Peggy Noonan

So it ended, so it begins. We ought to give ourselves a moment this weekend to take pleasure in the end of a strange, grinding era and rejoice in the continuance of something we had blithely taken for granted: the peaceful transfer of presidential power. That jewel in our crown had been there a long time; we’d neglected the binding wire and setting and it came loose. The aim of the inauguration was to show it is back in place, immovably, as are our institutions, and our 200-year-old way of moving forward in the world.

It was all very handsome and well done, a real achievement considering the circumstances: a pandemic, an insurrection in the Capitol two weeks earlier, and what amounted to a military occupation of the streets. The swearings-in took place in what amounted to a militarized ghost town. There is a grim defensiveness in a guarded, boarded-up, fenced-off Capitol Hill and White House. Their relative undefendedness in the past was an assertion: We have nothing to fear from each other. You lose a lot when you lose that.

There was no way the planners could produce a happy, moving inauguration with that degree of difficulty. Yet they did. It was a day worthy of a great people.

I did not, unlike everyone I know and almost every conservative, find tears in my eyes. I just felt gratitude and relief.

What a hunger there is for “normal,” for stately, serene and dignified. For seeing forms maintained.

Crucially, the world saw it. It won’t change their minds about the mess and weakened state America is in, but they’ll be impressed we regained our composure. The past few weeks, or years, they’d had it in the back of their minds that maybe we’d run out our string. Wednesday would have left them thinking: Maybe not.

Arrayed before the world were former presidents, the chief justice, members of Congress and representatives of the institutions—the military, law enforcement, the press right down to the scrambling photographers. The corny old music, the flags going by, the bands and drums and flutes, the old majesty re-enacted and, through re-enactment, to some degree restored.

Lady Gaga looking delightfully freakish, and killing it. China, you have penetrated every data cloud and downloaded every invention, you have discipline and determination and believe the future is yours, but you don’t have Lady Gaga.

It wasn’t a scandal Donald Trump wasn’t there, it was a gift. He would have tried to harm it in some way, cast a pall.

The inaugural address was what the moment needed.

More than President Biden’s other speeches it reflected who he is, his essential nature and intent. Yes, he is a practical pol, a lifer who enjoyed being called Senator and relished making the kind of deals that leave the deal makers safe and the public possibly served with what might turn out to be a useful initiative, or at least one that is high-minded and generous. He is sentimental, not cerebral, and blarney is his default setting. But he is sufficiently cunning to last half a century in public life and rise to the top. And he loves his country in an old-school way, with an old-style heart on his sleeve. When he recited from the Pledge of Allegiance—“One nation, under God, indivisible”—you know he meant every word.

The heart of his speech was an urgent call for unity. We must unite as we have in crises past—if we do, everything is possible. But so much is tearing us apart. “We must end this uncivil war” between groups, races, conditions. We must move past “exhausting outrage.” We need tolerance and humility. We cannot allow our tensions to break us up: “Disagreement must not lead to disunion.” “Every disagreement doesn’t have to be a cause for total war.” “Politics need not be a raging fire destroying everything in its path.” This seemed aimed not only at his political opposition but at some of his party’s constituent groups.

It was clear he wants to be the Great Unifier. That’s what he meant when he asked those who didn’t vote for him to “take a measure of me and my heart” and vowed, “My whole soul is in it.”

Good for him, that’s the ambition for this moment. Will he have the force, judgment and toughness to become what he wants to be? We’ll see. But it’s the right thing to want.

His instincts are generally and historically those of a moderate. If he is allowed to proceed and govern as a liberal centrist who yet has a canny sense of where he can push the edges, it will be one kind of presidency—quite possibly a unifying one. If not, it will be another.

There were clichés, the banalities we’re all used to—“A day of history and hope,” “the American story,” all that stuff. But they too had the odd effect of being reassuring. In a time of jarring change some things continue.

As for former President Trump, one wants to be gracious as a man leaves—but what was departing was a national trauma.

His goodbye rally at Joint Base Andrews was intended to show the spirited and temporary receding of a titanic force. It didn’t. His remarks were wan and offhand, and the White House had to scramble to get people to come. His last words in public as president: “Have a good life. We will see you soon.” Then he flew off to Xanadu.

Shortly after, the alt-right group Proud Boys disowned him as a “total failure,” and QAnon message boards lit up. They had believed in “the plan,” when that conspiracy was always fantastical and bizarre. Now they were concussed. Mr. Trump was gone. Were we played? Yes, you were played. Now get offline and go find your life.

A final thought on Mr. Trump. It is one thing to come into the presidency with no particular class or dignity, as a person who knows “the price of everything and the value of nothing.” It is another and almost an achievement to leave the presidency like that—to have been untouched by the grandeur, unchanged by the stature and history of the office. None of it rubbed off and improved him. His supporters see this as proof of his authenticity, of his irreducible Trumpness. It is not. It is proof not that he couldn’t be reduced but that he couldn’t be enlarged.

Anyway it’s over, and goodbye to all that.

Hollywood, you would do us a great kindness if you would stop for a while making movies and series that show how sick and corrupt politics is, and how conniving and immoral our political leaders. Your cynicism helped lower standards and reduce expectations. It had a leveling effect. After you gave them decades of fictional bums they one-upped you and started electing real ones. People could use a little faith now, and inspiration.

Can a good inauguration and speech heal the nation? No. But they can assert an attitude, they can turn the page, help people feel something new is beginning, maybe something better. They can encourage citizens to take part.

Those things were done. Now onward to new history.

Liz Cheney’s was a moment of real stature. Addressing the issue of impeachment, the third-ranking member of the Republican leadership said, of the events of Jan. 6: “The president of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack. Everything that followed was his doing. None of this would have happened without the president. The president could have immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence. He did not. There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.”

And so she would vote to impeach. Her remarks implicitly urged others in her party to do so, and the bluntness and power of what she said offered them cover: They could be tough too. But most couldn’t. They were stupid and cowardly.

They claimed high-minded concern for the nation’s well-being, but they didn’t seem to believe their own arguments; some rushed through their statements, some gestured wildly as if hoping their arms could convince their brains they were sincere. Impeachment is needlessly divisive. They weren’t concerned about division when they refused to accept the Electoral College result. You’re rushing it. The president’s term is expiring; those who need more time to understand what happened on 1/6 don’t want to understand it. It’s revenge. Revenge has no high purpose and is base. The impeachment consisted of a branch of the American government asserting the country’s standards and the rule of law; an attempt to act decisively against a historic transgression in a way that says, “No more”; an attempt to draw clear and vivid lines for future leaders. To do nothing is to guarantee that it will happen again, that “storming of the Capitol” will become a picture in the minds of the ignorant and unstable as a thing that is possible for them, an option.

Ms. Cheney’s stand seemed brought by conviction, and given that she is the only woman in the House Republican leadership, took some guts: She operates within an environment that is dumb, male and clubby. She courted danger by giving them more reason to want to suppress her down the road.

