Peggy Noonan

No one likes the Republican Party. Pretty much every power center in America is arrayed against it—the media, the academy, the entertainment culture, what remains of our high culture, the corporate suite, the nonprofit world. The young aren’t drawn to it.

The party is split, if not shattered. The opposition has a new presidency, almost a Senate majority, the House, albeit by a hair. The president nearing his hundred-day mark and deeply committed to showing energy in the executive, has yet to make masses of voters crazy with rage. His approval numbers are steady.

Everything’s against the Republicans nationally, even many of their leaders in Washington, many of whom don’t trend toward brightness.

What would constitute an active civic and political good in America in 2021? Helping to bring that party back. It is worth saving, even from itself. At its best it has functioned as a friend and protector of liberty, property, speech and religious rights, an encourager of a just and expansive civic life, a defender of the law, without which we are nothing, and the order it brings, so that regular people can feel as protected on the streets as kings. At its best it has been Main Street, not Wall Street, a stay on the hand of government when it demands too much. At its worst it’s been—worse! But let’s dwell on the good, which can function as a guide in rebuilding.

Some Republicans the past few years have talked of breaking from the two-party system and starting a third. But that’s not the way to go. Better to strengthen the system that for more than a century and a half has seen us through a lot of mess. In its rough way the two-party system, even without meaning to, functions as a unifying force: At the end of the day, for all our differences and arguments, you have to decide if you were a constituency of Team A or Team B. The parties, in their rough and inadequate way, had to be alive to your interests. Things proceeded with a sense, an air, of majority rule. With a third party you can win the presidency with 34%. That won’t help national unity. And this being America, once we have a third party we’ll have a fourth and a fifth, and everything will be chaos, with a loss of any feeling of general consensus.

Two parties are better for the country, and better for the Democrats. A strong Republican party keeps them on their toes. As Oscar Hammerstein once said, liberals need conservatives to hold them back and conservatives need liberals to pull them forward. One side should stop the other when it goes too far, or boost it when it fails to move. Hammerstein was a cockeyed optimist, but this isn’t a bad time for that.

I know a little about the modern Republican Party, have known its meaning, its reason for existing and what it has been as it traveled through history. Back in the 1980s when I was a new worker in Ronald Reagan’s administration, I told a friend that the American people looked at us and saw some very good things, but there was an air about Republicans also that they were in some private club, a country club, and it gave the party an impression of snobbery, exclusivity, social superiority. The phrase made its way into columns, and a concept was born.

During the 1984 election I set off on a mission to do outreach to Democrats, because I felt so many of them wanting to vote for Reagan but needing to know they weren’t being disloyal or leaving the team but were in fact joining something that was more like them. I was thinking: you shouldn’t be held back by old historical categories when new categories are being born—when you, Reagan Democrat, are that new category. You didn’t have to come from the country club to be a Republican. President Reagan spoke high and sincere praise of admirable Democrats— Henry Jackson, John F. Kennedy, Harry Truman. And of course it was natural to Reagan, who’d been an ardent New Dealer, a Democrat into his 40s.

The country club is mostly Democratic now, and rougher places trend Republican. Things change.

I left the Republican Party at some point in the 2000s. I didn’t like a lot of what I was seeing. I began to say, honestly, that I was a political conservative but not a Republican. Readers could see it in my work, and I heard from them a lot. I reregistered to vote in a Republican primary in New York City, and have kept it that way, maybe for reasons of orneriness.

But I’ve done a lot of mourning over it the past 15 years, shed literal tears over the GOP. There were a lot of break points. Iraq was one: If that wasn’t the country club at work, what was? People to whom nothing much bad had ever happened, so they expected good fortune to follow their decisions. Immigration was another, with the elite decision makers of the party not caring at all how the unprotected see and experience life. It was a total detachment from their concerns accompanied by a claim of higher compassion. Sarah Palin was another. I felt her choice as a vice presidential candidate degraded a good insight, that an ability to do the show business of politics is important—FDR, JFK and Reagan knew that—but you can’t let politics degrade into only showbiz; you need the ability to think seriously about issues. It is wrong to reduce politics to a subset of entertainment. There were more.

But now, at a time when the Grand Old Party is at the bottom, I find myself more loyal than I meant to be, to paraphrase Tennessee Williams. If the party is going to go forward and be a healthy contributor to the democratic future, it will have to figure out why it exists, what its meaning is, its purpose in the 21st century. It’s going to have to be alive in some new way to who exactly is going to join it and save it in the next few years. It will have to see all the new categories. Especially: the immigrants to America of the past quarter-century, people who fled something bad or limiting and don’t want to see those things instituted here, people who have businesses, who want freedom and peace and the possibility of flourishing.

It is a badly divided party. It will have to work through a great deal. It can’t keep existing only to own the libs, manipulate the distracted, monetize grievance, and plot revenge against those who spent the past few years on the wrong side.

Sometimes you have to look to who will follow you if only you take right and serious stands aimed at helping the people of your country.

The exact nature of the new Democratic Party now emerging will help the GOP find an agreed-on mission, but it won’t be enough. What you favor is as important as what you oppose. There will be a lot of thinking along the way in this space on what those things should be.

The Covid relief bill President Biden signed March 11 weighed in at almost $2 trillion. This week’s infrastructure bill also comes in at almost $2 trillion, and in a few weeks there will be a companion bill of the same magnitude. It’s all big and bold, and you can see it making a million possible messes, from the usual (How much ideological mischief is hidden in there?) to the existential (Don’t debt and deficits matter anymore? Isn’t inflation something to worry about?). But yes, the White House is in a New Deal state of mind, they’re rocking the Casbah, they feel they’ve got the wind at their back, and at this point they’re more or less right. But this is a whole lot of spending and taxing in the first hundred days. It’s a big political gamble.

The Infrastructure bill, according to the White House, will include $621 billion for infrastructure, $400 billion to increase care for the aging and disabled, $580 billion to boost manufacturing, and $300 billion for affordable housing. The public won’t dislike those goals. There’s a lot more shoved in there too. The plan to pay for it is to raise the tax on corporate profits (from 21% to 28%) and corporate foreign earnings. There will be individual tax increases also, to be announced in the coming bill, but the president repeated Wednesday what he’d said on the campaign trail: “I start with one rule: No one—I’ll say it again—no one making under $400,000 will see their federal taxes go up, period.” It’s unclear if that is individual or household income.

Since roughly 2000 we’ve been used to the federal government spending a lot and not worrying overmuch about it. But this White House’s approach is different. It’s not furtive and shaded, it’s formal and declared: Big money is about to be pumped into the economy and big money is about to be extracted, that’s how we roll. If it works it’s going to change a lot of assumptions in American politics. If it doesn’t, it will be a cautionary tale. That makes it a big gamble. In a small, tactical way you can imagine they’re thinking a big economic story will take the heat off the border crisis. But that wouldn’t be all they’re thinking.

