Peggy Noonan

It was a real insane-a-thon. It was genuinely moving. It didn’t avoid big issues. It led with a lie. It was a success in that it will have pleased the base and done some degree of outreach to others.

The parts of the Republican National Convention that were crazy included but were not limited to:

“Trump is the bodyguard of Western civilization,” said Charlie Kirk. “The frontier, the horizon, even the stars belong to us,” said Rep. Matt Gaetz. I’m still recovering from Kimberly Guilfoyle’s screaming. It was like seeing Eva Peron in an extended manic episode running from balcony to balcony warning the descamisados to stay armed, the oligarchs are coming. This was unfortunate because it was the first night and if Ms. Guilfoyle seemed insane, Republicans seemed insane.

They reduced the White House to a stage set for a political convention, which had never been done before. Had it never been done because all previous presidents were unimaginative? Why, no. It had never been done because they had some class. By tradition and long custom the two parties are political constructs that exist outside and apart from the peoples’ house. Maintaining the boundary protected that house’s standing as a place higher than politics to which all have recourse. “I fly from petty tyrants to the throne.”

Republicans will see the civic sin of this when the Democrats do it, as they will. For now they say, “Huh, it’s all politics there anyway.” It is, pretty much. But it’s healthy to pretend otherwise. “Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.” You’ll miss that tribute when it’s fully gone.

Some speakers decried elitist-insider nepotism. Others introduced the Trump children.

We are not a third-rate banana republic but at the moment we’re imitating one.

The president’s leadership in the coronavirus epidemic was lauded as timely and visionary. This is the big lie mentioned above. He denied the threat, lied with an almost pleasing abandon, especially about testing, and when forced to focus held bumbling daily briefings that only made things worse.

It was a mistake to insist it was a success. That ship has sunk.

*   *   *

What lifted the convention was the normal people who spoke, who were moving and provided the policy ballast the politicians often did not. More than half the speakers were homespun policy nerds in the way Americans learn to be now. We heard—and it was compelling—about U.S. timber and forestry regulation, lobster quotas, FDA protocols regarding permissions for the terminally ill to access experimental treatments, and breakthroughs in tele-health services. It was not all granular. Rebecca Friedrichs, a veteran California public school educator, painted the teachers unions as a reactionary force. “They spend hundreds of millions annually to defeat charter schools and school choice.” They do. It’s odd we don’t speak of this anymore since school choice is so crucial to so many.

Maximo Alvarez, who fled Cuba when young, looked at the protests that have been sweeping our cities for three months and said, “I have seen people like this before. I’ve seen movements like this before. I’ve seen ideas like this before.” It reminded him of a man long ago: Fidel Castro.

A convicted bank robber, Jon Ponder, became a religious man, changed his life, and started a prisoner re-entry program. He was issued a pardon by Mr. Trump, live, the FBI agent who’d befriended Mr. Ponder standing with him. If you weren’t moved by it you don’t do moved.

Abby Johnson, formerly of Planned Parenthood, gave the most compelling speech on abortion, explaining why pro-life people stand where they stand, that has ever been given at any convention anywhere. Nick Sandmann, the libeled teenager who did nothing wrong when the Native-American activist banged a drum in his face, spoke, entirely believably, on why Americans do not trust the media.

Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina was impressive.

He too spoke for school choice. “A quality education is the closest thing to magic in America.” It had changed his life. He and his brother were sons of a single mother; they lived with relatives and slept three in the bed. He got an education, went into business, ran for Congress in an overwhelmingly white district in Charleston and beat the field, included the son of former-Sen. Strom Thurmond. How did a black man who started with nothing do that? “Because of the evolution of the Southern heart.” That is a beautiful phrase.

Mr. Scott said his grandfather would have been 99 this week. That old man had suffered indignities; no one had even bothered to teach him to read and write. But he lived to see his grandson become the first African-American elected to both the U.S. House and Senate. “Our family went from cotton to Congress in one lifetime,” he said, with an air of what seemed fresh wonder.

It was beautiful, and affectionate about America to the point of tenderness.

The Republicans confronted what the Democrats at their convention glossed over: rising crime, looting and rioting in city protests, increased unease about personal safety, and besieged police forces. They hit on the one fear shared equally now by the rich, the poor and the middle: that when you call 911 you’ll go to voicemail. Someone literally used that image.

Social media is sharing the videos of diners at outside restaurants being swarmed by BLM protesters who try to harass and bully them into raising their arms in affiliation. There are videos of protesters marching on so-called gentrified neighborhoods at night, telling those who live there, through bullhorns, that they’re guilty of appropriation. There aren’t a lot of these videos but they carry a suggestion of where things are going. Rep. Debbie Dingell (D. Mich.), made an acute observation this week to Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times. She said in her district there are a lot of signs saying Blue Lives Matter—cops matter too. On voter sentiment she quoted a viral social media post: “I used to think I was pretty much just a regular person. But I was born white into a two-parent household, which now labels me as privileged, racist, and responsible for slavery.”

This country is full of law-abiding people of all colors who are appalled by Donald Trump. It is political malpractice to push them toward him.

Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the controversial couple who recently met protesters on or near their property in St. Louis with guns, looking in the photos provocative and nutty, gave their side of the story: They were trying to protect their home from what they thought was immediate danger. They spoke against violence, defunding the police, and ending the cash bail system.

Andrew Pollack, the father of a teenage daughter killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., eviscerated the liberal school and police policies that he believes contributed to his daughter’s death. “Far left Democrats in our school district made this shooting possible.”

Democratic political professionals must have found all this pretty powerful because almost immediately Democratic candidates began to decry the violence with what might be called increased vigor.

The president spoke also. The headline on his acceptance speech was the staggering degradation of the White House as his rally prop. The subhead is that he smacked Joe Biden around like a ruffian. It’s going to be something to see them debate. That will be one intensely human encounter.

To be fair in critiquing certain public events you have to be like a judge in the Olympics and factor in degree of difficulty. No one had ever done a Zoom convention before, so no one knew how to do it. Should there be a host each night? Should it be an earnest actress? Does that make us look shallow? Do we want to look shallow?

What hadn’t been done before was done rather poorly, with high schlock content. You got the impression no one creative or daring was authorized to be either. It has been compared to a telethon, an infomercial, and fundraising week on public television. Marianne Williamson said it was “like binge watching a Marriott commercial.” Mostly it was the Democratic Party talking to itself and playing to its base.

Missing was any hint of priorities or plans, of the meaning of the party or its intentions. They made the case against Donald Trump, and a case for Joe Biden as an essentially decent person. But they didn’t say what they’ll do. And this year that is key.

I’m not sure they’re sufficiently aware of two things. One is the number of people who don’t like Mr. Trump and will vote for him anyway. They don’t have to be talked into thinking he’s a bad character, they’re already on board.

All summer I’ve been running into two kinds of people. One kind says, “That man is a living shame on our country and must be removed.” The other kind says very little. They don’t defend him. They say, “I can’t believe I may vote for him, but . . .” And always they explain it this way: “What the other guys are gonna do on taxes,” “What the other guys will do to my industry,” “What the Democrats will do to the economy.”

