumptions of the leftist cultural regime that reigns in other institutions—Critical Race Theory, wokeness. Don’t let that stuff in. If in your reviews of the past 20 years you determine you have, stop. Your future and ours depend on it.

I want to stay with 9/11 to say something that struck me hard after the ceremonies last Saturday. The grief felt and expressed had to do with more than the memories of that day 20 years ago. It also had to do with right now.

It had to do with a sense that we are losing the thread, that America is losing the thread. We compared—we couldn’t help it, it is in the nature of memory—the America of now with the America of 20 years ago, and we see a deterioration. We feel disturbance at this because we don’t know if we can get our way back. The losing of the thread feels bigger than ideology, bigger certainly than parties. It feels like some more fundamental confusion, an inability to play the role of who we are, and to be comfortable in who we are.

Certainly, most obviously and geopolitically we lost the thread in Afghanistan. We went there 20 years ago to make quick work of mass murderers who’d attacked us, and those who’d harbored and helped them. But we didn’t get the man who gave us 9/11, he escaped, and attention turned elsewhere, to Iraq, and we just stayed and walked in circles and came up with new words to rationalize the mission and it all turned into a muddle of confused intentions. Ten years in it was like the drunken song, “We’re here because we’re here.”

Having lost the thread in the war we then with an almost magical consistency lost the thread in the ending of it. It was a frantic calamity of ill-thought-through actions and mistaken agendas. The horrifying part was that it couldn’t have proceeded without a willful ignoring of reality.

Evidence of a lost thread: 9/11 was a deeply communal event. We were all in it together, wounded together and mourning together. We dug deep, found our best selves, and actually saw the best selves in others. The spontaneous community of those who showed up at the hospital to give blood, of those on the top floors of the towers who gathered to try to lead people out, of those on the plane who banded together to storm the pilot’s door—“Let’s roll.” It wasn’t just you, you were part of something.

The country we are experiencing now is one of people in different groups ganging up on each other. We all see this. It’s all division, driven by identity politics, race, gender, class. Twenty years ago we were grateful for cops, now we denigrate them and they leave and we argue about why they left. A rising generation of voters who were children when 9/11 happened and who became conscious of history during the 2008 economic crisis see (and have been well taught!) the imperfections, mistakes and sins of their own country but have no human memory of the abuses of other systems, of how damaging deep socialism, and communism, have been. The passion of their emerging beliefs will engender opposing passions. They already are.

Just about every large business in America is now run by its human resources department because everyone appears to be harassing and assaulting each other, or accusing each other. Is this the sign of a healthy country?

Following the trauma and drama of 9/11 we started discovering in some new way our nation’s meaning—what it was in history, meant in history, meant to us. We talked about it. We saw: The first thing the firemen did after the towers fell was put up the flag.

Twenty years in our history is treated as all sin, sin, sin. We’re like mad monks flagellating ourselves. We are going through a nonstop condemnation of our past and our people and their limits and ignorance. It isn’t healthy. Reflection and honest questioning are, but not this. And so much of it comes from our most successful and secure, our elites and establishments. Regular people look and think, “But if our professors and media leaders and tech CEOs hate us, who is going to help us think our way out of this mess?” And they know someone has to, because they know in a way elites can never understand, because they have grown so used to security, that no nation can proceed in the world safely and fruitfully when at bottom it hates itself.

Watching the ceremonies last weekend it was understandable if you thought: We started out rediscovering our love and wound up obsessed with our sins. We started out together and wound up more divided than ever, driven apart by opportunists who set us at each other’s throats.

And of course it all plays out in a million political and cultural issues. The pandemic came, a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence (we hope) and somehow that shared experience became another opportunity for division. Government had to be deft and persuasive and honest about what it didn’t know and didn’t have, and often failed. But government can always regulate, spend and tax. We’re no deficit hawks in this corner but doesn’t U.S. public debt going toward $30 trillion feel a little . . . high? And dangerous?

When a country has lost the thread it gets a mob breaking into the U.S. Capitol going for the ballots that will ensure and formalize a presidential election. When it’s lost the thread it can no longer maintain a rough consensus—it doesn’t even WANT a rough consensus—on how we vote.

And there are the million goofy things that are insignificant and yet somehow feel . . . telling. The Met Gala the other night showed the elite of a major industry literally losing the thread. Google the pictures. It was a freak show. There was no feeling of a responsibility to present to the world a sense of coherence or elegance, to show a thing so beautiful it left the people who saw it aspiring to something they couldn’t even name. All this was presided over by a chic and cultivated woman who is cunning and practical. If freaky is in she’s going freaky deaky to the max. Follow the base, even if it’s sick. Do not lead. Leading is impossible now.

