Peggy Noonan

Those were two very different speeches Wednesday night, but both were effective and each will have an afterlife.

President Biden’s address, with its distancing, masks and half-empty audience, at first didn’t feel like the convening of a great nation’s Congress. It felt insubstantial and goofy, like they were playacting Pandemic Theatre.

Mr. Biden turned that strangeness into a virtue. His speech was conversational, unhurried, not like somebody talking to a big room and waiting for applause but more intimate. His self-presentation was that of well-meaning and peaceable man with a heart for the poor and a natural identification with working men and women. In mostly plain words he painted historically high spending and taxing as a simple and legitimate attempt, one well within the boundaries of American political tradition, to increase the nation’s quotient of happiness. “No one should have to choose between a job and paycheck, or taking care of themselves and a loved one, a parent, spouse or child.” We must help each other, isn’t this common sense? There were populist notes.

It helps Mr. Biden that nobody hates him. George W. Bush and Barack Obama were hated; Donald Trump was passionately hated; Bill Clinton, or at least “the Clintons,” were hated by the end. It’s early, but Mr. Biden is an exception to the recent rule. Not being hated is a power now.

His program has been characterized so often, by left and right, as a sweeping progressive agenda that we hereby give it that title. The SPA offers expanded child care and healthcare subsidies, preschool for all children, more family and medical leave, free community college, heavy spending on infrastructure, programs to address climate change. Nobody seems to know what the numbers are. Is it $4 trillion in new spending or $6 trillion? Four trillion in new taxes?

The president said again he is eager to negotiate with Republicans. There isn’t much evidence of this, but here are the reasons he should be treating them with respect and as equal partners. It would be good for the country to see the Senate actually working—negotiating, making deals, representing constituencies. It would be good for the Democrats to show they’re not just playing steamroller and flattening the Republicans; they’re reasoning because they’re reasonable. Also they need Republicans to co-own legislative outcomes because whatever they are they’ll be very liberal. Negotiation and compromise would suggest the increasingly powerful but relatively unpopular progressive left isn’t driving everything. Finally, it would help get the support of moderate Democrats. It isn’t only Republican voters the president was trying to persuade over the heads of Republican senators; it was moderate Democrats over the head of Bernie Sanders.

It is not good for the administration that it is increasingly seen as in the pocket of the progressive left. In a virtual town hall last week, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was highly enthusiastic. The Biden White House has “exceeded expectations progressives had,” she said. “I think a lot of us expected a much more conservative administration.” The White House’s willingness to work closely with progressives has been “very impressive.” “There has been a lot of openness and willingness and flexibility in incorporating many of our goals, requests, demands, etc.”

That was saying the quiet part out loud.

On the other hand, the president isn’t looking or acting as if he’s been dragged left. He seems to enjoy no longer having to be a moderate in sync with the Delaware of the 1980s and ’90s. The pandemic has been hard. He’s letting his inner Fighting Bob LaFollette out and having fun being popular with people in the party who never liked him. He reportedly bragged to cable anchors this week that no one thought he could unite his party, but he has.

The SPA has been called a gamble, and of course it is. Will a majority of Americans back it in the end, will it produce inflation or other harmful effects? Republicans, understandably and legitimately, warn against high spending and high taxing and anticipate big voter pushback. That’s how it’s always been: Mr. Clinton raises taxes in 1993 and gets a brutal midterm in ’94; Mr. Obama invents ObamaCare in 2009 and gets clobbered in ’10. Amy Walter of Cook Political Report says watch the suburbs: Liesl Hickey, a GOP strategist, has been involved in qualitative research on suburban voters in battleground states, and college-educated men and women there are “cautiously optimistic” about the future because the country is “correcting,” returning to normal. But “higher taxes and spending” are big concerns.

All this sounds right, and yet. I’m not sure things are as predictable as in the past. The chess pieces are moving all over the board. My eyes and ears tell me that in the past year America began a deep reconsideration of how it lives, and how things have always been. The process of the big rethink will become clearer in the next few years, but I sense the young, those in their 20s and 30s and maybe older, are questioning that oldest American tradition: ambition. Hunger to make your own circumstances better. They’re questioning what “better” means, how it is defined and what price you are willing to pay to rise. I think I sense a hunger for something new, less driven, more communal. If I’m right that hunger will play out, in part, in the political sphere. But something happened during the pandemic. We’ll find out what in the next decade.