They didn’t wait for down the road. Rep. Jim Jordan quickly announced she should be stripped of her leadership position. Others showed up on Hannity to drum up momentum. Having a GOP House leader vote for impeachment is “untenable,” Rep. Matt Gaetz said, showing he knows the word untenable.

The distinguishing characteristic of the House Republican Caucus right now is that whenever you say, “Could they be that stupid?” the answer—always—is, “Oh yes!”

That is how to kill the party in American national life—the men make it clear that the woman can’t be brave, that they rough her up because she stood on principle. This week, before the vote, Mr. Jordan was awarded the Medal of Freedom. I am not sure that great honor will ever recover. No press were allowed, but I’m sure the ceremony was elevated, like P.T. Barnum knighting Tom Thumb with a wooden sword in the center ring of the circus.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Ms. Cheney told reporters Wednesday, and good for her. As this was written, there was a rumor it had dawned on her antagonists that there might be a backlash if the only woman in leadership was ejected. So they thought they might replace her with—a woman! They could be this crude, but I can’t believe it. I can’t imagine any woman would be so classless, so happy to be used, so craven that she’d be switched in for a woman who took a brave stand based on conscience. There’d be a pall over that woman for years.

For the senators who will try the impeachment, a thought: It’s time to demystify Donald Trump. He leaves the presidency disgraced. He is a diminishing asset: postpresidential power always wanes, and will especially in this case. He can’t tweet his insta-attacks. Not all of his supporters are rocked and disheartened, but some are: What happened on 1/6 was wrong, has been seen by the country as wrong, and people are going to go to jail for it. Thousands turned up that day, but only thousands, in a nation of 330 million. The more time passes, the more we will learn how sinister it was. Evangelicals are having true and meaningful arguments about the meaning of the past five years. So much of Trump’s mystique rests on his wealth and worldly success, but they too are diminishing. Other, newer, younger candidates will draw attention. Just as establishment Republicans have known they cannot win without the Trump base, the Trump base is about to learn they cannot win without non-Trump Republicans. To come together eventually, in coming years, the Normals will have to agree to a party with more-populist inflections. The populists will have to cede something too. Quietly, over time, that will be Mr. Trump himself.

In running in fear from him you are running from a corpse. And you’ll never be safe anyway. Something wild has been let loose. So be brave. The Democrats want you tied to Mr. Trump forever. Stop, now.

I end with—well, my imagination. But I’ve got a hunch. We’ve got the simmering, resentful, enraged man in the White House, a man who due to his position is dangerous. You never know what he’s going to do. That’s why no one in America has had a normal sleep pattern since Jan. 5.

And yet—systems are maintaining. It’s as if sane, good people have set themselves to making sure everything is smooth, not endangered by a mad person. Perhaps this has to do with some of those who have been endlessly put down the past five years—governmental servants. The sober, boring people who don’t say they’re patriots but are patriots. I have a feeling we will look back—in time, after journalists and historians do their work—and find that some very specific people were deeply protective of their country. And maybe the 25th Amendment figuratively kicked in, informally, almost spontaneously, quietly. I am guessing a network of souls are quietly doing their jobs, establishing protocols of safety, wordlessly nodding as they keep their hand on the tiller. They’ve taken the keys from the drunk, so quietly he doesn’t even know. I’m imagining a mix of people—deputy secretaries and assistants to assistants and generals and some elected officials. Nancy Pelosi nattered on about how she’s on the horn with the Joint Chiefs, but beyond that no mistakes seem to have been made, and at least she stopped.

I just have a feeling our much-maligned establishments are saving the day. A former cabinet official said to me this week, “Trump never understood our institutions.” He never understood how strong and deeply layered they are. The agencies held, the military, the courts. Because Mr. Trump is purely transactional, he thought if he appointed Neil, Brett and Amy, they’d naturally do his bidding because that’s how the world works. But it’s not always how the world works. This week the Supreme Court blandly refused to fast-track his latest election appeal. They did it quietly, without comment.

I have a feeling there was a lot of quiet stature around us all along.

And they were quietly thinking: Don’t mess with my country. But they didn’t say mess.

How do we deal with all that has happened?

We remember who we are. We are a great nation and a strong one; we have, since our beginning, been a miracle in the political history of man. We have brought much good. We are also in trouble, no point not admitting it.

We regain our confidence. We’ve got through trouble before. We love this place and will keep it. We have a Constitution that’s gotten us this far and will get us further.

We lower the boom. No civilized country can accept or allow what we saw Wednesday with the violent assault on the U.S. Capitol. This was an attack on democracy itself. That is not just a phrase. Rule by the people relies on adherence to law and process. The assault and siege was an attempt to stop the work of democracy by halting the peaceful transfer of presidential power, our crowning glory for more than two centuries.

This was a sin against history.

When something like this happens it tends to be repeated. It is our job to make sure it is not.

And so we should come down like a hammer on all those responsible, moving with brute dispatch against members of the mob and their instigators.

On the rioters: Find them, drag them out of their basements, and bring them to justice. Use all resources, whatever it takes, with focus and speed. We have pictures of half of them; they like to pose. They larked about taking selfies and smiling unashamed smiles as one strolled out with a House podium. They were so arrogant they were quoted by name in news reports. It is our good luck they are idiots. Capitalize on that luck.

Throw the book at them. Make it a book of commentaries on the Constitution. Throw it hard.

They have shamed and embarrassed their country in the eyes of the world, which is not only a painful fact but a dangerous one. The world, and the young—all of us—need to see them pay the price.

Now to the devil and his apprentices.

As for the chief instigator, the president of the United States, he should be removed from office by the 25th Amendment or impeachment, whichever is faster. This, with only a week and a half to go, would be a most extraordinary action, but this has been an extraordinary time. Mike Pence is a normal American political figure; he will not have to mount a new government; he appears to be sane; he will in this brief, strange interlude do fine.

The president should be removed for reasons of justice—he urged a crowd to march on Congress, and, when it turned violent, had to be dragged into telling them, equivocally, to go home—and prudence. Mitt Romney had it exactly right: “What happened here . . . was an insurrection, incited by the president of the United States.” As for prudence, Mr. Trump is a sick, bad man and therefore, as president, a dangerous one. He has grown casually bloody-minded, nattering on about force and denouncing even his own vice president as a coward for not supporting unconstitutional measures. No one seems to be certain how Mr. Trump spends his days. He doesn’t bother to do his job. The White House is in meltdown. The only thing that captures his interest is the fact that he lost, which fills him with thoughts of vengeance.

Removing him would go some distance to restoring our reputation, reinforcing our standards, and clarifying constitutional boundaries for future presidents who might need it.

As for his appointees and staff, the garbage they talk to rationalize their staying is no longer acceptable to anyone. “But my career.” Your career, in the great scheme of things, is nothing. “But my future in politics.” Your future, even if your wildest schemes are fulfilled, is a footnote to a footnote. There are ways to be a footnote honorably. “But my kids.” When they are 20 they will read the history. You want them proud of your role, not petitioning the court for a name change.