There wasn’t much pushback against Covid relief—it was big and sloppy but we’re in a pandemic, let it go. Nobody will mind infrastructure either. We’ve been talking about our falling bridges, corroded tunnels and general civic ugliness for 25 years. If this bill actually turns out to be about building roads and tunnels and railways and undergirding bridges, people will like it. I will like it. If people can see it happening—if on the two or three days a week they commute into the city, big crews of human beings in safety vests and hardhats are out there building things—they’ll like it a lot.

Some part of my mind thinks it will be received as the first gesture of national self-respect in a long time, a visual counter to wokeness and critical race theory. We may hate our history, our ugly beginnings and our hypocrisy but apparently we still have enough confidence to build a soaring bridge we can use, and to make the highways look better. As if we still have some self-regard. But if the whole scheme begins to look like some dumb boondoggle featuring photo-ops with Democratic donors who own companies that make solar panels, people won’t like it.

Related to that, a question: About 15 years ago politicians began promising big infrastructure bills, and they’d say it’s all shovel-ready; give us the money and we’re good to go. Nothing happened. President Obama was big on infrastructure and included funding in the 2009 stimulus bill. Yet little came of it. In 2010 Mr. Obama admitted “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects.” It got all tied up in permits, red tape, public hearings, environmental challenges. I always wondered if Mr. Obama just failed to get environmental groups to bow to his will. Are we shovel-ready now? How did that happen? Will it all work this time?

I think there is considerable public openness and support for more spending, and believe this bill would be more supported if it were aimed at more-conservative ends—infrastructure plus things that will help our country become more culturally coherent.

I think there’s considerable tax-the-rich fervor among centrists and independents too, but I think when people imagine this they’re thinking billionaires on vast estates. Instead, it may come down to a couple with three kids in Westfield, N.J. Husband works full-time, wife part-time; together they bring in $500,000 a year. Pretty plush. But with federal, state and property taxes, sales taxes, mortgage payments, the kids’ braces, the babysitter, maybe private-school tuition, they don’t experience themselves as rich. During the Trump administration they lost the ability to deduct most state and local taxes from their federal taxable income. So they’d be feeling pretty clobbered if they’re targeted now for higher tax rates. They are also among the affluent suburbanites who joined the Democratic Party during the Trump years. A lot will depend on whether their congressman, in negotiations, can win back the state-and-local deduction, or at least part of it. That may have important political implications.

If there’s such a thing as cautious boldness, it would be a good attitude for the administration to adopt as it completes its first hundred days. It’s a heady thing to win a White House.

Why not see to what has to be seen to—the economy, Covid? There’s an immediate crisis at the border, and I suspect the only way out is something the president won’t do: Say he moved too quickly to improve the system, and warn in credible terms that if you come illegally we won’t let you in, we have a pandemic and unemployment and we can’t do that to our own citizens. So no, if you want to come to America you must do it the legal way.

If he can’t say something like that because his progressives will kill him, his progressives have gotten too powerful. It would probably do him some good to beat them back.

Beyond that there’s the long-term crisis with China, on which there’s no real American governing strategy because we haven’t yet defined the full contours of the challenge. We need a correct and unblinking definition of what China represents in this era—what it wants, what drives it, what its ultimate intentions are. We need a George Kennan-like Long Telegram on China, followed by a broad strategic decision.

“Every crisis is an opportunity!” But some crises are just crises, and the administration already has plenty. “We can only accomplish things in the first two years. We’ll get killed in the midterms!” Maybe, maybe not.

Sound stewardship means a lot at time like this. If they can improve the economy and the pandemic, stop the crisis at the border, negotiate a sound infrastructure bill, and seriously focus on China, that wouldn’t be a bad few years.

It would be a good few years. And people would notice.

We’re seeing some Grade A, first-class, brass-knuckle politics in the state of New York. Wednesday there was an event in Harlem ostensibly to publicize a pop-up vaccination clinic at Mount Neboh Baptist Church, where the embattled governor, Andrew Cuomo, was vaccinated (the Johnson & Johnson one-shot). It was really a planned and raucous rally for a governor under impeachment threat and accused of sexual harassment and nursing-home deaths.

Civil-rights veterans, clergy and politicians rallied ’round the governor, who for the first time in many weeks seemed in a bouncy mood, in part because he’d banned the press—his office claimed “Covid restrictions”—which kept them from asking questions that got in the way of the message, which was: The people are with Andrew. Former Rep. Charlie Rangel, who’d been dean of New York’s congressional delegation, said, “When people start piling up on you . . . you go to your family and you go to your friends because you know they are going to be with you.” Hazel Dukes, president of the state NAACP, called Mr. Cuomo her son. “Thank you, governor, for all you have done, we stand with you.”

It was one of those moments when politics has real human energy. But the crowd, while pumped, was not numerous, and the speakers were old. Mr. Rangel is 90, Ms. Dukes 89. I wondered what kind of pull they have in this young city.

Still, it was a shot fired back when you thought he was all out of ammo.

Some thoughts on Mr. Cuomo from a long time observing him:

He is in politics. He wants to win and he wants to be the man in charge and he wants everyone to know his power and bow to it. He is a Democrat because he inherited it from his family and neighborhood, and anyway Republicans have cold hearts, except for liberal Republicans, with whom you can make a deal and who in many ways are preferable to Democratic pols except they have a blindness, they act as if politics is an earnestness contest. It’s not, it’s a game! But that’s their problem.

He was late to see what the coronavirus was. In his statements in early March he warned against “inordinate fear” and said what happened in Europe probably wouldn’t happen here because we have the best hospitals. Weeks later, when New York was the epicenter of the virus, Thomas Frieden, former head of both the New York City Health Department and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said if New York had moved two weeks earlier its death toll could have been cut by 50% to 80%.

But once Mr. Cuomo understood what the pandemic was, he moved. It gave him a cause, a focus, a role—savior in a crisis. And there was a vacuum to fill.

The White House wasn’t capturing the moment, they were fleeing it—it’s no big deal, no worse than the flu, tests are available to everyone, maybe you can inject disinfectant, buy in the dip. They gave up all verbal leadership.

Mr. Cuomo seized it. None thought him sweet, but it takes a mean man to beat a mean virus. He used the same tools Rudy Giuliani used after 9/11: specificity, eloquence and daily briefings. Specificity implies you actually know things. Every day he’d make news—number of infections, deaths, new cases, how many hospitalized, how many in intensive care. It was granular—where the state is getting ventilators, the complexities of competing with other states for personal protective equipment. He joined this with wholly theatrical and fully welcome arias about the meaning of family, what love is, who New Yorkers are.

In the week of April 3, the height of the crisis, he announced America’s nurses were on their way: “Twenty thousand health professionals said, ‘I’ll leave my home and come to your state.’ ” New York would “systemize that volunteerism, systematize that generosity, that charity and that expertise, and that’s how we beat this damn virus as it marches across the country.”

