Peggy Noonan

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.

We’re easing up. Good, it’s time. Spring is here, summer’s coming. You can pass any well-meaning restriction and do your best to enforce it, but great leaders work with human nature, not against it. People need to be together, out in the air, in the sun, and if you don’t let them they’ll find a way anyhow, and then everybody will have to fight.

All 50 states are to varying degree unlocking. How citizens do this will determine the size and severity of second and third waves. It’s almost all in our hands. A report this week from a scientist who helped discover SARS said that a lab experiment confirms what common sense always suggested: Wearing a mask can substantially reduce disease transmission and viral loads. If we all do that one small thing, chances are we’ll get through OK.

How could we not? Especially after we’ve just done something so big.

What we did—essentially shut down a great, complex, modern nation for two months out of concern that people would become sick—had never been tried before. It’s something new in history. We will look back on it, however it turns out, with a certain wonder.

In those two months we learned a lot. How intertwined and interconnected our economy is, how provisional, how this thing depended on that. And how whisperingly thin were everybody’s profit margins. The well-being of the West Side block depends on human traffic, which depends on restaurants and bars, which depend on the theater being open. It was a George Bailey economy: “Every man on that transport died. Harry wasn’t there to save them, because you weren’t there to save Harry.” Every economy is, in the end, and if you’re interested in economics you knew this, but not the way you know it after the business catastrophe of 2020.

But the biggest things I suspect we learned were internal. No matter what you do for a living, when you weren’t busy introspection knocked on the door and settled in. Two different men, professionals, both blinked with surprise as they reported, unasked, that they can’t believe they have their college-age kids home again and they’re all together and they have dinner every night and play board games. They were so grateful. They had no idea this was possible, that it would make them so happy. That it had been missing.

People have suffered. They’ve been afraid. The ground on which they stand has shifted. Many have been reviewing their lives, thinking not only of “what’s important” or “what makes me happy” but “what was I designed to do?” They’ve been conducting a kind of internal life review, reflecting on the decision that seemed small and turned out to be crucial, wondering about paths not taken, recognizing strokes of luck. They’ve been thinking about their religious faith or lack of it, about their relationships. Phone calls have been longer, love more easily expressed, its lack more admitted.

It has been a dramatic time. We have stopped and thought about our lives, and our society’s arrangements. We have applauded together, for the first time, those whose jobs kept our towns up and operating, from nurses to truckers. We’ve rethought not only what is “essential” but who is important. All this will change you as a nation.

Here is what I am certain of. We will emerge a plainer people in a plainer country, and maybe a deeper one. Something big inside us shifted.

Superficially, the hair is scruffier, the roots grew out, but you can almost hear people thinking eh, our time is finite, our money limited—maybe that’s not gray, it’s silver. Maybe that new fringe is my silver lining. We’ve grown used to soft clothes, gym clothes. I have three outfits in daily rotation and I keep them folded on a window ledge, like a child laying out her clothes for school. I like the simplicity of this. I shared it with a friend. “That’s what I do!” he said. “And I don’t want to stop!” We watch TV news and home studios, light makeup and spectral lighting and think OK, sign of the times.

The world has admired and imitated America’s crisp chic, but I see an altering of the national style. For reasons economic and existential a new simplicity is coming, glitz leaving. (All this would be especially true for those over 40, but according to the Census Bureau that’s more than half the country.)

Fashion is a sliver of life. Maybe you approach it as the fun of glamour; maybe you see it as a way of paying tribute to life by making it even more beautiful. Maybe you see it as vanity, chasing youth. But it’s a leading indicator of a nation’s mood, and it will be changed by what we’ve experienced.

We’re getting pared down. We’re paring ourselves down.

I asked Andre Leon Talley, former creative director at Vogue, whose new memoir, “The Chiffon Trenches,” is about more than fashion, if he saw it as I did, knowing he’d disagree. But no. “I think more people will be dressed, when we come out of this pandemic, in almost Amish stoicism—a simple uniform of basic wash and dry. It’s going to be difficult for fashion to exist as a mainstream addiction.”