It was honorable to arrive with high hopes and idealistic commitments. It is not honorable to stay.

As for the other instigators, a side note.

True conservatives tend to have a particular understanding of the fragility of things. They understand that every human institution is, in its way, built on sand. It’s all so frail. They see how thin the veil is between civilization and chaos, and understand that we have to go through every day, each in our way, trying to make the veil thicker. And so we value the things in the phrase that others use to disparage us, “law and order.” Yes, always, the rule of law, and order so that the people of a great nation can move freely on the streets and do their work and pursue their lives.

To the devil’s apprentices, Sens. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz. They are clever men, highly educated, well-credentialed, endlessly articulate. They see themselves as leading conservative lights, but in this drama they have proved themselves punks practicing punk politics. They are like people who know the value of nothing, who see no frailty around them, who inherited a great deal—an estate built by the work and wealth of others—and feel no responsibility for maintaining the foundation because pop gave them a strong house, right? They are careless inheritors of a nation, an institution, a party that previous generations built at some cost.

They backed a lie and held out the chimera of some possible Trump victory that couldn’t happen, and hid behind the pretense that they were just trying to be fair to all parties and investigate any suspicions of vote fraud, when what they were really doing was playing—coolly, with lawyerly sophistication—not to the base but to the sickness within the base. They should have stood up and told the truth, that democracy moves forward, that the election was imperfect as all elections are, and more so because of the pandemic rules, which need to be changed, but the fact is the voters of America chose Biden-Harris, not Trump-Pence.

Here’s to you, boys. Did you see the broken glass, the crowd roaming the halls like vandals in late Rome, the staff cowering in locked closets and barricading offices? Look on your mighty works and despair.

The price they will pay is up to their states. But the reputational cost should be harsh and high.

Again, on the president: There have been leaders before who, facing imminent downfall, decide to tear everything down with them. They want to go out surrounded by flames. Hitler, at the end, wanted to blow up Germany, its buildings and bridges. His people had let him down. Now he hated them. They must suffer.

I have resisted Nazi comparisons for five years, for the most part easily. But that is like what is happening here, the same kind of spirit, as the president departs, as he angrily channel-surfs in his bunker.

He is a bad man and not a stable one and he is dangerous. America is not safe in his hands.

It is not too late. Removal of the president would be the prudent move, not the wild one. Get rid of him. Now.

You have to go into this year with dreams, there’s no other way to do it. We’re still in an epic struggle, and it will be a while before things settle down into some approximation of normal. Dreams are how we got through 2020, or maybe not dreams precisely but a picture you kept in your head that helped you keep going, that captured what you missed and will have again. It was a picture of When the Pandemic is Over and we carried it in our psychic wallets.

My friend John’s picture: He’s in Fenway Park, the seats are full and close together, and he orders a Fenway Frank and chowder, and the other people in the row pass them down without fear or masks. Someone gets a hit and no one’s afraid to cheer. He is certain this will come.

My friend the professor would see this: He and his students are in a room, and he is teaching them. For what seems like forever they’ve been postage-size faces on Gallery View on Zoom, which is how they see him. But in his head they’re together and know each other and he’s Mr. Chips again, not Max Headroom.

A friend who’s a reporter kept in her head the idea of future spontaneity. She’d be on the phone with a friend: Whatcha doin’? Wanna get in a car and get lost? What if we just show up and surprise them? Let’s see who’s in town.

My vision of 2021, the picture I held of that future, came into my head in early summer. This would come: We are gathered in a darkened theater, 1,500 of us, for the first time since March 2020. The orchestra starts, the curtain rises, and on the stage a crowded old railroad coach is in full cry. The train conductor booms, “River City next station stop!” And in the audience applause starts, unplanned, just erupting, and the actors playing the salesmen on the train play through. “Ya can talk-talk-talk. . . . Ya can talk all ya wanna, but it’s different than it was.” Suddenly a tall man in a natty suit comes forward: “Gentlemen, you intrigue me. I think I’ll have to give Iowa a try.” It’s Professor Harold Hill, the Music Man. He’s played by Hugh Jackman. We’re at the revival that was supposed to open in 2020. Now pent-up emotion really breaks out and what builds is a wave of unstoppable cheers, and then we can’t help it, we stand. And Mr. Jackman understands this moment, and after a minute he stops the show, and in a great flourish, as if speaking for all the history of the theater past and present, makes a deep and graceful bow. As if theater itself were bowing to all of those by whom it lives.

And all of us know: Theater is back. The thing we loved, that stands for New York City, that is this city, the stage, has returned. And we applaud for 4 minutes and 18 seconds straight, and in that time we realize we’ll never get over this moment, this first show when we knew the great pandemic was over. And life went on.

The great comeback of 2021 is surely coming, at least according to the new picture I have in my head, and it will be led and fed by the idea of pent-upness. There’s so much pent-up desire for joy out there. Surely it will begin to explode in late spring, with vaccines more available and a spreading sense that things are easing off, and be fully anarchic by summer.

Growth will come back, people will burst out, it’s going to be exciting. Businesses will start to come back to office buildings and see if that works. The great newsrooms will be full and bustling with noise again, and the young hire will be given a desk, not a Zoom link. We will call old friends for dinner and meet at crowded restaurants and everyone will be grateful for each other. Some people will go a little crazy and say how about a long weekend in Paris, and we’ll do it and not only for fun but to see that Paris is still there.

There will be a hunger to be out there again, en masse again. On the streets of my city at night it was once fairly common to see glamorous men in tuxedos and women in satin shawls. We are going to see them hailing a car and on their way to a party again. The young will come out of their apartments and flood into the streets dressed in all the colors in the world.

There will be much wreckage to get through, no point in not seeing that. It is odd that after almost a year the government doesn’t seem to have its hands around the number of small-business closings. Yelp reported that 60% of its listed small businesses that had closed as of August would never reopen. An estimated 164,000 had closed, 98,000 of them permanently. The numbers may be higher: A study from the University of California, Santa Cruz found that in May, the number of small-business owners was “down by 2.2 million or 15 percent from February,” although it had risen 7% in April.

There’s always a lot of churn in small businesses each year, but walk any city or town now, and there’s an unforgivingly targeted nature to this catastrophe. It’s not only “job loss” or even dream loss; small businesses are the beating heart of everything. Salons, restaurants, shoe stores—they’re where people go and gather. They keep the streets alive. They need support, and in my city it’s not only the pandemic doing them in. Real-estate firms have bought up buildings and closed the shops below to build expensive condos. They’re removing part of what made people want to live in the neighborhood, the stores and their street traffic, the sense of liveliness and the commerce they bring.

What guts it will take the owners and workers of small business to keep going, or start again, or shift weight and go into something else, something new.