Those briefings were spectacular. Someone had to seem in charge, someone had to rouse and rally.

He deserved the stupid Emmy.

Now, nemesis: his ego. He’d grown popular, even beloved. A Siena College poll in late April put his overall favorability among New Yorkers at 77%.

It went to his head. Having won plaudits for taking control, he took more. His plans on openings and closings were increasingly complicated. The whole system began to look arbitrary and nutty. He started going from sincere papa to authoritarian nincompoop. (It happened to Gavin Newsom in California, too.)

Then news began to filter out that while he was leading verbally he had made a harrowing behind-the-scenes mistake—mandating that nursing homes accept those known to be infected. When he had said from the beginning that he knew the old were most vulnerable.

He would admit nothing, but his top assistant did, in a conference call. The state attorney general broke the story open with a lacerating report and announced an investigation.

Then, one by one, seven women came forward with charges of sexual harassment, some of which, they alleged, were committed during the pandemic year. Every reporter in town started to write about the secret that isn’t a secret: He’s a bully who surrounds himself with toxic enforcers. An impeachment effort is under way.

So with all this trouble, Mr. Cuomo must be finished. But early polling is surprising. Even after the nursing-home scandal, and the women, a majority don’t back his removal. Maybe it’s impeachment fatigue, maybe it’s not wanting more big change after Covid, but maybe too it’s connected to this: The state’s budget is being negotiated. The Legislature, increasingly under the sway of the progressive left, wants sharply higher taxes on income, capital gains, estates. Andrew Cuomo doesn’t want big increases because he doesn’t want the rich fleeing New York.

Congress’s Covid relief act buttresses his position: There’s a lot of money in there for New York. But progressives want the hikes anyway, because they believe in it and because they grew up in a rich country and state and can’t imagine anything they do could make them less so.

The move against Mr. Cuomo the past few months has come from the left, not the right; from the young, not the old. Albany Republicans don’t mind him much; Albany progressives do. He’s in their way. Some would be pained by what happened in the nursing homes, some by the testimony of the women, but all want him weaker in the budget fight. Or gone, replaced by a new governor with no time to build a wall of competence.

It’s interesting Mr. Rangel and Ms. Dukes came out against them.

Mr. Cuomo won’t resign because he doesn’t care what you think. He really isn’t interested!

Thursday I watched his daily briefing. He’s got his mojo back. He was laughing, philosophizing. He’s opening things at a speedier clip than in the past. Time for baseball! “It has been a long dark winter . . . Spring is upon us.”

He can’t, he’s said, take questions on the scandals anymore: They’re under investigation, the process must take its course.

He is playing for time and has come to believe he’ll escape with his life. Doesn’t seem fair, does it? But that’s why he’s smiling.

What just happened?

That wasn’t just a high-charged celebrity interview that everyone talked about and then it went away. Oprah Winfrey’s conversation last weekend with the duke and duchess of Sussex will reverberate and last. It was history, a full-bore assault on an institution, the British monarchy, that has endured more than 1,000 years.

Harry and Meghan famously leveled two big charges, that the House of Windsor is racist and that it is weak. Previous incarnations of criticism painted it as invincible—the sharp-elbowed courtiers, the coldhearted family, they can crush you like a bug. No, Harry said, they are the bugs, trapped in fear of the tabloids that control whether they’ll keep the throne. “There is a level of control by fear that has existed for generations. I mean generations,” he said. “My father and my brother”—Prince Charles and Prince William —“they are trapped. They don’t get to leave. And I have huge compassion for that.” That must be a comfort to them.

No immediate-family heir to the British throne has ever talked like this. You are made quite vulnerable when people suddenly see you as weak. What remains of your mystique is lessened when you’re seen as just another group of frightened persons.

Meghan charged that her infant son, Archie—the “first member of color in this family”—was treated differently and denied things due him because he was biracial. There were “concerns and conversations about how dark his skin might be when he’s born.” She wouldn’t say who was involved. “I think that would be very damaging to them.” So she knew the power of the charge she was bringing. Harry, asked about it, said, “That conversation I’m never going to share, but at the time—at the time it was awkward. I was a bit shocked.” His refusal to name the person with whom he had the conversation didn’t limit guilt but dispersed it.

The queen’s response was a small masterpiece of blandness that sucked the heat from the moment: Accusations of racism are “concerning” and will be “taken very seriously,” but “recollections may vary.”

This is a story that will evolve for some time. Some observations:

Public life has gotten extremely, unrelentingly performative. Have you noticed you keep hearing that word? It means everyone is always performing—the politician, the news anchor, the angry activist. This gives natural actors an edge, and leaves those who aren’t by nature actors at a disadvantage. Meghan was a professional actress.

Both Meghan and Harry speak a kind of woke-corporate communications language that is smooth and calming but also slippery and opaque. You can never quite get your hands around the thought as you grab for meaning.

They spoke a great deal about their pain—it is a subject that animates them—but they seemed also to wield that pain as a weapon in a way that left you wondering if pain is really the word for what they experienced, as opposed to anger followed by cool desire for revenge.

Some of what was said beggared belief. Meghan claimed that going in she didn’t really have any idea what the royal family was, didn’t Google or do any research. “As Americans especially what you do know about the royals is what you read in fairy tales.” Actually, no. When Princess Diana died in 1997 it was a world-wide, epic drama. Diana was raised to heroic status, the people’s princess, roughly treated by royals who didn’t deserve her. Her funeral was watched by 2.5 billion people. Meghan Markle, home in California, was 16, presumably loved media, and went on to study acting. Is it believable she didn’t know this story, follow it, see who had the starring role?

As I watched I got the sense she knew more history than she said, that perhaps on some level she wanted to be Princess Diana, only she wanted not to die.

She sees herself as a moral instructor, an ethical leader. She and Harry were originally “aligned” by their “cause-driven work”: “I’ve always been outspoken, especially about women’s rights.” She wishes to “live authentically,” “just getting down to basics.” This apparently involves rescue chickens. She and Harry spirited them from a factory farm. “Well, you know, I just love rescuing,” she said. This was perhaps meant to underscore the idea that she rescued Harry from his charnel house of a family.

She is good at underscoring. She watches “The Little Mermaid” and comes up with a handy metaphor for her journey: “And I went, ‘Oh my God! She falls in love with the prince and because of that, she has to lose her voice.’ . . . But by the end, she gets her voice back.”

This is performative to the nth degree.

They have a foundation and a media-content company called Archewell. Asked about the latter, she said, “Life is about storytelling. About the stories we tell ourselves, what we’re told, and what we buy into.” Well, that’s part of what life is. “For us to be able to have storytelling through a truthful lens, that is hopefully uplifting, is going to be great knowing how many people that can land with.” Can land with? That is practiced show-people talk. She wishes to “give a voice” to those who “underrepresented, and aren’t really heard.”

