Peggy Noonan

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.

Congress and the White House are trying to overhaul police practices. By tradition in such efforts the obvious will likely be overlooked, so here is the obvious:

Violent crime is rising in almost every major American city, after decades of falling. Police departments are in crisis, battered by charges of abuse, targeted for cuts, many struggling under recent bail-reform laws. Officers are demoralized. From the New York Post one month ago: “More than 5,300 NYPD uniformed officers retired or put in their papers to leave in 2020—a 75 percent spike from the year before.” In Philadelphia they’re struggling with a shortage of recruits and a similar surge in retirements. “People don’t want to be police anymore,” a local chief told the Philadelphia Inquirer.

All this happened after America watched the cellphone video of the extinguishing of the life of George Floyd one year ago, by an officer, Derek Chauvin, who posed through much of the tape with his hand on his thigh, the picture of brute nonchalance.

An incident so horrifying can and will stop America in its tracks, causing nationwide convulsion—protests, riots, burning of businesses.

One bad cop can stop a great nation in its tracks. A plumber, an accountant, a movie star can’t kick America off its axis. A bad cop can.

Which means police officers are more important than ever in our history. And we are not fully seeing this.

We train them almost as an afterthought. You’d think men and women so crucial to domestic tranquility would be trained deeply and carefully, spending years in the police academy, but no, we train them for four to six months.

There are thousands of departments in the U.S., each with its own standards and policies. The Los Angeles Police Department provides six months of training for those who qualify. So does Miami. Smaller forces train less. The state of California mandates 664 hours of training, but the San Jose Mercury News last year quoted a criminal-justice reform advocate noting the state requires more training for cosmetologists than for police. On some forces, a high-school diploma or GED is enough to qualify. Some cities require two years of college or military service.

But almost all forces offer four to six months to learn everything: how to use gear, from the radio and body cam to firearms; how to control crowds, de-escalate situations, deal with the violent mentally ill, talk to citizens in a traffic stop. First aid, the law, the use of force, tactics—four to six months to absorb all that and more.

Doesn’t it strike you as mad? We ask our cops to be diplomats, to resolve domestic disputes peacefully. We ask them to have the law at their fingertips, and to treat everyone, including drunk 23-year-olds spoiling for a fight, with respect. At the same time we want them steely-eyed and sure if someone pulls a gun. We ask them to act proportionately. We ask them to control stray dogs. And all this while year by year society’s problems escalate, including a mental-health crisis and a drug crisis.

We are asking them to be a combination of Henry Kissinger, the Dalai Lama and John Wayne. All after four to six months of training.

If they get it innocently wrong—if they misjudge a situation in real time, or panic—it’s all there on cellphone video, and if they are judged guilty they lose their jobs, their benefits, their pensions; and their families will be left vulnerable. So now instead of doing something when bad things are happening, they feel the temptation to do nothing—to stay in the car or turn away from trouble. Street criminals know that. Not all criminals are stupid—that’s a myth. They are calculating, constantly judging who has the upper hand. They know we are entering a golden age of street crime, with local laws relaxed, systems changed, judges deactivated, streets full of guns, and cops on the defensive.

No one says “defund the police” anymore; it doesn’t poll well. Instead they play verbal games and say “redirect resources.” Which means funnel money away from the police and toward whatever programs they dream up to be part of solving the crime problem. The head of New York’s Police Benevolent Association told the Post he saw in this a strategy: “Abolition through attrition.” Get rid of the police by denying them what they need.

Considering their importance, we are underfunding the police. They need to increase recruitment, train new cops longer and deeper, and retrain veterans regularly to keep up with changes in the law and equipment. This will be expensive. But Washington is in a spending mood, and it’s less expensive than riots.

It’s not only that good policing is more important than ever. It’s that we think in categories and our minds tend to leap to clichés. In some part of our minds we think “cop” and imagine a big Irish Catholic family circa 1970, or Tom Selleck in “Blue Bloods.” Or the black longtime chief whose father and son were on the force. But this is 2021, today’s recruits were born in 2000, or the 1990s, and they came from our modern society, which means chances are good they came from a considerable amount of brokenness. Many were not raised closely, tidily, didn’t have generations of a family’s values guiding them. They come from all-broken-up America. They came from us—a jangly culture that put its emphasis on screens and how things look, as opposed to thoughts and how things are.

We are putting it all on the frail shoulders of the guy who was born in 2000 and spent visitation with his father playing “Call of Duty” and “World of Warcraft.” And the girl without a father who came from a chaotic home. They are the academy’s new recruits.

