Peggy Noonan

I wish to protest the current ugliness. I see it as a continuing trend, “the uglification of everything.” It is coming out of our culture with picked-up speed, and from many media silos, and I don’t like it.

You remember the 1999 movie “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” from the Patricia Highsmith novel. It was fabulous—mysteries, murders, a sociopath scheming his way among high-class expats on the Italian Riviera. The laid-back glamour of Jude Law, the Grace Kelly-ness of Gwyneth Paltrow, who looks like a Vogue magazine cover decided to take a stroll through the streets of 1950s Venice, the truly brilliant acting of Matt Damon, who is so well-liked by audiences I’m not sure we notice anymore what a great actor he is. The director, Anthony Minghella, deliberately showed you pretty shiny things while taking you on a journey to a heart of darkness.

There’s a new version, a streaming series from Netflix, called “Ripley.” I turned to it eagerly and watched with puzzlement. It is unrelievedly ugly. Grimy, gloomy, grim. Tom Ripley is now charmless, a pale and watchful slug slithering through ancient rooms. He isn’t bright, eager, endearing, only predatory. No one would want to know him! Which makes the story make no sense. Again, Ripley is a sociopath, but few could tell because he seemed so sweet and easy. In the original movie, Philip Seymour Hoffman has an unforgettable turn as a jazz-loving, prep-schooled, in-crowd snob. In this version that character is mirthless, genderless, hidden. No one would want to know him either. Marge, the Paltrow role in the movie, is ponderous and plain, like a lost 1970s hippie, which undercuts a small part of the tragedy: Why is the lovely woman so in love with a careless idler who loves no one?

The ugliness seemed a deliberate artistic decision, as did the air of constant menace, as if we all know life is never nice.

I go to the No. 1 program on Netflix this week, “Baby Reindeer.” People speak highly of it. It’s about a stalker and is based on a true story, but she’s stalking a comic so this might be fun. Oh dear, no. It is again unrelievedly bleak. Life is low, plain and homely. No one is ever nice or kind; all human conversation is opaque and halting; work colleagues are cruel and loud. Everyone is emotionally incapable and dumb. No one laughs except for the morbidly obese stalker, who cackles madly. The only attractive person is the transgender girlfriend, who has a pretty smile and smiles a lot, but cries a lot too and is vengeful.

Good drama always makes you think. I thought: Do I want to continue living?

I go to the Daily Mail website, once my guilty pleasure. High jinks of the rich and famous, randy royals, fast cars and movie stars, models and rock stars caught in the drug bust. It was great! But it seems to have taken a turn and is more about crime, grime, human sadness and degradation—child abuse, mothers drowning their babies, “Man murders family, self.” It is less a portal into life’s mindless, undeserved beauty, than a testimony to its horrors.

I go to the new “Cabaret.” Who doesn’t love “Cabaret”? It is dark, witty, painful, glamorous. The music and lyrics have stood the test of time. The story’s backdrop: The soft decadence of Weimar is being replaced by the hard decadence of Nazism.

It is Kander and Ebb’s masterpiece, revived again and again. And this revival is hideous. It is ugly, bizarre, inartistic, fundamentally stupid. Also obscene but in a purposeless way, without meaning.

I had the distinct feeling the producers take their audience to be distracted dopamine addicts with fractured attention spans and no ability to follow a story. They also seemed to have no faith in the story itself, so they went with endless pyrotechnics. This is “Cabaret” for the empty-headed. Everyone screams. The songs are slowed, because you might need a moment to take it in. Almost everyone on stage is weirdly hunched, like a gargoyle, everyone overacts, and all of it is without art.

On the way in, staffers put stickers on the cameras of your phone, “to protect our intellectual property,” as one said.

It isn’t an easy job to make the widely admired Eddie Redmayne unappealing, but by God they did it. As he’s a producer I guess he did it, too. He takes the stage as the Emcee in a purple leather skirt with a small green cone on his head and appears further on as a clown with a machine gun and a weird goth devil. It is all so childish, so plonkingly empty.

Here is something sad about modern artists: They are held back by a lack of limits.

Bob Fosse, the director of the classic 1972 movie version, got to push against society’s limits and Broadway’s and Hollywood’s prohibitions. He pushed hard against what was pushing him, which caused friction; in the heat of that came art. Directors and writers now have nothing to push against because there are no rules or cultural prohibitions, so there’s no friction, everything is left cold, and the art turns in on itself and becomes merely weird.

Fosse famously loved women. No one loves women in this show. When we meet Sally Bowles, in the kind of dress a little girl might put on a doll, with heavy leather boots and harsh, garish makeup, the character doesn’t flirt, doesn’t seduce or charm. She barks and screams, angrily.

Really it is harrowing. At one point Mr. Redmayne dances with a toilet plunger, and a loaf of Italian bread is inserted and removed from his anal cavity. I mentioned this to my friend, who asked if I saw the dancer in the corner masturbating with a copy of what appeared to be “Mein Kampf.”

That’s what I call intellectual property!

In previous iterations the Kit Kat Club was a hypocrisy-free zone, a place of no boundaries, until the bad guys came and it wasn’t. I’m sure the director and producers met in the planning stage and used words like “breakthrough” and “a ‘Cabaret’ for today,” and “we don’t hide the coming cruelty.” But they do hide it by making everything, beginning to end, lifeless and grotesque. No innocence is traduced because no innocence exists.

How could a show be so frantic and outlandish and still be so tedious? It’s almost an achievement.

And for all that there is something smug about it, as if they’re looking down from some great, unearned height.

I left thinking, as I often do now on seeing something made ugly: This is what purgatory is going to be like. And then, no, this is what hell is going to be like—the cackling stalker, the pale sociopath, Eddie Redmayne dancing with a plunger.

Why does it all bother me?

Because even though it isn’t new, uglification is rising and spreading as an artistic attitude, and it can’t be good for us. Because it speaks of self-hatred, and a society that hates itself, and hates life, won’t last. Because it gives those who are young nothing to love and feel soft about. Because we need beauty to keep our morale up.

Because life isn’t merde, in spite of what our entertainment geniuses say.

Most politics is day by day, and certainly we consume it that way. But the thought that presses on my mind has distant horizons.

The criminal trial of Donald Trump, de facto Republican presidential nominee, commenced Monday in Manhattan Criminal Court. The case revolves around charges that he directed hush money payments to Stormy Daniels, the adult-film performer, to stop her from speaking publicly of what she alleges was their sexual relationship. Witness lists not yet released are expected to include David Pecker, the former publisher of the National Enquirer said to have been involved in a “catch and kill” scheme to bury Ms. Daniels’s claims in 2016, and Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model. Days before the 2016 election this newspaper reported Ms. McDougal had told friends of an affair with Mr Trump, and also received money and blandishments from the Enquirer.

In the first days of the trial the judge refused to recuse himself and refused to allow into evidence the famous “Access Hollywood” videotape, in which the defendant claimed his fame was such that he could grab women by the genitals because “when you’re a star, they let you do it.” Mr. Trump was admonished for seeming to mutter menacingly toward a prospective juror, and the New York Times’s Maggie Haberman reported that he fell asleep at the defendant’s table: “His head keeps dropping down and his mouth goes slack.” CNN’s Jim Acosta joked Mr. Trump might call such reports “fake snooze.”