Vogue, he noted by email, has just published a new issue. “For the first time in ages there is no celebrity cover choice, no high-fashion model in near perfection of dress and grooming. There is a red rose, photographed by the late Irving Penn, which symbolizes more than a mere trend of dress.” He called the cover “iconic.” To him it symbolizes “the larger issues of life”—nature, gardens, fresh flowers.

When he speaks to people in fashion, “they are not even concerned with acquiring the new.” “Women are wearing neat, coordinated exercise gear or track suits as they walk off the extra pounds gained from self-quarantine.”

This, he said, is the mood: “I recently saw a video of Amish men moving a big red barn across a field. Instead of having it raised on a flatbed, 300 men wearing black simply picked up the full-size barn and moved it across a field. That was so moving to me. The idea of how humans can be so resourceful, based on strength and their cultural roots. Amish people are elegant, yet they adhere to traditions that have been passed down generation to generation.”

Women “will always want to look smart, neat and well groomed,” he said. “There’s nothing like a woman who has put on a simple white cotton button-front shirt, a simple skirt, and she has taken a beautiful cotton or linen or silk scarf and neatly knotted it at the chin or the nape of her neck. That is what I mean when I say Amish stoicism. The pioneer genes shall prevail, and women will focus on the essentials: nurturing their children in the arc of safety (homes and schools) providing food (driving to breadlines and food banks) and making do with what is already in the closet. Everything old will be suddenly new again.”

We will lose, for a while, our old patina. We will not much miss it.

America is about to become a plainer place. Maybe a deeper one, too. Maybe that’s good.

I think there’s a growing sense that we have to find a way to live with this thing, manage it the best we can, and muddle through. Covid-19 is not going away anytime soon. Summer may give us a break, late fall probably not. Vaccines are likely far off, new therapies and treatments might help a lot, but keeping things closed up tight until there are enough tests isn’t a viable plan. There will never be enough tests, it was botched from the beginning, if we ever catch up it will probably be at the point tests are no longer urgently needed.

Meantime, we must ease up and manage. We should go forward with a new national commitment to masks, social distancing, hand washing. These simple things have proved the most valuable tools in the tool chest. We have to enter each day armored up. At the same time we can’t allow alertness to become exhaustion. We can’t let an appropriate sense of caution turn into an anxiety formation. We can’t become a nation of agoraphobics. We’ll just have to live, carefully.

Here’s something we should stop. There’s a class element in the public debate. It’s been there the whole time but it’s getting worse, and few in public life are acting as if they’re sensitive to it. Our news professionals the past three months have made plenty of room for medical and professionals warning of the illness. Good, we needed it, it was news. They are not now paying an equal degree of sympathetic attention to those living the economic story, such as the Dallas woman who pushed back, opened her hair salon, and was thrown in jail by a preening judge. He wanted an apology. She said she couldn’t apologize for trying to feed her family.

There is a class divide between those who are hard-line on lockdowns and those who are pushing back. We see the professionals on one side—those James Burnham called the managerial elite, and Michael Lind, in “The New Class War,” calls “the overclass”—and regular people on the other. The overclass are highly educated and exert outsize influence as managers and leaders of important institutions—hospitals, companies, statehouses. The normal people aren’t connected through professional or social lines to power structures, and they have regular jobs—service worker, small-business owner.

Since the pandemic began, the overclass has been in charge—scientists, doctors, political figures, consultants—calling the shots for the average people. But personally they have less skin in the game. The National Institutes of Health scientist won’t lose his livelihood over what’s happened. Neither will the midday anchor.

I’ve called this divide the protected versus the unprotected. There is an aspect of it that is not much discussed but bears on current arguments. How you have experienced life has a lot to do with how you experience the pandemic and its strictures. I think it’s fair to say citizens of red states have been pushing back harder than those of blue states.

It’s not that those in red states don’t think there’s a pandemic. They’ve heard all about it! They realize it will continue, they know they may get sick themselves. But they also figure this way: Hundreds of thousands could die and the American economy taken down, which would mean millions of other casualties, economic ones. Or, hundreds of thousands could die and the American economy is damaged but still stands, in which case there will be fewer economic casualties—fewer bankruptcies and foreclosures, fewer unemployed and ruined.

