Peggy Noonan

The ends of things matter as much as the beginnings. This end was unworthy of an epic struggle. It was not a departure but an abandonment. We left carelessly, with incompetence that can hardly be imagined. Could there have been less planning and foresight? That’s what will follow Joe Biden now, his carelessness and, when it broke as a world-wide story with the stampedes at the airport and people falling from planes, his stubbornness and pride.

It was weird from the beginning. The withdrawal plan always seemed abrupt and arbitrary. Why did the White House think the 20th anniversary of 9/11 was the right date for a pullout? What picture of America do they carry in their heads that told them that would be symbolically satisfying? It is as if they are governed by symbols with no understanding of what the symbols mean.

The president’s speech Monday was what everyone called it, defiant. What was needed was a distanced kindliness—patience, an acknowledgment of the mess that was unfolding, an explanation of a way through, a reiteration of the soundness of the larger vision. Instead, blame shifting, finger pointing, and defensive claims of higher wisdom. He “inherited a deal” from his predecessor. Sure, things “did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated,” but that only “reinforced” his conviction that he’d made “the right decision.” He’d told Afghanistan’s president to prepare for civil war, clean up corruption, unite politically. “They failed to do any of that.” There was no admission of mistakes or misjudgments. “I stand squarely by my decision. . . . We were clear-eyed about the risks. We planned for every contingency. . . . I’ve worked on these issues as long as anyone.” Unlike others he sees the big picture. “I will not repeat the mistakes we’ve made in the past.”

What America needed was wise and stoic Lincoln after First Bull Run. What we got was more late-season Junior Soprano telling Tony and the boys they don’t have the vision and guts anymore.

In the interview with George Stephanopoulos he was even worse—dug in, standing by carelessness and painting it as courage. When he means to project strength he very often appears high-handed and merely mulish.

The reputational blow for the president and his administration will be severe, and so will the foreign-policy implications. On Wednesday Mr. Biden was condemned in the British Parliament by members from both sides of the aisle. Imagine that—our old ancestral friends, who fought with us side by side.

What can be done? I would say that when history turns dark, it can help to astound yourself and see the romance in it. History, after all, is the story of mankind: There’s a lot of derring-do in there, sacrifice too, even some high-mindedness.

The only right political path now is the humane one. It’s also the path to at least some partial redemption. Mr. Biden should see that his job now is saving the lives of Americans in Afghanistan and their friends in a major and declared rescue operation. If that means embarrassing himself temporarily by reversing decisions, then so be it. Humility never killed anyone.

No one knows how many Americans are in Afghanistan—you’d think we would at this point—but estimates are 10,000 to 15,000. They are U.S. citizens. They are our people. Our government exists to help them. They must be rescued, wherever they are. If we have to fight our way to them, we fight our way.

As for the Afghan translators and others who worked with us and with our European allies, the obvious should not need saying but apparently does. They threw their lot with America at some immediate cost and an enormous potential price. It is not only a national imperative but a human imperative to save them from retribution. America does this after its wars. It tried to save those who helped in World War II and Vietnam. Those refugees made excellent Americans. Afghan workers have for 20 years seen the idealism and good faith of our servicemen up close. They know us better than we know ourselves. They are not a burden but a benefit.

Mr. Biden, focus. Don’t be diffident and fatalistic, don’t be equivocal, don’t be forced by events. Don’t make the media and the military drag you to this decision. Take authority. This story is not going away.

Accept the chastening decision to send in more troops and air power if needed. Show that you recognize the emergency. Pivot away from process. Don’t “speed up Special Immigrant Visas”; that ship has sunk, suspend the rules. Get Afghans trying to flee to a third country, and sort it out there. Mistakes will be made; uncover them there.

Find and save the Americans who can’t get out. The road to Kabul airport should be smashed open and kept open by whatever means—whatever it takes. If Bagram Air Base needs to be reopened under U.S. control, reopen it. Throw in everything you’ve got. The administration, which is talking to the Taliban, should make it clear that this is what we are doing, that nothing will stop it, the rescue is going to happen. If it means blowing way past the Aug. 31 fixed departure day, blow past it.

Mr. Biden would fear this will make him look weak. It would make him look strong, and loyal. He will fear it will make him look stupid, always a concern of his. It would make him look like he knows what’s important.

Much depends on the attitude of Taliban leadership. Much, maybe more than we know, will depend on their ability to control their own hopped-up warriors cruising through the streets in American trucks. Can Taliban leadership control the situation on the ground? Can they make the fighters surrounding Kabul airport stand down?

If the leadership is thinking strategically and tactically—if—they will see the reasons it’s in their interests to let a U.S. rescue succeed. They’re on top of the world, delighted at their victory. They’ve already humiliated us; they don’t have to do it again right away. There’s no reason for them to want to keep a built-in simmering opposition around. It’s easier to run the country without them. They can always kill the stragglers later. Why should they want the picture of their triumph to be marred by new pictures of vengeance and carnage? They enjoy thinking they’re not barbarians. They want the world to think they’re not the Flintstones dragging their clubs but Taliban 2.0, cool players, real big boys. More violence will only complicate future requests for foreign aid.

But however things fall, the mood and needs of the Taliban cannot be allowed to determine events. We must do what we have to do. They must be made to understand this.

Here’s some romance of history. Dunkirk was a disaster: the British army trapped in France in 1940, the Nazis encircling and bearing down. Cunning Winston Churchill, with the complicity of the Western press, spun it into a triumph. A volunteer civilian fleet turned the Channel white-capped with its sails and saved our boys. It was splendid. Here’s to you, doughty John Bull.

Go save your people and our friends, and spin it however you want. If it works, no one will care.

They’re all afraid of their base. That’s the central fact of American political life now, that leaders of all sorts aren’t leading their people but are terrified of getting crosswise with them. They’re afraid of their own fans. This is true of everyone from cable anchors and hosts who know exactly who’s watching and what they want, to presidents of the United States.

Joe Biden is afraid of Joe Biden’s base, an extremely important part of which is the teachers unions. He’s afraid to insist publicly, with fervor and commitment, that they get vaccinated and open the schools. He speaks delicately of the unions when he speaks of them at all. It’s clear who’s in charge, who’s going to whom hat in hand.

Donald Trump is afraid of the Trump base. His administration pushed, against the odds, to develop the Covid vaccines and bragged, rightly, at the sheer scientific feat of it. He received the vaccine as soon as he could, as did his family and advisers. But he hasn’t led a national charge to overcome vaccine hesitancy; he’s not out there beating the drum to get the jabs. His stray comments have been furtive and low-key. Some in his base resist the vaccine and are angry that they’re going to be pushed around about it. If he put his name behind a campaign to persuade them, they just might push back and say he finally gave in to the swamp. So he dummies up.

I think Gov. Ron DeSantis fears his base. He’s shown some guts in Florida the past eight months, pushing back against a kind of National Federal Behemoth Establishment Thoughtblob that was claiming too much power and influence. But now he is forbidding local governments and public schools from requiring masks if they think circumstances justify. This is not conservative but extreme.