Why should an American care about any of this? I suppose we shouldn’t. In a practical way we’re interested in the royal family because we don’t have one, don’t want one, and think it’s great that you do. We get the benefits—the pictures of clothes and castles, the horses and military outfits, the stories of backstairs and love affairs—and you pay the bills.

But I think there’s something deeper, more mystical in our interest, a sense that however messy the monarchy, it embodies a nation, the one we long ago came from and broke with. The high purpose of monarchy is to lend its mystique and authority to the ideas of stability and continuance.

Henry VIII, Mad King George, Victoria—these names still echo. It is rare and wonderful when you can say of a small old woman entering a large reception area, “England has entered the room.” Someday Elizabeth II will leave us and the world will honestly mourn, not only because of what she represented but because she was old-style. She performed but wasn’t performative. She was appropriately, heroically contained, didn’t share her emotions because after all it wasn’t about her, it was about a kingdom, united. You could rely on her to love her country and commonwealth; she was born and raised to love them. And so she has been for the world a constant. And in this world, a constant is a valuable thing.

I keep thinking of the special predicament she and her family are in. Diana did them a lot of damage in her life, and her death, but their feelings about her were mixed. She wasn’t born into the family, she was a thing that happened to the family. But Harry—Harry they would have loved, as brother and son and grandson. They would miss him. And now he has done great damage to everything they are and represent.

The old queen must be grieving. Not that she’d say it, or share the wound. There’s something so admirable in that.

A friend died this week, and I want to try and do him some justice in this pandemic time, with no memorials or gatherings and old social expectations gone down. He was a singular man, a profound presence in many lives, and I keep thinking of the simple old phrase, “the pleasure of his company.”

Vernon Jordan was variously called a civil-rights leader, Washington insider, Wise Man, power broker, deal maker, rainmaker, Wall Street banker and, as an interviewer put it a few years ago in the Financial Times, “the most connected man in America.” He was all those things.

He relished the tale of how far he’d come. Born in Atlanta in 1935, father a postal worker, mother a cook and caterer, raised in public housing, waited tables at his mother’s events. He saw local white establishments up close and thought, as a friend put it Wednesday, “I’m gonna be that, only I’m gonna show them how to do it right.” He went to college and law school; as a young lawyer he helped desegregate the University of Georgia. On to civil-rights leadership with the NAACP, United Negro College Fund, National Urban League. In 1980 he was shot by a white supremacist and almost died. After three months in the hospital and a long recuperation he took a turn. Others would work on voting rights and the schools, and he would help, but he was going to bring the movement into the boardrooms of America. He joined a great Washington law firm, lobbied, advised CEOs and political figures, became an investment banker. He told me he wanted to make money and support his family, but he didn’t feel he’d left the civil-rights movement, he brought it with him into every powerful room he entered.

I want to describe the special quality of his friendship. He took the most serious and active interest in the lives of those within his ken. It takes time to do what he did, to answer every call, make yourself available, really listen. “Attention is the beginning of devotion,” the poet Mary Oliver said. That is what he gave. He drilled down, reduced problems to their essentials, discussed concrete ways out and through. His advice was considered, serious. Loyalty was central to his nature. People confided in him, knew they could. The head of a New York cultural institution said this week, “You could share everything, and he would never trade on it. He was honorable and discreet. As effective as he was at connecting and building alliances, he didn’t trade on what he knew. It was not transactional.”

I knew him since the late 1990s; as a longtime friend of the Clintons he sought me out to explain I was wrong in my criticisms of them. Over the decades we had lots to disagree on, and lots to agree. When he’d call you’d pick up and hear a deep Southern baritone: “This is Jordan, like the river.” He was raucous, teasing, sometimes profane. He often talked about his faith; he was a Christian, had been brought up in a Bible culture and liked to think aloud about what that meant. He wrote me once that “friendship is the medicine of life.” He signed off, “I am on Martha’s Vineyard with the liberals.”

Vernon was a singular figure in that he was a true and honest partisan, declared and convinced, a liberal Democrat, but he didn’t only tolerate the other side; he had deep affection and respect for the other side, for those he judged deserved it, and there were many. This attitude is so old-school, a throwback. It was convenient for him to think this way—political differences don’t help deals get made—but it was also what he thought. He was of that generation of Washington people who, as bipartisan figures, function as the glue that keeps things from falling apart.

“Political differences must be subordinated to common humanity,” he said in a commencement speech at Syracuse University in 2017. He meant it. After he was shot and came out of surgery, the first telegram he read was a warm and encouraging one from George Wallace, the famous segregationist. It meant a lot to Vernon when, a few years later, Wallace asked to be wheeled over to him for a warm conversation. Life is full of such marvels, Vernon thought. Be open to them.

I remember he was exasperated in early 2015 that more wasn’t being made of the election of South Carolina’s Tim Scott —the only black man ever elected to the Senate from that state. That was Strom Thurmond’s seat! Why isn’t this getting more attention? Vernon, I said, he’s a Republican, the press sees it not as a clean breakthrough but a vague setback. I asked why he was so moved by the rise of a conservative. “I didn’t expect when we were crossing the Edmund Pettus bridge that we’d all agree on everything when we got to the other side.”

He had a yearly lunch at home in Washington’s Kalorama neighborhood to mark the Alfalfa Club dinner, and it was even more exclusive. Those lunches summoned—they required—a cordial bipartisan spirit. You never knew who would be there, and everywhere you looked there was someone fascinating. Embedded unseen at the dozen round tables were dozens of small kindnesses, and some judgments you didn’t know he’d made. If you were a journalist and it would do you good to understand economic issues better, you were seated with Warren Buffett. If you were a progressive with an attitude you would be placed near the sweetest-souled and intellectually sharpest old Republican, who just might gently bop you on the head in a way you need bopping.

Vernon knew how establishment it all looked. He welcomed guests in January 2018 with “Welcome to the swamp!”

He was worldly in some old-fashioned way that was more than “at home in the halls of power” or “understood the ways of the world.” He was discerning about human nature and secretly charitable about who the humans are. He thought people were complicated, that you could never get to the bottom of them, that they could be mysterious but at the end of the mystery was a simplicity: Most people are doing their best within their limits. Maybe the action is in figuring out the depth and provenance of the limits.

He acted as if life was delicious, and if you were lucky enough to be here, you had a kind of moral responsibility to have fun. Take pleasure in your accomplishments, admit your mistakes, face problems, accept all the blows, but remember how delicious it is.

Once friends of his, a couple, had a big, fancy imported car they loved. Its plush seats were the only ones the husband, who’d long been ill, was comfortable in. But the wife feared it was ostentatious, and she was embarrassed people would think they were showing off, so she’d just sold it. Vernon turned to her and said, softly, “Did your husband steal the money for the car?”

She was startled. No, he was an honest man who worked hard.

“Then he earned it. Don’t be afraid, don’t worry about what people think, live your life.”

Good advice, no? Rest in peace, dear Vernon.