All of this is part of the fabulous freak show that is American politics, but we’re getting too used to scandal, aren’t we? We’ve become blasé.

The quality of our leaders is deteriorating, and we’re so used to it it’s not alarming us anymore.

I often read the memoirs of contemporary British politicians. Once I read weighty biographies by serious historians of the greats—Gladstone, Disraeli, Churchill, Harold Macmillan—but current leaders don’t seem great, and don’t last. They often write memoirs, however, and I read them to horrify myself.

Nadine Dorries’s “The Plot,” her memoir of her tenure as secretary of state for digital, culture, media and sport under Prime Minister Boris Johnson, is quite wild. (In 2012, as a member of Parliament, she appeared on the reality TV show “I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here!” which, almost touchingly, offended some people.) She calls her book a “shocking tale of corruption and unaccountable power.” It’s gossipy and score-settling: “Lee Cain was [Dominick] Cummings’ creature.” “Dominick hated Carrie,” Mr. Johnson’s future wife.

A source tells her of an incident in which a member of Parliament had sex on a billiard table as four other members watched. Another tells her of Tory sex parties. Another source—Ms. Dorries isn’t a historian or journalist, and we must trust that these are real sources and not third brandies—says of government in Westminster, “It’s all broken. Like, all the parameters that kept things in place—respect, values, public service—it’s all gone.” He tells her a member of Parliament gave a young female a date-rape drug.

In Rory Stewart’s more thoughtful and textured “How Not to be a Politician,” the former lawmaker diplomat reports the brains of Westminster politicians “have become like the phones in our pockets: flashing, titillating, obsequious, insinuating machines, allergic to depth and seriousness, that tempt us every moment of the day from duty.” Mr. Johnson is “a chaotic and tricky confidence artist, almost entirely unfit to be prime minister.” His successor, Liz Truss, confuses caution with cowardice: “Everything she did . . . had the flavour of a provocation.” (I haven’t yet opened Ms. Truss’s memoir, published this week, but the Guardian reports she contributes to the history of political insults by labeling party members who didn’t back her sufficiently “Chinos”—Conservatives in Name Only, who I guess tend to wear chinos. The Times of London said that for whole chapters the book is “readable only in the most literal sense of the word.”)

Back to Mr. Stewart. He was approached by an aide to the wealthy Russian Evgeny Lebedev, who invited him to stay for a weekend at Mr. Lebedev’s castle in Italy. A celebrity model who posed topless in the Sun would be there, she said; it would be fun. “I said as politely as I could that this was a joke, ‘I’ve just become a foreign minister. There’s no way I can possibly go. . . . The man’s father was an officer in the KGB.’ ” Also an oligarch. “ ‘Oh don’t worry about that,’ she replied. ‘Boris Johnson is coming and he is Foreign Secretary.’ ” Mr. Stewart didn’t go. Mr. Johnson did, and later put his host in the House of Lords.

The thing about these books is they’re almost all so tatty, so seamy. There’s a smallness to the preoccupations revealed, as if the authors are proud to be immature. They’re political leaders in the business of making history, yet they evince no particular interest in it. The American court case with the porn star, the shallow, frivolous British memoir—they seem to me of a piece, and part of the unseriousness of the West’s leaders.

Why is this worth mentioning, since everyone seems to have noticed a deterioration in their quality? Because our foes know. The character of our leaders seems to me a national-security issue.

My concern is that history will see it this way: At the exact moment America’s foes decided to become more public in their antipathy and deadlier in their calculations—“back to blood,” as Tom Wolfe said, in terms of the nature of peoples’ future loyalties—at that same moment our leaders in the West were becoming more frivolous and unfocused, more superficial, than ever in modern times. I suspect our foes notice this. It is perhaps part of why they have become more aggressive.

Harry S. Truman and Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, whatever else they were, no one ever thought they were buyable or shallow in their advancement of America’s meaning and interests. Their successors seem to lack a comparable internal stature. We’re too quick to accept the idea they’d let their family use their name to get money—from the company in Ukraine, or the one in China, or the Saudi sovereign-wealth fund.

I’m not saying once we had Henry Clay and now we have Marjorie Taylor Greene but—well, I guess I am saying that. And I think it’s dangerous.

The unseriousness of our leaders isn’t a small and amusing tabloid story but a reality that ought to startle us. Leaders of other nations extrapolate from our leaders, whom they know. They think that as they are, we are. It contributes to the power of the argument, in their councils of state, that the West has lost its way.

Sometimes serious national goals have to be long-term. In the daily press of events we don’t think enough about the character of those we’re putting forward to represent us.

One particularly good man here, one exceptionally good woman there, could begin to turn it around, or might at the very least startle foreign leaders and make them reappraise. That would be a good long-term project for us as citizens: Get a better class of humans to go into the business of leading us.

Our crazy country. The O.J. Simpson case was the beginning of knowing we were crazy and admitting it. It was 30 years ago this June, the murder followed by the Bronco chase, and I find myself wanting to tell those who weren’t there what a sensation it was, what an amazement.

Everyone over 40 this weekend will be saying, “I’ll never forget when I heard the verdict,” and, “Did you watch the Bronco?” The case burned itself into our retinas; everyone in the country was in the path of totality.

As much as anything and more than most, the story was the beginning of the modern media age. It was the beginning of hypercelebrity and marked by the emotionalism of crowds. Crowds ran to California freeway overpasses on June 17, 1994, to see the Ford Bronco containing Simpson roll by, surrounded by police cruisers. They cheered and pumped their arms. They didn’t see it as a tragedy, the story of the beautiful young woman and mother, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her 25-year-old friend, Ron Goldman, who had been brutally stabbed to death. They saw an exciting drama unfolding before their eyes, like Al Capone shooting his way out of a bank heist surrounded by cops. Simpson was a guy everyone liked. So they cheered. And people watching thought: Whoa, what are we seeing, what is this?

Some new kind of fame was being presaged. A close friend of O.J.’s, Los Angeles lawyer and businessman Robert Kardashian, an apparently quiet fellow no one had heard of, was thrust into the case from the beginning. At a news conference he read a public letter from O.J., just before he turned himself in. The letter said he had nothing to do with Nicole’s murder. “I loved her. . . . If we had a problem, it’s because I loved her so much.” It was classic abusive-husband patter.

Kardashian, like other O.J. attorneys, would become famous, and the fame would be a lesson to many. After fame comes wealth and power and everyone gives you a good table. It is probably true that none of this was lost on his former wife, Kris, who had been one of Nicole Simpson’s best friends, or on his children, Kourtney, Kim, Khloe and Rob. Their show, “Keeping Up With The Kardashians,” debuted in 2007. They were the first reality-TV family, famous for being famous. They are billionaires now.

“It marked the end of cozy, afternoon soap opera entertainment and ushered in a tabloid culture of Kardashians, Jenners, and lesser beings,” former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter said by email. “Also, it made, for a time, Dominick Dunne the most recognized print reporter in the world.” Dunne’s colorful and breathless reports each month in Vanity Fair covered the case like a blanket—who snubbed whom in the courtroom, who said what at Brentwood’s glittering dinner tables.