I’m getting the impression that for a lot of people, the ballot this fall won’t read “Trump vs. Biden” but “Trump vs. What the Other Guys Will Do.”

Do the Democrats understand how hunkered-down many people feel, psychologically and physically, after the past six months? If I asked this right now of a convention planner or participant I think they’d say, “Yes, people feel battered by systemic bias, inequality, and climate change.” And I’d say no, they’re afraid of foreclosures! They’re afraid of a second wave, no schools, more shutdowns, job losses and suddenly the supply lines break down this winter and there are food shortages.

When this is the context, what a great party plans to do couldn’t be more crucial.

*   *   *

To the speeches:

Barack Obama’s speech will stick in history; it won’t just slide away. No former president has ever publicly leveled anything like this criticism at a sitting successor: “I did hope, for the sake of our country, that Donald Trump might show some interest in taking the job seriously, that he might come to feel the weight of the office and discover some reverence for the democracy that had been placed in his care. But he never did. For close to four years now, he has shown no interest in putting in the work.”

This is a former president calling the current one shallow and lazy. He also suggested he’s greedy and intellectually incapable. Unprecedented? Yes. Unjustified? No, alas. And I’m not seeing Trump supporters rise up in indignant defense. They know it’s true, too.

Kamala Harris achieved complete adequacy. I can’t remember anything she said without referring to notes, so she gets no quotes. She’s a natural performer of politics and good at acting out warmth and joy, but she did something that they’re all doing more and more, which involves a husky catch in the voice as if they’re so sincere, so moved by what they’re saying, that their throats constrict for a moment. Mr. Obama did it. Michelle Obama did it a lot. Panelists will soon do it on cable news. Please everyone, stop.

As for Mr. Biden, all his political life he’s tried to express himself in ways he thinks eloquent but that tend to be only long-winded. He chases a thought a long way, even when it’s a small one and not worth the hunt. All of this is part of his old-school way and is neither harmful nor helpful. But he had a strong, tight speech. He looked good, spoke crisply, maintained focus. The speech is going to do him some significant good. Though he didn’t make his plans and intentions clear.

*   *   *

Two small thoughts I’ll try not to chase too far:

First, Democratic Party professionals are funny about policy. They take it seriously but don’t think other people do. The past three decades they wound up thinking all politics is about glitz, emotion and compelling characters. Part of the reason they’re like this is they never thought Republicans were serious about policy, because if they were, they’d be Democrats. They find it hard to credit the importance of policy in the making of a party’s fortunes. They thought Republicans liked Reagan because he was handsome, and George H.W. Bush because he fought in the war. But their elections were policy victories. Charm and humor, stagecraft and showbiz matter, but they’re not everything. They’re not even half of everything.

Because boomer Democrats thought Republicans won on glitz, they got glitzy in return. It was the central Clintonian insight of 1992: We have to become actors, like the actors we seek to replace.

It only made politics worse and left Democrats unable to speak in public forums of the central point of politics: why you stand where you stand and what you intend to do.

(Fairness forces me to note that socialists love talking about policy, and so does Elizabeth Warren. And that Republican political operatives, as a class, are naturally hostile to the meaning of anything.)

Second, apart from the “We The People” gauziness, there was a nonstop hum of grievance at the convention. To show their ferocious sincerity in the struggle against America’s injustices, most of the speakers thought they had to beat the crap out of the country—over and over. Its sins: racism, sexism, bigotry, violence, xenophobia, being unwelcoming to immigrants. The charges, direct and indirect, never let up. Little love was expressed, little gratitude. Everyone was sort of overcoming being born here.

Even Mr. Obama, trying, in a spirit of fairness, to expand the circle of the aggrieved, spoke of “Irish and Italians and Asians and Latinos told: Go back where you come from. Jews and Catholics, Muslims and Sikhs, made to feel suspect . . . black Americans chained and whipped and hanged. Spit on for trying to sit at lunch counters, beaten for trying to vote. . . . They knew how far the daily reality of America strayed from the myth.”

The cumulative effect of all this, especially for the young, would prompt an inevitable question: Why would anyone fight to save this place? Who needs it?

If I were 12 and watched, I’d wonder if I had a chance here. If I were 20, they’d have flooded me with unearned bitterness.

Injustice is real, history is bloody. But guys, do you ever think you’re overdoing it? Are you afraid that this is all you got? Is that why you don’t talk about policy?

Kamala Harris is a sitting U.S. senator who was vetted during the primaries, the daughter of immigrants and the first black woman and Indian-American on a major-party ticket. She thus satisfies the basic requirements of a vice-presidential choice: First do no harm, and second pick up what you can.

Three salient points:

She rose far fast. She was sworn into the Senate in January 2017. She went national early and quickly, like Barack Obama, who’d also been in the Senate less than two years when he began running for president. (Her pre-Senate background includes more-impressive offices, notably California attorney general.)

She is a woman of the left who entered the law not as a defense attorney but as a prosecutor. This hurt her in the Democratic primaries, where she was called a cop, but will help her in the general election with centrists and moderates.

She is an excellent performer of politics. Like Bill Clinton she enjoys and has a talent for the necessary artifice. She takes obvious pleasure in campaigning—making speeches, waving, laughing, pressing the flesh. In committee hearings she cocks her brow in the closeup to show skepticism. Her glamour, and her consciousness of it, were vivid enough to be spoofed by Maya Rudolph on “Saturday Night Live.”

Reading her 2019 autobiography, “The Truths We Hold: An American Journey,” it occurs to you that what she’s really bringing Joe Biden is the things she doesn’t say and the stories she doesn’t tell on the trail.

She was born and raised in a climate of liberal activism in Oakland and Berkeley, Calif., in the 1960s and ’70s. Her father, Donald Harris, born in Jamaica in 1938, was a student there and went on to be an economics professor at Stanford. Her mother, Shyamala, was born in southern India, graduated from the University of Delhi at 19, and earned a doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley. Shyamala, who died in 2009, was expected to return home for an arranged marriage; instead she met Donald. They married, had two children and divorced.

When Kamala Harris was a toddler, her parents brought her to civil-rights marches. “I have young memories of a sea of legs moving about,” she writes. Her mother liked to tell a story. Once Kamala was fussing in her stroller, and Mrs. Harris leaned down and asked, “What do you want?” “‘Fweedom!’ I yelled back.”

The general atmosphere was ’60s Berkeley—diverse, full of passion, consumed by identity politics and debates about liberation.

They took periodic trips to India. “My mother, grandparents, aunts, and uncle instilled us with pride in our South Asian roots. . . . We were raised with a strong awareness of and appreciation for Indian culture.” (India looks to be an increasingly important ally as America’s relationship with China deteriorates. If Biden-Harris wins and her background is helpful, good.)

She went to ballet class, sang in the choir in the 23rd Avenue Church of God, went to a black cultural center called Rainbow Sign on Thursdays. She saw Rep. Shirley Chisholm speak and was electrified.