New York

You can know something yet not fully absorb it. I think that’s happened with the pandemic. It is a year now since it settled into America and brought such damage—half a million dead, a nation in lockdown, a catastrophe for public schools. We keep saying “the pandemic changed everything,” but I’m not sure we understand the words we’re saying.

It will be decades before we fully appreciate what the pandemic did to us, and I mean our entire society—our culture, power structures, social ways, economic realities. We’ll see it more clearly when we look back from 2030 and 2040. A lot is not fully calculable now, and some problems haven’t presented themselves. One is going to be the profound psychological impact on some young people—how anxious and frightened this era will leave them, even how doom-laden. Kids 5 and 7 years old were trapped in a house surrounded by screens, and the screens said “germs” and “death” and “invisible carriers.” The pictures were of sobbing people on gurneys. We should be especially concerned about kids who are neglected and have no calm in the house, because they were left most exposed to the endless vibrations of the adults on the screens, and had no schools or teachers to help them.

But we’re in a transformational time. Some things that might have changed inch by inch over the next few decades were transformed in one large, incredible, 12-month shift. So many institutions will have to be nimble and farsighted now or they won’t survive. They’re going to have to be creative and generous and leave old intransigences behind. To lead in times like this will require the eyes of an artist who sees the broad shape of things, not an analyst who sees data points.

Look at the cities. I’m not sure we see the implications of what has happened there. In New York we are witnessing, for the first time in a century and a half, the collapse of the commuter model. You had to be in the magic metropolis if you were going to be in the top of your profession—finance, theater, law, whatever. Many couldn’t afford to live in the city because it’s where the top, moneyed people were, so they lived in the near-outside—New Jersey, Long Island, Connecticut. That is what my people did when they came to America a century ago, settling in Brooklyn and commuting to work as cooks and maids in the great houses of Manhattan.

But now you don’t have to be in the city. The top people are everywhere. You can be pretty much home and be the best. The office towers of Midtown are empty.

In the past year the owners of great businesses found how much can be done remotely. They hadn’t known that! They hadn’t had to find out. They don’t have to pay that killer rent for office space anymore. People think it will all snap back when the pandemic is fully over but no, a human habit broke; a new way of operating has begun. People will come back to office life to some degree, maybe a significant one; not everything can be done remotely; people want to gather, make friends, instill a sense of mission; but it will never be what it was.

The closed shops in and around train stations and office buildings, they’re not coming back. The empty towers—people say, “Oh, they can become luxury apartments!’ Really? Why would people clamor for them, so they can have a place in the city and be near work? But near work has changed. So you can be glamorous? Many of the things that made Manhattan glamorous—shows, restaurants, clubs, museums, the opera—are wobbling.

A lot of cities, not only New York, are going to have to reinvent themselves, digging down and finding newer purposes, their deepest value. They’re going to have to take stock in a new way: New York has the greatest hospitals, universities, the media, parks. What else?

And they will be doing this within a hard context. Public spending is skyrocketing due to greater need; the city and state budget deficits are through the roof. New York is Democratic and public sentiment will be for tax increases, big ones.

Here are some numbers from the Partnership for New York City, a business group. The city has lost 500,000 private-sector jobs since March, 2020. Tens of thousands of small businesses, and 5,000 restaurants, have closed. Less than 15% of office workers are back in the workplace they left a year ago.

Tourism, an approximately $70 billion industry, won’t be back until theater is back. When? Judith Miller had a good piece in City Journal on how Broadway’s older houses can’t be retrofitted for social distancing and still make a profit. No one is sure theatergoers will rush back. Theater will be reborn—man will always have shows and stories—but as what? Whatever comes—hybrid productions, tape and live, or more small and intimate theaters—it will have a whole new profit structure and financial realities. Show folk will tell you: A lot will depend on what the unions allow. Can they be nimble and farsighted? Or will they think everything is just an unending 2019?

The Partnership for New York City reports 300,000 residents of high-income neighborhoods have filed change-of-address forms with the U.S. Postal Service. You know where they are going: to lower-tax and no-income-tax states, those that have a friendlier attitude toward money making and that presumably aren’t going hard-left. Florida has gotten so cheeky that this month its chief financial officer sent a letter inviting the New York Stock Exchange to relocate to Miami.

Everyone in public life “knows” these things. But so far in New York’s mayoral debates no one is bluntly addressing these central challenges, no one is stressing them. The candidates seem like very nice people but not one that I saw in two Zoom debates radiated an appropriate sense of alarm or urgency.

“The pandemic has changed everything.” It has. Never have we needed visionaries more than now—people in politics, and out, who have an outsize creativity and a deep knowledge of human beings, who can come up with reasons people want to be here, have to be here, would be happy nowhere else.

That’s the long-term project. In the short term, New York needs to hold on to the wealthy—the top 5% percent in New York pay 62% of state income taxes—and force down crime. If you tax the rich a little higher, most will stay: There’s a lot of loyalty to New York, a lot of psychic and financial investment in it. But if you tax them higher for the privilege of being attacked on the street by a homeless man in a psychotic episode, they will leave. Because, you know, they’re human.

No one can stay fixed in the old world, in the Before Times. We’re in the After Times, and every stakeholder, as they say, is going to have to be generous, patient and farsighted in a way they’ve never been before. That’s the kind of bargain people who know how to survive make. We’re in a battle for our survival, and should start absorbing this.

I meant to talk about something else this week, but my thoughts keep circling back to Rush Limbaugh. His obituaries in the mainstream press were mostly judgment, no mercy. It’s not nice when malice gets a final, unanswered shot. On the conservative side, TV commentaries were cloying to the point of cultish. It gives a sense of horror to see people who are essentially cold enact warmth of feeling.

So here I give Rush without tears, and I guess the subtext has to do with the words “the base” in both a broad and narrow sense.

He was a remarkable figure, a phenomenon. At his height he was the most powerful radio personality since Walter Winchell, who rose in the 1930s after radio’s beginnings. Limbaugh helped save radio and certainly saved the AM band by pioneering a new form, the national conservative call-in show. This spawned an entire industry. Most important, he created a community—an actual community of, at his height, tens of millions of people who thought along with him every day and through that thinking came to feel less lonely, less like outsiders in their views. When Limbaugh came on the scene, conservatives had gotten good at electing presidents, but were largely left out of the national conversation on the airwaves.

To create a community of tens of millions of people in fractured, incoherent America was an astounding feat. To pretty much sustain it over 30 years was equally astounding.

It is perhaps ironic but probably inevitable that that community was created by a man whom one of his closest friends this week called “an isolate.” Knowing him slightly over a few decades, I believe the most important thing to him was his profession, his show—three hours a day, five days a week, unscripted, with sound elements and callers. Preparation was all-consuming. He had to be constantly plugged in, staying on top of the news, monitoring opinions, settling on the one he’d put forward. Three hours of live performance takes everything you have.