The O.J. case didn’t create mass celebrity, Hollywood did, in the 1920s. At that time a young teenager named Bette Davis went, on a lark, to a fortune teller in her small New England town. She recounts in one of her memoirs that the fortune teller read her palm and was puzzled: Your face will be famous in every corner of the earth, she said.

Davis thought that was silly, you can’t be famous everywhere. Then, in 1930, at 22, she walked onto her first Hollywood sound stage. Her mind immediately flashed back: This is what the fortune teller meant.

But that kind of fame took art or gifts or a talent. Now you could be just another crazy American and become a worldwide name.

If the signal moment was the Bronco chase, it was the court case that would have lasting significance. It was a prime example of how our legal system got bogged down in distractions, inanities, and poor police and legal work. It dragged on nine months. The judge, Lance Ito, also became a celebrity, and apparently liked it. He kept three open computers on his bench. No one had ever seen that before. Jay Leno on “The Tonight Show” had a regular sketch, the “Dancing Itos.” There were endless, meandering objections. The prosecutor, Marcia Clark, had to get her hair and makeup done, and a new wardrobe.

And the cast of characters! Kato Kaelin, the house guest who never left. Mark Fuhrman, the police detective who seemed solid on evidence and then was torn apart for having once used racial epithets and was accused of planting evidence.

And the phrases that bubbled up from the courtroom and entered the national consciousness: “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”

And, of course, the terrible and historic moment when the jury announced its verdict.

The trial felt like it had gone forever but the verdict came in within a day. No one in America did a bit of work from the moment it was announced that the jury had a verdict. Everyone ran to a TV set. From Robert D. McFadden’s O.J. obit in the New York Times: “Even President Bill Clinton left the Oval Office to join his secretaries. In court, cries of ‘Yes!’ and ‘Oh, no!’ were echoed across the nation as the verdict left many Black people jubilant and many white people aghast.” Exactly true.

A friend wrote Thursday afternoon: “Trial as spectacle has been with us for a long time (think Lizzie Borden), and so have juries doing unusual things. But this seemed to take it to a new level. If memory serves, the volume of the New York Stock Exchange went down to basically nothing for a few minutes as the verdict was announced. That’s real.”

Reaction famously fell almost completely along racial lines. It was one of those 20th-century moments when you realized race is here to stay as an unending factor, an unyielding actor in American life. White and black saw two different realities. Whites: All the evidence points to his guilt, he’s one of the most admired men in America, race isn’t the story here.

Blacks: This is what you do to black men, you railroad them on cooked-up evidence, there’s plenty of room for doubt.

It showed in some new and unforgettable way the divided country. The verdict itself didn’t divide the country; it revealed it, again and not for the last time, as divided. Reaction was called shocking, revelatory. But what it was, was simpler. It was painful. It left you with a tight and mournful feeling in your throat.

Before O.J., American blacks lacked confidence in the legal system. After O.J., everyone lacked confidence in the legal system. It looked cynical, performative, agenda-driven, not on the level.

I would say he got away with murder because I believe he was guilty. But in a way he didn’t get away with it; it stalked him the rest of his life. And that is tragedy, too, because he’d been such a hero, a winner of the Heisman Trophy, a football star, a man of great accomplishment whom everyone admired.

That’s all.

The O.J. case revealed so much and started a new age. Within a few years the internet would become ubiquitous, and at that point the new age would become more so.

There’s a funny thing that happens in a nation’s thoughts. At some point everyone knows something is true, and talks about it with each other. The truth becomes a cliché before it becomes actionable. Then a person of high respect, a good-faith scholar who respects data, say, comes forward with evidence proving what everyone knows, and it is galvanizing. It hits like a thunderclap, and gives us all permission to know what we know and act on it.

That is my impression of Jonathan Haidt’s new book, “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing An Epidemic of Mental Illness,” that it has broken through and is clearing the way for parents’ groups and individuals to move forward together on an established idea. Mr. Haidt, a widely admired social psychologist who teaches at New York University’s Stern School of Business, has spent his career studying emotion, culture and morality, turning along the way to child development and adolescent mental health.

What we all know is that there’s a mental-health crisis among the young, that they seem to have become addicted to social media and gaming, and that these two facts seem obviously connected. Mr. Haidt says, and shows, that the latter is a cause of the former.

He tells the story of what happened to Generation Z, which he defines as those born after 1995. (They followed the millennials, born 1981-95.) Older members of Gen Z entered puberty while four technological trends were converging. One was the arrival of the iPhone in 2007, another the continuing spread of broadband internet. The third, starting in 2009, was “the new age of hyper-viralized social media,” with likes, retweets and shares. In 2010 came the front-facing camera on smartphones, which “greatly expanded the number of adolescents posting carefully curated photos and videos of their lives for their peers and strangers not just to see, but to judge.”

This became “the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternative universe that was exciting, addictive, unstable and . . . unsuitable for children and adolescents.”

Pew Research reports that, in 2011, 23% of teens had a smartphone. That meant they had only limited access to social media—they had to use the family computer. By 2016 one survey showed 79% of teens owned a smartphone, as did 28% of children 8 to 12. Soon teens were reporting they spent an average of almost seven hours a day on screens. “One out of every four teens said that they were online ‘almost constantly,’” Mr. Haidt writes.

Girls moved their social lives onto social media. Boys burrowed into immersive video games, Reddit, YouTube and pornography.

The tidal wave came to these children during puberty, when the human brain is experiencing its greatest reconfiguring since early childhood. In puberty, as brain researchers say, “neurons that fire together, wire together.” What you do at that time “will cause lasting structural changes in the brain,” Mr. Haidt writes.

Suddenly children “spent far less time playing with, talking to, touching or even making eye contact with their friends and families.” They withdrew from “embodied social behaviors” essential for successful human development. It left them not noticing the world.

Signs of a mental-health crisis quickly emerged. Rates of mental illness among the young went up dramatically in many Western countries between 2010 and 2015. Between 2010 and 2024 major depression among teens went up 145% among girls, 161% among boys. There was a rise in disorders related to anxiety as well.

Some medical professionals were skeptical. Most pertinent studies were based on self-reporting: Maybe young people had simply grown more willing to talk about their feelings. Mr. Haidt looked at changes that weren’t self-reported—studies charting emergency psychiatric care and admissions. They too were up. “The rate of self harm for . . . young adolescent girls nearly tripled from 2010 to 2020.”
Read More Declarations

What Mr. Haidt calls the Great Rewiring isn’t only about changes in technologies. Parents over the past few decades made two big choices about how to keep children safe, and both were wrong. “We decided the real world was so full of dangers that children should not be allowed to explore it without adult supervision, even though the risks to children from crime, violence, drunk drivers, and most other sources have dropped steeply since the 1990s. At the same time, it seemed like too much of a bother to design and require age-appropriate guardrails for kids online, so we left children free to wander though the Wild West of the virtual world, where threats to children abounded.”

A dark irony: Parents are often physically overprotective of their children out of fear of sexual predators. But those predators have moved online, where it’s easy to find and contact children.