We are lucky to have them. But our culture hasn’t given the young enough clues, enough guidance, about how to be in the world. For instance—this is hilariously small, but not really small—we haven’t done a good job teaching what used to be called manners. It hardly matters if a kid at Harvard who’s going to a hedge fund is loutish and lacking in sympathy, it’s almost expected. But cops need kindness and dignity to do their tense and sensitive work, to defuse situations. To live in the world of criminals is to live in a world of male pride. That is a sensitive place.

My bet: We can give the police the training and resources they need. Or we can endure a rising tide of crime for five or 10 years or longer, and then give them what they need. Why don’t we do it now?

I close with the words of William Bratton, former police commissioner of New York, Los Angeles and Boston, in an interview a few weeks ago. I asked him what cops are, what their role is, why we should care. “They are the glue that literally holds society together,” he said. “They are an essential element of a successful democracy.”

They are. And God bless them as they make their way through Memorial Day weekend 2021.

Here is journalism as a true and honest public service: Carol Leonnig’s new book, “Zero Fail,” about the rise and fall of the Secret Service. It is just terrific, to use a phrase from the 1960s, when the service became universally admired. The Washington Post reporter interviewed more than 180 people including current and former agents, directors and other officials, and worked under some pressure: Secret Service leaders and alumni had vowed to attack her work, she says, on the grounds she meant only to embarrass the institution. But she is “in awe of the agents and officers” who do what they do each day. It’s clear she means to save the agency from many forces, including itself.

The service’s reputation has been battered the past two decades by embarrassing scandals involving agents and managers, but the greater problem is that it is no longer keeping the president safe. “Agents and officers gave me a guided tour, showing me step by step how the Secret Service was becoming a paper tiger,” weakened by bad leadership, underfunding, an insular culture and declining professionalism. It is painful reading because Secret Service agents have been unique among government workers in that everyone knew of them and admired them. They live in the American imagination as what they’ve long been and still often are: focused, ethical, no-nonsense, alert. Dwight Eisenhower called them “soldiers out of uniform.” When I worked with them, they were the pros on the premises; they were dashing even when they weren’t dashing.

Their primary job: to keep the president safe and if necessary take a bullet for him. That is literally what agent Tim McCarthy did during the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan on March 30, 1981. There too was agent Jerry Parr, who bundled the seemingly unhurt Reagan into the car and, after seeing pinkish, oxygenated blood on his mouth, countermanded an order and got him straight to the emergency room. (Wonderful arcana included by Ms. Leonnig: When Parr was a kid he saw a 1939 movie, “Code of the Secret Service,” which made him want to be an agent. The central character, fearless agent Brass Bancroft, was played by Ronald Reagan, whose life Parr saved some four decades later. Life is full of strange, unseen circularities.)

If you remember the JFK shooting you remember agent Clint Hill running to the president’s car when he heard the first shot, jumping on the back step as the car sped up, stumbling, hauling himself over the trunk and situating his body so if there were more shots they would get him instead.

What lore, what a tradition of valor. But the 21st century has been pretty much a disaster for the service; that is when the deterioration of the institution really began to show. There was a major expansion of duties, new missions and responsibilities, plus poor leadership, bad management and growing unprofessionalism. And it was always underfunded. In 2002 U.S. News & World Report revealed serious misbehavior in the highest ranks. The Secret Service was humiliated in 2012 when a dozen agents and officers were accused of turning a presidential trip to Cartagena, Colombia, “into a kind of Vegas bachelor party, complete with heavy drinking and prostitutes.” Men and women of the service had been known for “tireless and selfless vigilance.” Suddenly they were becoming known for “blackout drinking, bar brawls, and car accidents.”

In the Obama years the service was scrambling to cover up security breaches. Someone took shots at the White House. An uninvited couple waltzed past guards to attend a presidential dinner. In 2014 a mentally ill veteran jumped the fence—he was the fifth jumper that year—and got as far as the East Room. He was carrying a knife. “In 29 seconds [Omar] Gonzalez had made his way from a public sidewalk to inside the White House. He had gotten directly past eight trained security professionals on a compound staffed with 154 men and women.”

It doesn’t seem to have helped that after 9/11 the service was removed from its longtime home in the Treasury Department and blended into the behemoth Department of Homeland Security. The idea was a wholesale reorganization of the government’s separate security agencies, which Senate Democrats pushed for and the Bush White House went along with and finally took the lead on. A new civil-defense agency would be created from parts of 40 different ones. It would, then, have 170,000 employees. The service didn’t really resist, Ms. Leonnig writes: “DHS might be their ticket to larger budgets.”

