Peggy Noonan

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.

The hour and a half between 9 and 10:30 p.m. ET on Thursday, Oct. 23, at Belmont University in Nashville was the last chance Donald Trump had to turn it all around.

Did he? Could he?

It’s late in the game, most peoples’ minds are set, and more than 40 million have already voted. But he did himself some good. He wasn’t a belligerent nut. He held himself together, controlled himself, presented opening remarks that made sense. He won, not a dazzling win but a win that kept him in the game. He succeeded in doing what Joe Biden didn’t have to do: If you wanted or needed an excuse, an out, to vote for Mr. Trump, if you wanted an argument that justified your decision in a conversation in the office, he probably gave you what you need.

It was a good debate. The candidates argued big things. Both had some good moves. Mr. Trump was smart to dwell, early on, on opening up economically. He hung a “Closed” sign around Mr. Biden’s neck. Mr. Biden deftly turned accusations of familial venality into reminders of the president’s refusal, after five years of demands, to show his tax returns.

Mr. Biden too often lapses into government-speak—“the public option.” He was in government 47 years, and sounds it. Mr. Trump’s power, recovered Thursday night, is to speak like normal people, so you can understand him without having to translate what he’s saying in your head. He appears to have lied a great deal. That will be adjudicated in the coming days.

Moderator Kristen Welker was fabulous—fair-minded, professional and in control. What a star.

All that said, where are we? This close to Election Day and everyone with bated breath. Everyone sees the polls, the clear Biden lead nationwide and the smaller lead in most of battleground states. We know what those polls suggest. But there is little air of defeat among Trump supporters and no triumphalism among Democrats.

Trump supporters believe he will win because of his special magic, Trump foes fear he will win because of his dark magic. Pollsters and pundits stare at the data and wonder how to quantify his unfathomable magic. It’s remarkable that all in their different ways put such stock in the president’s powers, his ability to pull a black swan out of a hat. I believe he is not magic and faces a big loss, and from the way he’s acted the week leading up to the debate—flailing about, stirring themeless chaos—so does he.

But there are a few points that contradict the picture. One is the number 56. That is the percentage of registered voters who, asked by Gallup if they are better off than they were four years ago, say yes. (Gallup has asked this regularly in election years since 1984.) Fifty-six percent—in a pandemic, after protests, riots and recession!

It’s only a poll, but after Gallup, a New York Times/Siena poll asked the same question, and 49% said they were better off.

What’s interesting, though, is that when Siena asked respondents if the country was better off than it was four years ago, only 39% said yes.

What does this mean? No one knows. If the polling is more or less correct, you wonder: Will people vote on their own circumstances or what they perceive to be the country’s?

The second data point has to do with Mr. Trump’s rallies—big, boisterous and frequent. He’s been in Michigan and North Carolina and has rallies planned this weekend in Ohio, Wisconsin and New Hampshire. “Gastonia Municipal Airport was packed shoulder to shoulder Wednesday night as tens of thousands of people showed up,” read a local North Carolina news report. Mr. Biden doesn’t seem to draw much of anybody, and doesn’t try. He doesn’t have rallies, and barely even appearances at this point. You can, seeing the polls, hypothesize that what you’re seeing at the Trump rallies is a political movement in its death throes. But I don’t know, they look lively to me. You might say, “The Democrats aren’t having rallies because they are more careful about the virus.” Fair enough, but in a lifetime watching politics, sometimes up close, I have never seen crowds keep away from someone they love. They’ll come whether you want them or not; they’ll find out you’re coming and stand at the side of the road to cheer as the motorcade goes by.

It’s funny not to see any of this from the Democrat this year. You can’t gainsay a strategy that seems to be working; internal Democratic critics are called bedwetters. But it doesn’t feel right. Mr. Biden should be talking every day in a big way to the country he wishes to lead. He shouldn’t be seated in a handsome chair waiting for the crown to be passed, or going out for ice cream in a mask like John Dillinger on the lam.

