Peggy Noonan

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.

Where are we? Waiting, as the process plays out. In a week of talking to Republican political leaders, all by nature competitive, most veterans of tough races, I haven’t found one who believes Donald Trump won. All believe that there was fraud in the vote, and that this year’s semicrazy pandemic rules made clear the need for some baseline national voting standards. But none believe, though some seemed hoping, there was enough fraud to change the result.

They expect this will become clear through failed lawsuits and the production by the states of final certified votes. Would it be better if Republican senators, say, came forward and asserted the obvious, that Joe Biden won? Yes, if only for the sake of honesty and to show the Biden half of the country that they can see and have eyes.

But here is a rough sense of how some senators see things. They are leaders in a sharply, at times violently divided country and represent a party half of whose base is fed, daily, algorithmic incitements to suspicion and anger. The president leads this, fans it, gains from it. They lack the credibility with Mr. Trump’s base that the president has. They don’t want to jeopardize themselves over something that will be resolved through time. So hold off, lower the temperature, support the system. Recounts and court decisions will reassure some voters that every effort was made to get at the truth. This can buttress confidence in democratic processes and encourage a sense of their fundamental soundness. Taking time to get it right will have the effect of tamping down a destructive stabbed-in-the-back mythology among Trump supporters inclined in that direction.

I suspect the long process will also have the effect, in the end, of strengthening the position of the incoming president, Mr. Biden. The courts and the close states examined his victory and found it to be real. Onward.

Something happened Tuesday that I realized I didn’t think I’d witnessed in a decade. It was when Mr. Biden spoke and took a few questions in Wilmington, Del. I got the distinct impression as the old Senate veteran spoke that he knew exactly what the other side was thinking and . . . understood. He offered a pitch-perfect, bemused acceptance of the president’s behavior. Mr. Trump’s refusal to concede is “an embarrassment,” no more: “The fact that they’re not willing to acknowledge who won at this point is not of much consequence in our planning and what we’re able to do.” He condemned no one. “I hope I get a chance to speak to Mitch”—McConnell, the Senate majority leader.

On being denied the usual courtesy of the presidential daily briefing, “Obviously the PDB would be useful, but not necessary.”

Everyone said it was good but no, it was a small master class.

The past few days I reached out to some wise people, accomplished individuals whose love of country has been expressed through their careers.

I told the former Indiana governor and current president of Purdue University that I was calling people I knew to be sane. “That won’t keep you busy,” Mitch Daniels said.

He was upbeat on the election. “It seems to me the country just basically said it hadn’t lost its mind. I was stunned at the success the Republicans had in the congressional elections and in the state initiatives.”

He was hopeful about the presidential impasse. “I honestly think this mess offers an opportunity to, at the right moment, have a Goldwater moment.” That was when Republican members of Congress went to President Richard Nixon, during Watergate, and told him it was over. It was a moment of country over party. “It would signal that we got to get on with the business of the country now,” Mr. Daniels said.

Bill Brock, a former representative, senator, cabinet member and head of the Republican National Committee, believes in his party as a constructive force in the world. He doesn’t like the president using words like “stolen” when he speaks of the election: “Of course there was some fraud. Did it change the outcome? No. . . . This leaves a situation where President Trump uses his words and his desire to go out in the field again, but the effect will be to disillusion his own supporters. He’s using their loyalty to justify the fact that he lost an election that he did not believe he’d lose. He’s using their loyalty to cover the fact he lost. And he exposes them to the hazard of finding out that the election was over and that there was no theft of adequate size to change the outcome.”

He believes Mr. Trump sent his followers on the field without weapons. His voters chose him because they were “desperate for someone who they felt understood them, that no one else hears them. They wanted a voice and they got him and he was a loud voice and he’d be heard, and he changed the world in many good ways. But that voice now is in defense of his own situation.

“Nothing will change the results in a given state. The Biden margin is now sufficient that it would take all the close states. That is not possible. To leave the impression it is possible will leave many people disillusioned.”

As for Mr. McConnell, “Mitch is trying to keep people together so there’s some coherence” when the process is over.

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice calls for sensitivity and a sense of mutual give. On Sunday she tweeted: “Congratulations President-elect @JoeBiden and Vice President-elect @KamalaHarris.”