That’s what I see with leaders all over America’s business life. What follows the lost thread is go-with-the-flow. Even when you know it isn’t going anywhere good. Especially when it’s going nowhere good.

*   *   *

What are regular people doing? My sense is they’re trying to hide from the national, figuring they’ll make strong what they can make strong—the family, the school, the local. They’re not trying to “maintain control” or “retreat,” they’re just trying to make things work. But what does it mean for a country when its most sober and thoughtful people are essentially trying to hide from it? To hide from the accusations and division and the growing air of freakishness, from the whole cultural revolution and the woke regime, trying to enforce boundaries between “that” and “us.” And knowing all the while that, as they say, you may be through with the culture but the culture isn’t through with you.

I feel certain this whole story will have some effect on, maybe a big effect on, the next election and the one after that. Just people feeling, knowing, that we’ve lost the thread, need to get it back, and wondering what we can do to help make that happen.

Once when I was little, seven or so, I was sitting on the couch with my Uncle Johnny and we were watching something about Memorial Day. Johnny was about 30, a veteran of Korea, and on a day off from the Brooklyn Navy Yard. On the TV they showed a cemetery and at the end they played “Taps.” Suddenly Johnny stood up from the couch, saluted and held the salute with tears in his eyes. I didn’t understand what I was seeing but I knew it was important, and came to understand it had to do with loyalty and grief. And of course I remember it now because that is what I am feeling toward 9/11. I just want to stand and salute as it goes by, and it is going by.

Oh my God what we felt that day and that night and for years after. We wore our hearts on our sleeves. Read the emails you sent, the diary entries. It was all so big. It was the last day of the 20th century and the first day of the 21st and somehow, by dusk, we knew this. In New York, the thing you have to understand is not that the towers were hit, we could have taken that and regained our stride the next morning. It’s that the towers came down. That was impossible. If the towers could fall anything could fall. If the towers fell they were taking a whole world with them.

It was too big, not only in itself, as a catastrophe, almost 3,000 dead, but because we knew it would likely be war, of one kind or another. That was a lot to absorb in a city covered in ash and filled with sirens, a city where people were still lined up in hospitals to volunteer and give blood and help the wounded who would never come.

And the wars ended as they ended, and so the muted tone of things, and all the confused pain.

I want to mention something that happened in this small space, this column, that I’d never experienced before, because it gets at something larger. I had been an online columnist at the Journal for a year. After 9/11, 50 of the next 52 columns were about 9/11, and in that time and before my eyes a whole living community sprang up. It was still the early days of the internet. I didn’t fully realize you could write a column or essay and your readers could immediately respond, telling you what they were experiencing and feeling, what they’d seen.

And we weren’t talking about “politics” we were pouring out our hearts and we did it every week. Readers sent stories of things they’d experienced—for some reason I think first of the telephone repairman in Queens showered by a small rain of paper following the collapse of the towers, who grabbed one as it went by, the business card of a stranger who worked at the World Trade Center, and he kept calling to see if she was all right, and she was. I’d tell the stories in future columns. We helped each other through. It was one of the greatest professional experiences of my life, to write to and with a group of people tied by trauma and keening together.

And what we lived through. How chic, hard shouldered New York was suddenly awash in religious imagery—prayer cards and pictures of saints, candles and statues—and no one resented it, everyone was generous, many joined in. We experienced 9/11 as a spiritual event. We saw an old-fashioned kind of masculinity come back. We looked for meaning. We grieved the firemen. Three hundred forty three of them entered history that day when they went up the stairs in their 70 pounds of gear, and tried to impose order on chaos. We knew: Those outer borough boys were not part of the story but the heart of the story. We’ll never get over them. We don’t want to. So many of them, as you can hear in their last phone calls, and in their faces in recent documentaries, understood they were on a suicide mission. But they stayed and wouldn’t leave. Because they were firemen.

We talked about everyone who added that day to the sum total of human glory. For all the horrors and blunders that surrounded 9/11 and would follow it, there was always that, and always would be.