By the time Ms. Harris graduated high school she wanted to become a lawyer like her heroes Thurgood Marshall and Constance Baker Motley. Also like her Uncle Sherman and a family friend named Henry. “Any time someone had a problem . . . the first thing you’d hear was, ‘Call Henry, call Sherman. They’ll know what to do.’ . . . I wanted to be the one people called.”

For college she chose Justice Marshall’s alma mater, historically black Howard University in Washington, founded just after the Civil War and rich with legacy.

Her first day on campus she thought, “This is heaven.” She’d hang out with other students in the campus’s central lawn: “On any given day, you could stand in the middle of the Yard and see, on your right, young dancers practicing their steps or musicians playing instruments. Look to your left and there were briefcase-toting students strolling out of the business school, and medical students in their white coats, heading back to the lab. . . . That was the beauty of Howard. Every signal told students that we could do anything.”

She ran for student office, joined the debate team, pledged Alpha Kappa Alpha, the powerhouse sorority founded in 1908. Expect to see its colors, pink and green, at campaign events this year.

She was a tour guide at the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing. Once she bumped into the great actors Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis waiting for a VIP tour. “They projected an aura . . . they made a special point of engaging me in conversation and telling me that it made them proud to see me as a young black woman working in public service.” She never got over how they made her feel.

Then on to San Francisco’s UC Hastings law school. She was mortified at failing the bar exam—you get the impression it was her first failure; she always aced the test. She passed on the second try, joined the local prosecutor’s office. She had to defend her choice to family and friends. She is tough and seems sincere in her writing on her early days up against sexual predators and other violent criminals.

She is extremely interesting when writing about real things. She talks about how hard it was to put grade-school victims on the stand to testify to their sexual abuse, and teenagers who’d been virtually abandoned into an inadequate foster-care system. She didn’t see prosecutors as oppressors: “I had found my calling.” There are plenty of cases in which prosecutors have used their office as “an instrument of injustice.” But “I knew the history of brave prosecutors who went after the Ku Klux Klan in the South” and “corrupt politicians and corporate polluters.” It was the attorney general who sent officials to protect the Freedom Riders in 1961. “I was going to be a prosecutor in my own image.”

“You can want the police to stop crime in your neighborhood and also want them to stop using excessive force,” she writes. “You can want them to hunt down a killer on your streets and also want them to stop using racial profiling. You can believe in . . . accountability, especially for serious criminals, and also oppose unjust incarceration.”

In the primaries we saw that when she changes her stands it tends to be politically convenient, slowly acknowledged and poorly explained. There are signals of seeing policy as an external thing, not an outgrowth of one’s own belief structure, and things can change.

In the book we get a sense of gusto. She admires toughness. She is a natural pol. She was bred to achieve in an aspirational immigrant environment. She loves to compete.

She is warm, humorous. Like most of the men around her in politics, she enjoys being important. She isn’t embarrassed by attention.

Again, she has risen far fast. She ran nationally for the first time this year, in the Democratic primary. It didn’t end well; she dropped out before the first vote.

She is running for the second time now. The tough learn a lot from defeat, but most politicians find it hard to change their moves.

This is going to be interesting.

It’s August, high summer, and you’re trying to ease in and relax with family, and friends. You’ve imagined it for months. You’re at the beach with pails and shovels and towels and the short chairs, and you’re trying to sit back and do nothing after this unrelenting year of stress and effort and rolling with every punch. That’s something people don’t fully appreciate about themselves, don’t fully credit—that they rolled with every punch this year, even when history wouldn’t stop throwing them.

You’re looking at the waves with this fixed and pleasant look on your face because the kids or grandkids are always picking up cues and clues. But really you’ve got this thousand-yard stare, you’re a million miles away, immersed in your concerns, your fears. About everything.

It is the salient fact of the summer of ’20, that everyone goes so quickly from “Beautiful day” to “How you doing?” to “I’m so worried.”

People who haven’t worried in years are worried, and it’s not about regular things, it’s about big and essential things. It’s a whole other order of anxiety.

That’s all this is about. How anxious everyone is, and how deep down they know they’re going to be anxious for a long time.

We’re in the middle (perhaps—nobody knows) of a world-wide pandemic, a historic occurrence that for everyone alive has been without precedent. We are in the middle (perhaps—nobody knows) of a severe economic contraction that looks likely to produce a long recession. We’ve experienced a national economic shutdown, again without precedent. The virus continues, and everyone fears it will turn worse in the fall when it starts to collide with the flu.

Everyone is worried about the future of the big cities. Crime, protests, the feeling nobody’s in charge. The historic upending of a commuter model that has, in New York at least, reigned for centuries. When you return to the city in the fall, what will you be returning to?

You’re thinking: Do we want to live there, should we live there, should we live someplace else? What you’re really asking is: Will the city hold?

Are we going to have school? How will that work? If we don’t, what will it do to the kids and to parents who have to work? If schools open, what might the kids catch and bring home?

Is my business going to make it? Will it really open up again as an office, a store, a way of working? If it does, will it continue to need me? At the same salary? Real-estate sales outside my city are booming.

The mood: Everyone is trying to think all this through, even though it’s too big to “think through.”

And everyone is afraid of making a mistake.

Everyone wants a feeling of safety. But no one is certain where safety is.

I’m not sure Washington and the national political class see this, but a great question of 2020: What will make us feel safer?

Am I right in what I’m seeing? I ask five disparate friends. In spades, they say.

A nurse in a lake community in New Jersey names her worry: “Evictions and foreclosures.” People are maintaining a surface cool. “Everyone I talk to is getting by day to day but anxious about what the future holds.” “The uncertainty is so much.” People in the medical field tend to feel secure in their jobs, but she isn’t sure the nation’s nurses, in a second wave in the fall, will be willing to go back and work in the same conditions they faced in March and April. “Do we have it in us to do it again?’

A retired political pro in the Midwest: “Most people I interact with put on a good face, but the conversation usually goes to serious concerns”—the economy, jobs, the schools. Some large local employers are laying people off; several local businesses have gone under. “People are very worried about both the short-term impact and longer-term consequences.”

A university administrator in Southern California: “What adds to the weirdness for many in their 40s and 50s in particular is the dissonance between what people are seeing around them every day and what they feel and know is sand shifting under their feet.” People with white-collar jobs are still in their homes and on Zoom. “They see their co-workers every day, virtually, and if there are layoffs these people just—poof!—disappear into another dimension. No goodbyes or farewell happy hour.” If you read the papers you see there’s no run on the banks, and the stock market is booming. “But is it? There are warning signs—unemployment but also all the apparel firms going under, malls empty. Commercial real estate is next.”

A lawyer in Westchester County, N.Y., said weekday evening services at his synagogue are drawing twice as many congregants as in the pre-Covid past. “Folks are frayed, bewildered, they need a time-out from the uncertainty. It’s not that they expect deliverance—the High Holiday liturgy and history are a giant cautionary tale.” “It’s like things around us are broken and we want some certainty. Not the certainty that everything will be all right, but the certainty that ‘this’ is here this moment and will again be here in the morning.”