Mr. Haidt cites an essay for Free Press by a 14-year-old girl: “I was ten years old when I watched porn for the first time. I found myself on Pornhub, which I stumbled across by accident and returned to out of curiosity. The website has no age verification, no ID requirement, not even a prompt asking me if I was over 18. The site is easy to find, impossible to avoid, and has become a frequent rite of passage for kids my age. Where was my mother? In the next room, making sure I was eating nine differently colored fruits and vegetables on the daily.”

Mr. Haidt suggests four reforms:

• No smartphones before high school, only basic phones with no internet capability.
• No social media before 16. Let their brains develop first.
• All schools from elementary through high school should be phone-free zones—students can store their devices in lockers.
• Bring back unsupervised play. Only in that way will kids naturally develop social skills and become self-governing.

Parents feel defeated and powerless. “It’s too late,” they tell Mr. Haidt, “That ship has sailed.” No, he insists. America has always found ways to protect children while mostly allowing adults to do what they want. Automobiles? Seat belts and car seats. Cigarettes? Age limits and a ban on vending machines.

We can’t abstain and allow a virtual world in which adults run free and children are defenseless. Concrete measures and collective action, to which Mr. Haidt devotes the last third of the book, at least offer improvement.

Near the end he quotes Sean Parker, the first president of Facebook
, on the inner thinking of the Silicon Valley pioneers who created the new world. In a 2017 interview Mr. Parker said they wished to “consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible.” The “social validation feedback loop” they created exploits “a vulnerability in human psychology.” The apps need to “give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that’s going to get you to contribute more content, and that’s going to get you . . . more likes and comments.” He said that he, Mark Zuckerberg and Kevin Systrom, a co-founder of Instagram, “understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.” He added: “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”

We know now.

Easter’s coming, Holy Week’s here and Passover is a few weeks away, so it’s a good time to look at the work of a great artist who’s brought considerable beauty into the world, Paul Simon. Alex Gibney’s two-part MGM+ documentary on the making of his most recent album is also beautiful—moving, mellow, sweet and deep. It tells of Mr. Simon’s life and touches on three big themes—the nature of creativity and where it comes from; that tricky thing called a career, which carries a talent forward into the world and keeps it there, or not; and, centrally, an ongoing spiritual event in Mr. Simon’s life that sounds like an ongoing miracle, or at least has pronounced supernatural aspects.

Mr. Simon, now 82, is one of the greatest American songwriters of the 20th century, and you carry his songs in your head—“Bridge Over Troubled Water,” “Scarborough Fair,” “American Tune,” “Mrs. Robinson.” It was classic after classic. “People used to say, ‘Oh, you have your finger on the pulse,’ ” Mr. Simon says in the documentary. “And I would think, no, I don’t have my finger on the pulse, I just have my finger out there, and the pulse is running under it, for the time being.” How long it lasts is a mystery, knowing the pulse is there and feeling its vibrations is a gift, putting your hand out there is the effort.

He grew up in the New York City borough of Queens, where his heroes were Mickey Mantle, JFK, Lenny Bruce and Elvis. He met neighborhood boy Art Garfunkel in sixth grade, and they began to sing together, Mr. Simon writing the music and Mr. Garfunkel harmonizing. Mr. Simon says something arresting about America when he was coming up: “My culture was radio. It wasn’t like I was singing the music of Queens, you know? We didn’t have people sitting around on the porches in Queens singing fables about what it was like in Queens in the old days.” What he worked with was AM radio Top 40—the Everly Brothers, the Cleftones. America was becoming less local and regional even then, more a national entity projecting a national sound that generation after generation would imitate, recapitulate, expand on.

When Simon & Garfunkel first went on Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand,” Mr. Simon was asked where he was from. “Macon, Georgia,” he spontaneously lied. Because it sounded like a real place with a real meaning, not just someplace waves were passing through. I mention this because I think that’s a very American longing, to come from somewhere real, discrete and vividly itself.

He took his guitar into the bathroom at his parents’ house to write. “The tile made an echo and the water was kind of a white-noise sound.” He felt a flow of creative energy and wondered what it was. “One second ago that thought was not here and now I’m weeping. How’d that happen? And how can I do it again?”

Simon & Garfunkel knew huge recording success, would, in the coming decades, break up, reunite, part. Popularity fluctuated; Mr. Simon’s career went hot and not-hot. There’s a powerful section on a lukewarm period. Mr. Simon, solo, looking for the different sounds of the world, goes to Jamaica and South Africa. In the latter, in 1985, he is surrounded by singers and musicians and music he doesn’t know. They form the elements of what would become his masterpiece, “Graceland.” You hear the blunt, raucous accordion riff that opens “The Boy in the Bubble,” and it sounds so big. Later, when Mr. Simon started writing the lyrics he found his subject matter was unrelated to the world he’d just visited—he was writing about the Mississippi River, about Elvis Presley’s Graceland. Confused, he went there for the first time and realized he was writing about a father and son on a journey of repair. He accepted it, because creativity is a mystery. “I really love the mystery.”

Once he told Dick Cavett he didn’t know why he wrote “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? / Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you,” but he wasn’t perturbed not to understand. Someday it would mean something. It came to be a shorthand way of saying Americans have a sense of lessened greatness, that our heroes are in the past.

Now to the supernatural event. Mr. Simon and his wife, the musician Edie Brickell, had been living in Texas for a few years when, on Jan. 15, 2019, he had a dream that said: “You’re working on a piece called ‘Seven Psalms.’” He hadn’t written anything in a few years, hadn’t wanted to, but the dream was so strong that he got up and wrote it down. “I had no idea what that meant.” Gradually, information came—chords, a sound. Then he started to wake up two or three times a week between 3:30 and 5 a.m. and words would come. “I’d write them down and if I tried to add to them—‘Oh that’s a good verse, I’ll write a second verse’—it would stop.” He thought whatever it is, “it’s coming to me and that’s all, I just have to wait, and when it comes, write it down.”

In the documentary he sings one of the songs that came of the process:

I’ve been thinking about the great migration
One by one they leave the flock
I’ve been wondering about their destination
Metal grass on a jagged rock
The Lord is my engineer
The Lord is the earth I ride on
The Lord is the face in the atmosphere
The path I slip and slide on

It’s beautiful. He alters the lyrics slightly on the final album, but they’re beautiful too.

Throughout all this, another major event. He suddenly lost hearing in his left ear. Within a month it was almost gone. He couldn’t hear his music the same, his voice sounded different; it used to come from here and now it was there. He fell into depression, got out of bed, searched for remedies and workarounds. In time he thought maybe the whole thing—the dream, the words and sounds, the songs, the deafness—was part of the same whole, one he was meant to grapple with. Maybe it was supposed to be hard. Why not? The whole album was about an “argument” he is having with himself, which he later calls a “debate,” “about belief or not.” “Maybe it isn’t supposed to be so easy. Maybe you’re supposed to have an obstacle.” Maybe the struggle helps you know what you know in a deeper way.

Wynton Marsalis, another great artist and Mr. Simon’s close friend, told him, as he recorded, to “leave the struggle in there.”