They’ll take the latter. It’s a loss either way but one loss is worse than the other. They know the politicians and scientists can’t really weigh all this on a scale with any precision because life is a messy thing that doesn’t want to be quantified.

Here’s a generalization based on a lifetime of experience and observation. The working-class people who are pushing back have had harder lives than those now determining their fate. They haven’t had familial or economic ease. No one sent them to Yale. They often come from considerable family dysfunction. This has left them tougher or harder, you choose the word.

They’re more fatalistic about life because life has taught them to be fatalistic. And they look at these scientists and reporters making their warnings about how tough it’s going to be if we lift shutdowns and they don’t think, “Oh what informed, caring observers.” They think, “You have no idea what tough is. You don’t know what painful is.” And if you don’t know, why should you have so much say?

The overclass says, “Wait three months before we’re safe.” They reply, “There’s no such thing as safe.”

Something else is true about those pushing back. They live life closer to the ground and pick up other damage. Everyone knows the societal costs in the abstract—“domestic violence,” “child abuse.” Here’s something concrete. In Dallas this week police received a tip and found a 6-year-old boy tied up by his grandmother and living in a shed. The child told police he’d been sleeping there since school ended “for this corona thing.” According to the arrest affidavit, he was found “standing alone in a pitch-black shed in a blue storage bin with his hands tied behind his back.” The grandmother and her lover were arrested on felony child-endangerment charges. The Texas Department of Family Protective Service said calls to its abuse hotline have gone down since the lockdowns because teachers and other professionals aren’t regularly seeing children.

A lot of bad things happen behind America’s closed doors. The pandemic has made those doors thicker.

Meanwhile some governors are playing into every stereotype of “the overclass.” On Tuesday Pennsylvania’s Tom Wolf said in a press briefing that those pushing against the shutdown are cowards. Local officials who “cave in to this coronavirus” will pay a price in state funding. “These folks are choosing to desert in the face of the enemy. In the middle of a war.” He said he’ll pull state certificates such as liquor licenses for any businesses that open. He must have thought he sounded uncompromising, like Gen. George Patton. He seemed more like Patton slapping the soldier. No sympathy, no respect, only judgment.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer called anti-lockdown demonstrations “racist and misogynistic.” She called the entire movement “political.” It was, in part—there have been plenty of Trump signs, and she’s a possible Democratic vice presidential nominee. But the clamor in her state is real, and serious. People are in economic distress and worry that the foundations of their lives are being swept away. How does name-calling help? She might as well have called them “deplorables.” She said the protests may only make the lockdowns last longer, which sounded less like irony than a threat.

When you are reasonable with people and show them respect, they will want to respond in kind. But when they feel those calling the shots are being disrespectful, they will push back hard and rebel even in ways that hurt them.

This is no time to make our divisions worse. The pandemic is a story not only about our health but our humanity.

New jobless claims came out this week, putting American unemployment at an estimated 33.4 million. ADP, the payroll-processing company, reports the private sector lost more than 20 million jobs in April alone. Earnings reports are dreadful, and whole sectors—air travel, hospitality—are being wiped out. Nothing will turn around soon.

It is a catastrophe. But you know all that.

What’s needed now? A certain shift in stance and attitude that allows a broader appreciation of our predicament.

Our economy is experiencing a great contraction, a seizing up; it’s becoming smaller, tighter, more airless. As a nation we have rightly focused on the illness that caused all this and the fight to beat it back. That fight can’t let up. When the disease goes down in one place it shows up in another, and a second or third wave is likely; viruses like this don’t knock on the door just once.

But the economic contraction will have repercussions as destructive as the virus itself. People will die and sicken because of lost jobs, lost income and a feeling of no opportunity, no possibility. Alcoholism, drug abuse, anxiety, suicide, strife within families—all these things will follow. And there’s a feeling of terrible generational injustice. My generation is on pause, but the young are on stall, and it’s no good for them. People need to operate in the world to become themselves.