There was Welles Crowther. Remember him? A young guy, 24, just starting out, worked as a junior associate at an investment bank on the 104th floor of the south tower. He always carried in his back pocket a red bandanna, and they teased him. WHAT ARE YOU, A FARMER? He’d laugh and show bravado: WITH THIS BANDANA I’M GONNA CHANGE THE WORLD. And that day as the world exploded he did. He led people to safety, carried them down to lower floors. He kept going back for more. To protect from the smoke he put the bandanna over his face. He never came home from the towers that day or the day after, his parents were anguished, hoping against hope. Then one day, three days in, his mother was at her desk at home in Nyack, N.Y. Suddenly she felt a presence behind her. She didn’t look, didn’t move. She knew it was Welles. She knew he was saying goodbye. She said: “Thank you.” She knew now he was dead. Months of mourning, no word on how he’d died. And one day, Memorial Day weekend 2002, the New York Times had a story about the last minutes in the towers, and they mentioned survivors who spoke of a man in a red bandanna who’d saved them. And Welles’s mother thought she knew who that was. She got a picture of her son to the survivors and they said yes, that was the man who saved me. Some time later they found his remains, near the command post the firemen had set up in the South Tower. When his family opened his apartment they found an unfinished application to become a New York City fireman.

Just a few days before 9/11, on Labor Day weekend, Welles, visiting his parents, was unusually subdued. He told his mother he had a feeling he was going to be part of something big, had a role to play in it or a job to do.

Isn’t it funny how the mind works, how it knows things it does not know?

“Courage comes from love,” was my summation in 2016. “There’s a big unseen current of love that hums through the world and some plug into it more than others, more deeply and surely.” It fills them with courage. It makes everything possible.

Now that day is over, the shock and the sacrifice and the explosion of love, and the stories that brought tears to your eyes, not only in New York and Washington but Afghanistan and Iraq, and beyond. And on this 20th anniversary of 9/11, this psychic endpoint, maybe the last time the grief will still feel fresh, I suspect a lot of us will just feel like Johnny and want to stand in silent tribute as we hear the lonesome old bugle call.

Fades the light
And afar
Goeth day, cometh night
And a star
Leadeth all
Speedeth all
To their rest.

August changed things; it wasn’t just a bad month. It left a lingering, still head-shaking sense of “This isn’t how we do things.”

We don’t make up withdrawal dates that will have symbolism for photo-ops with the flinty, determined president looking flinty and determined on the 20th anniversary of 9/11; we don’t time epic strategic decisions around showbiz exigencies. We wait for the summer fighting season to pass; we withdraw in the winter when Taliban warriors are shivering in their caves. We don’t leave our major air base in the middle of the night—in the middle of the night—without even telling the Afghan military. We don’t leave our weapons behind so 20-year-old enemies can don them for military playacting and drive up and down with the guns and helmets. We don’t fail to tell our allies exactly what we’re doing and how we’re doing it—they followed us there and paid a price for it. We don’t see signs of an overwhelming enemy advance and treat it merely as a perception problem, as opposed to a reality problem. You don’t get the U.S. military out before the U.S. citizens and our friends. Who will protect them if you do that?

The president’s people think this will all just go away and are understandably trying to change the subject. But the essence of the story will linger. Its reverberations will play out for years. There are Americans and American friends behind Taliban lines. The stories will roll out in infuriating, sometimes heartbreaking ways. The damage to the president is different and deeper than his people think, because it hit at his reputational core, at how people understand him. His supporters have long seen him as soft-natured, moderate—a sentimental man famous for feeling and showing empathy. But nothing about this fiasco suggested kindliness or an interest in the feelings of others. It feels less like a blunder than the exposure of a seamy side. Does he listen to anyone? Does he have any people of independent weight and stature around him, or are they merely staffers who approach him with gratitude and deference?

What happened with U.S. military leadership? There’s been a stature shift there, too. Did they warn the president not to leave Bagram Air Base? Did they warn that the whole exit strategy was flawed, unrealistic? If the president was warned and rejected the advice why didn’t a general care enough to step down—either in advance to stop the debacle, or afterward to protest it?

Did they just go with the flow? Did they think the president’s mind couldn’t be changed so what the heck, implement the plan on schedule and hope for the best? President Biden’s relations with the Pentagon have been cool at best for a long time; maybe some generals were thinking: I can improve future relations by giving the president more than he asks for. He wants out by 9/11, I’ll give him out by the Fourth of July. It is important to find out what dynamics were in play. Because it’s pretty obvious something went wrong there.

The enlisted men and women of the U.S. military are the most respected professionals in America. They can break your heart with their greatness, as they did at Hamid Karzai International Airport when 13 of them gave their lives to help desperate people escape. But the top brass? Something’s wrong there, something that August revealed. They are all so media-savvy, so smooth and sound-bitey after a generation at war, and in some new way they too seem obsessed with perceptions and how things play, as opposed to reality and how things are.