The theologian Paul Tillich wrote about the difference between fear and anxiety. Fear is of something, you can name it and face it, and in the facing of it lift your own morale, show yourself what’s in you. Anxiety is amorphous; it doesn’t quite have an object, it’s a state. And so it’s harder to shake and no empowering necessarily comes from it. A lot of people this year will have to break down a generalized anxiety into specific fears and deal with them courageously.

America has been through so much this year—world-wide illness, lockdowns, death, sickness, searing arguments about how to handle it all. We tried to do what we had never done before, close everything down to fight a disease and each day, in real time, face the economic, social and cultural repercussions. The personal ones, too. It’s going to be the work of years to dig ourselves out fully, but there are many reasons to believe we can and will.

My idea of an appropriate American attitude comes from Carl Sandburg, in his poem, “The People, Yes”: “This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.”

That wouldn’t be a bad picture to keep in our heads for 2021, the laughing anvil.

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Twenty twenty defies summation. All of us tried; no words ever seemed to capture the whole. But three things are true:

You’ll tell your grandchildren about this year, you’ll never forget this year, and your life changed this year, though it may be some time before you know in exactly what way and how much.

For now, just scroll down. Go to any social-media account and scroll back to March. You’ll see videos that still have the power to bring tears to the eyes—people in Italy serenading each other from balconies; New York erupting in the 7 p.m. beating of pots and pans.

As we scrolled down through this column’s archives, the year flashed before our eyes.

In February we were alarmed: We’d been following the virus in China and Italy and felt certain that something bad was coming. There were 13 cases in Canada and one, origin unknown, in California: “We live in a global world. Everybody’s going everyplace all the time. Nothing is contained in the ways it used to be. It seems to me impossible that there are not people walking along the streets in the U.S. who have it, don’t know it and are spreading it.” We thought what was coming would decide the 2020 election. If the virus hit hard, “it is going to change a lot—the national mood, our cultural habits, the economy.” Was the president up to the challenge? “Or has he finally met a problem he can’t talk his way out of?”

Criticism came in sharp and heavy: We were fear-mongering.

In mid-March we urged readers and leaders to become “health hawks”: “Close the schools a few weeks. . . . Cancel celebrations. Marry but have the wedding party later.”

A week later, courage was all around us: “We are surrounded by nobility.” We must thank again and again those keeping us going, “the garbagemen and truckers, the people who stock the shelves and man the counters.”

By April, America had changed who it cheers. A nurse in New Jersey sent a series of texts: “Our dead are multiplying in my hospital. We have a refrigerated trailer behind the hospital for the bodies. We went from one to 3 to 9 in 3 days.”

Everyone in her town was gathering Fridays at dusk—they’d go to the edge of their property and wave to each other, yell hello. “They applauded me,” she wrote.

We teased: “Because you’re cute and sexy.”

“No,” she said, with wonder. “Because I’m a nurse.” In 30 years that had never happened to her.

Soon after came a great observation of 2020. “We are not all in the same boat. We are all in the same storm.” It came from the writer Damian Barr, on Twitter. He was right. Some were in yachts, some rowing alone in small skiffs. Some would sail through, health and professions intact; others would lose both.

By May it was clear the economy was experiencing a severe contraction. “We can’t grapple only with the illness, we have to grapple with the crash. The bias now should be toward opening.” In mid-May it seemed to me there was “a class element in the public debate.” The airwaves were full of scientists and medical experts. Far less attention was being paid “to those living the economic story, such as the Dallas woman who pushed back, opened her hair salon, and was thrown in jail by a preening judge. He wanted an apology. She said she couldn’t apologize for trying to feed her family.”

Regular people were suffering. Red states were pushing back harder than blue states, not because they didn’t think there was a pandemic but because they were seeing it this way: “Hundreds of thousands could die and the American economy taken down, which would mean millions of other casualties, economic ones. Or, hundreds of thousands could die and the American economy is damaged but still stands, in which case there will be fewer economic casualties—fewer bankruptcies and foreclosures, fewer unemployed and ruined.” They thought the latter better.

That column got a lot of pushback, too.

Some three months into the pandemic, in late May, we saw a new reflectiveness. People were thinking deeply about what they value, who they are: “Here is what I am certain of. We will emerge a plainer people in a plainer country, and maybe a deeper one. Something big inside us shifted.”

Even in one sliver of national life, fashion, something was changing. “The world has admired and imitated America’s crisp chic,” but “for reasons economic and existential a new simplicity is coming, glitz leaving.” This would be especially true of those over 40, but that’s more than half the country. “We’re getting pared down. We’re paring ourselves down.”

Andre Leon Talley, former creative director at Vogue, agreed: “I think more people will be dressed, when we come out of this pandemic, in almost Amish stoicism—a simple uniform of basic wash and dry. It’s going to be difficult for fashion to exist as a mainstream addiction.”

By June a major political shift: “ Donald Trump’s hold on history loosened, and may be breaking. In some new way his limitations are being seen and acknowledged.” Judgment of his pandemic leadership had settled in: “He denied the scope and scale of the crisis.”

At the same time social upheaval surrounding the death of George Floyd was sweeping the country. The cultural reverberations of that upheaval will be felt for decades. It couldn’t have been more consequential—protests, riots. From the president, photo-ops and “angry, blustering tweets” flew from the White House “like panicked bats fleeing flames.”

We lauded the most transcendent moment of the campaign, Rep. Jim Clyburn’s endorsement of Joe Biden, which made him the nominee, and welcomed vice-presidential nominee Kamala Harris to the fray.

Important to us personally: Last March we dreamed up a legislative action we think right and just. We know who kept America going during the pandemic—the stackers, counter clerks and others, some of whom were here illegally. When this is over, give them full U.S. citizenship, no questions or penalties. This week we received word the government of France has proposed just that, offering naturalization to hundreds of workers who helped that nation through the pandemic.

Joe Biden, Mitch McConnell: This would be a grand first piece of bipartisan legislation.

Finally, in the middle of this year we marked a personal milestone, the 20th anniversary of this column. From the beginning the intention each week was to try to answer these questions: What’s happening? What’s true? What am I seeing? Are you seeing it too? Then we’re not alone!

The key is to try to say clearly what you believe to be true, even if it makes people mad. Especially if they get mad—that means you’re over the target. Among my antagonists this year: an angry president, (“Peggy Noonan, a ‘Concast’ MSDNC @WSJ puppet, doesn’t have a clue,” Donald Trump tweeted on Aug. 1) indignant cable-news anchors and personalities who didn’t like my criticism of Kamala Harris on the trail, enraged Trumpers who called us elitist, and Never Trumpers who called us blind.

This little space was in the thick of it. What did it feel like? Like what it is, a privilege. To be here, to be part of it, to get to say what you see, especially in this of all years.

Who’s that battered old man making his way down shuttered streets, facemask hanging from an ear, IV pole dragging at his side. A poignant figure. Didn’t he used to be someone?

But wait, look. He’s not walking, he’s marching. Like he’s got his old strut back. As if he just remembered who he is.