Once in the 1990s I told him what struck me wasn’t the political content but what it took to be an entertainer, to go out there live and make it fresh, fun and interesting. People see you as about politics, I said, but you have to be Jackie Gleason. His eyes widened and he thanked me profusely. People thought he was just popping off, but every show had to be planned—segments, subjects, how to imagine what turn a conversation might make, how to anticipate curveballs and cul-de-sacs.

In its early days his show was funny, bombastic, original and over the top—“talent on loan from God,” “dittoheads.” There was a joy to it. His patriotism was real. He was, in the post-Reagan era— Ronald Reagan was the last man who, while president, didn’t know who Rush Limbaugh was—the great broadcast explainer of conservative stands. He would, as the Journal noted, give an hour to tax policy or deregulation, exposing generations of listeners to arguments they’d never heard before. This was powerful and constructive.

There were downsides, flaws that over the years became ingrained. There was a growing attitude of conservatism, c’est moi, which crowded out newer, sometimes more complicated strands of thought. He was too quick to do the bidding of those he considered powerful. He was too much the cigar-chomping head of the He Man Woman Hating Club. He could credibly be accused of bigotries and blindnesses. And in his last years what had always seemed at least one kind of conservatism looked more like nihilism.

To have a show such as his you had to be The Guy With the View, and knock down others’ views. In the past 15 years my views on important issues diverged from his; he came to see me as an apostate and attacked me for my criticisms of Iraq policy, Sarah Palin, George W. Bush and Donald Trump. His attacks turned personal: I was an elite fancy person, an establishment character of rarefied background who looked down on honest people like him and his listeners. His criticisms were at odds with the facts of our lives, and he knew it; for one thing he was damning me from his vast Palm Beach, Fla., estate. Like many male conservative media figures he made a game of pretending to class sensitivity and implying he’d had to scrap his way up. The radio station where he got his start was co-owned by his father.

In the past dozen or so years, I came to think he was not trying to lead people through thought but simply to divine where his followers were going and rushing to the head of the line so he could look as if he was leading them.

Everyone in public life has a base. The talkers on radio and cable TV, left and right, have one, and Rush had one. And they don’t want to get crosswise with them because they are afraid of them. They constantly have to be alert to where the base is and giving it what it wants, or it may leave. All this degrades and damages public attempts at honesty. It also feeds political polarization.

In 2006, when Mr. Bush’s White House led the party to a devastating congressional defeat, Rush said on his show that, now, “I no longer have to carry the water” for the people who’d just lost.

It actually shocked me when he said that. In supporting the president and the GOP on Iraq and immigration, he was carrying their water? But if you have class and self-respect, you carry no one’s water. And you don’t follow the base; you respect them, tell them what you actually think, and take the blows.

Rush Limbaugh had a groundbreaking career and a big one, but his legacy is mixed. Conservatives after him were less lonely and more aggressive. I think maybe they were at their best when they were lonely, when they didn’t have an echo chamber, when they had to be more deliberative and steelier, when they had to think it through, argue it through in their heads. Now they have the further iterations of Rush, who talk about conspiracy theories and stolen elections as they try, each in competition with the other, to hold on to their base.

What made Rush Limbaugh’s show possible was the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, which, starting in 1949, mandated that holders of broadcast licenses must both give airtime to important issues and include opposing views. It asserted a real public-interest obligation from broadcasters.

By the 1980s it was being argued that the doctrine itself was hurting free speech: It was a governmental intrusion on the freedom of broadcasters, and, perversely, it inhibited the presentation of controversial issues. There were so many voices in the marketplace, and more were coming; fairness and balance would sort themselves out.

In 1987 the doctrine was abolished, a significant Reagan-era reform. But I don’t know. Let me be apostate again. Has anything in our political culture gotten better since it was removed? Aren’t things more polarized, more bitter, less stable?

I’m not sure it was good for America.

And that’s a base, too.

The second impeachment trial of Donald Trump has been a rout for the pro-impeachment side. They made the case through time-stamped videos and close argumentation, and their timeline linked in an undeniable way the statements of the president on 1/6 and the actions of the rioters who stormed the Capitol. Democratic floor managers were at their best when they were direct, unadorned, and dealt crisply with information and data, as they did most of the time. They were less effective when they employed emotional tones to move the audience. Here is a truth: Facts make people feel. People are so unused to being given them. They’re grateful for the respect shown in an invitation to think.

Congress was riveted; journalists were riveted. Was America? Did it watch? We’ll find out the ratings and in time get a sense of what people felt was worth absorbing. Did the proceedings have the power to break through as anything other than a partisan effort? I don’t know, but I suspect so. In the pandemic people are glued to their screens. Nothing they saw—nothing—would make them admire Mr. Trump more.

As this is written a formal defense of the president’s actions is coming. It is hard to believe his lawyers will argue his innocence of the charge that he incited a crowd to move on Congress and thwart its certification of the 2020 election. Everyone knows he did that. More likely the defense will speak of extenuating circumstances—Democrats now speak violently too, and they didn’t care when cities exploded in violence last summer.

Beyond that I don’t understand the defense being mounted informally in conservative media. This is that everyone knows the storming of the Capitol was being planned before the president’s rally, and the government knew. This exonerates him? If the government Mr. Trump headed knew trouble was coming, it’s evidence of both imminent lawless action and Mr. Trump’s intent—the legal elements of incitement. It makes him more culpable, not less.

I do not see how Republican senators could hear and fairly judge the accumulated evidence and vote to acquit the former president. If we want to keep it from happening again, all involved must pay the stiffest possible price. That would include banning Mr. Trump from future office.

Everyone has a moment that most upset them in the videos of the rioters milling around, unstopped and unresisted, on the floors of both houses. Mine is when the vandals strolled through the abandoned Senate chamber and rifled through the desks of senators. Those are literally, the desks of Mike Mansfield, Robert M. La Follette, Arthur Vandenberg, John F. Kennedy and Barry Goldwater. They each had, in accordance with tradition, carved or otherwise inscribed their names in them. It looked to me like history itself being violated. It isn’t “loving government” to feel protective of that place; it is loving history and those who’ve distinguished themselves within it.

History will see 1/6 for what it was. Those who acquit are voting for a lie. Conviction would be an act of self-respect and of reverence for the place where fortune has placed them.

Some thoughts attendant to the proceedings.

An aspect of 1/6 that has yet to be satisfyingly addressed is also something I’m certain was one of the most upsetting for the American people.

You don’t know how hollow the tree is until you push against it and it collapses. That’s what people watching on 1/6 saw, a massive public-security and police failure. The Democrats played up the heroism of the Capitol police throughout the trial, and there was heroism, so that’s fine. But the fact is, order just collapsed, and people watched it, live, and it gave a sense of horror.

The Capitol still looks like an armed camp with big ugly fences and troops and the public unwelcome. That citizens could come in with relative ease was one of our glories. Congress should get things in hand and reopen, after the pandemic, as in the past. The long-term imposition of a stiff security regime would be a mistake—cowardly, and abusive of American citizens.