Eighteen months into the pandemic people have mask fatigue. The subject has become so fraught you have to be either pro or anti, pick a side, no room for an approach that weighs circumstances. Moderation is for the gutless and insincere. But it is reasonable that any power to mandate masks come from the power closest to the voters—local government. No federal power should tell them they must. No governor should tell them they can’t.

Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana had it right this week when he told CNN, “When it comes to local conditions, if my hospital is full and my vaccination rate is low and infection rate is going crazy, we should allow local officials to make those decisions best for the community.” He added: “I think you govern best when you govern closest to the people being governed.”

And local powers should do it tactfully. Nothing has been so damaged by the pandemic as what had remained of American tact. Schools should keep free masks in the supply room and not embarrass kids if they don’t have one. No one should be a Nazi about enforcement. That only raises the temperature and deepens kids’ trauma. Make a decision and then encourage, persuade, exemplify helpful behavior.

So much is in the doing, especially in a crisis. Nothing is going to be perfect. Don’t we know this by now?

Maybe not. We’re 18 months into the pandemic: At this point we’re all long haulers. People are tired, nerves are frayed, and our inability to predict with confidence what’s coming only sharpens things. The illness has settled in. Variants will continue to evolve. No one knows the characteristics of future mutations. It’s possible we’re in the worst moment right now, with hardy Delta, and possible we’re not.

What rules of the road might help us as we enter the coming school year, what general attitudes?

• Regain a sense of give. Stop pushing each other around. Have a generous and sympathetic sense of who your fellow Americans are. There are 330 million of them. It’s a big lumbering thing we have here, with a lot of moving pieces and millions of views. People you think stupid may be thinking things that hadn’t occurred to you. We all have to be patient with each other, not only as a moral but a practical necessity.
• Stop picking on each other. Some people don’t want the vaccine, which is the only way out of this mess. Does it help to ostracize them? No. Instead, try to change their minds with respect, good faith and clear language. Humor, too. I read about a woman the other day who saw, on TikTok, that the arm you get the shot in becomes magnetic. Spoons and knives are drawn to it so you have to watch yourself when you’re walking around the kitchen. The theory is creative and insane. But this country cares for little so much as entertainment. Why aren’t there entertaining and funny spots on what the vaccine doesn’t do, along with what it does, all over TV and the internet?
• Admit there are reasons people don’t trust the experts. If you are an expert, don’t doubletalk. Play it straight, if you don’t know something admit it, don’t be media-coached within an inch of your life. It would be good if all scientific and medical spokesmen for the pandemic could ask themselves: Do you like the American people? Do you feel a quick broad affection for them when you think of them? A sense of kinship? Or do you see them as unruly imbeciles you have to get in line? Because if the latter, you’re going to show it—in your TV appearances and written materials. People will pick it up, because nothing is more obvious than a lack of affection.

And maybe some of us should regain or adjust our sense of proportion. There’s a bad disease out there that’s settled in. Approaching it with prudent realism is good. Taking precautions is good. But—it’s hard to say this without being misunderstood—some people have gotten neurotic about the virus. They’re fixated, they’ve wound up every fear they have in it. They’re not concerned about heart disease, cancer, the big killers, it’s all Covid. But Covid now is part of life; it’s not life. At a certain point you’ve got to remember what Sean Connery’s character said in David Mamet’s great screenplay of “The Untouchables.” The Canadian Mounties had screwed up the ambush, Eliot Ness’s men didn’t know whether to join in. “Oh what the hell, you gotta die of something,” Connery’s character said. And they charged.

Life has to be lived.

And school this fall is everything. The only truly dreadful decision that could be made is if class doesn’t start throughout the country in September. That would be a generational disaster for kids who by then will have missed more than a year at school, some at vital stages. They will never make up what they were supposed to learn, and kids from disturbed and neglectful homes will never fully recover from what they witnessed or experienced. It’s going to take a lot to turn that around. We can’t even imagine what it will take.

If school does not begin across the country, it will curdle public opinion toward Joe Biden. A president’s base is, actually, the entire country. He’d be better off fearing that.

Let’s stop for a second to reflect on the state attorney general’s report in the case of Andrew Cuomo. I have read the 165 pages. It is a narrative about charges of sexual harassment that investigators found credible, and that were more numerous than expected. But there is a real Crazytown aspect to the story.

The governor of New York is painted as a public leader who treats the young women around him as sexual prey. The report details close and intimate hugs, kisses, buttock-grabbing, breast-grabbing, leering comments and violative questions and statements. Have you cheated on your husband? Would you? I am lonely. Have you been with older men? Would you find me a girlfriend? To one target he described his criterion for a girlfriend as someone who can “handle pain.” This is all too believable. His prey included not only women who worked for him but a state trooper he saw at an event and got assigned to his security detail even though she didn’t meet the position’s requirements. He then targeted her for harassment.

He had a modus operandi. When a woman whose bare back he was stroking grabbed his wrist and removed his hand, he remarked, “Wow, you’re aggressive.” He then asked for a kiss. He had an air of entitlement: He was taking what was his. Many of the events described in the report occurred after the pandemic had raised his profile to that of public hero. Politicians are never so dangerous as after a triumph.

The women were all afraid of him—he screamed, berated and was known to be vengeful. The culture of his office was rife with fear and intimidation. A victim: “It was extremely toxic, extremely abusive. If you got yelled at in front of everyone, it wasn’t any special day. . . . It was controlled largely by his temper, and he was surrounded by people who enabled his behavior.” Everyone feared retaliation for speaking out, so they didn’t.

But there is deep weirdness beyond that. He ordered one aide to memorize the lyrics to “Danny Boy.” She testified he “would pop out” of his office and ask her to start singing. A footnote says it was not the only time the governor asked her to sing. The aide found herself writing to a former staffer, “He just asked me to sing Bohemian Rhapsody so. We aren’t far off from a bedtime story.” He asked her to do push-ups in front of him, and asked what people were saying about the size of his hands. According to the report the aide testified that “she understood the Governor was attempting to get her to say something about the size of his genitals.” Another aide testified that, in complaining to staff that a speech was disappointing, the Governor said something to the effect of “You need to give me some catchy one-liners. Come up with a line like, ‘you’re having sex without the orgasm.’ ”

Mr. Cuomo’s office played a kind of berserk hardball. When news of the sexual-harassment charges broke this March, the governor’s chief of staff asked the state “vaccine czar” to call Democratic county executives and find out if they stood with the governor. The czar was understood to be in charge of vaccine availability and the location of vaccine sites. Demand for vaccines was exceeding supply. The czar called around. One Democratic county executive understood the call to contain an implicit threat regarding vaccine access. He described himself as “stunned” and unsettled by the call.

You read all this and think: The governor is a letch, a creep, a dirty old man. But also a nut—a high-functioning one, a politically talented one, but a nut. Only a nut would do these things, and only a nut would think he wouldn’t be found out.

No one in New York is walking around saying “I don’t believe it” or “That’s not the Andrew I know.” It’s apparently the Andrew Cuomo a lot of people knew.