But she also told me, “We need to worry about how bitterly divided we are. The level of anger is so high.” Trump supporters feel he was never given a chance: “I think we all need to take a deep breath. More than 70 million Americans voted for President Trump, and some reassurance through the process that this has been done fairly is not a bad thing.”

“It will be better when all this is over, and done expeditiously. I trust, and I think most Americans trust, the courts to get this right.”

As for the transition, “most of what you need to do in a transition you can do without the formality. The hardest part is getting your team in place, making personnel decisions, and then vetting those you’ve chosen. It’s not ideal that it hasn’t formally started. It would have been ideal to have it settled on election night and ideal to have a ‘normal’ transition, but they are experienced people.”

On the withholding of the presidential daily briefing, she says, “Sen. Harris has served on the Intelligence Committee, there is not much that will surprise her. Joe Biden has been vice president for eight years. The idea that we’re endangering national security is, I think, overblown.”

She is a veteran of Bush v. Gore. The official Bush transition didn’t begin until after the Supreme Court ruled on Dec. 12, 2000. Until then everything was uncertain—“it all came down to 537 votes in Florida, not multiple states with significant margins. I remember Gov. Bush calling me and saying, ‘I’d like you to be national security adviser.’ And I thought but didn’t say, ‘Yes sir, if you’re president.’ ”

Like everyone else I spoke to she wanted to see election reform.

Beyond that: “Trust the process that we are in. Our institutions work.”

Divided nation, divided outcome. Votes are still being counted, nothing is certain, but it looks as if Joe Biden will win the presidency, closely. The Republicans will hold the Senate, closely, and pick up some seats in the House. A moderate outcome: divided government.

Or so it seems. It’s all so close.

The aftermath could get rocky. It is right and reasonable to request recounts in close races where the legal requirement is met, and it looks as if there may be several of them. This will take time. Fine, get it right, protect the integrity of the system.

There’s nothing wrong with court challenges in the face of evidence of serious and broad malfeasance. But the emphasis must be on real evidence, not drummed-up drama and trying to throw a spanner into the works because you don’t like where things are going.

It looks to be a long slog. Will some mess and incompetence be uncovered on state levels? Probably. Will we see some mischief appear to have been done in this city or that county? Probably. As in every election. “Landslide Lyndon,” “Vote early and often for Curley”—these are part of our political vocabulary for a reason. Mayor Richard J. Daley is still believed to have put JFK over the top in Illinois in 1960 with the votes of the dead. A certain amount of misbehavior is in our genes, and in democracy’s. Elections are human enterprises.

But there’s a point at which we have to remember there are limits to all inquiries. Richard Nixon in 1960 didn’t challenge what had been done to him when the cemeteries went strong for JFK. He thought it wouldn’t be good for the country.

Do those involved understand that turning this election into a political street fight could result in literal fighting in the streets? Oh, for a president who could say something like, “Let’s let the system do its work in a hard election shaped by changed rules during a pandemic. Let’s trust in honest outcomes and see where we are at the end. For now from me a simple vow, to stick to tradition and respect the decision of the people.” Instead the president, as this is written is screaming on Twitter about “Voter Fraud,” “STOP THE COUNT,” “secretly dumped ballots.” He vows, based on nothing, to go to the Supreme Court. He ends as he began, playing with fire.

We will have to keep our cool and see to it that the law prevails.

Some small thoughts, an observation and one cause for joy.

We focus on personas, but policies are often decisive in politics, and surely were this year. One way to say this is to ask a question: What happened between the mighty blue wave of 2018, when a triumphant Democratic Party gained 41 House seats and seven governorships, and the 2020 election, which had no blue wave?

Lots of things, but one was a year of Democratic presidential debates, in which week after week the party painted itself as deeply progressive. The candidates were down with identity politics, would ban private health insurance, were for essentially open borders. I wrote wonderingly after the first debate that the entire party seemed to have picked itself up and placed itself down outside the mainstream and apart from the center.

They were to the left of their own base. Joe Biden was the base’s man, and he won. But the party had already been tagged.