That was the picture that came to mind on Monday. We were like America of old. And I’m not sure we’re fully seeing it. But on that day our Constitution did what it was built to do, prevail. And our scientific genius and spirit of invention asserted themselves as national features that still endure.

So here’s to you, Dec. 14, 2020. You provided a very good ending to a very bad year.

On that day the winner of the 2020 election was formally declared president-elect by the Electoral College. This would normally be a formality, but this year it had—let’s call it deeper than usual resonance. Presidential electors met and voted throughout the day in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The vote was 306-232. It was done as in the past, in an orderly manner without great incident.

For all the postelection threats and accusations the system held. It turns out some words in a 4,543-word document that was ratified 232 years ago, on June 21, 1788, still had the last say. Article II, Section 1: “The electors shall meet in their respective states.” The 12th Amendment, ratified in 1804, established procedures more specifically and clarified confusions that had caused mischief in the election of 1800.

Our mess of an election has finally, officially, irrefutably been resolved. We owe this to the brilliance of our Founders, but we deserve credit too for our continued fidelity to their vision. (Those who would abolish the Electoral College: Keep in mind the role it just played.)

Three days before the electors met, the Supreme Court, often now referred to as “the conservative court,” refused to hear a case that implied the election’s illegitimacy. There had long been accusatory talk that justices would, if they got the opportunity, vote with the man or party that had appointed them. But no. They’d read the Constitution too.

On Dec. 14 it was clear: Structures stood, institutions served their purpose, we kept our wits about us. The rule of law prevailed, including the tradition that you need more than a theory or notion to make a case, you actually need facts.

The young have learned many unfortunate lessons from the grown-ups the past few years, but that was a wholesome one, and it too will have reverberations.

The second big thing that happened Monday: the human and scientific miracle of the first Covid-19 vaccines began that day to arrive at American medical centers and be administered to health-care professionals. You saw the pictures of nurses getting the shots from doctors, and health-care workers in Boston dancing in the hospital parking lot. It was beautiful. Shipments of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine carried about three million doses, and they arrived—this is so American—by UPS and FedEx. I don’t know why that pleases me so much, but it does. I keep wondering who signed for the delivery.

All this was done against the odds, against scientific history—no vaccine had ever been developed and produced so quickly—and by a country battered by illness. People slept in their offices to get this thing done. The ability of drug companies to shift focus, reorient research and development, race for an answer—all this is a triumph of medical science, of manufacture and distribution. They retrofitted factories to ensure manufacturing capacity even before the Food and Drug Administration approved the inoculations. The sheer scientific brain power involved, the level of organization demanded, all came at record speed. Billions came from the U.S. government; big profits will be made. I don’t care. This was a kind of greatness. We all decry Big Pharma, and high prices, and opioids. We like to hate them. I like to hate them. But look what they did.

Our country got pummeled by an illness, and we did this. Really there must be more to us than we think.

A bad thing also made itself clear this week. We’ve written of it in the past and will in the future. It is that the estrangement between average working people and the elites of government and media, here defined as people who regularly or will eventually appear on cable news, has become deeper. I believe we’ve been witnessing an utter lack of empathy for—actually an inability or unwillingness to hear—the owners of small businesses that have had to close up or limit services or recede in general during the pandemic. I believe small-business men and women looked up during this holiday season, on which they depend so much to make a living, and saw uncaring officials and unpredictable, seemingly political fiats and decisions. And I am certain they thought: Our elites don’t care about us at all. They don’t even think they have to imitate caring.

The professional class of politicians, media people, scientists and credentialed chatterers care about business in the abstract—“small-business bankruptcies” concern them; they have a sense some people will lose livelihoods. But they have no particular heart for them. They never betray any appreciation of the romance of opening a place and being your own boss and offering a good product and being part of the town and being a success. They don’t understand the sacrifice it takes. Or that the shuttering of a store is, literally, the death of a dream.

The growing estrangement between the elites and everyone else has for years been a preoccupation of this column. Historians looking back will see the capsizing of small businesses and jobs in America, and how owners were allowed to drown, as a deepener of that estrangement.

It seems a funny thing to say of public policy, but so much of what doesn’t work in life has to do with an absence of love.

We’ll be seeing the working out of this further estrangement over the next decade. It will have big political implications.

But for now—well, for now it has been a good week, one of triumphs. In one day our Constitution and our scientific inventiveness came through. Every time Elon Musk sends up a rocket I think: That used to be us. This week that was still us.

I have been rereading Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931), a poet whose work was important to me as a child. He was half crazy, almost a genius and his subject was America. When I was thinking about this column, I remembered Lindsay’s “General William Booth Marches Into Heaven,” about the death in 1912 of the Salvation Army’s founder.

And this is how I imagined Uncle Sam:

Booth led boldly with his big bass drum . . .
The Saints smiled gravely and they said: “He’s come.” . . .
Booth died blind and still by Faith he trod,
Eyes still dazzled by the ways of God.
Booth led boldly, and he looked the chief
Eagle countenance in sharp relief,
Beard a-flying, air of high command
Unabated in that holy land.

Unabated. Exactly right.

I want to stick with Margaret Chase Smith this week, in part because I can’t get my mind off her and in part because we have a new Congress coming in, the 117th, to be sworn in on Jan. 3, and its members could benefit from Smith’s rules of the road. She was the first senator of either party to stand up to Joe McCarthy. Her fellow Republicans scrammed: McCarthy was popular back home. So did Democrats; they feared McCarthy too. What she’d done and suffered through made her name. History appreciated her, and so did flinty, independent Maine.

The problem with McCarthy was that he was reckless and cynical but there was some truth in his overall position. There were communists in the U.S. government. Alger Hiss was one. But not the 205 or 81 of them he’d claim, and not the innocent people he smeared and whose lives he ruined. So standing against him was a delicate thing: Your moral disapproval had to be both compelling and calibrated, acknowledging the truth but asserting other, higher, longer-ranged truths.

She did that. What can those being sworn in learn from her?

• Know what you’re about and say it. Smith wasn’t much for grand political theory; she was plainer than that and closer to the ground. But she knew why she belonged to her party and she had a picture of it in her head. Her Republican Party was Lincoln’s party of justice and mercy, Teddy Roosevelt’s of “trustbusting,” Dwight D. Eisenhower’s of “peace” and “world leadership.” David Richards, director of the Margaret Chase Smith Library in Skowhegan, Maine, told me, “Being a politician in her conception was about service and conscience more than ideology.” But she had a philosophical approach and she didn’t shy from stating it. In her stump speech when she ran for president in 1964 she said, “I call myself a moderate or independent Republican. I operate independently of the party but I never fight the organization.” She named where she stood: “I am at the left of [Barry] Goldwater, and at the right of [Nelson] Rockefeller.”

• If you want to be believed, say it straight. She didn’t think public remarks should be fancy, and she probably wouldn’t recognize the airy, edgeless statements we mistake for eloquence. “My speeches in the Senate are blunt and to the point,” she said. “I do not indulge in political oratory.” “I study the facts, make up my mind, and stick to my decisions. I never dodge an issue.”