Republicans shouldn’t assume what has been true the past 40 years will be true now. I see more support for governmental spending in general, and some not fully formed feelings about the taxing aspect. No one loves the megarich. If Mr. Biden’s tax increases don’t clobber the middle and upper-middle classes, I wouldn’t count on all the old pushback.

Maybe the SPA is not only a gamble but also a mystery.

*   *   *

As for Sen. Tim Scott’s response, he’s been on the rise in the party for a while now and his speech was strong because it offered a perfect balance of public-policy realism and faith. On race: “I have experienced the pain of discrimination. I know what it feels like to be pulled over for no reason, to be followed around a store while I’m shopping.” “I get called Uncle Tom and the N-word by progressives, by liberals.” “Our healing is not finished.” He has written police-reform bills, which Democrats blocked because they wanted the issue active, not resolved. He threw down a gauntlet: “Hear me clearly: America is not a racist country.” The left exploded on social media and insulted him exactly as he said they do. This mild man never tries to own the libs, but he owns them the minute he walks in the room.

He ended with words a lot of quiet Americans would hear and deeply appreciate: “Original sin is never the end of the story. Not in our souls and not for the nation. The real story is always redemption.” Broadcasters missed the meaning, thinking it was just some sweet Christian talk. No, it was about the heart of the human drama, the heart of this nation’s drama. It was about the reason to keep trying. Republicans are going to remember this speech.

We witnessed something good this week. To my mind it was a kind of triumph.

America had been through a horrible time: a gruesome murder on a Minneapolis street, seen on tape nationwide and showing an act that could hardly be mistaken for anything but what it was, the cruel extinguishing of a human life. It shook people. It was followed by civic convulsion—mass protests, riots with innocent people hurt and shop owners burned out. All during a pandemic, with the country in lockdown.

All this has been going on since Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd early in the evening of May 25, 2020, 11 months ago. It was a lot for a country, a people, to take in and process.

This week the verdict. Sen. Tim Scott (R., S.C.), who has talked in this space about driving while black and legislating while black, summed it up: “George Floyd died because Derek Chauvin kneeled on his neck and stopped him from breathing for more than nine minutes. There is no question in my mind that the jury reached the right verdict.” This, he said, should give renewed confidence in the justice system, but bad cops cannot be allowed to define all officers, “the vast majority of whom put on the uniform each day with integrity and servant hearts.”

What did the verdict mean? It meant that black lives matter, George Floyd’s life mattered, the police aren’t above the law, the system worked. It meant a jury of your peers confirmed what your eyes saw. It meant the American nation, which spends so much time putting itself down, retains something that has long distinguished it: a conscience to which an appeal can be made. The entire nation saw that video and did not look away.

There were elements of inspiration. It was a unanimous verdict from a diligent jury that had spent the trial taking notes. Members were varied in every way—race, ethnicity, sex, profession, neighborhood. Relatives of cops, admirers of Black Lives Matter. Their ages spanned from the 20s to the 60s. They came to peaceful and emphatic agreement and spoke with one voice.

The three dozen witnesses were impressive in their earnestness, their seriousness of purpose. The EMT worker, the eyewitnesses, the cops who came forward—the chief of police who said no, Mr. Chauvin wasn’t going by the book, this didn’t have to happen. The girl, 18-year-old Darnella Frazier, who’d held her phone steady to tape what she was seeing, who’d been on her way to the store for a snack. “He was in pain. . . . It seemed he knew it was over for him,” she testified. “He was suffering.”

Excellent citizens who take who they are and what they do seriously. They were inspiring.

And now we’ve got to get the other hard part right. The story shifts to Washington. Congress and the White House are engaged in trying to put together a bill to overhaul and regularize police practices—banning some, limiting no-knock warrants, maybe imposing more liability risk on officers for misconduct. Mr. Scott is the Republican point man. He’s been working on legislation since Floyd’s death, has said he was thwarted by Democrats in the election year, but is trying to forge a bipartisan agreement.

It is important that this be done right. There is a crisis in policing and it’s healthy to acknowledge it.