And no one in New York can see how Mr. Cuomo survives all this, even as no one can figure out how he’ll leave. He could resign, but no one who’s known him in the past thinks that possible. The book he wrote during the pandemic has a subtheme and it’s how losing all power and standing when he lost his party’s nomination for governor in 2002 was the great trauma of his life, and winning his career in politics back in 2006, when he was elected attorney general, restored meaning to his life. He literally lives in the governor’s mansion. It’s his only home.

That leaves impeachment. All who will vote on that question know this: if Mr. Cuomo is impeached, Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul will become governor. She is a career politician from Western New York who is usually assumed, based on history and temperament, to be a moderate Democrat. If she becomes governor—the first woman in New York history—she would garner great initial good will and could become popular. This might thwart the ambitions of her party’s powerful progressives. Maybe they’ll figure that once she’s installed they can rough her up and let her know who’s boss; maybe they’ll find her unexpectedly pliant. But that’s chancy. Republicans don’t want a potentially popular Democrat either: They want to win in 2022. Both sides would benefit from a weakened, suppurating Gov. Cuomo, not a vibrant moderate who might play well on Long Island.

It would be interesting to know who’s talking to Ms. Hochul right now, and what’s being said.

Still, the Legislature’s hand might be forced by events. Circumstances now are different from when the scandals first broke. The attorney general’s report was grimly particular and distilled stray charges into one compelling narrative. The allegation that Mr. Cuomo brought a cop, a state trooper, into his net and abused her startled people and changed their sense of the story. The old civil-rights establishment that kept Mr. Cuomo afloat in the spring looks to be fracturing. And early polling is bad. An overnight Marist survey this week showed 63% of registered voters saying they want him to resign. When the scandal first broke, the public backed the governor.

His strategy since the beginning has been to delay, delay, let the steam come out. That may still be his strategy, and that of some legislators currently acting out their disapproval of him.

Here’s my thought when I finished the report. As America becomes stranger and our culture becomes stranger, our politicians become stranger. As their power increases (I can close a whole state down; I can close a country!) so do the stakes.

When parties and primary voters pick their candidates this year they will judge them in terms of various categories: likability, local support, money and the ability to raise it, stances on issues. People now have to include explicitly another category, an important, baseline question: Is the candidate fully sane? Is the candidate the kind who will be destabilized or further destabilized by the acquisition of new power? Does he push people around?

If your candidate does, take the other one.

“It happened, move on.” “It wasn’t so bad.” “It was just a protest that got out of hand.” A lot of the rioters were screwballs in antlers—crazy uncles, unhappy sons. They didn’t even have a plan. They didn’t know what they were going to do in there. They just ran around and screamed. “Hang Mike Pence. ” You get the distinct impression from the videos that they were extremely relieved they couldn’t find Mr. Pence, or anyone else.

These are aspects of the events of 1/6/21, but they aren’t anywhere near the most important ones.

There are three reasons we have to learn everything we can about what happened that day, and they are the reasons the House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the United States Capitol, which held its first public hearing this week, deserves the support of both parties.

One is that the central intent of the riot was to halt, unlawfully and through violence, a constitutionally mandated activity: the counting of the physical Electoral College ballots that would yield the final, formal result of the 2020 presidential election. Those paper ballots, transported to Washington by each of the 50 states, rested inside wooden boxes secured by thick leather straps and placed on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Their counting is an expression, but also a practical requirement, of the peaceful transfer of presidential power. Their counting had never been stopped before, even in America’s wild wilderness beginnings.

If we have a future in which such attempts become commonplace, everything will fall apart: No future presidential outcome will be assumed to be settled, no transfer of power peaceful. That would be a disaster.

Something else almost as important: The melee, the whole crisis of 1/6, made America look unstable, hollow, all facade. In a predatory world such appearances are dangerous. What happened that day knocked us down a few pegs, disheartening our international friends and exciting our foes. (Imagine what those cool operators in Beijing thought as they watched the videos. These are the people with whom we’ll spend the 21st century in epic struggle? OK!)

These are the reasons what happened on 1/6 can’t be allowed to become normal. One way to discourage that is to see that all involved pay a steep practical and reputational price—public exposure, shame and, when a crime can be proved, prison time. To determine who deserves this requires investigation.

Indignation is a form of loyalty. You protect the things you love.

The committee hearing this week focused on public testimony from four police officers who described what 1/6 was really like—not just a lark by guys in antlers but a day of considerable blood lust. They testified that they were physically and verbally assaulted, targeted by the mob, kicked, punched, crushed and sprayed with chemicals.

Rep. Liz Cheney asked: Was it a “loving crowd,” as Donald Trump has described it? “I’m still recovering from those hugs and kisses that day,” Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell responded dryly. He characterized the day as “a medieval battle.”

The committee will have a chance to create a formal record and secure details that amplify and supplement what we think we already know. Some of it may be surprising and some shocking.

Members of the Republican leadership are making a huge error in how they are responding to the committee. They misunderstand their own position. They should be quietly trying to push away from the disaster by leaving it on Mr. Trump and his White House, not their party. They should have taken part in the committee investigation, defended those who entered the Capitol but did no harm and truly thought their presence was legal—the president, some have said, told them to do it—while letting the evidence against Mr. Trump pile up.

Instead they’ve played down what happened and dismissed the committee as a partisan effort. They have put their party on the wrong side of reality. When House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy called the two Republicans on the panel, Ms. Cheney and Rep. Adam Kinzinger, “Pelosi Republicans,” he looked unserious and stupid. He breathed more oxygen into crazytown theories of a stolen election, and again propped up Mr. Trump, whose support in the party is broad, true, but also shallow. Trump supporters are loyal to him and defend him, but when you talk to them you sense their passions are moving on. The candidate he endorsed in a special congressional runoff election in Texas just lost by a resounding six points.

The reality of Donald Trump torments a lot of the GOP leadership, and yet they constantly revive him. They set their fortunes with his when the physics of politics dictates one thing: Out of power, removed from the presidency and denied social media, this is a balloon losing air, not gaining it.

Republican leaders think they’re playing to his base, and they forgive this in themselves by telling themselves stories about how he really may have won the election. They aren’t loyal, they have Stockholm syndrome: They’ve come to identify with the guy who took them hostage and hope the cops don’t hurt him.

The committee should spend the next few months doing everything it can to get the story. More important than the timing of future hearings this fall and winter is what can be gotten that is deep and new—real information that has never been heard before. Members should focus on what drove this thing, who quietly encouraged it. The collapse of Capitol security has already been done. More interesting now: Were members of Congress in communication with the rioters? Did any advise or coordinate with them before 1/6? What did they say to the White House by phone and text on 1/6?

There’s an important roadmap in the books coming out about Mr. Trump’s final days in the White House. Everyone around the former president seems to be talking, usually not for attribution. Most of what they say is not complimentary. Much that has already come out is valuable, a contribution to the record, but it all lacks the true heft of history because it reflects the limits of journalism. Reporters don’t have subpoena power. They can’t make their sources speak under oath.