Here is a human question. I don’t understand why I haven’t heard a single story of a member who supported the president in refusing Electoral College certification, who stood with him, and who, hearing what was happening in the first stages of the riot, went into the halls to speak with the rioters. Why did they not do that? They knew there was a rally and expected a march, presumably peaceful. Why didn’t they go into the halls where the clamor was and tell the people, “Friends, I share your beliefs and am arguing for them on the floor, but what you are doing is wrong and unlawful, and you must leave.” Instead they were spirited from the floor by the police and hid in their offices and other rooms. Why didn’t they go out and speak to the crowds, their own people?

Is it that they didn’t actually understand their own people? Or, in barricading themselves in, were they showing they understood them all too well?

Another human question. Watching all the videotape, seeing all the posing of the rioters and holding up phones and live-streaming the event—there was something about it all that made you wonder if something about this age of hypermedia has made people less human, less natural, more like actors who operate at a remove from themselves, even in a passionate moment of insurrection. They acted as if the Senate was a movie set, and they took videos because they’re actors in a story called “Storming the Capitol.”

They dressed up in costumes, as if they’d ordered them up from Wardrobe for the big scene. They live-streamed like they were doing the long tracking shot from “Goodfellas.” There was a feeling of profound unreality about all this.

We are removing ourselves from ourselves. It’s all the image before your eyes and what you feel. There is no emphasis on thought, on reflection, on the meaning of things.

Connected to this is the emotionalism of politics now. I’m not talking about the House managers this week, I’m talking about what is becoming our national style, or at least a public political style. I thought of this last week when Democratic representatives who wanted to share what 1/6 was like for them spoke on the floor. It was full of tears, full of personal information, full of feelings. People wept and got choked up.

I don’t mean it’s insincere—it’s all too sincere. They think their feelings are important and must be voiced. But when institutions seem so frail I’m not sure it helps that leaders are frail. I watched and thought: It’s like nothing bad has ever happened to them before. And I realized it’s not ideal to be governed by people to whom nothing bad has ever happened.

Friends, you are the elected representatives of a great nation. The template is supposed to be Atticus Finch standing up to the crowd, not Atticus Finch endlessly sharing his retrospective terror on YouTube.

We can’t go forward with a national style of such timorousness. It won’t do us any good in this rough world, and don’t think they’re not noticing.

Liz Cheney won. She won’t lose her leadership position after her blistering statement supporting the impeachment of Donald Trump. The vote in the House Republican Conference Wednesday night wasn’t even close, it was reportedly 145-61. Her antagonists spent two weeks bragging they had it in the bag. She insisted on a vote and called their bluff. Suddenly people remembered: She was raised by a House whip.

What does it mean? It doesn’t turn the page on the Trump era in Congress but it does, tentatively, begin a new chapter. The pro-Trump group lost, and the We Exist in the Time After Trump forces won. The lopsidedness of the vote implies some sympathy for Ms. Cheney’s stand, or at least grudging respect for the idea of a vote of conscience. Some were likely glad to see someone stand up to a bully, even if they won’t. Some may have been thinking: Hmmm, maybe it wasn’t a good idea to offer quiet encouragement for an insurrection that left five people dead. Some no doubt worried Republicans would be seen as the party of knuckle-dragging louts if they removed the only woman in House leadership for doing what she thought was right.

The men who’d threatened her almost from the moment she backed impeachment were left looking like what they are—weak, emotional, spiteful and in the end incompetent. Rep. Matt Gaetz, who swanned around in his Elvis hair in Ms. Cheney’s Wyoming in an attempt to whip up a movement against her, looked especially silly, and left the conference meeting with no statement for the press. Which is exactly how Joe McCarthy left after Margaret Chase Smith gave it to him full in the face on the floor of the Senate 71 years ago.

Sometimes things repeat themselves neatly and in a way rich with meaning. (Though to be fair, Mr. Gaetz later tweeted and went on “Hannity,” but I’m sure McCarthy would have too if he could.)

Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, after letting Ms. Cheney twist in the wind for a few weeks, spoke forcefully in her support and called for unity. He didn’t relieve freshman Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the QAnon-supporting conspiracist whose social-media accounts appear to have endorsed violence, anti-Semitism and denialism of historic events, of her committee assignments, which was wrong and a mistake.

Mr. McCarthy said in an interview soon after that he didn’t really know what QAnon is. He knows what QAnon is. They all know.

Here is what the party, and conservatism, cannot do. They cannot sit back and hope the new extremism will go away, play itself out, magically disappear. It won’t. It is going to get worse. This is the moment, while it’s fully on the table, to face it down. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who is not exactly excitable and tends to choose his words carefully, called it what it is, a “cancer for the Republican Party and our country.”

The GOP and the constellation of conservatism—cable news and magazines, local party officials and state leaders—should move against this tendency, in force and together. What exists in the dark corners of the internet has to be exposed and refuted. It’s time for some frank exposés, investigations and documentaries.

Sick theories radicalize and destabilize those who hold them. They encourage disrespect, suspicion, anger and ultimately violence. Individuals and families are harmed, and so is the country.

Parties have reputations. Not everyone is passionately immersed in politics. People see politics as it goes by on their screens; they get impressions. Do Republicans want their party to seem like a serious alternative, or yet another American institution that has lost hold of reality? Suburban voters, the college-educated—they will not align with what appears to be degenerate radicalism.

We are probably already seeing repercussions. In Arizona and Pennsylvania, thousands of voters have dropped their GOP registration.

Republican officials should at least have some feeling of protectiveness toward their own party. Its great virtue was that it stood for certain truths about the relationship between man and the state, between what is justly and rightly demanded of the citizen and what is not justly asked. It is odd that current members of Congress, so obsessed with words like the “brand,” don’t even know their brand, which, at its best, has stood for hard truths gently given. It is wanton and destructive to let it be reduced to crackpot conspiracies loudly brayed.

The whole conspiracy thing will only get worse with time, and more dangerous. A few weeks ago we asked what would have become of the John Birch Society if it had existed in the age of the internet. They were pretty radical; their anticommunism reached the point of suspecting Dwight Eisenhower was a Soviet agent. They faded. All they had to spread the word was books, magazines and some radio stations.

In our age they would have flourished. A recent CNN.com piece by Donie O’Sullivan described a South Carolina woman, Ashley Vanderbilt, who joined QAnon and then left. Ms. Vanderbilt had become increasingly radicalized—passionately pro-Trump, worried about the future, convinced America was nearing its end. Out of work in the pandemic she began spending more time online. She interacted with pro-Trump and anti-Biden videos, and soon TikTok’s “For You” page—“an algorithmically determined feed in the app that suggests videos a user might like,” according to CNN—was showing her conspiracy theories. This “continued on Facebook, YouTube, and Telegram,” the network reports. By January, Ms. Vanderbilt said, she was spending hours each evening learning more about the supposed cabal of pedophiles in the Democratic Party that had stolen the election. She believed in “the plan,” the QAnon narrative that martial law would soon be declared and the Biden inauguration halted. Mr. Trump would remain president. When he didn’t, Ms. Vanderbilt panicked. Her family intervened. She came to wonder if she had put Trump before God. Looking back, she thinks she might have quit QAnon earlier if Mr. Trump had condemned it instead of retweeting QAnon accounts.