• Your state is more than a platform for your rise. Her connection to Maine was almost mystical. “She was Maine,” said her biographer, Patricia L. Schmidt, author of “Margaret Chase Smith: Beyond Convention,” by telephone. What deepened her knowledge is that her entire life had been one long status shift. Her mother was a waitress, her father a barber; she was the oldest of six and didn’t go to college but to work at the telephone company. She wound up as ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, putting the CEO of Lockheed on hold.

She knew how the salesgirl at the five-and-dime saw the world because she’d been one; how businesspeople thought because she’d been one of them, too. She wasn’t exactly awed by the patriarchy. Her father was an alcoholic and not fully stable, her late husband a philanderer who hurt and embarrassed her. (No one knew, but she quietly supported the mother of his illegitimate child, Ms. Schmidt says.) From this emotional background she rose to social respectability, which was her real status shift and allowed her to be an outsider-insider.

Travel broadens but struggle deepens, and gives you unexpected insights. When she was at odds with the sentiment of her state she didn’t think: My people hold some old-fashioned views, I’ll have to be careful. She felt leaders set an example of how to think, make an argument for a point of view, help bring people along. She believed the imperative of politics was not to accept but to improve.

• Don’t abandon the middle ground, which actually exists. We’re a big and varied country. Maine isn’t Mississippi. People can be ornery about their rights and slippery about their responsibilities. No one likes being lectured. Lead toward your conception of the right but always seek middle ground. Never leave it abandoned. Do that and the country splits into separate camps.

• Understand you won’t always be appreciated. Smith was a breakthrough woman who encouraged women to enter politics. She backed an Equal Rights Amendment, but 1970s feminists didn’t acknowledge her accomplishments and called her “elitist,” by which they meant “Republican.” An idiot from the National Organization for Women said Smith stood for “everything women in the liberation movement want to eliminate.” Smith in turn didn’t like their lack of decorum and criticized their air of anger and grievance. She felt those attitudes would cause division in the great center, and that change lasts when it comes through inspiration, not accusation.

• People need concrete help. If Smith were with us now, she would doubtless wear a face mask—she’d lived through the 1918 flu pandemic—and she would lacerate the government for not sending facemasks to every American last spring. If it didn’t have them in reserve it should have admitted it, not gone back and forth about whether masks are necessary. Health officials could have told people how to make them at home; they could have sent cloth. I imagine her saying, “You can’t suddenly change your mind and command people to go to the drugstore or Amazon. Not everyone has a computer, not everyone has a charge card; it’s your job to help them!”

• Spirit has its place. Smith didn’t much like John F. Kennedy ; she saw him as a Massachusetts glamour boy. She was willing to work with him when he became president, but it started out rocky when she fought one of his foreign-policy appointments because his oil interests might skew his thinking on the Mideast. JFK took revenge by visiting Maine and forgetting to invite her to the greeting party. She ignored the snub, jumped on a plane, went anyway, and merrily waved at the crowds. Seeing her moxie, he changed tack. Would she like to ride back to Washington with him on gleaming Air Force One? No, she said, snubbing him back. And made sure the story got around. Later he called her “formidable.”

• Human sentiment matters. It’s not a byproduct of a political life, or any life, it’s the product. People should have honest feelings and show them, as opposed to, say, commoditizing your emotions for public consumption. When JFK died there was a lot of oratory in the Senate. She didn’t speak. She listened for a while and then crossed the aisle, unpinned the rose she wore each day on her lapel, and placed it quietly on his old desk. Everyone saw. No one touched that rose for days. I remember hearing years ago that when Smith died, on Memorial Day 1995, someone put a rose on her old desk. No one knows who, but the rose went similarly undisturbed. I’m not sure it’s true, but it should be.

History can sometimes help us through current moments by showing what’s needed and providing inspiration.

This year marks the 70th anniversary of a great act by a great lady. Margaret Chase Smith was a U.S. representative from 1940-49 and a senator from 1949-73. Her name is always followed by “the first”—the first woman to serve as a senator from Maine, first to serve in both the House and Senate, first to have her name placed in nomination for the presidency at a major party convention.

She was generally considered a moderate to liberal Republican, and sometimes called a progressive one. She wanted to provide citizens the help they needed to become fully integrated into society and productive within it.

She was independent and made this clear early. She was initially the only member from Maine to support Lend-Lease and extension of the draft. She survived these votes because she understood her state: It was isolationist but also patriotic, against war but for preparedness, and Mainers didn’t like partisanship messing with foreign policy. She was for civil rights, supported Social Security and Medicare. She had a strong sense of where she was from, and felt the civic romance of it. She told biographer Patricia L. Schmidt that she loved Maine’s small-town church spires, and her dream was to see that each town had the money to buy a spotlight so the white spires could be seen for miles at night.

She faced criticism from the right. No, she’d blandly state on being questioned, union leaders hadn’t endorsed her in the last election, but she couldn’t help it if union members loved her.

She was by nature honest and humorous. Her dignity and simplicity led people to think her a blue blood, but her roots were modest. Her mother worked at a shoe factory, her father as a hotel clerk and barber. She got her first job at 13 in a five-and-dime, didn’t go to college, and became a telephone operator. She was proud of all this and liked to speak of her roots, not to brag about her steep climb but as a kind of affirmation: Look what’s possible in America.

She’d married a local politician who became a congressman, Clyde Smith. When he died in 1940 she filled the remaining months in his term and was re-elected in the first of many landslides. There were Mrs. Smith Goes to Washington clubs.

She never asked anyone to vote for her because she was a woman, but because she was the better candidate. Still, she thought women brought particular “sensibilities” to office: “The thing that concerns women more than anything else is the betterment of social conditions of the masses. Women are needed in government for the very traits of character that some people claim disqualify them.”

She could be wry. NBC’s Robert Trout once asked what she’d do if she woke up in the White House. “I think I’d go right to Mrs. Truman and apologize. And then I’d go home.” She thought a lot about how other people heard things. When she spoke to grade-school children, she always explained that though it is true she sat on the floor of the Senate, she wasn’t really sitting on the floor.

But it is her “Declaration of Conscience” speech for which she is best remembered. It was 1950 and she was increasingly disturbed by Sen. Joe McCarthy’s anticommunist crusade. In February he’d made his speech in Wheeling, W.Va., charging communists had infiltrated the U.S. government at the highest levels. He claimed to have 205 names of known communists; in later statements he put the number at 57 and 81.

The base of the party found his opposition to the communist swamp in Washington electrifying. His wildness and disrespect for norms was seen as proof of authenticity: He’s one of us and fighting for us.

Smith was anticommunist enough that Nikita Khrushchev later described her as “blinded by savage hatred,” and she was certain communism would ultimately fail. But you don’t defeat it with lies.

She always listened closely when McCarthy spoke. Once he said he was holding in his hand “a “photostatic copy” of the names of communists. She asked to see it. It proved nothing. Her misgiving increased.