The intent of such reorganizations is always to make management and the flow of information more coherent, actions more coordinated. It looks good on paper, but something’s always sacrificed. More meetings with less institutional pertinence, more managing up. Less accountability because there are more closets in more corridors in which to hide more mischief. And less esprit, less a feeling of singularity, of lore and tradition, less pride. You’re not part of a mission, you’re an office drone within a beast.

There are heroes in the book. In 2005 uniformed officer Charles J. Baserap, assigned to the White House compound, was asked by superiors if he had any ideas on how to improve security. He was new, honored to be asked, wrote and signed a memo pointing out real security flaws. His superiors didn’t take it well. The day before he reached full career status, he was let go. But service members still pass around dog-eared copies of his memos. To them he’s a legend.

And there’s Rachel Weaver, staff director for Sen. Ron Johnson, the ranking Republican on the Homeland Security Committee. After Cartagena she tirelessly dug into what was going on at the Secret Service and uncovered a history of abuse and misbehavior.

In 2011 Julia Pierson, who would become the first female director, told the Office of Management and Budget her agency was “bankrupt.” Budget cuts led to understaffing and waves of uniformed-officer resignations. Ms. Leonnig: “Officers were fleeing simply because they were tired of working more than half of their days off, with no end in sight.” Agents on the president’s detail, due to be rotated out after years in the pressure cooker, were forced to stay so the agency could save relocation costs.

Some of the understaffing was due to a new hiring system. In the past, agents in field offices would recruit new agents: They knew what it took and could tell who’d wash out. But they mostly recruited beings like themselves: white men. Greater fairness and diversity were needed. So now people applied on the federal government’s USAJobs website. But field officers found themselves overwhelmed, having to interview hundreds of applicants who couldn’t meet basic fitness and security standards—physically or emotionally impaired, obese, oblivious. Applicants showed up in gym shorts. “Some said they couldn’t agree to a required home interview because their roommates didn’t like having cops around.”

Here is the ground this book breaks: its deep reporting reveals a decline not only in the service’s reputation but in its reality.

Something bad is going to happen if officials fail to act. Congress and the White House live in a world of emergencies, but if they don’t focus on the Secret Service, quickly, they’re going to have big trouble.

There’s a lot to build on. Save that old thing.

What is to become of the Republican Party? It will either break up or hold together. If the latter, it will require time to work through divisions; there will be state fights and losses as the party stumbles through cycle to cycle. But in time one side or general tendency will win and define the party. Splits get resolved when somebody wins big and nationally. Eisenhower’s landslides in 1952 and ’56 announced to the party that it was moderate. Reagan’s in 1980 and ’84 revealed it was conservative. The different factions get the message and follow the winner like metal filings to a magnet.

The future, according to this space, is and should be economically populist and socially conservative.

The future GOP, and the current one for that matter, is a party of conservatism with important Trumpian inflections. The great outstanding question: Will those inflections be those of attitude—wildness, garish personalities and conspiracy-mindedness? If so, the party will often lose. Or will the inflections be those of actual policy, in which case they will often win?

In terms of policy the future GOP will be more Trumpian, meaning more populist and nationalist. High spending will continue (and will not much be acknowledged!) but it will be high spending with a more conservative bent—more for cops, for instance. The party will be preoccupied neither by the capital-gains tax nor by what’s good for corporations. It won’t cut entitlements.

Skepticism about great international crusades will continue. The modern GOP has been internationalist and interventionist. (The Democrats too.) The future GOP will be internationalist up to a point—the world has a way of forcing you to think about it; trade deals need to be made. But it won’t be like it was, all flags unfurled.

Conservative social thinking—against what used to be called political correctness, against being pushed around by faculty-lounge Robespierres—will continue. It will be antiradical on race. Republicans are and will be with Sen. Tim Scott : America is not a racist country, but can always benefit from remembering that racism is a sin and a vice of the ignorant. The argument against wokeness is powerful: We are our souls and our character; we are not only our color and our country of origin.

Do Trump supporters even care to institutionalize their policy ascendance, or do they just want to obsess on the sage of Mar-a-Lago and insist people bow to him? Never mind Liz Cheney, why do they insist on putting him at the immovable center of things? Some part of it would be that they interpret respect for Donald Trump to be respect for themselves. They may be “the deplorables,” but they changed the priorities of a great party. There’s something to that.

But if they are serious they have to wake up. They can’t win elections without classic GOP voters. They can win with Trumpism, but they’ll lose with Trump. As they just did.