Maybe after the debate he’ll change.

Turnout looks to be historic. There are predictions that it will reach 150 million, even 160 million. In 2016, 137 million people voted. The changes in how we vote, from early voting to voting by mail, all hastened by the pandemic, will have been established after this election, and won’t go away. This will make things appear more democratic and may leave them more Democratic. Progressive preoccupation with the Electoral College is about to diminish, sharply.

If Mr. Biden is an extremely lucky man he will win the presidency and his party will hold the House and lose the Senate. If the Democrats win all three they’ll be a runaway train fueled by pent-up progressive demand. If the Democrats lose the Senate, Mr. Biden will have a handy excuse for his natural moderation: “You guys may want court packing, reparations and taxes on bovine flatulence but I’ve got to get it past Mitch McConnell.” If the Democrats lose the Senate the Biden presidency will be more moderate, and more popular in a country whose nerves are shot.

A Republican Senate will let Biden be Biden.

For her part, vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris is, when on the trail, giddy. She’s dancing with drum lines and beginning rallies with “Wassup, Florida!” She’s throwing her head back and laughing a loud laugh, especially when nobody said anything funny. She’s the younger candidate going for the younger vote, and she’s going for a Happy Warrior vibe, but she’s coming across as insubstantial, frivolous. When she started to dance in the rain onstage, in Jacksonville, Fla., to Mary J. Blige’s “Work That,” it was embarrassing.

Apparently you’re not allowed to say these things because she’s a woman, and she’s doubling down on giddy because you’re not allowed to say them. I, however, take Ms. Blige’s advice to heart: I will not sweat it, I will be myself. Kamala Harris is running for vice president of the United States in an era of heightened and unending crisis. The world, which doubts our strength, our character and our class, is watching. If you can’t imitate gravity, could you at least try for seriousness? I hate the shallowness with which politics is now done, the absolute puerility of it. Do you? We’re on the losing side. The future is an endless loop of Barack Obama on “Between Two Ferns,” stamping on your face, forever.

Everyone’s insane now. I mean everyone in Washington. The great challenge of the era is to maintain your intellectual poise under pressure. Washington this week looked like a vast system fail.

Tuesday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, on CNN, let it be known she won’t countenance pushback. At issue was the stalled stimulus deal. Anchor Wolf Blitzer noted that millions have lost their jobs, can’t pay the rent. Members of the speaker’s own caucus want a deal—why not accept the president’s $1.8 trillion offer?

Mrs. Pelosi went from zero to 60 in a nanosecond: “What I say to you is I don’t know why you’re always an apologist, and many of your colleagues, apologists for the Republican position.” “Do you realize” the GOP bill is inadequate, she demanded. “Do you have any idea . . .?”

What about Democrats who want a deal? “They have no idea of the particulars. They have no idea of what the language is here. . . . You’re the apologist for Obama. Excuse me. God forbid. Thank God for Barack Obama.”

Mr. Blitzer said he wasn’t an apologist. Why not just call the president and make a deal? “What makes me amused, if it weren’t so sad, is how you all think that you know more about the suffering of the American people than those of us who are elected by them to represent them at the table.”

Is this all about keeping the president from claiming credit? No, Mrs. Pelosi said, “he’s not that important.” “You really don’t know what you’re talking about.” “Do a service to the issue and have some level of respect for the people who have worked on these issues.”

Twice Mr. Blitzer insisted, “I have only the greatest respect for you.” But, he said, Americans need the money. Mrs. Pelosi: “And you don’t care how it’s spent.” “You don’t even know how it’s spent.” “May I finish, please?” “Have a little respect for the fact that we know something about these subjects.” She said he doesn’t respect committee chairmen.

I respect all of you, Mr. Blitzer said. Mrs. Pelosi: “You’ve been on a jag defending the administration all this time with no knowledge of the difference between our two bills.”

