Peggy Noonan

Only five years ago, in the first autumn of the pandemic, the big question was whether New York was over, finished. It was a real debate. The threatened collapse of commercial real estate, the rise of remote work and the growing knowledge you didn’t really have to be here to be at the top of your profession, the financial hit of the pandemic itself, the demonization of the police after George Floyd, the retirements and departures from the New York City Police Department, the rise in crime . . .

We made it through that. We are up and operating again, getting our strut back. Midtown Manhattan is clogged again with impossible traffic, downtown’s booming, people are back in the office and out on the town, Broadway is back.

It didn’t happen overnight, took a lot of moxie and grit, but we made it through. And you wouldn’t think we would be on the verge of handing ourselves a brand new setback in the choice of our next mayor. But we are.

So I guess this piece goes under the heading “Often in life after a bad thing happens, those who allowed it say, ‘I’m not sure we were sufficiently warned.’ ” Here’s a warning:

New York should breathe deep, think twice, then think again before electing the socialist mayoral candidate, Zohran Mamdani. He is barely 34, has never had a real job, was elected five years ago to the state assembly, which is a badge you wear while you scrounge around for attention and connections. This isn’t the résumé of the person you want in a position to guide the future of one of the largest economies in the world.

Different things are needed at different times. With our footing just back, what the city needs is an air of energy, bounce, expansion—more enterprise, more of a welcoming attitude for the woman who wants to open a small store or new restaurant. Make it easier for her. We don’t need more of the dead hand of government; we need to return more of a sense to the young that striving is still a realistic attitude, that grieving for a system that seems broken and can’t fit you in is premature.

Mr. Mamdani’s major stands are famous and often repeated. They involve freezing rents, increasing property taxes in “richer neighborhoods,” and no-cost child care up to age 5. The platform of the Democratic Socialists of America, of which he is a longtime member, is what you would expect—tax the rich, fight police brutality and mass incarceration, free college and medical care for everyone.

How will “the rich” react? They’ll understand all this means taxes and crime will go up, so they’ll be less inclined to stay. In the pandemic we worried as billionaires fled to Florida; now I fear millionaires fleeing nearby. It’s too early to say, everything at this point is anecdotal, but the New York Post this week reported sudden bidding wars among New Yorkers on million-dollar homes in Westchester County and Connecticut: “Real-estate brokers in these suburban markets report a frenzy reminiscent of the early pandemic exodus.” At a recent open house in Scarsdale, the report went on, a real-estate agent said the SUVs were double-parked down the block. “It’s like the Knicks at the Garden right now.”

A young Zohran supporter will wave a hand: Goodbye, who needs you? But every Upper West Side family buying a $1.5 million home in Greenwich was a New York family that threw off a whole world of local jobs and spending—delis, hair salons, babysitters, dog walkers, cleaners, dentists—and every one of them paid the already-high New York City taxes that pay the bills in this town. We’re going to miss them if they leave. Left behind will be the kulaks who won’t leave even after their crops are confiscated.

Mr. Mamdani has long been accused of a deep, persistent antisemitism. I won’t quote the clips suddenly flooding social media, the apparent result of someone’s late and incompetent oppo research, of his saying things that betray to my ear an obvious animus. There is a reason more than 1,000 American rabbis have warned his victory would threaten the safety of Jews.

He closed out his campaign this week unembarrassed to manipulate, implying that if you don’t vote for him it just might be because you’re “Islamophobic.” In a speech outside the Islamic Cultural Center of the Bronx, he said: “To be Muslim in New York is to expect indignity, but indignity does not make us distinct. There are many New Yorkers who face it. It is the tolerance of that indignity that does.”

He said, “I want to speak to the memory of my aunt who stopped taking the subway after Sept. 11 because she did not feel safe in her hijab.”

Here his voice caught. It was quite something. He was talking about the city he is asking to choose him to lead, and accusing it of casual and habitual bigotry. “The dream of every Muslim is simply to be treated the same as any other New Yorker. And yet for too long we have been told to ask for less than that, and to be satisfied with whatever little we receive.” Accounts on X later found that Mr. Mamdani’s aunt doesn’t wear a head covering and apparently didn’t live in New York, and he later said he meant a cousin, who turns out, perhaps conveniently, to be no longer living.

In an embarrassingly self-valorizing way, he vowed, “I will not change who I am, I will not change how I eat, I will not change the faith that I am proud to belong to. But there is one thing I will change. I will no longer look for myself in the shadows. I will find myself in the light.”

Oh please. This man is from the top rung of New York society, his father a Columbia professor who lectures against colonialism and his mother a director whose films have had two Academy Award nominations. A place was made for him in society the day he was born.

More important, New York is such a moving and astonishing place in part because what Mr. Mamdani suggested—fierce and widespread public discrimination against Muslims after 9/11—didn’t occur, and could never have occurred because it is at odds with the city’s essential nature. We don’t like bigotry. We pride ourselves on this. Individuals do jerky things every day and everywhere, but all the messages of this city’s culture are to be open, not narrow, and fair, not unjust. He is probably our next mayor because New Yorkers are more like this than he understands.

History moves and does what it does. The polls suggest that more than half the city opposes Mr. Mamdani, but his opposition is split between Republican Curtis Sliwa, who has no chance, and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat running as an independent, who maybe, maybe, could squeak through if absolutely everything suddenly goes his way.