He is a waning figure. It is the way of things that a former leader becomes former, even him. He pays the finaglers around him to tell reporters how powerful he is, and reporters are only too eager to headline it, but how true is it, and for how long? He is distracted by investigations, lawyers, age and golf. His new social-media empire is a blog. What power he has is wielded brutishly but not cleverly or thoughtfully.

One of the scoops of the Cheney drama was when the Washington Post reported that in a briefing at an April GOP retreat the National Republican Congressional Committee hid from its members polling information on battleground districts. That information showed Mr. Trump’s unfavorable ratings were 15 points higher than his favorable ones: “Nearly twice as many voters had a strongly unfavorable view of the former president as had a strongly favorable one.” Bad numbers had been covered up before. Ms. Cheney concluded party leadership was willing to hide information from their own members to avoid acknowledging the damage Trump could do to Republican candidates.

An NBC News poll last month had only 32% of respondents with a favorable impression of Mr. Trump. More interesting, it had his numbers falling among Republicans themselves. Only 44% of them said they were “more a supporter of Donald Trump” than “of the Republican Party”; 50% said the other way around.

Mr. Trump’s trend is downward. He is losing air, like a deflating Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade balloon that’s going to wind up wrapped around a light pole.

House leaders should stop being mesmerized by this guy and building him up in their heads. They are way too dazzled by his supposed powers. They shouldn’t be going on missions to Mar-a-Lago. He’s merely a force to be factored in.

They think Ms. Cheney should pay him less attention. They should pay him less attention.

It was good for the party to have someone who opposed him, and said it, in the leadership. It didn’t cause trouble in America, and made those who noticed what she was doing feel represented. If Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy hadn’t been so afraid Mr. Trump would come for him too, he would have stood by her and averted a crisis.

As I’ve written, in running in fear from him, they are running from a corpse. Because the insurrection changed everything. They say, “Trump got 74 million votes,” but many Republicans held their noses and voted for him. Jan. 6 forced many of them to say Basta!—“Enough!” It’s not true 74 million are Trumpists. You could as well call them 2020’s Not Democrats.

If the Republicans don’t take an honest stand on 1/6, they’re saying what happened that day was allowable, and there will be more attempts to overthrow elections. An honest stand on what happened after the election separates the party from evil. It’s not a question of aligning with Mr. Trump, it’s a question of aligning with that. Not being truthful invites half your base to go live in Crazytown and never come back, not even to vote in your elections.

What could help the Republicans unify? Normally it would be the Democrats. Their policies are always the GOP’s great unifying factor. The Biden administration is doing a good job of providing the issues. Inflation is rising; the southern border has been ruptured. The administration is silent in the face of the progressive cultural revolution with its antipolice fervor, and silent about teachers not having to teach because they have a powerful union. All this is part of the reason the Republicans may still take back the House.

You’d think a healthy party could oppose all that with documents that are thoughtful, stands that are clear, votes that are pertinent. Instead of just going on cable and scoring points off Ms. Cheney.

This week more than 100 former Republican officeholders and activists signed a letter suggesting they might form a third party. Their grievances are real but it won’t work. At the end of the day our two big incompetent behemoths function as a unifying force in a nation with too few. You’re a Democrat or a Republican, take your choice and find your place in the coalition. Give people three parties and they’ll take seven, and America will fracture.

Grit your way through this hard time. Stay and fight.

It all comes back to the Capitol insurrection. It’s at the heart of the battle that is, four months later, tearing the House GOP apart. Increasingly, Republicans paint 1/6 as a rowdy and raucous event, an arguably understandable but certainly embarrassing one in which hundreds of people illegally marched into the Capitol and, for a few hours, occupied its halls. There was some unfortunate violence; it should be prosecuted. But you don’t endlessly, ruthlessly and for political reasons bring governmental force down on members of a crowd that got carried away. America is a nation in which crowds get carried away. They didn’t tear the place apart, as street rioters did last summer. It was goofballs dressed in antelope horns. So get a grip, maintain perspective.

There is some truth in this. But it dodges the larger, defining and essential truth.

That has to do with the expressed aim and intention of many rioters. It wasn’t to roam the halls and yell. It was something grave and dark: to disrupt and prevent the constitutionally mandated counting of the Electoral College votes in the 2020 presidential election. That was scheduled to occur in Congress that day. That act of tabulating is more than two centuries old, formalizes and validates the election outcome, physically represents the peaceful transfer of power, and has never been stopped or disrupted. What happened on 1/6 was an attempted assault on the constitutional order.