A doctor in New York, who was right from the start and ahead of the curve in his warnings in February, told the patients in his practice this week that social distancing worked. The hospitals reached full capacity but weren’t overwhelmed; against the odds they stood their ground. But he was honest. The victory came with “grave consequences” for employees and businesses and “an increase in domestic violence and child abuse.” People with life-threatening symptoms like chest pain avoided the emergency room, and parents delayed vaccinating their children for measles and meningitis. Patients with mental illness experienced severe increases in their symptoms. “The full extent of these costs will take years to fully understand.”

We have to see the unfolding economic calamity in a new, more present and urgent way, and think about its impact on our culture, our ability to fund things, our standing in the world, our morale.

We can’t grapple only with the illness, we have to grapple with the crash. The bias now should be toward opening, doing everything we can to allow the economy to become itself again, to the degree that’s possible.

Toward that end, two thoughts from two wise men. The first is that we must unleash the creativity of businessmen and -women, an uncalled-on brigade in this battle. Not only doctors and scientists will get us out of this, business must be on the lines, too.

Second, we have to cooperate by doing the things that contain the illness so that businesses can stay open and functioning. A mask isn’t a sign of submission as some idiots claim. It’s a sign of respect, responsibility and economic encouragement. It says, “I’ll do my small part.”

The first wise man is George Shultz, a participant in and observer of history to whom I spoke by phone. “It is a catastrophe,” the former secretary of state and of labor said of the virus and the economy. “The government shuts things down, the government has all the money and is dealing it out, so there’s an expectation the government can get us out of this.” But no government has that power.

Where is the hope? “We have a potentially vibrant private sector. There’s an immense amount of energy and ingenuity and fresh thinking there. They think about how to get themselves in a profitable position, and to do that they have to take into account a lot—supply chains, the health of their employees, the safety of customers. We have to open things up and say to the private sector, ‘Do your job.’ They have creativity, they want to get things up and going again.”

The second wise man: Ken Langone, a founder of Home Depot. If you hear his name a lot lately it’s because he endowed a hospital at the center of New York’s struggle with coronavirus, NYU Langone Medical Center. He said if we do everything we can to make people safe, we’ll be doing everything to get business going.

“There is a bigger risk in business not being open than in staying closed,” he said by phone. “Why? Look, you’re looking at depression, financial problems, taxes will have to go up to pay for all this.” Taxes pay for public services—including the operation of hospitals.

“It isn’t safety or business, it’s safety right now which allows business.” Every American can contribute by observing the protocols we now know by heart—washing hands, maintaining social distance, wearing masks, using hand sanitizer. “If the American people want to be cavalier about this they should be ashamed.”

Last Sunday afternoon he drove to the Home Depot store in Jericho, N.Y. Home Depots have stayed open as essential businesses. “I go up and down the aisle. There wasn’t an empty space in the parking lot. They were buying flowers, garden tools, seedlings—people were all over. People aren’t gonna sit and vegetate at home. The wife says, ‘Don’t sit around on your ass, go buy some paint, paint the house.’ American energy, this is our advantage.”

But the store is careful. “We have distancing. All wore masks. People will have to stand 6 feet away and yell a little. OK with me, I like to yell!”

“We’re not gonna be the same,” he said. “We’re gonna be challenged like never before, but we will pass the test with flying colors. . . . Capitalism brought America to the party. It’s what gonna get us out of this mess.”

But a “big readjustment” in business thinking will be needed to get through the crisis. If a restaurant reopens with half as many customers due to distancing protocols, the owner will have to hike prices, but that will hurt business. The answer is that the landlord needs to lower the restaurant’s rent, and the landlord’s lenders need to adapt in turn. “The financial chain’s gotta be readjusted, concessions up and down the line.”

Fine. We can all be patient with each other as we try to come back, together.

I want to get back to the national morale. All these dreadful economic numbers—you can’t let people sink into defeatism. You can’t let them think there is no hope, or that things in the future are just going to be bad. They are Americans, they know how to suffer—even the ones who’ve never suffered a day in their lives, it’s still in their genes. But they’re like the pioneers, they have to be able to believe while they’re on the long trek that there’s some fertile area around the next bend, or the one after that. They have to know there’s a safe place where they can finally settle.

People need hope. Americans live on it. We must return to life. That is where the bias must be.