She didn’t want to move against him. She was new to the Senate; he was popular in Maine. She waited for her colleagues. They said nothing.

Finally she’d had enough. On June 1, 1950, she became the first Republican to speak out. On the way to the chamber Joe McCarthy suddenly appeared. “Margaret,” he said, “you look very serious. Are you going to make a speech?”

“Yes,” she said, “and you will not like it.”

He has some intelligence network, she thought. It left her rattled.

She took her seat. McCarthy was two rows behind her. When she was recognized she said the Senate needed to do “some soul-searching.” The Constitution “speaks not only of the freedom of speech but also of trial by jury instead of trial by accusation.” Those “who shout the loudest about Americanism” are ignoring “some of the basic principles of Americanism,” including the right to hold unpopular beliefs and to independent thought. Exercising those rights “should not cost one single American citizen his reputation or his right to his livelihood, nor should he be in danger of losing his reputation or livelihood merely because he happens to know someone who holds unpopular beliefs. Who of us does not? Otherwise none of us could call our souls our own.”

People are tired of “being afraid of speaking their mind lest they be politically smeared as ‘Communists’ or ‘Fascists.’ . . . Freedom of speech is not what it used to be in America.”

She took on both parties, accusing the Democrats of showing laxness and “complacency” toward “the threat of communism here at home,” and the Republicans of allowing innocent people to be smeared.

She feared a fiery McCarthy rebuttal. He quietly left the room. She was praised in some quarters— Bernard Baruch said if a man had given that speech, he’d be the next president—and damned in others. Her colleagues didn’t like being shown up by a woman.

McCarthy got her dumped from a subcommittee. The Maine press didn’t like that and pushed back: “They Done Our Girl Dirt.”

Her speaking slot at the 1952 Republican convention was pulled. She told biographers that at first she was given 25 minutes in a prominent spot, then 15. Finally House Minority Leader Joe Martin told her she could have five minutes. “And you have to represent a minority.”

“What do you mean a minority?” Smith asked.

“You represent the women,” he said. She passed.

Yet she had three more landslides to come. Maine admired her independence and integrity. She didn’t lose a re-election bid until 1972. She was almost 75. Times had changed.

What are we saying?

When history hands you a McCarthy—reckless, heedlessly manipulating his followers—be a Margaret Chase Smith. If your McCarthy is saying a whole national election was rigged, an entire system corrupted, you’d recognize such baseless charges damage democracy itself. You wouldn’t let election officials be smeared. You’d stand against a growing hysteria in the base.

You’d likely pay some price. But years later you’d still be admired for who you were when it counted so much.

It’s been a fairly gruesome year—pandemic, lockdowns, economic woe, death and illness. We’ve done a column in past years asking friends and acquaintances what they’re thankful for. This year we emailed a dozen people whom we respect and who know a lot, asking what they’d seen, experienced or realized this annus horribilis that left them moved or grateful. It could be personal or galactic in scope, concrete or abstract, but not political, and it had to be particular to this year.

An investor who feared he wouldn’t see much of his grown kids since they’d flown the coop is awed to be living with them in crowded, happy circumstances. A priest is grateful young people are still coming into the church. A former pollster can’t believe how Zoom kept her far-flung family together.

There was a lot of surprised gratitude for technology. A subtext emerged, unexpected gifts of the pandemic. Most of all and strikingly there was deep gratitude for the people who work on the ground in America, who kept the country functioning. Almost everyone mentioned personal thanks for grocery-store workers and truckers. For eight months we’ve read and heard stories of self-sacrifice and dedication. They have sunk in. I believe the pandemic inched forward a certain cultural shift, a broadened sense of who deserves honor.

Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, found himself awed this year by “the resilience of the human spirit”—medical professionals “risking their lives to save others, researchers racing against time for a vaccine, and countless everyday heroes delivering packages, stocking shelves.” Technology helped save the day: “When it was crucial to remain apart, technology brought us closer together in ways unimaginable just a few years ago—helping families stay connected . . . helping us all stay productive, entertained, and healthy.”

In some new way the pandemic helped reveal America to itself. Megan McArdle of the Washington Post, who helped nurse her father through his recovery from Covid: “This year I discovered how courageous people can be in the face of adversity, even grave personal danger. Our institutions may have failed us and our civic trust been savagely corroded, but everywhere you turned there were countless individuals bravely doing what they could for their neighbors. Those fine old words from William Hazlitt finally became a visceral reality for me: ‘I do not love war, but I love the courage with which men face war.’ America, I hate this pandemic but I adore your bravery, and am grateful to you for showing it to me.”

Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York said, “I’m grateful for people like Recto. Recto is a home health care worker who, before Covid, took a bus every day to care for two elderly people. When COVID hit New York City his bus route was cancelled, so he took money out of his own pocket to pay for a cab to and from, helping these people who depended on his care.”

Early in the pandemic this column asked political figures to note who was getting us through it, and to take action to help those here illegally. If you can show through pay stub or attesting letter that you worked during the pandemic of 2020, you are thereby granted full citizenship with no fines, fees or penalties. We asked a note be stapled on top: “With thanks from your grateful countrymen.” Mo Rocca of “CBS News Sunday Morning,” who is especially grateful to delivery people, had a better idea. A new immigration policy “damn well better include automatic citizenship,” for those who worked the pandemic but it should come with “a gift bag. Like a super blingy Oscar gift bag.”

Father Roger Landry, a Massachusetts priest working at the United Nations, spoke of the courage of police officers, doormen, waiters and chaplains. “Courage is not the absence of fear but doing what one should despite one’s fears. I’m grateful for those who boldly carried on while others cowered.” For some, the pandemic was a spiritual catalyst: “In the midst of widespread spiritual lockdown the hunger of so many for God was stoked.” People “started asking deeper questions about life, death and suffering, how to be selfless, to grieve with hope.” He has this year accompanied “several newly restless hearts to find the God for whom their hearts were made.”

Here are some gifts of the pandemic:

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie wound up knowing those he knows more deeply. “I watched the extraordinary generosity of friends and neighbors who helped people in desperate financial and spiritual despair because of the pandemic. It reminded me that Americans continue to be the most generous people in the world—not only financially but emotionally.”

Sen. Deb Fischer of Nebraska: “My 97 year old mom entered assisted living on Dec 30, 2019. The Senate’s April recess due to Covid gave me time to begin sorting through more than 60 years of memories in my childhood home.” She did office work online and by phone. “My parents kept everything—WW II letters, family photos, vacation scrapbooks. Toys and blue ribbons. It was a gift.” She’d show her mother what she’d found, and her mother would marvel. “I found the top of their wedding cake—a soldier in uniform standing next to his bride.” It was on a basement shelf. It’s made of ceramic or clay. Fischer now keeps it under a little glass dome. She found the letters her father wrote during the war: “‘My darling’ was his salutation.” She found her mother’s sewing box.