There are more spiritual references in the documentary—he speaks of the psalms of David and makes biblical references—and once you see them you realize they’ve always been there in Mr. Simon’s work. All writers reveal their obsessions and preoccupations, and half the time they’re not even conscious of it. And no one knows where anyone’s going or what’s going on with them, but Paul Simon is speaking the language of conversion and I think he’s going to graceland.

A radiant Easter to my beautiful readers.

The heartening story this week was the House vote to force TikTok, the video sharing platform, to stop acting as what U.S. officials have long warned it is, a true and grave security threat to the United States.

In this, the House showed what it rarely shows, self-respect. Its members said: You can’t harm America without our at least trying to resist. They signaled to China that it can’t bank forever on America’s stupidity and carelessness. Maybe they signaled to Big Tech outfits here that Congress will eventually move against their abuses, too.

The vote was bipartisan and overwhelming, 352-65. Nancy Pelosi backed it, as did Elise Stefanik. Against it were many on the fringes of each party, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Matt Gaetz.

TikTok is owned by ByteDance, which is connected to the Chinese Communist Party. If the bill becomes law, ByteDance will be required to sell TikTok to non-Chinese owners or face a ban in the U.S. At least one prospective buyer has expressed an interest.

Here is part of the case against TikTok:

It uses its algorithms to suck up information about America’s 170 million users, giving it the potential to create dossiers. Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Christopher Wray has warned that China, through ByteDance, has the ability to control software on millions of devices in the U.S.

TikTok demonstrably suppresses content that China doesn’t like and promotes posts injurious to America. It can flood the U.S. in an election year with information that can be used to toy with us and further drive us apart. Here it should be said that if you’ve been watching things for a while you have a strong sense that the Chinese, and our other competitors, aren’t pulling for Donald Trump or Joe Biden; they think both are jokes. They want to hurt America. They want to bring it down as a power. It’s not about favoring one party or the other, it’s about hurting us. You could see China’s commitment to its efforts in the language it used before the House voted. A proposed ban would “come back to bite the United States,” its Foreign Ministry warned.

TikTok fought back hard and lost, which seems to me the first such loss for a tech company. It pulled out all the stops, alerting its U.S. users, who jammed phone lines on Capitol Hill. TikTok paid expenses for “creators” to go to Washington. The New York Times quoted a creator called Giovanna González, who posted in a video: “So old white people boomers we call congresspeople are trying to ban TikTok, but I’m not having it.” You are having it.

I don’t know if what TikTok did backfired, exactly, but it didn’t work. It overplayed its hand.

U.S. security agencies have been warning the American people since 2020 that TikTok is an espionage tool. Since the warnings began, use of the social-media app has exploded. It seemed to me a seminal event when agencies of Republican and Democratic administrations in turn told the people that a platform was threatening their own safety and security—and Americans not only don’t turn it off; they clamored for it. At some point we have to admit that something is wrong not only with Congress but also with us. People make their living on TikTok, it is true, but they can make their living in a lot of places, not only one that can do damage to their fellow citizens and, old-fashioned concept coming, their country. Independence and entrepreneurship are beautiful but can tip into sheer dumbness and lack of care for others.

The bill now goes to the Senate. Senators would be impressed by the size of the House win and its ideological mix, but I wonder if Big Tech money is flowing in or being withheld. Will they slow things down until people forget? Victory will take vigilance. Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley on Thursday told Axios he doesn’t expect the Senate to vote for it. “Nothing that Big Tech doesn’t want moves across the Senate floor,” he said. “My observation is that people say, ‘I agree with the idea in principle but have concerns.’ That basically means we should never do anything.”

*   *   *

The second most important story this week was the clincher nobody noticed.

Donald Trump and Joe Biden sewed up their respective parties’ presidential nominations in primaries on Tuesday, each receiving the threshold number of delegates needed to win in coming conventions. By the latest count, Mr. Biden has received a combined total of 8.5 million votes. Another 1.3 million voters cast Democratic ballots for other candidates or no candidate.

In all Republican contests combined, Donald Trump received 10.3 million votes, and Nikki Haley drew 3.3 million, and 500,000 other ballots were cast.

Does the disparity in turnout—9.8 million Democrats showed up and 13.7 million Republicans—suggest which party has the energy and hunger? I suspect so.

But overall this is an absurd moment. Everything’s settled but nothing feels stable. A nation now knows who its two major party candidates will be, after relatively easy contests, and that nation doesn’t want those candidates! The polls show it. The general feeling: We’re stuck with these crazy old coots.

Neither candidate can, as they say in politics, do optimism. Neither can make you see a better tomorrow. Mr. Trump is American carnage; everything’s terrible and only he can repair it; the worse things are, the better his chances. That’s why he didn’t want the recent bipartisan immigration bill. On a problem that’s, say, a foot long, it offered 2 inches of progress. Can’t have that! Mr. Biden can’t do optimism because when he speaks of the sunny side he sounds out of touch. He’s not believable and does not have a plan beyond keep on keepin’ on. He sounds like a politician who’s just word-saying.

But you can also connect a little of the general unhappiness and dissatisfaction to the TikTok story itself. President Trump was the first to call it a security risk, and he did it with vivid, concrete language. His 2020 executive order banning it warned that TikTok could funnel American users’ personal data to the Communist Party, “potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.” The order was enjoined in court, and Mr. Biden later rescinded it. The bill passed this week was aimed at redressing those grievances. But Mr. Trump has now reversed his stand, saying this week that banning TikTok would make Facebook happy. Can’t have that! Also a major ByteDance investor is a major Republican donor. His former adviser Steve Bannon said on the social-media site Gettr that it is the “coin.”

As for Mr. Biden, his administration continued the warning of TikTok’s threat and backed a ban. Then, his approval ratings sinking, he decided to open an account on TikTok to sway its young hep-cat users. (He says he’ll sign a final bill.)

What a crew. How mutually swampy. It is a cliché that it’s not what’s done in secret in Washington that’s a scandal but what’s done in public, right under your nose. It’s a cliché because it’s true.

How much can one speech do? When you’re a president in a hole (approval numbers stubbornly stuck below 40%, a re-election campaign under way) a big speech can help a lot or a little, be a wow or a mess. You know fairly quickly when the speech didn’t work: People start making jokes and the jokes gel. If the speech is splendid you may only know in retrospect because it takes time for history to see where it fit in the scheme of things and what it really did.

On cable Thursday afternoon they were calling Joe Biden’s State of the Union the most important speech of his career, and not only because they were trying to get you to watch. The cumulative effects of 50 years of speaking sort of made Joe Biden the figure he is, but he never really had a make-or-break speech, and maybe this was it.

The headlines in the speech: There’s life in the old boy yet.

And: Boy, he came in hot. It was fiery. He opened by comparing the current moment to 1941 and suggesting his right presidential corollary is Franklin D. Roosevelt and “no ordinary time.” He immediately pivoted to Ukraine and NATO, issuing passionate vows. “We have to stand up to Putin.” “Europe is at risk.” “Freedom and democracy” at home and abroad are at risk. Then quickly on to Jan. 6.

He sure didn’t ease into things. It was pow pow pow.