Mr. Blitzer: “We will leave it on that note.”

Mrs. Pelosi: “No, we will leave it on the note that you are not right on this, Wolf.”

He said it’s not about him but people in food lines. Mrs. Pelosi: “And we represent them. And we represent them. And we represent them. And we represent them. We know them. We represent them and we know them. We know them. We represent them.” “Thank you for your sensitivity to our constituents’ needs.”

“I am sensitive to them because I see them on the street begging for food,” Mr. Blitzer said.

Mrs. Pelosi: “Have you fed them? We feed them.”

It was bonkers. To watch was to witness, uncomfortably, the defensive aggression of an official who goes through life each day not being challenged nearly enough.

“I feel confident about it . . . and I feel confidence in my chairs,” she said. No, she doesn’t.

And Mr. Blitzer was right: It’s wrong to hold hostage people in immediate economic crisis.
From the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, critical perspective and analysis on developments from Washington

The Barrett hearings were almost as strange. They were, as usual, not really about her and her views but the senators and theirs. But it seemed to me that slightly more than usual they treated her like a piece of furniture. There were bizarre questions. From Mazie Hirono of Hawaii: “Since you became a legal adult, have you ever made unwanted requests for sexual favors or committed any verbal or physical harassment or assault of a sexual nature?” No, Judge Barrett said. Ms. Hirono says she asks this of all nominees, but it would have been nice if she’d said it with a hint of doubt.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse delivered a Rachel Maddow-style monologue on “dark money.” His data board linking “phony front groups” was wonderfully John Nash-like. The not-funny part, the sadness of it, actually, is that you could do a mirror-image chart of Democratic activism and money surrounding court nominees, and it would have been a public service if he had.

I don’t know Judge Barrett’s deeper thoughts on the Second Amendment, but by the end of the hearings I was hoping she’d pull out a gun.

As for her Republican supporters, some of them went on about her large family and motherhood in a way that seemed, subtly, to obscure the depth of her intellect and the breadth of her command of the law. I think some of them couldn’t quite grok a mother of seven who’s their intellectual superior, so they reverted to form and patronized her. And competed with her. Sen. John Kennedy seemed especially eager to save the drowning woman, not noticing she wasn’t drowning and appears, as a lawyer, to swim better than he.

They lauded her large family in a way that lacked finesse, by which I mean at times they sounded like Mussolini advancing pro-natalism as a matter of state. If Judge Barrett were single and childless like David Souter, she would still be a deeply impressive nominee. If she were married and the parent of nine like Antonin Scalia, she would be impressive. It is not irrelevant that she is bringing up seven children. “A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions,” said Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., and every child is a new experience. But when you focus on the personal at the expense of the public, you wind up with Mr. Kennedy asking, “Who does the laundry in your house?” I remember when a senator asked Scalia that and Scalia laughed in his face. Oh wait, no one ever asked Scalia that.

Guys, did you not notice the immediate recall with which she summoned, and the depth with which she analyzed, the history of American jurisprudence? Say thank you, God, and move on.

She will be confirmed. Having spent a long time reading of her and her decisions, what strikes me is a story she told last spring, at Notre Dame. It is personal but sheds light on her thinking. She and her husband had suddenly received a call saying a baby had come up for adoption. But she had just found out she was pregnant with her fifth child. She threw on a jacket, took a walk, and wound up on a bench in a cemetery. She thought, “If life is really hard, at least it’s short.” They adopted the baby.

There have been many men on the court who seemed deep and were celebrated for their scholarly musings but were essentially, as individuals and in their conception of life, immature. But this is not a child, a sentimentalist, an ideological warrior. This is a thinker who thinks about reality.

She’s not what you expect when you open your handy box of categories. People who understand conservatism in a particular, maybe limited way—they don’t know what they just got.

Modern, a particular kind of Catholic, a woman, with a lived emphasis on people in community—this is not a “standard conservative.” In her independence from partisan politics, in her lived faith in higher persons, spirits and principles, this is rather a dangerous woman.