To a writer and consultant based in Virginia, this historical moment feels charged. “It’s maybe not quite the summer of 1914 or 1939, but there’s a definite sense of worry, of not knowing, and thinking there’s a long road until we’re done with this, if one can even say such a thing, and certainly a long road until the joys of next summer, which seems very distant.”

If you broaden your lens and look toward Washington, what makes you feel better, more secure, inspired? What makes you feel safer, as if there’s a way out or a path through? Anything?

There’s something I’ve been trying to write for a few weeks but can’t get my hands around—but it’s as if there’s no president, it’s an empty White House, nobody’s really there, it’s not an administration but an eccentric event that causes clamor. I’ve never had that feeling before, that a White House is empty and weightless. The media, whose job it is to hold it to account, are distrusted. A Knight Foundation-Gallup survey released this week showed 86% of Americans seeing “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of political bias in news coverage. The Democrats can’t agree on what they’re running on beyond “We’re Not Trump, ” which may or may not be enough, with a presidential candidate age 77 who sometimes seems confused. People can’t even be confident the election will work, that it will be orderly, that the old rough integrity of the system will hold. They know there will likely be no “election night” with states called and a winner declared. But will there be an election week? Month?

When you look toward Washington it’s not solid ground, it’s more shifting sand.

And so the mood this charged summer of ’20: Everyone’s scared, everyone’s trying to figure out where safety is, everyone’s afraid of making a mistake.

You aren’t alone. The whole vast middle of the country now is a Coalition of the Worried.

Where did Donald Trump come from? Where is the GOP going? Should the whole thing be burned down? A lot had to go wrong before we got a President Trump. This fact, once broadly acknowledged, has gotten lost, as if a lot of people want it forgotten.

Mr. Trump’s election came from two unwon wars, which constituted a historic foreign-policy catastrophe, and the Great Recession, which those in power, distracted by their mighty missions, didn’t see coming until it arrived with all its wreckage. He came from the decadeslong refusal of both parties’ leadership to respect and respond to Americans’ anxieties, from left and right, about illegal immigration. He came from bad policy and bad stands on crucial issues.

He came from the growing realization of on-the-ground Americans that neither party seemed to feel any particular affiliation with or loyalty to them, that both considered them lumpen bases to be managed and manipulated. He came from the great and increasing social and cultural distance between the movers and talkers of the national GOP, its strategists, operatives, thinkers, pundits and party professionals, and the party’s base. He came from algorithms that deliberately excite, divide and addict, and from lawmakers who came to see that all they had to do to endure was talk, not legislate, because legislating involves compromise and, in an era grown polar and primitive, compromise is for quislings.

He came from a spirit of frustration among a sizable segment of the electorate that, in time, became something like a spirit of nihilism. It will be a long time repairing that, and no one is sure how to.

And here, in that perfect storm, was Mr. Trump’s simple, momentary genius. He declared for president as a branding exercise and went out and said applause lines, and when the crowd cheered, he decided “This is my program,” and when it didn’t cheer, he thought, “Huh, that is not my program.” Some of it was from his gut, but most of it was that casual. After the election a former high official told me he observed it all from the side of the stage. This week the official said that after a rally, on the plane home, all Mr. Trump and Jared Kushner would talk about was the reaction. “Did you see how they responded to that?”

The base, with its cheers, said they weren’t for cutting entitlement benefits. They were still suffering from the effects of 2008, and other things. They weren’t for open borders or for more foreign fighting. They were for the guy who said he hated the elites as much as they did.

The past four years have produced a different kind of disaster, one often described in this space. The past six months Mr. Trump came up against his own perfect storm, one he could neither exploit nor talk his way past: a pandemic, an economic contraction that will likely produce a lengthy recession, and prolonged, sometimes violent national street protests. If the polls can be trusted, he is on the verge of losing the presidency.

Now various of his foes, in or formerly of his party, want to burn the whole thing down—level the party, salt the earth where it stood, remove Republican senators, replace them with Democrats.

This strikes me as another form of nihilism. It’s bloody-minded and not fully responsible for three reasons.

First, it’s true that the two-party system is a mess and a great daily frustration. But in the end, together and in spite of themselves, both parties still function as a force for unity in that when an election comes, whatever your disparate stands, you have to choose whether you align more with Party A or Party B. This encourages coalitions and compromise. It won’t work if there are four parties or six; things will splinter, the system buckle. The Democratic Party needs the Republican Party, needs it to restrain its excesses and repair what it does that proves injurious. The Republicans need the Democrats, too, for the same reasons.

Second, if the Republicans lose the presidency, the House and the Senate in November, the rising progressives of the Democratic Party will be emboldened and present a bill for collection. They’ll push hard for what they want. This will create a runaway train that will encourage bad policy that will damage the nation. Republicans and conservatives used to worry about that kind of thing.

Third, Donald Trump is burning himself down. Has no one noticed?

When the Trump experience is over, the Republican Party will have to be rebuilt. It will have to begin with tens of millions of voters who previously supported Mr. Trump. It will have to decide where it stands, its reason for being. It won’t be enough to repeat old mantras or formulations from 1970 to 2000. It’s 2020. We’re a different country.

A lot is going to have to be rethought. Simple human persuasion will be key.

Rebuilding doesn’t start with fires, purges and lists of those you want ejected from the party.

Many if not most of those calling for burning the whole thing down are labeled “Never Trump,” and a lot of them are characterologically quick to point the finger of blame. They’re aiming at Trump supporters in Congress. Some of those lawmakers have abandoned long-held principles to show obeisance to the president and his supporters. Some, as you know if you watched the supposed grilling of tech titans this week, are just idiots.

But Never Trumpers never seem to judge themselves. Many of them, when they were profiting through past identities as Republicans or conservatives, supported or gave strategic cover to the wars that were such a calamity, and attacked those who dissented. Many showed no respect to those anxious about illegal immigration and privately, sometimes publicly, denounced them as bigots. Never Trumpers eloquently decry the vulgarization of politics and say the presidency is lowered by a man like Mr. Trump, and it is. But they invented Sarah Palin and unrelentingly attacked her critics. They often did it in the name of party loyalty.

Some Never Trumpers helped create the conditions that created President Trump. What would be helpful from them now is not pyromaniac fantasies but constructive modesty, even humility.

The party’s national leaders and strategists don’t have a lot to be proud of the past few decades. The future of the party will probably bubble up from the states.

But it matters that the past six months Mr. Trump has been very publicly doing himself in, mismanaging his crises—setting himself on fire. As long as that’s clear, his supporters won’t be able to say, if he loses, that he was a champion of the people who was betrayed by the party elites, the Never Trumpers and the deep state: “He didn’t lose, he was the victim of treachery.”

Both parties have weaknesses. Liberals enjoy claiming progress that can somehow never quite be quantified. Conservatives like the theme of betrayal.