The committee can. Democrats in recent investigations have been slow to use the subpoena. They say this time they will. To get the story they’ll have to.

I hope they get at least one of their colleagues on the record on this: Some representatives who later insisted the rioters were peaceful patriots, that it was all just another day with rowdy, happy tourists, accepted the protection of the police they now deride on 1/6. If the protesters were such gentle souls, the representatives could have confidently refused police protection, refused to hide in undisclosed locations, walked freely into the halls, and told their fellow Trump supporters that while their passion was understandable they were breaking the law. “March with me to the exits. We will move our questions about the election forward in the courts, but lawfully.”

Why didn’t they? Because they were afraid of the people they now excuse? They were scared little rabbits who finally knew what they’d unleashed.

Nail this story down. Nail everyone involved. Then, and only then, move on.

In the Democratic primary, which took place Tuesday, the candidates for mayor reflected competing party realities. Each brought a particular vibration. City Comptroller Scott Stringer was Abe Beame without the charisma. Former Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia was the woman on the train working a hard job in the city, the kind of middle manager who keeps the whole place going. Manhattan loved her. Andrew Yang was a good person, refreshing and unpredictable—refreshing because unpredictable—but he didn’t know the city in his gut. Activist Maya Wiley was elegant, dignified, had presence and warmth, but her policies were those of the detached academic, all progressive ideology. She wouldn’t say in debate that she’d refuse to disarm the police.

Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, currently in first place by nearly 10 points, scrambled things up. In the war between the abstract and the real, he backed reality. Opposition to his candidacy had a constant undercurrent: He’s an old-time machine pol, a deal maker, corrupt, he doesn’t even live in New York. Everyone heard these things. A lot didn’t care because of the other thing they knew, which is that Mr. Adams was a cop for 22 years, left the New York City Police Department as a captain, and was the first and for a long time the only candidate to campaign on crime and the public’s right to safety. He was the first to admit we were in a crime wave.

That was considered cheap until it was considered visionary. (The NYPD reports shootings were up 73% last month, compared with May 2020.)

Mr. Adams’s election-night speech had an air of lovely bitterness: “How dare those with their philosophical and intellectual theorizing and their classroom mindset talking about the ‘theory of policing’?” he said. “You don’t know this. I know this. I’m going to keep my city safe.”

His multiracial coalition drew heavily from black voters. It looks to me like the Democratic Party is in the middle of a big change that it’s not fully noticing, or admitting. For at least 50 years Democrats thought they had to lean left to secure the black vote. In a general way this tilted the entire party left. Now the party has to tack rightward to hold them, at least on some issues, those I’d characterize as the intensely human ones, such as crime. This shift has been apparent at least since the 2020 presidential primaries, when black voters in South Carolina, specifically women, deliberately and strategically rejected progressives and chose Joe Biden, the moderate with whom they’d had a long relationship, saving his candidacy.

I think this was part of the story in New York. Because of the new system of ranked-choice voting, we don’t know the winner. Later rounds of counting could deliver a surprise. But whoever wins, this is true: If you take the top five first-choice candidates as of Thursday afternoon, the more or less reality-oriented moderates (Mr. Adams, Ms. Garcia and Mr. Yang) received 63% of the Democratic vote. The self-declared progressives (Ms. Wiley and Mr. Stringer) got 27%.

This in deep blue New York, ground zero of the progressive explosion, where in 2018 Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sprang from Zeus’ brow and defeated the moderate Rep. Joe Crowley in the Bronx. (It must be noted that progressives did better down the ballot on Tuesday; we squish that information in here so as not to harsh our mellow.)

Here is something I think helped Mr. Adams.

What is always missing from “the public discourse” on crime is simple compassion. It is weirdly absent. Being the victim of violent crime can change a life and bring untold long-term woe, real physical and psychological repercussions.

The progressive left brings a coldness to this issue. If they feel any personal horror they don’t show it, perhaps because horror demonstrates a human and real-world understanding of the nature of the violation, which suggests an insufficient adherence to ideological abstraction. Rising crime is simply more evidence that if we don’t focus on root causes—poverty, racism—crime will continue to rise. Rising crime is proof that inequity brings violence. AOC at a town hall last July, when the crime uptick had begun: “Do we think this has to do with the fact that there’s record unemployment in the United States right now?” People are “economically desperate.” “Maybe this has to do with the fact that people aren’t paying their rent and are scared to pay their rent and so they go out and they need to feed their child and they don’t have money so . . . they feel like they either need to shoplift some bread or go hungry.”

But bread-stealing isn’t the problem. The problem is that criminals, professional and freelance, know the police are on the defensive, that elimination of cash bail has left the criminal-justice system a revolving door, and this is in fact a golden age for street criminals.

On the conservative side what is always present is indignation and a tendency equal to the left’s to diminish the problem by reducing it to a matter of political gain. Yes, Sean, I think voters will punish those who want to defund the police. It will be a killer issue for us in ’22.

What is missing is human sympathy. It is missing because many in public life are detached from the lives of the people they represent.

The media cover the politics of the issue, not the issue itself. They seem afraid to tell the stories of victims of crime—their lives, what happened, the physical and emotional impact on them and their families, including long-term effects such as debilitating anxiety, or fear of being on the subway, which has an impact on your ability to hold a job. When you are a victim of violent street crime, you become not only afraid of the streets but afraid of your fellow citizens. You feel in some new way how thin is the veil of civilization, how quickly it can be sundered. And this is a fairly common story. In 2019, before the current crime wave, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said there were approximately 367 violent crimes per 100,000 people. New York City’s figure was 571. The numbers for this year are sure to be a lot higher.

Media folk seem to fear such coverage might be taking a side, or somehow exploitative. But the public, I think, sees these stories are never or rarely told. That tells people who have experienced crime, or the fear of it, that they’re not really at the table, not really seen, not an Official Object of Compassion. It does us no good as a society that our national media underreport this story and don’t break your heart with it.

Eric Adams, however, talked about the victims of crime a lot. You could see he felt it. This would have made an impression on a lot of people.

Whatever the outcome, those in the primary who gave signals that they know what crime is and how its victims suffer got far more votes than those who gave signals they don’t. Good. Gives you hope.

The word now is radicalized. So many people feel pushed to the edge and are pushing back. Go to social-media sites and search “school board meeting” adding descriptors like “explosive,” “outrage” and “chaos.” Parents are rising up. New York Democrats just picked an anticrime former cop as their mayoral nominee. Other signs that suggests a spirit of having been radicalized: Longtime alliances based on natural affinity are loosening. Conservatives by nature support and respect the military. That’s changing among some of them, or at least becoming less reflexive, under the pressure of charges of political correctness and a woke brass. Conservatives have begun detaching from traditional support for corporations over the idea they’re too woke, too big, and feel no particular loyalty to America, which made them, when the China market beckons.

There’s a sense in America of a continuing political realignment, that it didn’t all start and end in 2015-16. I think that what happened last summer, when the streets erupted and statues toppled, is being answered now with a pushback—a quieter one but no less consequential.