And she’s sane.

I hear America absorbing. Quietly. Not screeching around and having fun, not stomping and shouting as you’d expect at this point in a dramatic campaign with weeks to go, not acting up and merrily pulling campaign signs from the neighbor’s lawn in the dead of night. It all feels so subdued. As if people are taking it all in, coming to terms with where this is going.

There’s been so much to take in! The past week was bizarre, berserk, almost biblical—the president’s illness, the sudden helicopter to Walter Reed hospital, the botched mess of his spokesmen withholding information about his condition and treatments, the joyride to wave at fans. His sudden, eerily lit return to the White House, the tearing off of the mask, the salute, the balcony speech, the apparent gasping for air. The sheer deranged spectacle of it, and the underlying sense it heightened, that the White House has been reduced to a stately facade with nothing going on inside—an empty place, a ghost government.

A former member of Congress summed the week up: “Trump is China. He started out denying the pandemic and became a superspreader.”

So far 34 have been reported sick in the White House as of Wednesday. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, chief of the effort to appoint conservative judges, skipped the Rose Garden nomination ceremony for Amy Coney Barrett, which itself became a hot spot. Wednesday night I asked if this was due to health concerns. “He did stay away but you should know he’s stayed away from the White House for several weeks now because of their lax (he would say reckless) behavior re covid,” a McConnell strategist emailed. “He did not go near the ACB event.” Thursday Mr. McConnell told reporters he hasn’t been in the White House in two months.

This is how a lot of Republican political professionals sound to me: ready for a jailbreak and afraid to dig a tunnel. They don’t know where the floor is soft, which direction gets them outside the walls.

They believe the polls. They think the president is going down and is all too willing to pull the rest of the ballot down with him. A few will try to cut loose. And he’ll be gracious about it, in the way Tony Montana was being gracious when he said, “Say hello to my little friend.”

But this is also the week that journalists and politicos in Washington began wondering about something they never expected to be thinking about this year. They are wondering if Nov. 3 won’t be a win for Joe Biden but a blowout, a landslide in a polarized country that doesn’t produce landslides anymore.

It’s not only the past week’s events, not just the polls and their consistency, their upward tick from a lead of 6 or 7 to a lead in some polls of double digits; it’s the data about women and voters over 65.

No one will talk about it in public because they’re not idiots. Journalists don’t want to be embarrassed if they’ve got it wrong; Democrats don’t want to encourage complacency; Republicans don’t want to demoralize the troops; and the networks have to keep everyone hopped up on the horse race. But Tim Alberta wrote a smart and hardy piece in Politico in which he said with four weeks to go, “it’s time to inch out on a limb.” Among his impressions: There’s a lot of Trump fatigue, and it’s peaking at the wrong time for the president. Even Trump supporters “feel trapped inside a reality TV show and are powerless to change the channel.” “Trump might lose women voters by numbers we’ve never imagined.” Every poll has always shown his deficit with women, “but what we’re seeing now, in polling conducted by both parties, isn’t a wave. It isn’t even a tsunami. It’s something we don’t have a name for, because we’ve never seen anything like it.” “When it comes to the white, college educated women who made up a sizeable chunk of Trump’s base . . . his numbers have collapsed entirely.” We could see “the biggest gender gap in modern election history.”

No one knows what’s going to happen, and after 2016 people are rightly spooked off making predictions. But if what a growing number of people are seeing as a real possibility happens, if we are in blowout territory, I think part of the reason won’t be political in any classic sense, or ideological, or having to do with some stupid question about which candidate you want to have a beer with. If Joe Biden wins big, part of the reason, maybe a big part, will be simply that he is normal. Not “he’s such an accomplished legislator,” not “he’s the man of the future” or “charismatic” or “warm” or “has such a moving back story.” No. He is normal. And people miss normal so much.