It will be unhelpful for Republicans, and bad for the country, if that’s the background music of the party the next 10 years.

Something shifted this month. Donald Trump’s hold on history loosened, and may be breaking. In some new way his limitations are being seen and acknowledged, and at a moment when people are worried about the continuance of their country and their own ability to continue within it. He hasn’t been equal to the multiple crises. Good news or bad, he rarely makes any situation better. And everyone kind of knows.

On Wednesday a Siena College/New York Times poll found Joe Biden ahead 50% to 36%. It’s a poll four months out, but it’s a respectable one and in line with others. (A week before, a Fox News poll had Mr. Biden leading 50% to 38%. The president denounced it as a fantasy.) This week’s poll had Mr. Biden leading among women by 22 points—a bigger lead than Hillary Clinton enjoyed in 2016. He has moderates by 33 points, independents by 21. On Thursday a separate Times/Siena poll had Mr. Trump losing support in the battleground states that put him over the top in 2016. His “once-commanding advantage among white voters has nearly vanished,” the Times wrote.

The latest White House memoir paints the president as ignorant, selfish and unworthy of high office. Two GOP House primary candidates the president supported lost their primaries resoundingly. Internet betting sites that long saw Mr. Trump as the front-runner now favor Mr. Biden. The president’s vaunted Tulsa, Okla., rally was a dud with low turnout. Senior officials continue to depart the administration—another economic adviser this week, the director of legislative affairs and the head of the domestic policy council before him. Why are they fleeing the ship in a crisis, in an election year?

Judgments on the president’s pandemic leadership have settled in. It was inadequate and did harm. He experienced Covid-19 not as a once-in-a-lifetime medical threat but merely a threat to his re-election argument, a gangbusters economy. He denied the scope and scale of the crisis, sent economic adviser Larry Kudlow out to say we have it “contained” and don’t forget to buy the dip. Mr. Trump essentially admitted he didn’t want more testing because it would result in more positives.

And the virus rages on, having hit blue states first and now tearing through red states in the South and West—Arizona, Florida, the Carolinas, Texas.

The protests and riots of June were poorly, embarrassingly handled. They weren’t the worst Washington had ever seen, they were no 1968, but still he wound up in the White House bunker. Then out of the bunker for an epically pointless and manipulative photo-op in front of a boarded-up church whose basement had been burned. Through it all the angry, blustering tweets issued from the White House like panicked bats fleeing flames in the smokestack.

It was all weak, unserious and avoidant of the big issues. He wasn’t equal to that moment either.

His long-term political malpractice has been his failure—with a rising economy, no unemployment and no hot wars—to build his support beyond roughly 40% of the country. He failed because he obsesses on his base and thinks it has to be fed and greased with the entertainments that alienate everyone else. But his base, which always understood he was a showman, wanted steadiness and seriousness in these crises, because they have a sense of the implications of things.

He doesn’t understand his own base. I’ve never seen that in national politics.

Some of them, maybe half, are amused by his nonsense decisions and statements—let’s ban all Muslims; let’s end this deadbeat alliance; we have the biggest, best tests. But they are half of 40%, and they would stick with him no matter what. He doesn’t have to entertain them! He had to impress and create a bond with others.

The other half of his base is mortified by his antics and shallowness. I hear from them often. They used to say yes, he’s rough and uncouth and unpolished, but only a rough man can defeat the swamp. Now they say I hate him and what he represents but I’ll vote for him because of the courts, etc. How a lot of Trump supporters feel about the president has changed. The real picture at the Tulsa rally was not the empty seats so much as the empty faces—the bored looks, the yawning and phone checking, as if everyone was re-enacting something, hearing some old song and trying to remember how it felt a few years ago, when you heard it the first time.

In the end, if the president loses, he’ll turn on them too. They weren’t there for him, they didn’t work hard enough, they’re no good at politics. “After all I did.”

That will be something, when that happens.

Nobody knows what’s coming. On New Year’s Eve we couldn’t imagine the pandemic, economic contraction and protests. We don’t know what will happen in the next four months, either. I believe in the phenomenon of silent Trump voters, people who don’t tell anyone, including pollsters, that they’re for him because they don’t want to be hassled. But eight, 10 or 14 points worth? No.

It’s generally thought that if the summer’s protests and demonstrations become riots again, if they’re marked by more violence and statues crashing to the ground, then Mr. Trump will benefit. This may be true. There will be powerful pushback if things are grim. But I’m not sure he will benefit. A sense that things have gone out of control under your watch does not help incumbents. A sense that he cannot calibrate his actions but will do any crazy thing to bolster his position will not help him. He is a strange man in a strange time, the old rules don’t necessarily apply.

It’s possible, but not likely, that a general calming will occur as progressive activists make progress in party primaries and corporate boardrooms, and as their ideological assumptions ascend in public life. They’ve already won and are winning a lot.

And it’s always possible Joe Biden will awaken to the moment we’re in, see that a leader isn’t someone who sits back in a sunny, well-appointed suburban room and watches, passively, as dramatic events unfold. He could emerge as a real leader with a series of statements putting forth guiding principles to weather our crises. We have problems with race, problems with the police. What rearrangements should be made? How do we make them nonviolently, democratically? What is the meaning of history? What is a statue? What is socialism? What is the path?

He is bowing to the ancient political wisdom that you should never interrupt a man while he’s destroying himself. And he’s afraid of being on the wrong side of rising progressive forces. But thoughtfulness and seriousness would put him squarely with wavering Trump supporters and the honestly undecided, and reassure them that a vote for him is not also a vote for unchecked extremism and mayhem.

Silence is short-term shrewd. Rising to the occasion, taking a chance, making a gamble when everything is going your way but the country needs more—that is long-term wise. And wise always beats shrewd in the end.

We had wondered if Mr. Trump can lead in a crisis. He cannot. Can Mr. Biden?

Summer begins and it may be a hard one. Lots of pain in this big place.

The cultural upheaval continues, the plague marches on, a bitter election looms. This is a good time to think about something noble and inspiring, the life and work of Bob Dylan. He has an album out this week, his first with original material since 2012, called “Rough and Rowdy Ways.”

Mr. Dylan wrote his most famous anthem, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” in 1962. He has been operating at the top of American culture and embedded in the national consciousness for almost 60 years. You have to go back to Robert Frost and Mark Twain to find such a span of sustained literary productivity and importance.

Like Twain and Frost his great subject is America. Like them he is a genius: He did work of high artistic merit that had never been done before and won’t be replicated. For me, having known his work since I was young, his work is grave, wistful, rollocking, full of meaning and true. Also, obviously, prophetic, as if he were picking up big clear waves of themes in the electrical static all around us. “The battle outside ragin’ / Will soon shake your windows / And rattle your walls / For the times they are a-changin’.”

That was true when he wrote it and is true today. Great art is always about right now. It time-travels. Mr. Dylan’s music never settles down into an era, it’s dynamic, it’s like hearing the past in active conversation with the future.