In the past four years, Mr. Shor said, “white liberals have become a larger and larger share of the Democratic Party.” But whites are “sorting on ideology” more than nonwhite voters. “We’ve ended up in a situation where white liberals are more left wing than Black and Hispanic Democrats on pretty much every issue: taxes, health care, policing, and even on racial issues or various measures of ‘racial resentment.’”

In connection with that, a small but possibly telling piece from a man of the left, journalist Kevin Drum, a veteran of Mother Jones and Washington Monthly, who posted some thoughts on July 3 on his blog at Jabberwocking.com. What he said is the obvious, but it wouldn’t be obvious to all his readers, and those to whom it is obvious wouldn’t want it said.

He titled the piece bluntly: “If you hate culture wars, blame liberals.”

“It is not conservatives who have turned American politics into a culture war battle,” he writes. “Since roughly the year 2000, according to survey data, Democrats have moved significantly to the left on most hot button social issues, while Republicans have moved only slightly right.”

He cites data on issues from abortion and religion to guns, same-sex marriage, immigration and taxes. The numbers suggest “the obvious conclusion that over the past two decades Democrats have moved left far more than Republicans have moved right.” He’s not personally unhappy with this, but Democrats should be concerned they’re moving further away from median voters.

He refers to the work of David Shor, “a data geek who identifies as socialist but is rigorously honest about what the numbers tell us.” Mr. Shor told New York magazine a few months ago that Democrats in 2020 gained roughly 7 points among white college-educated voters. Support among blacks declined by a point or two, and Hispanic support dropped by 8 or 9. This followed last summer’s defund-the-police movement. The Democrats had, in Mr. Shor’s words, “raised the salience of an ideologically charged issue that millions of nonwhite voters disagreed with us on.”

“Black conservatives and Hispanic conservatives,” Mr. Shor notes, “don’t actually buy into a lot of these intellectual theories of racism. They often have a very different conception of how to help the Black or Hispanic community than liberals do.” His conclusion: “If we polarize the electorate on ideology—or if nationally prominent Democrats raise the salience of issues that polarize the electorate on ideology—we’re going to lose a lot of votes.”

Mr. Drum agrees: However those on the left feel about the Democrats’ “leftward march,” the party “has been pulled far enough left that even lots of non-crazy people find us just plain scary. . . . Democrats have stoked the culture wars by getting more extreme on social issues and Republicans have used this to successfully cleave away a segment of both the non-college white vote and, more recently, the non-college nonwhite vote.”

Why, then, is it still conventional wisdom on the left and in the mainstream media that it is conservatives who are culture warmongers? Because “for most people, losing something is far more painful than the pleasure of gaining something of equivalent value. And since conservatives are ‘losing’ the customs and hierarchies that they’ve long lived with, their reaction is far more intense than the liberal reaction toward winning the changes they desire.”

Mr. Drum speculates that “the whole woke movement in general” has turned off many moderate voters. “Ditto for liberal dismissal of crime and safety issues.”

The white activist class won’t like hearing this, he says, but moving to the left, while galvanizing the progressive base, “risks outrunning the vast middle part of the country, which progressive activists seem completely uninterested in talking to.”

He ends: “And for God’s sake, please don’t insult my intelligence by pretending that wokeness and cancel culture are all just figments of the conservative imagination. Sure, they overreact to this stuff, but it really exists, it really is a liberal invention, and it really does make even moderate conservatives feel like their entire lives are being held up to a spotlight and found wanting.”

Good on him for speaking truth to rising power.

The cultural provocations that are currently tearing us apart do, certainly and obviously, come from progressives. And the left seems to have no prudent fear of backlash. They don’t seem to believe public opinion counts for much anymore.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, made this clear in her big speech this week to union members. She said parents who are rising up against the teaching of what is called critical race theory aren’t opposing, as they perceive it, a radical and destructive theory in which they fear to see their children indoctrinated. No, they are bullies, “culture warriors” who are trying to stop teachers “from teaching students accurate history.”

It was a very aggressive speech. It threw a match in the gasoline. You wouldn’t give it unless you thought a big political party is fully with you and fully has your back. That of course is the Democratic Party, of which the teachers unions (though not all teachers) are a major subsidiary, and in which they have major power, including financial power.

That may be good for the teachers unions. I’m not sure it will prove, in a time of pushback, an unalloyed good for the Democrats.

I end with what I think is the left’s misreading of its position. They act as if they’ve got everyone on the run, including those who show their movement the greatest respect in corporate suites and private offices. But I think something unspoken is going on. As a journalist based in New York, you meet a lot of executives, corporate leaders, people in the arts and education. They publicly support the woke regime, speak the lingo, are on board with the basic assumptions, and much early support was sincere. But they have grown indignant at and impatient with the everyday harassments of woke ideology. Deep down, many of them would like to see the left knocked back on their feet. I think the left is overplaying its hand.

America is a sharply divided place. The conservative world is divided, marked by the continued estrangement of old friends. There is the divide over Donald Trump, and the connected division between those open to conspiracism and those not. There are divides between those quietly fighting over policies that will determine the Republican Party’s future meaning and purpose, its reason for being, and between those who differ—polite word!—on the right moral attitude, after 1/6, toward the former president.

So let’s take a look at the historian Gordon Wood’s superb “Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson ” (2017), the story of two great men whose deep friendship was sundered over politics and later repaired.

They met in Philadelphia in the Continental Congress in 1775 and invented a nation together in 1776. What allies they were, how brilliantly they worked, in spite of differences in temperament, personality, cast of mind and background. Adams of Massachusetts was hearty, frank, abrupt. He was ardent, a brilliant, highly educated man who found it difficult to conceal his true thoughts. His background was plain New England. He made his own way in the world.

Jefferson of course was an aristocrat, a member of Virginia’s landed gentry. He let the game come to him. Mr. Wood quotes a eulogist, who said Jefferson “kept at all times such a command over his temper that no one could discover the workings of his soul.” He was serene.

Adams tended to erupt. But once past his awkwardness and shyness he was jovial and warm. Jefferson, in Mr. Wood’s words, “used his affability to keep people at a distance.” Their mutual friend Dr. Benjamin Rush said Adams was “a stranger to dissimulation.” No one ever said that of Jefferson.

In the Continental Congress Adams found Jefferson so frank and decisive on the issue of independence “that he soon seized upon my heart.” Jefferson would tell Daniel Webster that Adams in those days was a “Colossus.” He was “not graceful, not elegant, not always fluent.” But in debate he’d come out “with a power, both of thought and of expression which moved us from our seats.”

Their friendship deepened in the late 1770s and ’80s, when both were diplomats representing the new nation in Europe. Abigail Adams captivated Jefferson; she was so intelligent, well-read and politically astute he called her “one of the most estimable characters on earth.” Abigail told Jefferson her husband had no closer friend. Jefferson was “the only person with whom my companion could associate with perfect freedom, and unreserve.” When Jefferson was made minister to France and Adams to Britain, their families parted. Jefferson wrote to say it left him “in the dumps.”