Then—this again was in the first few minutes—to abortion: “In the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court majority wrote the following, and with all due respect, Justices: ‘Women are not without electoral or political power.’ ” He said “those bragging” about the decision “have no clue about the power of women.” He said they found out in 2022 and 2023, “and we’ll win again in 2024.” That was a perfect play to his base and deeply aggressive toward the justices seated immediately before him, who couldn’t reply. He vowed, with a new Congress, to “restore Roe v. Wade as the law of the land again.” I’m not sure how that works.

But it was all part of the drama of a dramatic speech.

The great question the past month was about his persona. Would he walk in shakily? When he was done, would we be using words like old, frail, incapable, embarrassing? We won’t. People will say that guy has a lot of fight in him. He was wide awake, seemed to be relishing the moment, did not seem to tire much, and in fact improved as the speech moved along.

He showed energy and focus, blurred some words and thoughts, maintained a brisk pace. He almost never spoke softly. He sometimes yelled. There was a give-’em-hell-Harry vibration, as if he’d been reading up on Truman. The White House meant to quell growing Democratic fears on the president’s age and acuity. They succeeded, at least for a while. Congressional Democrats looked happy to the point of bubbly when it was over.

It can also be said the president often maintained an indignant and hectoring tone that he confuses with certitude and commitment. In the end I don’t know if the speech came across to a viewer at home as strong and focused or, as has been said, “Angry Old Man Yells at Clouds.” That probably depends on where you stand on Joe Biden.

He was ready for back-and-forth from the floor and seemed to summon it. Conservatives and Republicans need to field a better antagonist than Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who wore a “Make America Great Again” hat and heckled from the floor. She makes her party look stupid and her movement vulgar.

Mr. Biden’s expression was mostly plain-spoken and blunt. He tried to rouse emotion but he didn’t do it with fancy, opaque phrasing. He has a tropism toward words and phrases that sound like high-end ad copy. He says, “America’s comeback is building a future of American possibilities,” and I hear, “Dodge trucks are Ram tough.” But he didn’t do a lot of that in this speech. He was unfrilly and direct, which added to his power.

The speech was to begin at 9 p.m. At 9:09 members were still milling around the chamber patting each other’s arms and backs. Politicians touch each other more than actors on opening night. The president wasn’t announced until 9:16 and didn’t make it to the podium until 9:25.

All this was rude and self-indulgent on everybody’s part. They milked it. Ladies and gentlemen of Congress, tighten up, keep it crisp. Don’t be slobby like a not-great country.

Before the president’s speech began, when the networks were filling time showing scenes from the floor, every time they cut to Vice President Kamala Harris at the podium she was giving the new House speaker, Mike Johnson, the brush-off. He’d try to chat, she’d say a word, look away, smile at the crowd. She was collected; he looked at a loss. It was his first State of the Union in that chair. She had no mercy for the bumpkin. There was something take-no-prisoners about it. It seemed to me suggestive of the coming campaign.

I close with my impression that the press corps, to use an old term, has been feeling increasingly pressured by the White House. Biden folk always expect the mainstream press to carry their water; whatever they want said of the president and the administration, they poke the press to say and think about and look into. The press in turn is thinking: Why don’t you make your own points in front of cameras and at events, and we’ll report what you did? It is a real weakness—and ultimately self defeating—that Democratic White Houses expect so much from the press, focus on its members so much and cuff them about when they don’t come through.

This White House is in this respect the opposite of Ronald Reagan’s. Reagan never expected a break from the press, ever. They were liberal Democrats; he was delighted and surprised when they achieved simple fairness. He went over their heads to the American people to tell his story. If he wanted to be considered vigorous he had to show vigor. If he wanted to impress with his views and his plan he walked up to a mic. One of the Biden White House’s mistakes on the issue of the president’s health is the now heavily spoofed spin about how energetic and on top of it he is behind the scenes—in the thick of it, at the vital center, the bride at every wedding, as was said of the honestly energetic Teddy Roosevelt. It’s nonsense. If it were true, wouldn’t the White House allow some cameras to capture it just once?

The president did try to show things through his own presence and performance Thursday night, and it worked. They should leave it at that.

I don’t know if Mr. Biden changed his situation, but it sure was interesting. We just heard his half of the 2024 presidential campaign. His stump speeches will derive from it.

A man on CNN is reporting live from outside a polling place in suburban South Carolina and recounts a small story. An 18-year-old man had just voted, and the election clerk called out, “Ladies and gentlemen we have a first-time voter.” The room burst into applause. “They say that’s a tradition here,” the reporter said. It touched me.

All the networks had been showing all these normal Americans who showed up to vote, the people who make the country work, and interviewing them on the way in and out. “I voted for Trump because . . .” “I’m for Haley.” All of them patient and good-natured with the media folk. I thought, not for the first time, that America has become an 80/20 country, with 80% so sterling and responsible and constructive, taking part, keeping the whole edifice up and operating, of all faiths, colors and persuasions. But we only pay attention to the 20% because they make all the news—outrageousness of every sort, hurting people on the street or making threats on TikTok or acting out in every field, including politics, in some ignorant way.

The 80% never make news because they’re modestly doing what’s expected. But we should never forget who we are, a good people, and by an overwhelming majority. That gets drowned out in the daily drumbeat.

On the evening of his South Carolina triumph, Donald Trump said of the Republican Party: “I have never seen the Republican Party so unified as it is right now.” It isn’t a united party but one broken in two, with one half bigger than the other. Mr. Trump won South Carolina roughly 60/40 and that is a win, a big one, a landslide. But as Nikki Haley said, speaking after him that evening, “40% is not some tiny group.” Especially when you consider that South Carolina Republicans are pretty Trumpy. Forty percent of voters not desiring his return is a big deal. The South Carolina outcome mirrored New Hampshire, but Michigan this week was different, a bigger and more decisive split for Trump, roughly 70/30. But still a split.

Eight years ago the Trump part of the party was a small minority, though one that in the end triumphed. Now the non-Trump part is a rump.

When a party is broken both sides get to speak of why they’re right and the other side’s wrong. That is why it is legitimate and constructive—it is a very 80% move!—for Ms. Haley to stay in and argue against Mr. Trump and his policies. This is right, helpful and clarifying. Mr. Trump tends to avoid this, or rather to do half, the part about why he’s the right person. He doesn’t much address his own policies, or explain why Ms. Haley is wrong in hers. But he owes it to the country. Is he capable of engaging on issues? Is he too old, too scattered and unfocused?

Some say Ms. Haley should get out now to preserve her viability for 2028. This is fantasy. She is taking on the more-than-half part of her party now and alienating them every day. They won’t forget it. In any case, future presidential cycles aren’t at all predictable or plannable. Everything changes; people will enter whose names we don’t know. If Ms. Haley has a presidential future it will more likely be with a third party. For now she is doing an authentic public service in bearing a standard and explaining why it must be borne, and that is enough.

Next week is Super Tuesday, when certain overwhelming trends, if they continue, and there’s no reason to believe they won’t, will produce the expected outcome: a Trump-Biden race, a repeat of 2020, even though no sane person would want to return to that dreadful year.