There are two things you have to do if you have big ambitions and want to create something important that lasts. The first is the daily work and trying to keep it at a height that satisfies you. That’s hard. If you succeed, the second is dealing with the effects of the work, managing a career. That’s tricky. It involves making big, real-time decisions about pathways and ways of being. You have to figure out if an opportunity is a true opening or an easy way out; if a desire for security has the potential to become a betrayal of yourself and the thing God gave you, your gift.

Mr. Dylan seems to have handled all this by following to an almost radical degree the dictates of his essential nature and talent, and doing the work as he envisions it day to day. You can wind up being a hero one decade and a joke the next when you choose that route, and that’s happened to him. But in the end, this: In October 2016, he became the first writer of songs to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

What a great figure.

In his autobiography, “Chronicles,” Mr. Dylan writes of how one night, when he was starting out playing the clubs in New York in the 1960s, he stumbled on a man who’d been stabbed to death. The blood made interesting patterns in the snow. This reminded Mr. Dylan of old photos of the Civil War. He began to study the war, deeply. Its meaning would shape him: “Back there, America was put on the cross, died and was resurrected. There was nothing synthetic about it. The godawful truth of that would be the all-encompassing template behind everything that I would write.”

He loves the mythic, fabulous figures of U.S. history. On the first page of his autobiography he writes of meeting Jack Dempsey. “Don’t be afraid of hitting somebody too hard,” the old boxer, taking him for a bantamweight, advised him. On “Rough and Rowdy Ways,” Mr. Dylan sings of William Tecumseh Sherman and George Patton, “who cleared the way for Presley to sing / who cleared the path for Martin Luther King.” It’s as if it’s all a continuum in which America’s outsize and spectacular beings clear the way and pave the path for the renegades and revolutionaries who will follow.

Mr. Dylan has the soul of a worker, a craftsman who has learned his craft. He spoke of this in February 2015, when he received the Person of the Year award from MusiCares Foundation. Rolling Stone later printed a transcript taken, the magazine said, from Mr. Dylan’s notes.

“These songs didn’t come out of thin air,” he said. He learned how to write lyrics from listening to folk songs over and over. He studied them, absorbed them, sang “The Ballad of John Henry, ” the steel-driving man with the hammer in his hand. “If you had sung that song as many times as I did, you’d have written ‘How many roads must a man walk down?’ too.” He said his intention was “extending the line,” continuing the music he loved by internalizing it and turning it into his own words, thoughts and stories.

In a New York Times interview last weekend, the historian Douglas Brinkley asked Mr. Dylan about the musical tributes he’d done to John Lennon. Is there anyone else he wants to write a ballad for?

Some public figures “are just in your subconscious for one reason or another,” he said. “None of those songs with designated names are intentionally written. They just fall down from space. I’m just as bewildered as anybody else as to why I write them.”

Writers are often asked how they get their ideas, and the language with which they express them. The truth is they don’t know. Why did your mind yield up that thought in those words? Walker Percy thought when he got something right the Holy Spirit had snuck into him.

Mr. Dylan doesn’t know where it comes from. Sometimes you write “on instinct,” he told Mr. Brinkley. “Kind of in a trance state.” His recent songs are like that: “The lyrics are the real thing, tangible, they’re not metaphors. The songs seem to know themselves and they know that I can sing them, vocally and rhythmically. They kind of write themselves and count on me to sing them.”

Mr. Dylan more and more speaks of fellow artists—fellow workers—with great tenderness. He reminds me of what Pope John Paul II said, that artists know a special pain because they imagine a work and see it in their heads but can never execute it perfectly, can never achieve what they’d imagined, and forever carry the anguish of unmet ambition.

Mr. Dylan looked up to Nina Simone, “an overwhelming artist.” When she recorded his songs, it “validated” him. “Johnny Cash was a giant of a man, the Man in Black.” When Mr. Dylan was criticized, Cash defended him in letters to magazines. In Cash’s world nobody told a man what to do, especially an artist. Little Richard was a man of “high character”: “He was there before me. Lit a match under me.” Why didn’t people appreciate his gospel music? “Probably because gospel music is the music of good news and in these days there just isn’t any. Good news in today’s world is like a fugitive, treated like a hoodlum and put on the run. Castigated. All we see is good-for-nothing news. . . . On the other hand, gospel news is exemplary. It can give you courage.”

We can forget: There are geniuses among us. They’re doing their work and bringing their light. Remembering this is encouraging.

Also Bob Dylan needed freedom to be Bob Dylan. Lose that and you lose everything.

But isn’t it good that he’s here? Rock on, Bob Dylan. Your work adorns us.

I want to get back to the pandemic, which is not at the moment being seen for what it is. It is taking place within a very different context. It has been subsumed by the Upheaval, the culture-shaking event we are undergoing as a nation.

States have begun to reopen, people are going out. Covid-19 feels like yesterday’s story—we don’t want to think about it, we’re barely out of the house. But it’s tomorrow’s story too.

The first wave is still here. It never went away. We have every reason to think another, newer, possibly different wave will come in the late fall (different in that the strain could be more lethal, or less).

We have to keep this in mind and have a plan. Public officials especially should be thinking about one.

Outbreaks continue. Some 800 Americans a day are still dying. The number of new cases in Arizona, California, Florida, Tennessee and Texas is up. Alaska, Kentucky, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Carolina, Puerto Rico and South Carolina are also experiencing increases. Angela Dunn, Utah’s state epidemiologist, said last week that the state’s “sharp spike in cases,” is “not explained easily by a single outbreak or increase in testing. This is a statewide trend.”

Nationally there have been more than two million confirmed cases. The true number of cases may be higher for many reasons, including that, as the Journal reported this week, some testing sites were shut down during protests. Reported deaths are approaching 115,000. The head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Robert Redfield, told Congress that the demonstrations may turn out to have been “a seeding event.”

It had been assumed the summer would offer a respite, and that seems likely in many places, maybe most. New York, hard hit early on, is experiencing a decline in cases. Coronavirus doesn’t like sunlight, fresh air or warm temperatures. It prefers coolness and poor ventilation in enclosed places, meatpacking plants being the most famous example.

Flus and colds tend to recede in the summer and return in the fall and winter. The 1918 influenza epidemic hit America hard in the spring, but its second, deadlier wave came in October.

Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitchtold the Journal of the American Medical Association that he thinks warmer weather is likely to reduce transmission rates by about 20%: “That’s only enough to slow it down, but not enough to stop it.”

Anthony Fauci can be distressingly deft when speaking on issues that touch on the political, but one never doubts he’s being forthcoming when he speaks of disease. This week he told a biotech conference that Covid-19 has been his “worst nightmare”—a highly infectious new virus that typically attacks the respiratory system, with no clear treatment and no cure. “In a period of four months it has devastated the world,” he said. “And it isn’t over yet.”