Jefferson later told James Madison that while Adams was vain, that was “all the ill” that could be said of him. He was a man of “rigorous honesty,” “profound in his views,” and “he is so amiable, that I pronounce you will love him if ever you become acquainted with him.”

What blew them apart? The French Revolution. Other things too but 1789 was at the heart of it. They disagreed on what it was (a continuation of 1776, said Jefferson; a perversion of 1776, said Adams) and what it would produce (a Continent drowning in blood, said Adams, who could see a Napoleon coming; a global flowering of the spirit of liberty, thought Jefferson, who seems to have mistaken Robespierre for Paul Revere ). When the revolution’s ferocity was revealed in the Terror, Adams threw it in Jefferson’s face: “In France anarchy had done more mischief in one night than all the despotism of their kings had ever done in 20 or 30 years.”

If it hadn’t been for the revolution, they might have gotten through the other strains in store. There were many. Adams became the second president, served one term, ran for re-election and was defeated by Vice President Jefferson in the brutal, rancorous 1800 election.

They disengaged, brooded (mostly Adams) and said bitter things in letters to others (mostly Jefferson).

*   *   *

What saved their friendship? Their friend Benjamin Rush, another great though insufficiently remembered founder. He and Adams had a long correspondence. In 1809, as Jefferson’s second presidential term ended, Adams teasingly asked Rush if he’d had any dreams about Jefferson. Rush had a lot of dreams and often shared them. Months later he reported he did have a dream, about “one of the most extraordinary events” of 1809, “the renewal of the friendship” of Adams and Jefferson. In the dream Adams wrote a short note congratulating Jefferson on his retirement.

“A Dream again!” Adams responded. “It may be Prophecy.”

Rush wrote to Jefferson to soften him up. You loved Adams, he said. Of all the evils of politics, none were so great “as the dissolution of friendships.”

Rush then told Adams to forget what had separated them—explanations are required of lovers, he said, “but are never so between divided friends.”

On New Year’s Day 1812, Adams sent Jefferson a friendly letter. Jefferson wrote back right away, what he later called a “rambling gossiping epistle.” And so their great dialogue recommenced.

They wrote faithfully for 14 years, 158 letters, on everything—what they were reading, who they saw, political philosophy, a thought they’d just had. At one point Adams said: “You and I ought not to die, before We have explained ourselves to each other.” They did their best. Adams would bring up the French Revolution. Jefferson would dodge and share his thoughts on the religious beliefs of the Shawnee Tribe. Adams remembered their history. “I look back with rapture to those golden days” when Virginia and Massachusetts “acted together like a band of brothers.”

They were writing for themselves but also, they knew, for history. They knew who they were.

And so it continued, a great pouring out, until the summer of 1826, the Jubilee summer when the entire country would celebrate the 50th anniversary of what had happened in Philadelphia on July 4.

Both men were near the end of their lives. Both held on for the great day. Wood reports Jefferson woke the night of the 3rd and asked if it was the 4th yet. His doctor said it soon would be. Early the next morning he woke again and called for his servants. Just after noon he died.

At the same time Adams, 500 miles to the north, lay dying. A memoir by Abigail’s nephew William Cranch, chief judge of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, reports that Adams awoke on the Fourth to bells ringing and cannon booming. The celebrations had begun. Asked if he knew what day it was he said yes, “It is the glorious 4th of July—God bless it—God bless you all.” According to legend, just before he died at 6 p.m., he awoke and said, “Thomas Jefferson survives.”

What drove their reconciliation? A tenderness, toward history and toward themselves. They knew what their friendship had been. They had lived through and to a significant degree driven a world-historical event, the invention of America. They had shared that moment and it had been the great moment of their lives, greater than their presidencies, greater than what followed. They had been geniuses together.

As the Fourth explodes around us we should take some inspiration from the story of an old estrangement healed. We’re all trying to repair something. May you have a Benjamin Rush.

Here’s a statement that deserves amplification.

Last week Bill Maher of HBO’s “Real Time” did a commentary on something he believes deeply destructive. Maher, who has described his politics as liberal, libertarian, progressive and practical, is a longtime and occasionally brave foe of wokeness in its extreme manifestations. He zeroed in on one aspect that fuels a lot of grievance, and that is the uninformed sense that America has largely been impervious to improvement.

Mr. Maher called this “progressophobia,” a term coined by the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker. Mr. Maher defines it as “a brain disorder that strikes liberals and makes them incapable of recognizing progress. It’s like situational blindness, only what you can’t see is that your dorm in 2021 is better than the South before the Civil War.”

His audience laughed uncertainly. You could tell they didn’t want to get caught laughing at the wrong thing and weren’t certain what the wrong thing was. Normally they’re asked to laugh at right-wing idiocy, which is never in

“If you think that America is more racist now than ever, more sexist than before women could vote, you have progressophobia,” Mr. Maher said. Look at the changes America has made on disputed issues like gay marriage and marijuana legislation. “Even something like bullying. It still happens, but being outwardly cruel to people who are different is no longer acceptable. That’s progress. Acknowledging progress isn’t saying, ‘We’re done,’ or, ‘We don’t need more.’ And being gloomier doesn’t mean you’re a better person.”

He was asking for perspective, a hard thing to do when you’re a comic because a comic’s tools are exaggeration, satire and sarcasm. But Mr. Maher maintained earnestness.

“In 1958,” he said, “only 4% of Americans approved of interracial marriage. Now Gallup doesn’t even bother asking. But the last time they did, in 2013, 87% approved. An overwhelming majority of Americans now say they want to live in a multiracial neighborhood. That is a sea change from when I was a kid.” Mr. Maher was born in 1956.

He barreled on: “In a country that’s 14% black, 18% of the incoming class at Harvard is black. And since 2017, white students are not even a majority in our public colleges. Employees of color make up 47% of Microsoft, 50% of Target, 55% of the Gap, as companies become desperate to look like their TV commercials.”

“The ‘Friends’ reunion we just had looked weird, because if you even suggested a show today about six people all of whom were straight and white, the network would laugh you out of the room and then cancel you on Twitter. And yet there is a recurrent theme on the far left that things have never been worse.”

The comedian Kevin Hart had recently told the New York Times, “You’re witnessing white power and white privilege at an all-time high.” Mr. Maher: “This is one of the big problems with wokeness, that what you say doesn’t have to make sense or jibe with the facts, or ever be challenged, lest the challenge itself be conflated with racism.”

He added: “Saying white power and privilege is at an all-time high is just ridiculous. Higher than a century ago, the year of the Tulsa race massacre? Higher than when the KKK rode unchecked and Jim Crow unchallenged?” He acknowledged that “racism is unfortunately still with us,” and its “legacy of injustice” lingers. “I understand best I can how racism singes a person’s soul so much they might see it everywhere. But seeing clearly is necessary for actually fixing problems, and clearly racism is no longer everywhere. It’s not in my home, and it’s probably not in yours if I read my audience right, and I think I do. For most of the country the most unhip thing you could ever be today is a racist.”