America in 2020 was not in a progressive mood. From a state-level political professional: “The fear of the left, packing the court, big tax increases, AOC as the face of the party and the group Biden had to answer to. He didn’t have a Sister Souljah moment. Bill Clinton would have.” She believed if Mr. Biden had, it would have increased his margin.

Democrats surely pay a big price for AOC and “The Squad” and the woke, who are not members of the Democratic coalition but a wrecking ball within it.

Another part of the story: Not only do the elites not understand the electorate, and the press does not understand the electorate, and the pollsters don’t understand the electorate, but neither of the two parties understands the electorate. And that’s their job! But they don’t understand their own voters. Most Democrats were shocked at the president’s support among Hispanics. Why didn’t they know how that key group within their coalition was seeing the world? Most Republican political professionals were expecting a big blue wave. Instead Trump supporters pretty much stayed. How could they get it so wrong? “Shy Trump voters” doesn’t begin to explain it. This is a real divide, between the professionals and the people, and not a new one. We saw it in 2016. Why does it persist so strongly?

I took the polls seriously, including the Republican ones, and saw a big Biden win, not a modest one. Only two things gave me pause. One was the big raucous rallies the president had, and Mr. Biden’s not drawing or even trying to draw big crowds. People show their support in lots of ways, and one is taking an entire Saturday, getting to the event site, standing in line in the cold for hours, listening, then trying to get home, sometimes left there without shuttle buses. Mr. Trump’s people sacrificed to see him. Man, that does not mean nothing.

The other was the number of those who told pollsters the past few months that they’re better off now than they were in 2016. It was amazing—in the middle of a pandemic. That probably meant something too.

I end with a just victory. Susan Collins, four-term Republican senator from Maine, was over—in the fight of her life for re-election, never once leading in the polls, written off. She had been brave in 2018 when she backed Justice Brett Kavanaugh after accusations of sexual assault. She took heavy fire back home; her eventual opponent, Maine House Speaker Sara Gideon, vowed to take her out on that vote alone. But what struck me was the care and respect with which Ms. Collins explained her decision on the floor of the Senate.

Last month she opposed the confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett: “In fairness to the American people—who will either be re-electing the President or selecting a new one—the decision on the nominee . . . should be made by whoever is elected on November 3rd.” For this she took fire from conservatives who’d long dismissed her as a Republican in name only. But when everyone else was scared, she took tough votes, tough stands, and shared her thinking.

She puts herself forward with an air of modesty, even a soft-spokenness, as if she wished the camera were on someone else. But have you ever observed one of her re-election campaigns? She crushes her opponents. She’s not meek, she’s Don Corleone. She’s savage.

She won in a 9-point blowout.

She deserves the respect of her party. Her male colleagues who so often patronize her, she could teach them a few things. Maybe they’ll ask. It’s 2020, the year of shocks.

I find myself going back, as I review these years, to a crisp, dark evening in December 2016, in Manhattan, where I’d joined a visiting friend, a Catholic activist, for a drink. She had been ardently anti-Trump, was heartbroken at his election and struggling to come to terms, to find some higher meaning. “Maybe this is God’s way of giving us a last chance,” she said. “I think when God gives you a last chance he gives you John Kasich,” I said, and we both laughed. The 2016 election to me felt more like a chastisement, a judgment from on high of who we are and what we are becoming.

Where did Donald Trump come from? I think now what I wrote then. He was produced by both parties’ collusion in refusing to stop illegal immigration, carelessness about war, and confusion as to how to avoid, then how to deal with, economic calamity. The Republicans were afraid to lift their wagons out of ruts formed half a century ago. Mr. Trump was clever enough to see an opening that wouldn’t harm him either way (victory or a branding opportunity) and won.

In the time since everyone has felt tested—personally, in terms of higher loyalties, in our national life. Some maintained their poise, good cheer and judgment. Others wobbled, some a lot. It’s been a hard time. Everyone but the stupid feels wounded in some way.

Twenty sixteen was raucous and wild—the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pantsuit, Make America Great Again. Twenty twenty is altogether different—subdued, determined. As if a steely decision is being made and executed. I believe Mr. Trump is about to be fired, most spectacularly by the women of America. Those long lines at the early-voting places—they are the rallies Mr. Biden didn’t hold. They happened anyway.