Here I want to say something about the president’s debate performance Sept. 29, then get to this week’s vice-presidential debate.

He has been knocked, including here, for his belligerence. But it needs to be said that his belligerence was offensive not because he was aggressive, not because he was trying to knock the Biden Ltd. off its track and into a ditch. That’s a political debate. Sometimes you have to throw hard swings. You need a little Jake LaMotta in you if you enter the arena. What was offensive about the president was that he was aggressive about small things that mean nothing. Hunter Biden, Pocahontas, you didn’t beat Bernie Sanders by much. Those are garbage issues. He wasn’t aggressive about issues that actually bedevil the country. Politics is big and has meaning, is often crucial and sometimes even noble. He comported himself as if it’s only about small, personal concerns. It’s not that his conception of the purpose of politics is small, it’s that he’s a carrier of that smallness, a superspreader. That is what people mean when they say he diminishes the office.

As for the vice-presidential debate, neither candidate damaged the party’s prospects or especially advanced them. You could view the evening as smirky versus smarmy, theatrical versus sedated, or dramatic versus dignified, and at different points I did. It featured the worst sentence ever uttered at a vice presidential debate, from Sen. Kamala Harris: “I want to ask the American people, how calm were you when you were panicked about where you’re going to get your next roll of toilet paper?”

Both ducked questions. Ms. Harris wouldn’t answer on court packing. Since Mr. Biden wouldn’t at his debate either, I guess that’s where they’re going! Mike Pence didn’t answer on pre-existing conditions. It would have been good if the moderator had pointed out that their evasiveness is at odds with the purpose of the event, which is to find out where they stand and why.

But Mr. Pence at points reminded those viewers who hung in there of the old, differing visions of Democrats and Republicans, which used to be spoken of, even considered at the heart of things, before Donald Trump distorted all vision fields.

The vice president referred to the private sector and its power to help solve public problems, school choice, law enforcement and charges of racism, in a way that harkened back, if only a little, to the old days.

It felt . . . normal.

I strongly felt in the winter of 2016 that it was right and wise to hold off on a replacement for Justice Antonin Scalia, who’d died in his sleep in February at 79. The court has taken on outsize importance in our lives, the kind of judges Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump would choose would be very different, let the people decide in the coming election. But there was another reason, and it had to do not with constitutional prerogatives or political calculus but with human sentiment and the respect it deserves. This was the Scalia seat. It had been held for 30 years by a man who was the gravitational center of conservative thinking on the court. He was one of nine but it wasn’t just any seat; for many Americans his presence on the court had an almost spiritual meaning. So let the people in on this one, more directly than usual. This will allow a more peaceful acceptance of outcomes.

Likewise in this case: Hold off, lower the temperature. It was Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat, held for 27 years by a liberal icon of the court. In a great and varied nation of 330 million people some tact is in order, some give, some deference to what is important to others. We won’t survive otherwise. The presidential election is in a matter of weeks. The kind of judge Donald Trump and Joe Biden would choose will be very different, we all know this. Let the people decide, and accept outcomes.

A Trump Republican might say, “The other side would never do that for us!” That is completely true. But someone’s got to think about the larger project, which is trying to keep the country together when a million forces are tearing it apart.

So we’re about to have—in the middle of a pandemic, an unprecedented economic emergency, a new and enduring wave of racial division, and a distinctively passionate presidential election featuring an incumbent who won’t even say he will accept the final result—a new layer of turmoil, the confirmation of a new Supreme Court justice.

And it will be ugly.

This column is published before the president announces his nominee. It is expected to be Judge Amy Coney Barrett of the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. With this president you never quite know! Let’s assume it will be.

Her Democratic interrogators in Senate Judiciary Committee hearings will go forward with one intent: to kill. Barring accusations of high-school sexual assault and personal financial malfeasance, which don’t seem promising lines of attack, the committee will attempt to paint her as an extremist—not only a judicial one but also a religious one.