Among its mysteries: Why such a case-to-case range of severity? Do the infected who become seriously ill fully recover? Are there “long-term durable effects”? And the illness is “shining a bright light on something we’ve known for a very long time,” Dr. Fauci said, which speaks of the greater vulnerability to and harder impacts on African-Americans and other people of color. It has been a “double whammy” for black people.

“Oh my goodness,” he said, “Where is it going to end?”

Markets often tell you how bright investors are viewing the future. CNBC reported Thursday that “the so-called stay-at-home trade” stocks “bucked the market’s overall negative trend . . . amid growing concerns of a potential second wave of new coronavirus cases.” Netflix and Amazon were up, and so was Zoom Video Communications.

Obviously a vaccine would change everything. Dr. Fauci told Yahoo Finance that “it is very difficult to predict” when and how success will come, but he is, as always, “cautiously optimistic” there might be an answer by the end of this year or the beginning of 2021. Yet “there is no guarantee at all that we are going to have a safe and effective vaccine.”

It is not unhelpful in life generally, at least in historical matters, to expect the worst. You’ll never feel disappointed. If the worst happens your bleak worldview is ratified. If it doesn’t you’re pleasantly surprised.

If you expect the worst on coronavirus you’ll think personal caution and carefulness are absolutely essential this summer, and a hard time is coming late this fall and winter.

Which gets us to the governors, who again will be galvanized.

They were right to take strong action early on in the crisis. There is no doubt that the lockdowns saved many, many lives and allowed hospitals to hold their ground. Some governors moved late, some made big blunders, such as in the New York nursing-home disaster. But at the beginning of the crisis, in the face of federal dithering and denials, they were at least doing something.

Then they got carried away. They received too much adulation, enjoyed the role of savior too much, and the lockdowns became longer. Told we were grateful someone was taking responsibility, they became micromanagers of human life. Briefings became self-aggrandizing and Castroesque in length.

If a big fall wave comes it will arrive in a very different context. The shocked and cooperative citizens of March are the battered, skeptical citizens of June. They saw the inevitable politicization of the process. They saw the illogic and apparent capriciousness of many regulations. They suffered financially and saw little sympathy for their plight. They were lectured and hectored. There was no governmental modesty in it.

There will be exactly zero appetite this fall for daily news conferences in which governors announce the phased, Stage 2 openings of certain sectors that meet certain metrics that some midlevel health-department guy seems to have pulled out of his ear. That was the past three months.

What’s the plan if things turn difficult? People won’t want and may not accept a second lockdown, even in the face of a more lethal iteration of the virus. They will likely in a crisis accept increased calls for voluntary social distancing, mask directives, bans on big events, not that we have big events. But—what else?

The governors gained great stature and authority in March and April and began to lose it in May, as did some in the medical and scientific establishments, who became inconsistent in their advice regarding safety and crowds. What early on seemed nonideological came, inevitably, to look like activism.

But we’re going to need all of them again in the fall. They can turn now to where they started—speaking forcefully of the latest, most reliable facts, of how to save lives, of what history tells us about our predicament. Trouble is coming in the fall, and the country is going to need advice, and to trust the advice-givers.

We are only in Act I. Act II is coming. That’s usually the point in the drama when the deepest complications ensue, and demand resolution.

There’s so much to say but my mind keeps going back to New Year’s Eve, when we watched the ball come down and knew the story of 2020 was the presidential election and whatever stray harassments history throws our way. No one that night guessed—no one could have guessed—that in the next few months we’d have a world-wide pandemic, an economic catastrophe and fighting in the streets. The point is not that life is surprise or history turns on a dime, it’s that we’ve been battered. We’ve been through a lot. And with economic and cultural indexes down, with the world turned darker and more predatory, we will go through more. We thought we’d be telling our grandchildren about the spring of 2020. Actually we’ll be telling them about the coming 10 years, and how we tried to turn everything around.

The painful irony of the protests and riots is that for a few days everyone was in agreement. We all saw the nine-minute tape. We saw the casual brutality as the dying man begged for mercy and the cop didn’t care. In the past there were arguments about similar incidents. Not this time. Most everyone concedes the problem—that black men are profiled and cannot feel safe in their own country. Walking while black, driving while black—Tim Scott of South Carolina has been stopped for trying to impersonate a U.S. senator, which is what he is. In an interview a few years ago he told me that seven times in his first six years in Washington he’d been pulled over for “driving a new car in the wrong neighborhood.”

Following the killing of George Floyd, America would totally accept protests and demonstrations, would understand expressions of anger and pain.

What Americans wouldn’t accept was looting, violence, arson. They wouldn’t accept that shopkeepers just out from lockdown were pulled from their stores and beaten. They won’t accept this because they will not accept more battery.

We’re now supposed to hate cops. No. Hate bad cops, help good ones. A great cop does as much to help society as a great doctor or nurse, and is in the line of fire. In New York, one officer was mowed down by a hit-and-run driver; another was stabbed in the neck; two were shot. One cop was shot in Las Vegas and four in St. Louis, where the police chief said someone randomly shot at a police line. Also in St. Louis a 77-year-old retired police captain, David Dorn, black, on the force 38 years, was shot and killed during the looting.

Cops witness the worst things in America. They answer the 911 call at 3:20 a.m. and see things so horrible they can’t tell anyone because if it gets around there will be imitators. They see the violent parents and the kids watching television, checked out at age 8. They see what meth does. They’re often poorly trained and have to get everything right, and they assume between the pols and public opinion no one really has their back except the unions that too often keep cities from weeding out bad cops so that good cops can thrive.

There is a phrase among medical professionals, “moral injury.” Health-care workers who are strung out, stretched to the breaking point, suffer from moral injury.

So do a lot of cops. A lot of black men, too. The thing for all of us now is to keep our moral poise and intellectual balance, try to be fair and make things better. Some cops failed to do that this week—unnecessary roughness, targeting journalists. Some really came through. Among them were the police who were face to face with demonstrators and took a knee. This has been criticized as obsequious, bowing to the mob. No, it is how we are saved, by showing love and sympathy. It happened from New York to Los Angeles. Yahoo News reported on what happened in Flint, Mich., when Sheriff Chris Swanson told protesters, “I took off the helmet and laid the batons down. Where do you want to walk? We’ll walk all night.” Protesters cheered. In Fayetteville, N.C., there was a standoff between demonstrators and the police. The officers, some 60 of them, took a knee before marchers on Murchison Road. The department later said they wanted to show “understanding” for “the pain” many civilians are feeling. Witnesses said some officers and protesters had tears in their eyes.

To the extent things were contained this week, that’s how it happened.

That’s the big story, what happened in America.

As to the president, this week he altered his position in the political landscape. Something broke. He is no longer the force he was and no longer lucky. In some new and indelible way his essential nature was revealed.

It got out that faced with protests around the White House, he hid. Or perhaps let the Secret Service, which might have struggled with realistic threat assessment, talk him into going into the White House bunker. (Mr. Trump later said he was simply “inspecting” it.) He tweeted that he was protected by the “most vicious dogs” and “ominous weapons.”