Meanwhile, for eight years normal, old-style Republicans—normal and old-style not only in policy but in terms of personal and professional seriousness—have been saying: We can’t win without the Trumpers. It has yet to dawn on the Trumpers that they need the normal, old-style Republicans, too. They were alerted to this in the elections of 2018, 2020 and 2022, but the lesson didn’t take. At some point in the future it must. Trumpism is by nature triumphalist: We are the unstoppable wave. But that wave broke in ’18, ’20 and ’22 on the rocks of the normal, old-style Republicans who ringed the shore. They may well break it again, in November. This hasn’t moderated Mr. Trump’s approach.

*   *   *

We close with Mitch McConnell. On hearing of his decision to step down in November as GOP Senate leader, I thought what I have been thinking for some time as various House veterans, and serious younger members, have stepped down: The doctors are fleeing the asylum.

Age and a recent family loss, the death of his sister-in-law Angela Chao, played into the decision, but so surely did the current moment. Mr. McConnell entered the Senate in 1984, and became Republican leader 2007. He came up in one party, during the Reagan revolution, and a different one has risen since.

As leader, Mr. McConnell was subtle, saw around corners, never lost his head, skillfully herded some highly unusual cats. He wasn’t a visionary but kept in his mind the big picture and played a long game. Politics to him was the art of the possible; he respected the mathematics of the situation. I suspect the political regret of his life was his decision not to back Donald Trump’s second impeachment, after 1/6. It would be a right regret.

Democrats in the Senate knew him as a formidable foe; when he blocked the Supreme Court nomination of Merrick Garland in 2016, he sent them into a blazing rage. They painted him in return as a great villain, understandably, and as he knew they would. The break never fully healed. Yet to the extent the Senate as an institution still holds, Mr. McConnell is a primary reason. His Democratic counterpart, Chuck Schumer, looked honestly moved as, at the end of Mr. McConnell’s remarks announcing his decision, in the well of the Senate, he crossed the aisle to take Mr. McConnell’s hand.

His remarks were moving, and there was throughout an air of gallantry. He quoted Ecclesiastes: To everything there is a season. He said: “One of life’s most underappreciated talents is to know when it’s time to leave.” Would that others heeded his example.

“I said exactly what I felt,” he said afterward by phone. “The reaction has been surprising and rather heartwarming, and I wasn’t sure that would be the case.” A historian of the Senate wrote that he had not only been the longest serving party leader in the Senate; he had been the best. When I mentioned Mr. Schumer, Mr. McConnell said their “shared passion” on Ukraine had brought them closer.

He was one of the last grown-ups. Trump people will jeer him—“Another head we’ve cut off.” They couldn’t carry his sandals.

He will remain in the Senate and, liberated from the constraints of leadership, no doubt feel free to be a thorn in the side of irresponsible presidential and party leadership. Something tells me in this area he’ll make John McCain look like a piker.

You know that look everybody gets when a long, bad Zoom meeting ends and you’ve said goodbye and you’re searching for the Leave Meeting button while keeping a determinedly pleasant look on your face? That’s how I’m feeling about our national political life! Or that tingly feeling you get when the novocaine starts to wear off but your jaw doesn’t have full feeling yet and you know when it does it’s going to hurt? That’s how I’m viewing 2024! Like a certain amount of pain is coming but one must maintain one’s poise. (I just thought I’d share. But it’s how you’re feeling too, isn’t it?)

Ol’ Cranky vs. Ol’ Crazy continues apace. Mr. Trump’s campaign is odd for a probable primary victor in that he is obsessed with the love of his assured followers while giving no apparent thought to anyone else. He says mad things, inviting Russia to invade U.S. allies and comparing himself to Alexei Navalny. But he takes questions from the press even when not emerging from a courtroom, and a friend suggests one whose answer might clear things up: “Would the killing of Navalny come under your idea of presidential immunity?”

Nikki Haley plugs away, sharpening her critiques. The South Carolina primary is Saturday, and one wonders how expectations will play into its coverage. She has consistently trailed by about 30 points. If she loses by 15, can she claim momentum? She’ll likely call it a victory. Will it be? Honest question.

It’s good she’s in and still swinging, because her simple presence says something important: that a significant portion of the party doesn’t support Donald Trump for president, and all arguments as to why will be made.

As for Ol’ Cranky, he delivers his State of the Union address on March 7, two days after Super Tuesday. This will be President Biden’s kickoff to the election year, his final scheduled speech to Congress before November, his last chance at a new unveiling. I’m leapfrogging the news cycle because I have thoughts.

The speech is an exhausted form, bloated and interminable. People say it’s too long because it is. The shortest by a modern president was Richard Nixon’s in 1972 (under 29 minutes), the longest Bill Clinton’s in 2000 (almost 90). Last year Mr. Biden’s went 73 minutes. Does anyone remember anything he said?

Make it short—no more than 30 minutes. Instruct party members not to jump up and cheer constantly. Say you asked them not to, there’s much at stake and this isn’t theater.

If Mr. Biden is going to stay in this thing, he must turn serious. Not somber or ponderous, but serious.

There are only three subjects: America at home (illegal immigration), America in the world (Ukraine, Israel), and the economy.

No one knows how Mr. Biden is thinking about the massive illegal-immigration crisis. People are coming to believe, and they are right, that it isn’t only a matter of the law, our capacities and our culture, but what is happening now at the border has a huge national-security component. All the friendly, well-put-together Chinese nationals crossing—who are they, why are they coming, how did this happen? All the Eastern Europeans, Asians and Africans. Once Mexico was coming illegally, then Central and South America, now the world, including people on the terrorist watch list. This is a border collapse.

It’s easy to imagine how the Joe Biden of 1984 would have thought about this: That’s bad, the people won’t buy it, we gotta stop. Or even 2004: This is gonna be a problem for us and a gift to Republicans. It’s not at all clear how he thinks about it now. He owes it to the country to say. About half of us feel we’re experiencing an unaddressed invasion. We can’t imagine how this ends well.

America in the world: What are we doing? What are we trying to do? The president has to get back to the basics. Many conservatives see Ukraine as a secondary interest, a place far away with no immediate bearing on our safety, the effort to help it defend itself driven by unrealistic assumptions about American power. Answer this. Why must Russia be stopped? Why is it in America’s interests? America has to hear a clear, contained argument that isn’t emotional, that isn’t cheap applause lines, that gives a clear sense of strategic thinking.

On Israel, decent people who were moved and horrified by the atrocities of Oct. 7 are now four months out from that event. Gaza, tens of thousands dead, Benjamin Netanyahu as the face of the Israeli government—an attrition of support is undeniable. Quinnipiac had a poll this week that said more Americans support aid to Ukraine than to Israel. We’re in a sea change in U.S. public opinion. What should America do? What is the right way to think? The president should reject the soft, rubbery language of the State Department and the National Security Council, which can always be interpreted in several ways because it’s supposed to be interpreted in several ways.

On the economy, we have functional full employment and inflation isn’t worsening. Bragging rights, but keep it low-key, not “we did this” but “America did this.” Americans need to hear from the president why food prices are so unbudgeably high. And what the plan is.