But what happened the afternoon the Floyd verdict came in is instructive. In Columbus, Ohio, officers responded to a request for help in a family disturbance. A policeman shot a 16-year-old girl, Ma’Khia Bryant, to death. This was followed by uproar and accusation—another black youth killed by the police. But body-camera video showed a more complicated picture. Bryant had a knife in her hand and was attacking another girl. The officer made a split-second decision. It’s under investigation.

If you are a cop you know that in the current atmosphere you are going to be assumed by the press and others to be guilty whatever you do, because the police are the Official Foe now. Everyone talks about the blue wall of silence, but do police officers think anyone reliably has their back?

The most important words spoken in the Columbus altercation were in the 911 call from the house where the fighting began. The voice sounds like that of a young woman. There’s a scream in the background. The caller says someone is “trying to stab us” and “we need a police officer here now.”

People living stressed lives need the police most. It is the police they rely on when things turn bad.

We aren’t being sufficiently sensitive to the position of the police after decades of being accused of reflexive brutality and racism. We should be concerned about demoralization—about officers who will leave, about young people who could have become great cops never joining the force, about early retirements of good men and women. We should be concerned that more policemen will come to see their only priority as protecting the job, the benefits, the pensions for their family, so they’ll quietly slow down, do nothing when they should do something. That they’ll put on the uniform each day not only thinking “I protect the public” but also, “I must protect myself from the public.” Which means they won’t be good at their jobs anymore, and the stressed will suffer.

America swerves too much now, it gets its remedies wrong, it unthinkingly overcorrects. Years ago our great corporations swept internal allegations of abuse under the rug. Now, having been shamed in the press, they have human-resources departments immediately launch investigations on single-source accusations, or vague charges with murky motives, and put careers under clouds. We go from serious reflection on racism to accusing all whites of being privileged oppressors, and force schoolchildren to grapple with societal dilemmas they are incapable of understanding.

We get all tangled up in our desperate attempts to get it right. Washington should realize how demoralized the police are, and how much normal people depend on them.

If I ran the world, we wouldn’t be diverting funds from the police; we’d be spending more to expand and deepen their training—literally lengthen it by a year or two, deepen their patience, their sense of proportion, their knowledge. Because they are so important to us.

Some of our policing problem is connected to a problem that affects everything: They came from us. Our police come from modern America, that jittery, jacked-up, broken place. They don’t really come from health and stability but from families that are fractured and a culture that is crude and violent, from hypermedia and videogames, from a society that doesn’t cohere. They don’t come from something boring and solid like the cop on the beat 50 and 100 years ago did; they don’t come from a world that went out of its way to teach them manners, morals, faith. How to act.

All the cops, and the perps, they came from us.

They need more from us, not less. And good cops need more respect, and gratitude.

We have been thinking about the Republican Party and how it can come back—worthily, constructively—after the splits and shatterings of recent years. The GOP is relatively strong in the states but holds neither the White House, House nor Senate and in presidential elections struggles to win the popular vote. Entrenched power centers are arrayed against it, increasingly including corporate America. But parties have come back from worse. The Democrats came back from being on the wrong side in the Civil War.

Some thoughts here on Republicans and immigration.

From Pew Research’s findings on U.S. immigrants, published in August 2020: America has more immigrants than any other nation on earth. More than 40 million people living here were born in another country. According to the government’s 2020 Current Population Survey, when you combine immigrants and their U.S.-born children the number adds up to 85.7 million. Pew estimates that most (77%) are here legally, including naturalized citizens. Almost a quarter are not.

Where are America’s immigrants from? Twenty-five percent, the largest group, are from Mexico, according to Pew. After that China at 6%, India just behind, the Philippines at 4%, El Salvador at 3%.

America hasn’t had so many first- and second-generation Americans since the great European wave of the turn of the last century. The political party that embraces this reality, that becomes part of it, will win the future.

Here I jump to a political memory. A few weeks before the 2012 election I was sitting on a step watching Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, walk by. It was their annual street fair. The whole world was there. I’m from Brooklyn and had parts of my childhood there; much of the world was there back then, too. It really is the place where America keeps getting made. But that day in 2012 just seeing everyone—young Asian kids, Arab teenagers, people from Russia, Ukraine, Central America, Mexico—I had, not for the first time, an epiphany. “The entire political future of America is on this street,” I wrote. In part because so many were young, I felt they were politically up for grabs. The Democrats were trying harder, though. There was a political booth, with a sign that said “Democrats for Change.” There was no Mitt Romney booth, because Brooklyn is New York and New York wasn’t in play. But I felt then and feel more strongly now that in 21st-century America everything is in play. You have to have imagination, and confidence, to see it.