On Monday, he spoke in the Rose Garden. “I will fight to protect you,” he said. “I am your president of law and order.” This was unsubtle, and seemed more aimed at protecting his political prospects than your safety and property.

Then, upset that people might be getting the impression he was a physical coward, he set out to prove he is brave. Protected by a phalanx of police, Secret Service, sharpshooters and what looked like a Praetorian Guard with shields, he marched to St John’s, the church of the presidents. Aides said it was a Churchill moment. And it was just like Churchill during the blitz, if Churchill secretly loved rubble. Upon arrival with his friends, the people who work for him, he brandished a Bible like—who in history?—the devil?

In all this he gave up the game and explicitly patronized his own followers. It was as if he was saying: I’m going to show you how stupid I know you are. I’ll give you crude and gross imagery and you’ll love it because you’re crude and gross people.

And some would love it. But not all. Not most, I think.

He has maxed out his base. He’s got his 40% and will keep it, but it isn’t growing. His polls are down, he has historically high negatives. As for suburban women, they’d crawl over broken husbands to vote him out.

He is proud of his many billionaire friends and thinks they love him. They don’t. Their support is utterly transactional. They’re embarrassed by him. When they begin to think he won’t be re-elected they will turn, and it will be bloody and on a dime.

This will not end well. With his timing he’d know it. He should give an Oval Office address announcing he’s leaving: “America, you don’t deserve me.” Truer words have never been spoken in that old place. And he won’t be outshone by his successor. Network producers will listen to Mike Pence once and say, “Let’s do ‘Shark Week.’ ” But you know, America could use a shark week.

Something is coming that is well-meant and seriously intended but carries the promise of trouble. It is the planned state-by-state coronavirus contact-tracing regime. It has all the potential to be an onerous system that provokes resentment, spurs anxiety, and invites pushback.

The plan is to curb Covid-19’s spread by tracking those exposed. They will be informed that someone they know has tested positive (for privacy reasons the name will be withheld) and they may have been exposed. They will be instructed or asked to get tested, to self-quarantine for a period, which may or may not be monitored, and to share the names and numbers of those they have recently been in contact with. Those persons in turn will be called, and so on.

Tom Frieden, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told Statnews.com the idea’s practical intention: “You can prevent the clusters from becoming outbreaks, prevent outbreaks from becoming epidemics, and prevent the epidemics from driving us into our homes again.”

Most of the tracking will apparently be done by phone. But a lot is unclear, including enforcement powers and their limits. States and cities will create their own rules and processes. New York, California and Michigan seem to be taking the lead. This week New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the hiring of 1,700 trackers, who begin work June 1. There is enthusiasm at the federal level. Robert Redfield, head of the CDC, says he supports “very aggressive” tracking—but no national plan.

The Washington Post reports public-health experts estimate that an effective tracking system will require at least 15 trackers per 100,000 Americans. The National Association of County and City Health Officials puts the cost at about $3.7 billion to cover the work of 100,000 tracers. It will be an army, on the ground for a generally agreed upon estimate of 18 months.

But no one is so far really clear on how exactly the army will do its job, what it will be empowered to do, what legal sanctions if any will apply to those who don’t share names or go into quarantine. How will trackers know if people obey quarantine rules? Will law enforcement become involved?

To supplement manual tracing, phone apps are being prepared by private industry, including Google and Apple. Some questions on this from TechnologyReview.com: If people use the apps, “what data will [the companies] collect, and who is it shared with? How will that information be used in the future? Are there policies in place to prevent abuse?” China, they note, “sucks up data including citizens’ identity, location, and even online payment history so that local police can watch for those who break quarantine rules.”

All this is disquieting.

The program will be launched in a particular context and a particular country. The context: a pandemic in which a lot of people have lost loved ones and jobs and fear getting sick. People are under pressure, nerves are frayed. By fall they may be starting to get back on their feet. Then the phone rings and someone tells you a nameless person is sick and named you and you have to stay home . . .

The political context: We are a divided nation. Some will see the program as Big Brother. Others will think it’s ICE at the door. We’re a whole country dodging bill collectors and afraid to answer our so-called landlines because of scammers who say they’re the IRS or your credit-card company. There’s a lot of understandable suspicion and some paranoia.

The larger context: who we are as a people. We are the heirs of geniuses, of religious visionaries and visionaries of self-government. Read the Mayflower Compact and your eyes fill with tears. Even in 1620 they knew! We also come from people who fled, from rascals and renegades. We came from the nobleman who got the girl in trouble and hopped the next ship. We come from idealists who wanted to bring Catholicism to the Indians. We came from people who couldn’t make “back home” work, impoverished farm girls and boys, people with nothing to lose. We come from people who were oppressed culturally, economically or by their governments. We come from the restless. Once in a history of Wyoming I read of settlers who couldn’t settle down and dragged their children on an endless search for the right patch of land. That is so American.

There’s something displaced in us, and uneasy. Something violent, too.

We fled cartels. We don’t want people following us. We fled the czar’s cossacks. We said, “If only the czar knew,” and then laughed because we knew the czar knew. We came from the enslaved, dragged out of Africa.

We came from people being pushed around, and mistrust of authority is in our DNA. Americans are exactly the people who won’t like trackers asking them who they’ve seen and where they’ve been, and telling them where they can’t go and what they can’t do. They won’t like feeling they’re naming names.

You can see all this in the polls. In 2018 a Monmouth University poll found 53% of Americans very or somewhat worried about government monitoring and invasion of privacy. The response cut roughly the same among Republicans, Democrats and independents. The same year a Chapman University Survey of American Fears found No. 1 was corruption of government officials. (They didn’t randomly meet conservatives: Nos. 2 and 3 had to do with pollution of oceans, rivers, lakes and drinking water.) In July 2019, Pew said 75% of Americans feel distrust for government.

The tracking programs are going to go forward because the politicians have announced them and declared them crucial to the fight. They’re already being budgeted. They’re also a kind of jobs program when people need jobs. And the scientists support them, arguing that they’ve worked well in Asia. But we’re not Asia, and we don’t have an outbreak of 50, or 5,000, or even 50,000 to deal with. More than a million and a half Americans have been infected, and more will be after things open up. So it’s going to get complicated, and probably ragged.

They’d better think through how they do this. So much will depend on execution. Some trackers will be geniuses of tact and empathy. Some will be officious clods. Some will have a natural and internal respect for those they’re talking to. Some will think America is a thing that happens in a petri dish beneath their gleaming microscopes.

Everything will depend on humility of process. Trackers should neither carry nor imply threats or coercion. They should request but not demand information. There’s nothing wrong with asking people to get a test, telling them where to get it and that it’s free. Nothing wrong with asking them to stay close to home for now, and if you test positive stay home for a few weeks. The point is to make it easy—to offer a weekly stipend and see to it that a reliable local agency comes regularly with food or diapers and formula. Offer to call a boss, explain the situation, protect a job. Accept no if the answer is no.

If government is going to do it, they better make it possible for the American people to appreciate it. If it’s done badly, they won’t, and there will be pushback.