He got a big laugh when a picture behind him showed two young people with their heads suddenly exploding. “Here’s the thing, kids. There actually was a world before you got here. We date human events A.D. and B.C. but we need a third marker for millennials and Gen Z: B.Y. Before you.”

“There are a helluva lot of Americans trying really hard these days to create a new spirit of inclusion and self-reflection, and this progressive allergy to acknowledging societal advances is self-defeating. . . . Having a warped view of reality leads to policies that are warped—blacks-only dorms and graduation ceremonies, a growing belief in whiteness as a malady and [that] white people are irredeemable. Giving up on a colorblind society—only if you believe we’ve made no progress does any of that make sense.”

Yes, some things are worse, “but where progress has been made it’s not a sin, and it’s certainly not inaccurate, to say, ‘We’ve come a long way, baby.’ Not mission accomplished. Just a long way.”

It was refreshing to hear a popular entertainer take on Progress Denialism. It was great.

Having a sense of perspective about what America is and the progress it has made encourages not only self-respect—maybe you yourself tried to help in some of the social-justice movements of the past 75 years—but respect for this great project we’re all involved in, which is America itself. It’s hard to continue an arduous journey toward something like equality when you’re demoralized, and you become demoralized when you can see no distance from point to point, and are given no credit for pushing on.

America is a funny place, more like a great continuing drama than a country. We’re always sinning, sometimes wildly, and always looking to reform ourselves, redeem ourselves. All our civil-rights movements attest to this. We’re an agitated people constantly looking for betterment. We’re always tearing open our shirt, baring our chest and saying, “There’s something wrong with us!” And there is, a lot! It is revealing that while other countries did quiet conversions, we did great awakenings, that in the 20th century, when other Western countries might experience quiet revivals, we in America flocked to huge rallies for a great man like Billy Graham, who in his way was saying there’s a way to quiet the American heart, any heart, you have got a home, you are not alone, you can become a better person.

Americans are always trying to figure out a way to broaden the number of available lanes to happiness. You can’t do that by mere divisiveness (persons of other colors are bad) or unrelieved bitterness (nothing ever changes).

Anyway here’s to Bill Maher, an entertainer with a popular, irreverent show who took another chance on thoughtfulness, and clearly meant it.

By the way, it seemed to me he experienced no major pushback, just criticism here and there, but nothing big.

Here is a guess on why. Because everyone knows what he said is true, that America is not only capable of transformation and improvement; it has long produced both. Even the organized accusers who castigate for a living, who’ve become famous and rewarded for castigating and accusing, know this. They depend on it. As progress accrues they’ll be claiming victory one day. Meanwhile they’ll keep doing their thing: They’re being rewarded in the marketplace, handed more power, and enjoying both. That’s very American too.

I started the new year with a bang, at a gathering in the Washington home of a European diplomat. I was interested in how Europe was processing America’s political scene, including Donald Trump’s refusal to accept the election outcome. I got an earful. The diplomat was rattled: America is democracy’s beacon, you’re letting the world down.

It was Jan. 1, my first trip to Washington since the pandemic started. In a note to the diplomat a few days later I threw in a caution: stay home on Jan. 6; the big Trump rally planned could bring trouble.

I knew this only because I pay attention to what’s going on, as adults do. I had no special information, no inside source, no heads-up on an encrypted app. I share this because I just read the report issued this week by two Senate committees on Capitol preparations for a possible insurrection. And the authorities weren’t paying attention.

No one was ready. The report underlined how stupid government agencies often are, how careless. They had intelligence systems and people who monitor the web. But there was a systemwide security failure, “critical breakdowns involving several federal agencies.” Agencies failed to warn of a potential for violence or to prepare. An arm of the Capitol Police knew of the danger in the weeks before Jan. 6 but failed to include the information in its assessments. Police leadership never developed a staffing plan for the joint session convened to count the electoral votes, and didn’t detail where officers would be located. After the insurrection they couldn’t provide documents showing where officers were as the attack began. Incident commanders couldn’t relay information to superiors because they were engaged with rioters. Frontline officers weren’t provided with proper equipment—helmets, armor, shields. Most defended the Capitol in their daily uniforms. Heavy gear was stored in a bus near the Capitol, but when a platoon tried to retrieve it, the bus was locked and nobody had a key. Capitol Police leadership bumbled calling in the National Guard and the Defense Department bumbled getting it there.

What a disaster. Reading it, after the indignation subsides, you realize: This sounds like a lot of America now. You put on the outfit and walk around playing a role. You’re doing your best but you haven’t been properly managed, trained or equipped, and you’re not sure exactly what to do. So you walk forward and do your best. This is true in many professions—politics, business, medicine. These institutions are interested in “public facing,” not “inner reality.” They’re all about marketing and communications. Managers are rewarded not for training carefully but for training quickly.

Anyway, Capitol Hill was asleep at the switch.

I want to say something about the meaning of 1/6 and why it is so important we set ourselves to knowing all that happened that day.

It’s not just “the past” and we can’t just “move on.” It’s a story that’s still happening.

People experienced it differently. Most of us were chilled and horrified as we saw the pictures of men in assault gear climbing the face of the Capitol, breaking in, swarming the Rotunda. It was a shock to see the Capitol breached.

But some weren’t horrified. They see the Capitol as already trashed through decades of bad governance, and now a stolen election. Jan. 6 was merely the physical expression of a longtime fact, that the vandals had already arrived and were wearing congressional pins.

To the horrified, the Capitol is a symbol and repository of our republic, our democracy. Those we choose to represent us do their work there. It may be a mess and a bit of a whorehouse but it’s always been a mess and a bit of a whorehouse, because it’s human. And yet greatness can erupt there, progress can be made, things improved.

It’s what as a nation we’ve got. It’s our only hope.

If you weren’t appalled by 1/6, then you have given up: Throw in the towel, democracy’s done, its over. Those who know it’s not done, not over, who won’t allow it to be done and over, also know that democracy needs friends right now.

*   *   *

Here is a way to be its friend.

The breaching of the Capitol happened because of a conspiracy theory: that the election was actually won by Mr. Trump but stolen from him by bad people. That theory hasn’t gone away, it’s growing and spreading. What might be called the Trump Underworld—the operatives, grifters and media figures around him—is pushing the theories harder than ever. It’s as if they think he’s not going to be a candidate in 2024 and they’d better make their money now, the window is closing.

This conspiracism is bad for the country: It leaves us more polarized and lessens our faith in our systems. It is bad for one of our two major parties: It leaves the GOP with an untreated cancer.

The only thing that can stop it is true facts independently developed and presented with respect—and receipts. How did 1/6 happen; who was behind it, paid for it, silently encouraged it, exploited it? Who didn’t care if people got hurt? Who wanted people hurt? This information is still gettable through deep dives into documentation—phone records, bank records, hotel records, text messages. It is gettable through sworn testimony.