The internet changes everything, and internet behemoths have some game going. They divine your interests and thoughts from what you search for, then adjust your algorithms. If you’re looking for darkness they feed you poison, nonstop incitement toward further radicalism. If you act on what they feed you, if you post incendiary, racist, anti-Semitic comments and videos, they then make a great moral show of banning you for hate speech.

They are like drug dealers who condemn their clients for becoming addicted to the fentanyl they sell.

There is no particular reason to believe we will have less conspiracism in the future, every reason to expect more. And it has the power to tear the country apart.

Republicans who still don’t know how to think about the big tech companies, whether to break them up or regulate them, might start with this insight: They are not your country’s friends.

There is radicalism and strangeness on the left and on the right, it has been going on for years, it has sped up in the Trump era, and on the right it fed the beliefs that led to the storming of the Capitol. That was a seminal moment, and it’s the work of Republicans to do whatever they can to keep it not the first but the last such moment.

Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio isn’t running for re-election in 2022. This is not good. He is a rightly respected figure. He tries to advance serious legislation. He doesn’t spend all his time talking on television.

He cheerily returned my call Wednesday from “the beautiful Russell Office Building.” He thinks his office was once that of Sen. Harry Truman ; his previous office had been occupied by Truman’s frequent antagonist, Ohio’s Sen. Robert Taft. Mr. Portman finds this satisfying. In 11 years in the Senate, he has been known for a bipartisan approach.

Before being elected to the Senate in 2010 (by 18 points) and 2016 (by 21), Mr. Portman had six terms in the House and stints as director of the Office of Management and Budget and U.S. trade representative, both under President George W. Bush. He’s dexterously made his way through the party’s Trumpian minefields. Over the years when national events have turned especially murky, I’ve asked his read on things, and what’s always struck me is his stubborn sense of reality: He doesn’t let his wishes get in the way of what he sees. In the geography of the Republican Party he’d be placed with figures like Mitch Daniels —the We Actually Know Things Caucus.

When he made his announcement Monday, he said the Senate is too polarized, common ground has been lost. He has been moved by the response: “It’s a crazy world right now, and this decision I made I thought normal, but the response was abnormal. I think people are really yearning for some renewed bipartisanship and cooperation.” Potential candidates for his seat have called to say they want to be like him. “It’s been crazy,” he laughs, “like dying a good death.”

He’s 65 and means it when he says he wants more time with his family: “I never expected to be a career politician.” He intends to make progress “on the outside” on issues he cares about—drug addiction, sex trafficking, a commission on mandatory federal spending.

It really is something that we’re living in a time when ambitious people leave the U.S. Senate to get things done.

On his party’s prospects he’s somewhere between bullish and serene. Everybody is talking about the inevitability of breakup, but he doesn’t see it that way. The 2020 election, he argues, showed Republican strength—gains in the state legislatures and the U.S. House. He thinks coming elections can bring out traditional Republicans and summon new ones. “There’s a meshing of the traditional GOP agenda—lower taxes, strong military—with more-populist approaches on, say, immigration, on trade. In the real world you have to have a fair trade system, and it’s not un-Republican to think so.”

An altered tone would help. “This does require leaders who have the ability to communicate these messages without the coarseness and the divisiveness that we have seen over the last four, five years.”

He sees his state as a microcosm of the country. In 2020, “a lot of the pushback in the suburbs was style and personality. The suburban, more educated folks in Ohio, who are independent voters these days—you can win these areas if you’re focused on the right policies, and more welcoming and embracing.” Donald Trump did well among minorities: “That was about issues—the economy, small business, lower taxes.”

In spite of the smallness and rage various state GOP committees are displaying now, we agree in this space with Mr. Portman’s sense that in the long term it is issues that count. The potential health and durability of the GOP will be based on an integration of old and still-applicable stands with new and still-urgent ones. But that process won’t proceed easily with Mr. Trump as a dominant force. If he’s on the scene it’s back to the old battle lines, and everyone dug in.

On the upcoming impeachment trial: “I have said I will listen to both sides, and I will. I’m a juror.” But he believes trying a former president probably sets a bad precedent.

I asked about the comment of his former campaign manager Corry Bliss, published Tuesday in National Journal, on Portman’s decision not to run: “If you want to spend all your time on Fox and be an a—h—, there’s never been a better time to serve. But if you want to spend your time being thoughtful and getting s— done, there’s never been a worse time to serve.” Mr. Portman roared with laughter. “Did he say that?” He roared again. “Yeah, I won’t comment.”

Here I switch away from Mr. Portman to squeeze in something being overlooked on the coming impeachment debate.

I started the new year talking with an ambassador to the U.S. from a European nation, who spoke of Mr. Trump’s campaign to delegitimize the election. Do Americans understand the damage this does to U.S. allies, the ambassador asked. We look to you for an example of how to do democracy—you’re the oldest in the world! It grieves us to see the beacon of democracy sullied in this way.

Those words rang in my ears five days later as I watched the Capitol besieged.

On “Axios on HBO” Sunday we will hear from President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. He is playing a hard hand. Russia is breathing down his neck, Republicans don’t want to hear about him because they’re embarrassed by the Trump phone call that triggered the first impeachment, and Democrats are embarrassed by Hunter Biden and Burisma. Mr. Zelensky seems kind of on his own, sitting on top of one of the world’s flashpoints. China has been sweetly reaching out.

Reporter Jonathan Swan asked the president how he felt as he saw the Capitol stormed. “Shocked,” Mr. Zelensky said. “I could not even imagine something like this was possible in the United States of America. . . . We are used to thinking that the U.S. has ideal democratic institutions where power is passed calmly, without war, without revolutions.” Such things happen elsewhere; they’ve happened in Ukraine. “That it could happen in the United States, no one expected that. . . . After something like this, I believe it would be very difficult for the world to see the United States as a symbol of democracy in the world.”

For more than a century we have claimed the mantle of world power, basked in the warm glow of our exceptionalism, and put ourselves forward as an example. When you do that you have responsibilities; you owe something in return. What you owe is the kind of admirable behavior that gives the world something to aim for. On 1/6 they saw the storming and the siege and thought: Ah, no stability in that place. We can’t learn how to do it there and replicate it here.

This is a loss to rising democracies and also to us, to our standing and reputation. Senate conviction is the chance to show the world: No, we won’t have this; those who did it will pay the highest penalty.

It matters that all evidence be presented, that everyone sees we can come down like a hammer, ensuring that 1/6 was a regrettable incident, not a coming tendency.

It matters that the world see this. That we see it.