Judge Barrett is a Roman Catholic, like Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi. Judge Barrett is also a member of a faith community called People of Praise, which is part of the Charismatic Renewal movement within the church that started in the 1970s, after Vatican II. The movement emphasizes personal conversion and bringing forward Christ’s teachings in the world. There are tens of millions of members throughout the world, and about 1,700 members of People of Praise in more than 20 cities in the U.S., Canada and the Caribbean. Judge Barrett is associated with the founding American chapter in South Bend, Ind.

People of Praise has been accused of being a right-wing sect. It answers that it has politically liberal and conservative members. They don’t appear to be obsessed with traditionalism or orthodoxy and are ecumenical: Members include Protestants as well as Catholics. They have joined together intentionally, in community, to pray together, perform service, and run schools. They’re Christians living in the world.

If they are right-wing religious extremists someone had better tell Pope Francis, who appointed a member of People of Praise’s South Bend community as auxilliary bishop of Portland, Ore. The pope has created a Vatican body to serve the renewal, and reminded the world-wide movement that its work must include service to the marginalized. Austen Ivereigh, author of an admired biography of Pope Francis and an essayist who writes with some asperity of conservative Catholicism, has written that although the Charismatic Renewal hasn’t been distinguished by its social commitments, “there are important exceptions to this story,” and People of Praise in South Bend is one.

They have been accused of encouraging the subjugation of women. Until 2018, women who were leaders in the organization were called “handmaids.” “Handmaid” is a reference to the Blessed Mother and the annunciation—she was “handmaid to the Lord.” After Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel, “The Handmaids Tale,” became a TV series and a symbol for anti-Trump activism, the group dropped “handmaid,” saying “the meaning of this term has shifted dramatically in our culture in recent years.” I’ll say.

There have been charges that women in People of Praise are encouraged to be submissive. One former member said as much to Reuters. Yet as O. Carter Snead, a Notre Dame law professor and director of the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture, notes, Amy Barrett—herself a law professor as well as a judge—appears to be failing at being submissive and a total disaster at being subjugated. Mr. Snead said an interview that he thinks People of Praise draws scrutiny in part because of nomenclature and terminology: “Even the name, People of Praise, sounds to the secular ear either corny or sinister. If you wanted to imagine a group in a dark dystopian hellscape, People of Praise is the name you’d give!”

Joannah Clark, a local leader of People of Praise in Portland and the head of Trinity Academy, a People of Praise school, also appears to be failing at submissiveness. “I consider myself a strong, well-educated, happy, intelligent, free, independent woman,” she laughs. She has a doctorate from Georgetown. Trinity’s culture is “distinctly Christian” but “purposely ecumenical.” The emphasis is on reading, writing and Socratic inquiry. “Our three pillars are the humanities, modern math and science, and the arts—music, drama.”

Do they teach evolution? They do.

“We are normal people—there’s women who are nurses, doctors, teachers, scientists, stay-at-home moms” in the community. “We are in Christian community because we take our faith seriously. We are not weird and mysterious,” she laughs. “And we are not controlled by men.”

If Amy Coney Barrett is the nominee, People of Praise will come under discussion. Good. We can all understand each other better. Some bigotry against Catholics and Christians is unintentional, and all bigotry is a kind of fear. Senators can fairly ask Judge Barrett about the impact of her faith on her jurisprudence, as they have with previous nominees. When John F. Kennedy met with the Houston ministers who wanted to know the impact of his membership in the church on his ability to govern a varied constitutional nation, he had no trouble.

But Democrats shouldn’t overplay their hand. People of Praise isn’t a strange radical group, it’s ardent Catholics being Catholic, American Christians trying to be Christian. Questioning with a hostile, aggressive or accusatory inflection may please and excite those who are alienated by or unknowing of religious life in America. Will it please anyone else? It might more likely produce a Kavanaugh-like disaster for the Democrats, perhaps even for some of their media handmaids.