There has been a lot of talk about Mr. Biden and what drove his single-minded insistence on leaving on his timetable. Axios recently mentioned the 2010 Rolling Stone article in which Gen. Stanley McChrystal and his staff made brutal fun of Biden. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates wrote in his 2014 memoir that President Obama told him, “Joe is over the top about this.” Mr. Obama himself, in his presidential memoir, wrote of Mr. Biden warning him the military was trying to “jam” him, “trying to box in a new president.”

People have been rereading George Packer’s great 2019 book on the diplomat Richard Holbrooke, “Our Man” (great not only as history but as literature). Holbrooke met with Vice President Biden one day during the first Obama term and they argued about Afghanistan. Mr. Biden dismissed Holbrooke’s arguments for protecting Afghan women’s rights as “bull—.” Their discussion was, according to Holbrooke’s diary, “quite extraordinary.” Mr. Biden said Holbrooke didn’t understand politics, that the Democrats could lose the presidency in 2012 in part because of Afghanistan, that we have to get out as we did from Vietnam.

There was politics in President Biden’s decision, and frustration. Mr. Biden had spent years in Afghanistan meetings, in the Senate during the Bush years, and later in the White House as vice president. He would have seen up close more than his share of military spin—contradictory information, no one with a sustainable strategic plan, and plenty of that old military tradition, CYA.

Afghanistan was emotional for him, for personal reasons. This would be connected to his son’s service in Iraq, and the worry a parent feels and the questions a parent asks. And maybe the things Beau Biden told him about his tour.

And I suspect there was plenty of ego in it, of sheer vanity. A longtime friend of his once told me Mr. Biden’s weakness is that he always thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room. I asked if the rooms are usually small, and the friend didn’t bristle, he laughed. I suspect Mr. Biden was thinking he was going to be the guy who finally cut through, who stopped the nonsense, admitted reality, who wasn’t like the others driven by fear of looking weak or incompetent. He was going to look with eyes made cool by experience and do what needed doing—cut this cord, end this thing, not another American dead.

History would see what he’d done. It would be his legacy. And for once he’d get his due—he’s not some ice-cream-eating mediocrity, not a mere palate-cleanser after the heavy meal of Trump, not a placeholder while America got its act together. He would finally be seen as what he is—a serious man. Un homme sérieux, as diplomats used to say.

And then, when it turned so bad so quick, his pride and anger shifted in, and the defiant, defensive, self-referential speeches. Do they not see my wisdom?

When you want it bad you get it bad.

This won’t happen, but it would be better for his White House not to scramble away from the subject—Let’s go to the hurricane!—but to inhabit it fully. Concentrate on the new reality of the new Afghanistan, the immediate and larger diplomatic demands, the security needs. Get the Americans out, our friends out, figure out—plan—what you would do and say if, say, next November there is a terror event on U.S. soil, and a group calling itself al Qaeda 2.0 claims responsibility, and within a few days it turns out they launched their adventure from a haven in Afghanistan.

Don’t fix on “perception.” Focus on that ignored thing, reality.

“For all sad words of tongue or pen, / The saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’”

I keep thinking of what happened at Tora Bora. What a richly consequential screw-up it was, and how different the coming years might have been, the whole adventure might have been, if we’d gotten it right.

From the 2009 Senate Foreign Relations Committee report “Tora Bora Revisited: How We Failed to Get bin Laden and Why It Matters Today”:

“On October 7, 2001, U.S. aircraft began bombing the training bases and strongholds of Al Qaeda and the ruling Taliban across Afghanistan. The leaders who sent murderers to attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon less than a month earlier and the rogue government that provided them sanctuary were running for their lives. President George W. Bush’s expression of America’s desire to get Osama bin Laden ‘dead or alive’ seemed about to come true.”

The war was to be swift and deadly, with clear objectives: defeat the Taliban, destroy al Qaeda and kill or capture its leader, Osama bin Laden. Already the Taliban had been swept from power, al Qaeda ousted from its havens. American deaths had been kept to a minimum.

But where was bin Laden? By early December 2001 his world “had shrunk to a complex of caves and tunnels carved into a mountainous section” of eastern Afghanistan, Tora Bora. For weeks U.S. aircraft pounded him and his men with as many as 100 strikes a day. “One 15,000-pound bomb, so huge it had to be rolled out the back of a C-130 cargo plane, shook the mountains for miles.”

American commandos were on the scene, fewer than 100, but everyone knew more troops were coming. Bin Laden expected to die. He wrote his last will and testament on Dec. 14.