Regular readers know where I stand. Repeating it feels redundant and impolite. He is not a good man who became not a good president. He has had achievements: three sober Supreme Court choices, a strong economy until the pandemic, an attitude toward regulation unhostile to economic growth. Beyond that, bills of damning particulars have been done, some brilliantly. Kevin Williamson in National Review has it exactly right that conservative resistance to Mr. Trump is not about style and aesthetics. The president’s personal flaws are governance flaws. “Trump’s low character is not only an abstract ethical concern but a public menace that has introduced elements of chaos and unpredictability in U.S. government activity. . . . Trump’s problem is not etiquette: It is dishonesty, stupidity, and incompetence.” Ramesh Ponnuru in the same magazine notes something especially important to conservatives: Mr. Trump is an unwitting ally of political correctness. “It posits that the only alternative to left-wing views is bigotry, and he lends credence to that conviction. His presidency has accelerated the growth of our divisions and so been a gift to radicals of the Left and of the Right.”

I add only two things. For 20 years this column has had at the back of its mind fear of a terrible and immediate crisis that could befall America from its foes. We have seen Mr. Trump’s crisis management in one that unfurled not over minutes but months. Last February I wrote I had a feeling the 2020 election was being settled then, that Mr. Trump had finally met a problem he couldn’t talk his way out of. I believe that’s what happened: He played down the pandemic, lied, made uninformed claims at briefings that serious people were struggling to keep useful. He produced chaos. The country can’t afford any of that in a crisis that is sudden and severe. He would only be worse, more dangerous, more careless, in a second term.

You look at that White House and you know nobody’s really there inside. It’s a hollow government mostly populated by second- and third-rate people, with the seasoned and competent fired and fled. It’s all so dangerous.

A vote for him is not possible for me.

Of the two presidential candidates Joe Biden is more normal, and God knows that has appeal. But normal isn’t “normalcy.” We’ll never return to political normalcy again; we won’t wake up Nov. 4 and say, “Wow, things are sturdy and placid again, like they should be!” We’re in an age of drama and extremes. There are too many ways to avoid the problems of being alive, and the problems of your life, through politics now. The political tribe is the only family a lot of people have, the only religion they have too. And as government has taken up more space in our lives, a weird attentiveness has come to feel not like neurosis but like necessity.

The Democrats in their current construction are animated and being pushed internally by a progressive left that punches above its weight and numbers, and will continue to do so until it achieves full party dominance. In the next few years, especially if Democrats have the Senate, the new administration looks to become a runaway train with Joe Biden its hapless and reluctant conductor.

The progressive left endorses and pushes for the identity politics that is killing us, an abortion regime way beyond anything that could be called reasonable or civilized and on which it will make no compromise; it opposes charter schools and other forms of public school liberation; it sees the police as the enemy, it demonstrates no distinct fidelity to freedom of speech and, most recently, its declared hopes range from court packing to doing away with the Electoral College and adding states to the union to pick up Senate seats. The left is animated by a spirit of historical vandalism seen most lately in the “1619 Project” and the attitudes it represents.

The political philosopher Edmund Burke, a man great enough to address a revolution personally, said to radical France in 1790: “You began ill, because you began by despising everything that belonged to you.” Burke knew that society, as his most recent biographer, Jesse Norman, emphasizes, is the product not only of reason but of affection. Burke: “To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society . . . is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind.” Only from warmth of heart—not with it alone, but it must be there—can you build what will last. Donald Trump doesn’t have it in his words, the progressives don’t in their policies.

Those policies aren’t a way out, which is what you want in a policy—a way out of a mess or a way to avoid it. They won’t build on and undergird America; they’ll only continue to fracture it.

I spent 2016 being lectured by hopped-up partisans about binary choices. I didn’t vote for either candidate then and will not now. Is abstaining an honorable choice? For me it is the only one.

Sometimes you just have to hold up your hand and say no, bad choice, bad paths.

I thought I might leave the line blank as a statement: Neither. Then I thought no, make a gesture that shows what you mean to hold steady to. And so if on some readout of the recorded vote in northern Manhattan you see Edmund Burke, that was me.