Republicans senators recently shut down a bill to create a public 9/11-style commission investigating what happened and what led up to it. But they can’t stop, say, a House select committee with five Democrats, five Republicans, full staffing and full subpoena power.

Democrats haven’t been quick to launch a big and formal investigation. Maybe they’re afraid they themselves would be embarrassed by some revelations. Early on they figured Mr. Trump humiliated himself, and they should turn the page into the shining new Biden era. They should rethink this. A deep investigation would be a dramatic one, and it would help distract from recent bobbles.

Barbara Comstock, a two-term GOP former House member and hearty supporter of a full investigation, notes the idea the election was stolen has morphed into “ ‘the November 3rd movement.’” She says in an interview: “I do think cutting out the sickness of conspiracy and QAnon is important. Trump-world is invested in it, they are duping good people who are writing $25 checks. You have smart people who believe in conspiracies now, and the ones who are smart are slower to figure out the truth than the ones who are not.”

She adds that “sometimes good policy is good politics.” Republican candidates need to be freed to develop policies that address people’s real issues again, not only their grievances. Politics needs to be serious again. Republican Trump stalwarts on Capitol Hill need to be confronted with the facts, pressed on them. “The future doesn’t have to be anti-Trump,” Ms. Comstock says, “it has to be non-Trump.”

She fears more violence and believes future attacks are possible: “Polarization has made the danger real. Threats are up 107% since the election. They wanted to hang Mike Pence. ”

Capitol Police have told her they themselves want a broad investigation. “What happened to Back the Blue?” she asks.

Congress should take this seriously and do it sooner rather than later. “The longer you wait,” Ms. Comstock says, “the more records get away.”

Here is an attempt to get at some of what’s behind conspiracism, the rising belief in and promotion of political conspiracy theories. In recent years those theories have been heavily associated with QAnon: that a cabal of child sexual abusers running a world-wide trafficking ring has been a major force in opposing Donald Trump ; that “the storm,” the day the cabal is exposed and jailed, is coming. In the past year, it includes the charge the presidential election was stolen through state-by-state fraud. In the past week there is increasing talk of the coming “reinstatement,” in which proof of election fraud is revealed through state audits, previously reported results are overturned, and Donald Trump is inaugurated again.

Belief in these things is growing. An online poll this week from Ipsos reported 15% of Americans agree that the government, media and financial worlds are controlled by Satan-worshiping pedophiles. Not 15% of Republicans or conservatives, but of Americans. That’s a lot. Twenty percent believe in “the storm.” Axios last weekend quoted Russell Moore, the evangelical theologian, saying he talks every day to pastors of virtually every denomination “who are exhausted by these theories blowing through their churches.”

What is behind the growth of conspiracism? Many things. In no special order:

It is pleasurable to know and hold a higher knowledge—you get it, others don’t. In confusing times it’s good to have a Theory of Everything that explains it all to you. America has always had more than its share of cranks and crackpots—it’s the darker side of what gives us our gifts and original thinking. We’re open to the outlandish. America is a lonely place. When you hold to a conspiracy theory, you join a community. You’re suddenly part of something. You have new friends you can talk to on the internet to whom you’re joined at the brain. They see the world the way you do; it is a very intimate connection.

Church affiliation and practice have been falling for decades, but people always have a spiritual hole inside, and if God can’t fill it, Q will do. The unrealized and unhappy are always in search of a cause to distract themselves from the problems of their lives. And we like to be divided, too. We like to be in a fight—“Albion’s Seed”—and on a side. One of the enduring and revealing songs of America asks “Which side are you on / Which side are you on? / You go to Harlan County / There is no neutral there / You’ll either be a union man / Or a thug for J.H. Blair.”

Conspiracy believers don’t believe what the mainstream media tell them. Why would they? Newsrooms are undergoing their own revolution, with woke progressives vs. journalistic traditionalists, advocacy versus old-school news values. It is ideological. “We are here to shape and encourage a new reality.” “No, we are here to find and report the news.” It is generational: The young have the upper hand and the Slack channel. The woke are winning. If a year ago you thought the obvious—maybe the coronavirus that came from Wuhan leaked out of the Wuhan lab where they were studying coronaviruses—you were shut down as racist, bigoted, divisive. The progressives’ great talent is policing, and they are always on patrol. Everyone, even the most unsophisticated news consumer, can kind of tell.

So all those things are at play. But so is this: When you think your country has grown completely bizarre, only bizarre explanations will do.

Think of what normal human beings have been asked to absorb the past year. The whole country was shut down and everyone was told to stay in the house. They closed the churches, and the churches agreed. There was no school and everyone made believe—really, we all made believe!—screens were a replacement. A bunch of 13-year-old girls in the junior high decided they were boys and started getting shots, and no adults helped them by saying, “Whoa, slow down, this is a major life decision and you’re a kid.” The school board no longer argues about transgender bathrooms, they’re on to transgender boys wanting to play on the girls team. Big corporations now tell you what you should think about local questions, and if this offends you, they don’t care. There were riots and protests last summer and local government seemed overwhelmed.

And in the course of events, the Founders were revealed to be not flawed but great men who made something new in history, but venal, vicious bottom dwellers who made something bad for bad reasons. Mobs tore down and graffitied the statues, not just the Confederate ones but Washington, Lincoln, Frederick Douglass. Not only your understanding of your country’s greatness was being taken away but the idea of human greatness itself, leaving you with less to aim at when you tell your kid, “I’m not much, but you can be great.” There’s literally less for you to point up to. And if you grieved over this and were white, if your eyes filled with tears, it was explained as white fragility, the brittle response of a frightened soul unable to stare unblinking at the truth. Your grief proves their point.

I don’t think our elites understand all they’ve asked people to accept the past year. And I’m sure they don’t care. The great thing about being “the elites” is you never think you are “the elites,” so you don’t have to make anything better because you’re not the one in charge.

It wouldn’t have helped that one of the great crime and culture stories of the century has been quickening the past year—the story of Jeffrey Epstein and presidents and princes, and tech titans and heads of hedge funds, and the private island and the young girls. It’s the kind of story that might leave you believing young people are being trafficked by powerful men.

All this would contribute to a mood of conspiracism. Should we be surprised that people might look at the landscape of just the past year and say, “The devil himself must have done this”? It’s a small jump from that to the information, which you just got on Reddit and which seems suddenly plausible, that a devil-worshiping cabal is in charge.

Conspiracism is of course fueled and powered by the great engine of this still-new thing in human history, the internet. We are so used to saying “The internet changed everything” that we have forgotten it changed everything. American politics has always been full of spleen and madness, and the pamphlets and newspapers of George Washington’s era were full of conspiracy. (John Adams was a secret monarchist, Washington a doddering egomaniac with “a sick mind.”) But the pamphlets could go only so far and reach so many. In a nation of farmers only so many people had time to incorporate wild talk into their worldview.

The internet is a great thing with great virtues, but it is helping break up America. This is a problem that can’t be solved, only managed. Good people should be thinking about how to do that.

Conspiracism isn’t going away. It will only grow and become damaging in ways we aren’t quite imagining.