But calls for reinforcement to launch an assault were rejected, as were calls to block the mountain paths into Pakistan, which bin Laden could use as escape routes. “The vast array of American military power, from sniper teams to the most mobile divisions of the Marine Corps and the Army, was kept on the sidelines.”

Sometime around Dec. 16, bin Laden and his bodyguards made their way out, on foot and horseback, and disappeared into Pakistan’s unregulated tribal area.

How could this have happened? The report puts responsibility on Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his top commander, Gen. Tommy Franks. Both supported a small-footprint war strategy, and it was a bad political moment for a big bloody fight: Afghanistan’s new president, Hamid Karzai, was about to be inaugurated. “We didn’t want to have U.S. forces fighting before Karzai was in power,” Gen. Franks’s deputy told the committee. “We wanted to create a stable country and that was more important than going after bin Laden at the time.” Washington seemed to want Afghan forces to do the job, but they couldn’t. They didn’t have the capability or fervor.

Gen. Franks took to saying the intelligence was “inconclusive.” They couldn’t be sure Osama was there. But he was there.

Central Intelligence Agency and Delta Force commanders who’d spent weeks at Tora Bora were certain he was there. Afghan villagers who sold food to al Qaeda said he was there. A CIA operative who picked up a radio from a dead al Qaeda fighter found himself with a clear channel into the group’s communications. “Bin Laden’s voice was often picked up.” The official history of the U.S. Special Operations Command determined he was there: “All source reporting corroborated his presence on several days from 9-14 December.”

Bin Laden himself said he was there, in an audiotape released in February 2003. He boasted of surviving the bombardment. “Warplanes continued to fly over us day and night,” he said. “Planes poured their lava on us.”

There were enough U.S. troops in or near Afghanistan to get him, the report said. It would have been a dangerous fight on treacherous terrain in hostile territory. There would have been casualties, maybe a lot. But commanders on the scene said the reward was worth the risk.

In Washington the White House was already turning its attention to Iraq. Late in November, after the fall of Kabul, President George W. Bush asked Rumsfeld about Iraq war plans. Rumsfeld ordered up an assessment. Gen. Franks was working on air support for Afghan units being assembled to push into the mountains around Tora Bora. Now he was told an Iraq plan would have to be drawn up. The report noted that for critics of the Bush administration, “the shift in focus just as Franks and his senior aides were literally working on plans for the attacks on Tora Bora represents a dramatic turning point that allowed a sustained victory in Afghanistan to slip through our fingers.”

It changed the course of the war in Afghanistan. The most wanted man in the world, the reason those poor souls jumped from the high floors of the twin towers, the man whose capture was an integral part of the point and mission of the war was allowed to . . . disappear. The American presence descended into a muddle of shifting strategies, unclear purpose and annual reviews. The guiding military wisdom in Washington—that too many troops might stir up anti-American sentiment and resistance—was defied by the facts of Tora Bora. The unwillingness to be supple, respond to circumstances and deploy the troops to get bin Laden “paved the way for exactly what we hoped to avoid—a protracted insurgency.”

Why didn’t Washington move and get him? Maybe it was simply a mistake—“the fog of war.” Maybe leaders were distracted by Iraq. Maybe it was a lack of imagination: They didn’t know what it would mean to people, their own people, to get the bastard. And maybe this: Maybe they consciously or unconsciously knew that if they got the guy who did 9/11, killed him or brought him to justice, that would leave a lot of Americans satisfied that justice had been done. That might take some steam out of the Iraq push. Maybe they concluded it would be better not to get him, or not right away . . .

Bin Laden was found almost 10 years later, in May 2011, and killed in a daring operation ordered by Barack Obama, who was loudly, justly lauded. He made the decision against the counsel of Vice President Joe Biden.

But what if we’d gotten Tora Bora right? Think of what might have followed. Bin Laden and his lieutenants captured or dead, an insult answered. Maybe a few more months in Afghanistan for America while the bad guys were fully, truly broken. Then—time for some historical romance—a message is delivered by a U.S. general, the last general in Afghanistan, who puts the last boot on the last helicopter. “Months ago you wounded a great nation. Your government of mad imbeciles has been removed. Fortresses have been reduced to rubble, your Taliban killed, al Qaeda expunged. Our mission complete, we will now leave. Let me give you some advice: Don’t make us come back. It will be so much worse when we do.”

Human, ragged and clear. What would have followed? Who knows? But it’s hard to imagine it would be worse than the 20-year muddle and the troops and treasure lost.