It was instigated by a lie, the one Donald Trump told his supporters starting the day after the election: that it had been stolen and was fraudulent. And, in time and implicitly, that the certification of results could be thwarted.

After the election every attempt to prove it was stolen failed. Recounts failed, more than 60 court challenges failed, some before Trump-appointed judges. Dominion Voting Systems launched lawsuits against those who slandered it. The nutty Trump lawyers dummied up and scrammed.

The former president is undeterred. He insisted in a statement this week that the idea that he lost the 2020 election is “THE BIG LIE!” Rep. Liz Cheney famously responded in a tweet: That the election was stolen is actually the big lie.

Under attack by House colleagues she will almost certainly be stripped of her leadership position next week.

Why did she take the bait of this slowly waning figure, Mr. Trump, and the gravy-train operatives around him whom others in Washington call “the unemployables”? Because, as she wrote days later in the Washington Post, if the former president is allowed to keep telling his lie unchecked and unresisted it will only dig in and spread, and the foundations of the Republic begin to crack. “Trump has never expressed remorse or regret for the attack of Jan. 6 and now suggests that our elections, and our legal and constitutional system, cannot be trusted to do the will of the people.”

And so the latest battle in the Republican civil war. The pro-Trump side is believed to have the larger ground force, while the anti-Trump side has greater air cover, in terms of media support.

Members of the House Republican Conference should breathe deep, cool down, and think twice. There will be great cost to the party if it removes the only woman in the House leadership and the only one pushing back against Mr. Trump. Ousting her for saying the obvious puts the party on the side of a lie. That’s never a healthy place to be in the long term.

The Republicans like to call themselves a big tent. Ms. Cheney is in that tent, a woman who isn’t in the boys club and yet has been respected by the boys. If they throw her out she looks like Churchill, and they look like little men with umbrellas. It will make the party look stupid and weak, as if it can’t tolerate dissent. Republicans like to call for diversity of thought on campuses. What about in the Republican Conference? Giving her the boot places Mr. Trump at the center of things, and is a gift to President Biden, taking all the heat off his programs and policies.

House Republicans keep repeating that Donald Trump won 74 million votes, more than any Republican presidential candidate ever. But Joe Biden won 81 million votes. There was historically high turnout in a divided country. The Democrat won by seven million votes. That’s not something for Republicans to brag about.

In a move the men who run the House GOP take to be sophisticated, they hope to replace Ms. Cheney with a woman, New York Rep. Elise Stefanik. It will haunt the rest of her career if she allows the boys to swap her for a woman who stood where she stands at a cost and for principle. A former member of Congress said this week: “When you’re replaying ‘All About Eve,’ you don’t want to play the part of Eve. You want to be Bette Davis. ” You don’t want to be the conniving understudy who takes out the star. Whoever replaces Ms. Cheney will be elevated by a conference that booted a woman for telling the truth but has expressed little criticism for, say, Rep. Matt Gaetz, reportedly being investigated by federal agents to determine whether he had sex with a minor (he’s denied it). Odd, isn’t it?

More oddness: The truth in this case isn’t really at issue. Ms. Cheney’s colleagues are ejecting her not because they think she’s wrong on the facts. They know she is right. They know Mr. Trump lost the election and Mr. Biden won. Most of them know it’s not good if embittered generations of voters turn on the system and come to feel no fidelity to democratic outcomes.

They just don’t want her to say it. They don’t want to antagonize constituents who believe the election was stolen. They think Ms. Cheney is doing so, pointlessly. They think the way out is to be quiet and hope the fever passes. Here is a fact of our current political life: The fever never passes. It has to be treated. By not pushing back they create more crazy.

And it’s not an argument about policy. Ms. Cheney supported Mr. Trump on policy issues, in many cases more often than her opponents did. In any case, Trump supporters aren’t all about policy. They want to close the border to illegal immigration; their inflection is populist and nationalist, but mostly they believe in standard Republican things, such as that taxes and spending should be lower.

The Cheney drama has an underappreciated subtext, however. She has called hard for a Jan. 6 commission to investigate formally what happened that day, which is a problem for some Republicans, not because they don’t want to relitigate the past but because there are members who are uneasy about what such a probe might unearth about their own actions.

Here is the problem of House Republicans: No matter how pro-Trump they show themselves to be, there will always be someone back home who’s Trumpier. They’re jumpy and scared, fear a primary challenge, and probably know deep down the inquisition won’t stop with Ms. Cheney.

In times of high heat, get cool. They shouldn’t do what they’re going to do next week.