He should avoid the soaring phrases he loves; they always sound like high-end ad copy. Say it plain and straight. All of Mr. Biden’s political life he saw rhetoric as magic wordage, as if the right series of words a consultant pulled from his hat would put him over the top. He should forget that formula. It was never true. Mr. Biden rose because he was young and attractive, perceived as moderate but malleable, and wanted it so much, and looked the part, and people kind of liked him. They never thought he was eloquent. They thought he had a noncrippling and almost endearing tendency toward blowhardism.

The past week reading the old speeches I found myself drawn to the simplicity of the language of Harry S. Truman in 1948. He was another old busted valise whose electoral prospects were dim. “We are here today to consider the state of the union.” What a great, straight beginning. “The United States has been great because we as a people have been able to work together for great objectives even while differing about details.” That was plainness in service of tact.

A good thing for the president: If he does a perfectly adequate job, the press will be inclined to call it brilliant. Expectations are low. There’s a politesse about State of the Union coverage, nobody wants to pounce. The media have been slapped around recently for taking notice of Mr. Biden’s age after three years of ignoring it.

Bad news: People won’t be impressed if anchors call it brilliant, because our media world is all broken up in pieces and anchors speak to mere shards. And most Americans aren’t watching. Viewership declines each year.

But some are, and they’re intelligent, and when you play it straight with them they are generous.

The only time Democrats get excited now is when the subject is Donald Trump. Then they get marvelously worked up. An official of the administration called to let off steam. “Trump says NATO doesn’t pay its bills—has anyone noticed the irony? Donald Trump is the biggest deadbeat in history. How many hundreds of contractors did he stiff through his career, how many plumbers didn’t get paid for their work, and he complains about others? Talk about projecting!”

But when the subject is Joe Biden, they’re depressed. They have accepted that he is the inevitable nominee and explain the reasons. I can’t get myself to buy them. The thinking is too limited, too weary and defensive about life. And so a last stab at why it doesn’t have to be this way.

Mr. Biden is stuck at 39% approval; Mr. Trump is leading; a large majority of the country thinks he’s too old for the job. It’s not that his walk is slow or stilted, not that he occasionally loses his thought. It’s that the presidency is a speaking role and he can’t make a sustained case on Ukraine, Israel, illegal immigration, all the great issues. This leaves things confused, without a central voice, and makes people nervous: there’s too much mystery around this White House. They say he’s fine when he’s well-rested, but events don’t knock softly on the door and ask if you’re ready for them.

This is what Democrats argue: There is nobody else. But there is. Here we summon the usual names, starting with the Gs—Gov. Gavin Newsom, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo. Add Jared Polis, Josh Shapiro, all the candidates of the 2020 primary. There is no Biden movement within the party that would bolt without him, no Biden cult that must be appeased.

The Democrats will never be able to agree on anybody. Then they aren’t a party. A party’s function is to yield up and secure the election of candidates who fulfill its mission and meaning. The Democratic Party is a mess, but its constituent parts don’t want it to die, they have too much invested. In the end they’ll make a choice.

It would be bloody. So what? It would be vital, not as if the party is in some somnambulistic shuffle toward a dark, inevitable fate.

It’s too late. Lyndon B. Johnson, the last president to decline to seek a second term, dropped out on March 31, 1968. There was still time for contenders to launch and fund races. The primary rules have changed since then, and ballots have been printed up. Mr. Biden can free his delegates, either from the day he steps aside or at the convention. Only political romantics think an open convention is possible. You can’t know it’s impossible. Now and then in life you have to say, “History, hold my beer.”

But the American people would see chaos. Americans appear to enjoy chaos. It will only help Trump. His campaign is planning on a Biden rematch; he’ll be crowded out of the news cycle for months; it’ll throw a wrench in his works.

What about the Kamala problem? What problem? She can run for the nomination like anyone else.

It’s too big a gamble. Backing Mr. Biden is a gamble. Bookmakers give him a nearly 70% chance of losing.

The family won’t go for it. They aren’t the arbiters of American history; the White House isn’t their candy store.

He will never change his mind. Barack Obama dissuaded him from running for president in 2016. If Mr. Biden steps aside, sacrificing all vanity and need, he is a hero to his party forever. If he stays and loses, he’s Ruth Bader Biden. They’ll never forgive him. His legacy is the second Trump term.

Has anyone had The Talk with him, his family and staff? All the odds laid out, the arguments made, a plea spoken? Has anyone been frank, candid, tough?

If not, why not? Donors love to talk, so do senators and governors.

We end with the famous political intervention that took place 50 years ago this summer, in August 1974. Sen. Barry Goldwater, Sen. Hugh Scott and House Minority Leader John Rhodes went to Richard Nixon to tell him it was over.

Goldwater, in his blunt and gossipy 1988 autobiography, remembered telling a newspaper, in the spring of ’74, that the Watergate scandal reminded him of Teapot Dome. He was summoned immediately after for dinner at the White House. He hadn’t seen Nixon much and was taken aback. The president’s conversation was a stream of “ceaseless, choppy chatter.” He was “constantly switching subjects,” “hunching and quickly dropping his shoulders.” Goldwater drove home and dictated for his personal files: “I have reason to suspect that all might not be well mentally in the White House.” The next day he phoned fellow guest Bryce Harlow, Nixon’s counselor, who offered comfort: Nixon had merely been drunk.

On Aug. 6, as impeachment loomed, Goldwater alerted the White House the president may only have a dozen Republican senators with him. The next day he, Scott and Rhodes saw the president. Goldwater had been asked by chief of staff Al Haig not to demand or suggest resignation—that would leave Nixon defiant. In the Oval Office, Goldwater wrote, “Nixon put his feet up on the desk, leaned back in his swivel chair, and began reminiscing about the past.” Then Nixon’s voice turned hard. He challenged his visitors. Goldwater was direct: “Things are bad.” Nixon was sarcastic. “Less than a half-dozen votes?” “Ten at most,” Goldwater said. He’d taken a nose count that morning. “You have four firm votes. The others are really undecided. I’m one of them.”

Nixon asked if he had any options. None were offered. Goldwater left feeling, “He would make the decision in the best interests of the country. It was going to be all right.”

But after the meeting, Goldwater returned to his office and called Katharine Graham of the Washington Post. He didn’t much like the Post—earlier that day he’d stood on the Senate floor, looked up at the press gallery and declared “You are a rotten bunch!” But he knew the Post’s place in the story and its power with its readers. He had one, Richard Nixon, in mind.

He decided to trust her. “I told Mrs. Graham what had happened in the Oval Office.” Nixon might “go off in any direction, depending on how the media, particularly the Post, handled the story. Could they play it cool for just one day, refrain from saying Nixon was finally finished?” If they got Nixon mad, “there was no telling what he would do. As things stood, I believed he would resign.”

Kay Graham chose to trust Goldwater. “The Post was as circumspect as it could be the following morning.” Afterward she never mentioned it to Goldwater when they saw each other. Goldwater thought he knew why. “Newspapers call their own shots.” But he felt the Post that morning put country over self. “I will never forget their recognition of responsibility as long as I live.”

Nixon resigned that night.

These old stories are always so moving, because everyone was always thinking about America, and thinking imaginatively, too, as if history’s a thing you can personally shape.