For Jason Gay, the Journal’s sports columnist, the lockdown carried unexpected opportunity. “This was a year of family fishing. I’d resisted it all my life—my late father loved to fish, and I couldn’t be bothered. But now my seven year old son is crazy for it, and my father is up there somewhere laughing. I grew to love the chase, and the disconnect of the natural world. Fish don’t know it’s 2020. I don’t even think fish watch cable news.”

For Willie Geist of NBC News, a fruitful, poignant conversation. “In late September, I was walking the halls of the eerily empty 30 Rockefeller Center when I ran into Herman Pinckney, a beloved custodian in the building. I was surprised when Herman told me he would retire in a couple of days, without fanfare, after 48 years on the job. As he reminisced through a mask, Herman said of the country, ‘I’ve seen a lot. We’re gonna be OK.’ I felt better immediately.”

For me this holiday weekend is quieter than usual, a traditional, raucous house party pushed back. It’s reminded all of us how we cherished our old lives of bubbling affection, and how grateful we’ll be when they return.

For now life wants to increase itself. Our trusty editor of 20 years, James Taranto, wed Anastasia, “the love of my life,” on the Fourth of July. The journalists Betsy Woodruff Swan and her husband, Jonathan, became parents of a baby girl. “At a time when it feels like death is everywhere,” she wrote, “we are incredibly grateful for the gift of a new life.”

Welcome to the world, Miss Esther Swan, a place that is more tender and beautiful than it always appears.

No hard evidence of widespread fraud, no success in the courts or prospect of it. You can have a theory that a bad thing was done, but only facts will establish it. You need to do more than what Rudy Giuliani did at his news conference Thursday, which was throw out huge, barely comprehensible allegations and call people “crooks.” You need to do more than Sidney Powell, who, at the same news conference, charged that “communist money” is behind an international conspiracy to rig the U.S. election. There was drama, hyperbole, perhaps madness. But the wilder the charges, the more insubstantial the case appeared.

More than two weeks after the election, it’s clear where this is going. The winner will be certified and acknowledged; Joe Biden will be inaugurated. But it’s right to worry about the damage being done on the journey.

It’s one thing when supporters of the president say, simply, “Let’s go through the process and see where we are.” It’s not bad to look into how messy the voting system is, not the worst to realize it needs long-term remedial attention. How did we devolve into a nation that no longer has an election night but an election month?

But the sheer nuttiness surrounding the current mess is becoming deeply destructive. Online you see the websites read by millions saying the entire election system is shot through with criminality. The headlines read: It was stolen. We have proof of coordinated vote tampering. The president has many avenues to victory. The Trump campaign sent an email under the name of formerly respectable Republican Newt Gingrich, once speaker of the House, saying “The Corruption is Unprecedented”: “It’s time for us to get MAD.” We can’t “roll over.” “Please contribute $45 RIGHT NOW to the Official Election Defense Fund.”

This isn’t a game. America isn’t your plaything. Doesn’t Mr. Gingrich realize how dangerous it is to stoke people like this, to rev them up on the idea that holding even the slightest faith in the system is for suckers?

Trump staff and supporters should know at this point that in trying to change the outcome they are doing harm—undercutting respect in and hope for democracy. Republican senators and representatives, in their silence, are allowing the idea to take hold that the whole system is rigged. This lessens faith in institutions and in their party’s reputation. Republicans were once protective of who we are and what we created in this democratic republic long ago.

Now they’re not even protecting themselves; in future years what’s happening now will give their voters an excuse not to take part or show up. What’s the point? It’s all rigged.

And they are accepting a new postelection precedent, that national results won’t be accepted until all states are certified and all legal options, even the most bizarre and absurd, exhausted. Wait until this is used against you, in 2024 or ’28. You won’t like it.

I found myself thinking this week of the 1960s and the John Birch Society, which had some power in its day as an anticommunist movement whose core belief was that officials of the U.S. government were conspiring with international communism to take down America. They were pretty wild. In time they accused Dwight D. Eisenhower, president of the United States and hero of Normandy, of being a secret communist agent.

Rising conservative leaders, embarrassed by the Birchers, didn’t wish to see their movement tainted. They also didn’t want to alienate voters who sympathized with the Birchers: Every movement has its nuts. Russell Kirk, Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley pushed back, the last calling the head of the society, Robert Welch, “far removed from common sense.” Even Ayn Rand joined in: Thinking the country’s woes were due to a communist conspiracy “is childishly naive and superficial.” Anyway, “they are not for capitalism but merely against communism.”

The John Birch Society faded because all these conservative leaders, and more, sort of congealed and took the larger weight of their movement in other directions. And so modern conservatism was born as pretty much a healthy movement, and not pretty much a sick one.

I’ve been thinking about all this because of the question: What would have happened if the John Birch Society had been online, if it had existed in the internet age when accusations, dark warnings and violent talk can rip through a country in a millisecond and anonymous voices can whip things up for profit or pleasure?

It wouldn’t have faded. It would have prospered.

We’ve all decried this aspect of the internet for 20 years; our alarm about its ability to enable and encourage extremism is so old, we forget to keep feeling it. But we’ll look back on this time as one in which the least responsible among us shook big foundations.

Responsible Republican leaders ought to congeal and address the fact that what rough faith and trust we have in the system is being damaged. Which means our ability to proceed as a healthy democracy is being damaged.

There is no realistic route to victory for the president, only to confusion and chaos and undermining. He is not going to find the votes in recounts to win the election. Dominion, the voting-machine company under attack, has not been credibly charged with doing anything wrong. As the Journal said this week in an editorial, “Strong claims need strong proof, not rumors and innuendo on Twitter. ”

The irony is that this election will be remembered for the president’s attempts to sow chaos, not for what it actually appears to have been, which is a triumph for America. In the middle of a pandemic, with new rules, there was historically high turnout. Under stress the system worked. Voters were committed, trusting, and stood in line for hours. There was no violence at the polls, no serious charges of voter suppression. In a time of legitimate hacking fears, there were no reports of foreign interference. Our defenses held. On top of all that, the outcome was moderate: for all the strife and stress of recent years, the split decision amounted to a reassertion of centrism.

You’d think the president would take his winnings and go home, because he had them. He outperformed polls and exceeded his 2016 vote total by more than 10 million. For one brief shining moment, on Nov. 3, he’d finally expanded his base to almost 50% of the electorate. He found new sources of support.

Imagine if he’d acted even remotely normal in his first term, if he’d had the intellectual, emotional and spiritual resources to moderate himself, to act respectably. Heck, imagine if he’d worn a mask. He might have won.

He is set on going out like a villain. He and his people would find this Jacksonian—he’s refusing to bow to entrenched establishments! He would think this is what his base wants—the old battler refusing to accept the illicit judgments of a decadent elite.

If he were clever and disciplined, he’d do it differently. He’d accept the election’s outcome, if not graciously at least with finality, go home to Mar-a-Lago, play golf, and have fun torturing his party by plotting his return. “I’ll be back.”

Instead he leaves behind real and politically pointless ruin.