It’s my belief that the immigrants of America the past 40 years are a natural constituency of the Republican Party. When I say this to Republican political professionals they become excited or depressed. The excited say yes, we made progress in the last election with Hispanics; if we could become more liberal on illegal immigration, we could start to clinch the deal. The depressed say no, Republicans can’t win them because we’re too tagged as the anti-immigrant party.

To them I say when a whole class of people think you don’t like them, they are probably picking up a signal you don’t know you’re sending. Which leads us to Donald Trump, and the signal he did know he was sending. In opposing illegal immigration he opposed—he insulted and denigrated—immigrants themselves. His supporters didn’t mind because they recognized it as burn-your-bridges language: It meant he wouldn’t go to Washington and sign some big, lying, establishment-driven comprehensive reform like all the rest.

What he said did a lot of damage and caused a lot of just resentment. But he’s gone right now, and something new, day by day, is being built in his place.

The GOP should continue as the anti-illegal-immigration party, because illegal immigration is a violation of law and sovereignty, takes jobs, depresses wages, and is an abuse of all who came here legally. It will continue as a grinding crisis and in time be appreciated as a burden that cannot be forever borne locally or nationally. But the Republican Party’s attitude toward illegal immigrants themselves—toward all immigrants—should be sympathy and respect: They’re looking for a job and a better life. So was your great-grandfather!

A friend of mine, a businessman in New York, a big taxpayer, a moderate conservative, always smiles when he talks about illegal immigration. He’s against it. Then again his grandfather 100 years ago, an Italian seaman, found himself in a ship off America, liked what he saw, and jumped. He made his way to Brooklyn. Behind every great fortune lies a great crime, Balzac said. No, but in America a lot of fortunes started with a jump from a ship in the night.

The approach of the Republican Party should be one not of distance and guilt but of affinity and identification. Immigrants, legal and illegal, are tough. They’ve often had hard lives. They left everything, even the sound on the street of their old lives, to come to this different place. “I made myself lonely for you” is something almost all of them can say to their children.

No one who comes here from El Salvador really wants it to become El Salvador. People don’t flee Nicaragua so America can turn into Nicaragua. This is where Republican policies come in. There’s no reason to believe the bulk of immigrants to America the past 40 years want to tax people to death or see an economic system they risked so much to enter radically altered. They don’t want small businesses to be subject to the endless shakedowns of state and local government. They don’t want to defund the police, they depend on the police. The riots of 2020 would have shocked and repelled them, and may prove to have been a turning point.

Identity politics is powerful but not as powerful in the long term as here’s-where-we-stand politics. Republican officials ought to be going to America’s immigrants and saying: We might have had a rocky road but we are seeing the world the same way. The appeal must be to the brains and wisdom of their audience, not some patronizing babble on Republican Hispanic Voter Night.

The GOP donor class hasn’t liked restrictions on illegal immigration. More workers keep wages down. But great parties know who their base is. The GOP’s should be the working and middle class of all colors. Workers already here need backup. It’s better to lose campaign contributions than voters.

The Democratic Party is increasingly in thrall to a progressive left whose most impressive accomplishment has been communicating an air of its inevitable triumph. Under their pressure Democrats will make a lot of mistakes. They already are.

During the Bush immigration debates, when the base of the party rebelled against his comprehensive reform bill, a mostly unspoken accusation emanated from the president’s operatives. It was that the new Americans, including illegal immigrants, were kind of better than the existing American working class, harder-working. This was situational snobbery: The operatives themselves had left the working class behind, but daily rubbed shoulders with newer Americans at home and at the club. That snobbery helped break the party.

But I’ll tell you what is true. We do have the best immigrants in the world. I so want the Republican Party to know this, embrace it. Embrace them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He deserved the stupid Emmy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What just happened?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is performative to the nth degree.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New York

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m not sure it was good for America.

And that’s a base, too.