At the very least, New York, don’t give the Democratic Socialist a mandate or anything he can claim as such. Make it a close one. That might at least limit the setback for a city newly back on its feet and starting to be itself again.

Donald Trump’s supporters are feeling satisfaction after two astonishing achievements: He is the first president this century to establish order on the southern border, and he has secured some new possibility for a Mideast settlement. These are breakthroughs even if they don’t last. But the people in this White House, with every triumph, become wilder and wilder. Their triumphalism is accelerating my now-chronic unease over the sense that the strict lines of our delicately balanced republic are being washed away.

Ben Franklin, famously asked by a woman on the street in Philadelphia what sort of government the Constitutional Convention had wrought, is reported to have said, “A republic, if you can keep it.” The reply was wry and factual but also a warning: Republics are hard to maintain.

Are we maintaining ours?

Democrats worry about our democracy. Is that the area of greatest recent erosion? I doubt it. Donald Trump really won in 2016, you can trust those numbers, and he really lost in ’20, and really won in ’24. Your governor won, your congressman—you can pretty much trust the numbers even factoring in the mischief in any system built by man. When shocks happen—“I just want to find 11,780 votes”—the system has still held. The state of Georgia told the president to take a hike in 2020. If you’ve spent much of your adult life deriding the concept of states’ rights, that moment would have complicated your view.

It isn’t our democracy that I worry about, it is our republic. That’s where we’re seeing erosion, that’s the thing we could lose.

Quickly, obviously, broadly: A republic is a form of government in which power begins on the ground, with the people, and shoots (and is mediated) upward. Power doesn’t come from the top down. The people choose representatives who are protective of local interests while keeping their eye on the nation’s. The government of which they’re part is bound by laws, by a Constitution that is not only a document of enumerated laws but a mean, lean machine for preserving liberty.

The Constitution the founders devised was born of deep study of history, philosophy and human nature. Their understanding of the last was deeply conservative. “If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” James Madison said. They aren’t, so one is.

The American republic would consist of three branches, with each knowing and protecting its specific powers and duties. The legislative branch would have chambers representing the people and the states, holding the power of the purse and the power to make law. Congress would represent.

For the executive branch, the presidency. The holder of that office would be a single person elected by the nation and anticipated to be energetic. The president would act—declare a direction and lead.

The judiciary would be guardian of the Constitution and the rule of law. It would have the power to strike down laws judged unconstitutional. Alexander Hamilton: “No legislative act, therefore, contrary to the Constitution, can be valid.” An independent judiciary would judge.

All three would work together in a system of divided powers; no part would completely dominate. They’d be in constant tension with one another. Madison distilled it down: “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” This would tend to limit corruption and keep “eruptions of passion,” to borrow a phrase of Hamilton’s, from swaying things too immediately and dramatically. Madison especially thought pure direct democracy would prove unstable, a too-slight skiff heaved about in history’s seas. A rooted republic would be a mansion that could take heavy winds.

The republic they devised produced not efficiency but equilibrium. It established not only a system but a spirit. It has seen us through for 237 years.

Are we maintaining our republic? Is our equilibrium holding? The last nine months a lot of lines seem to have been crossed—in the use of the military, in redirecting the Justice Department to target the president’s enemies, real and perceived. There are many areas in which you’ve come to think: Isn’t the executive assuming powers of the Congress here? Why is Congress allowing this? The executive branch takes on authority to bend its foes, defeat them. You ask: Is all this constitutional? The president “jokes” that he may not accept the Constitution’s two-term presidential limit. Are you laughing?

The 250th anniversary of July 4, 1776, comes up next year, and many of us are rereading the old documents. The past week I’ve talked to two historians, one rightish, one leftish, and both conversations turned toward Thomas Jefferson’s stinging bill of particulars against King George III in the Declaration of Independence.

They resonate in unexpected ways: “For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world.” “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us.” “He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our Legislatures.” “He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people.” “Obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither.”

The Founders didn’t want any of that. It’s why they created a republic.

The tearing down of the East Wing of the White House also seems, in this context of concern, disturbing. White House defenders dismiss qualms as pearl clutching—a big vital building’s gotta grow, it’s been torn down and built up before, we need more room.

But all this was done without public demand or support, and was done in a way that was abrupt, complete, unstoppable. Congress has the power of the purse for such projects but the president says no, our wonderful donors are paying for it, but the names of the donors were not quickly revealed. Your imagination was forced to go to—why? Might certain bad actors be buying influence? Crypto kings, billionaires needing agency approvals, felons buying pardons, AI chieftains on the prowl. Might the whole thing be open to corruption? Would it even have been attempted in a fully functioning, sharp and hungry republic? Or only a tired one that’s being diminished?

The photos of the tearing down of the East Wing were upsetting because they felt like a metaphor for the idea that history itself can be made to disappear.

I started with Trump supporters and end with them. They feel joy at real and recent triumphs, but deep down are rightly anxious about the world. Artificial intelligence, nukes, everything out of control, a cultural establishment that hates you. We may have to make some readjustments or revisions in our constitutional traditions, we’re in endgame time.

It all gives you a feeling of nihilism, something you’ve never felt in your entire honestly constructive life, and it’s so shocking that for a moment it leaves you giddy, and in the end, having been broken down a bit, you wind up laughing last week at a video in which an American president put a crown on his head in the cockpit of a fighter jet, flies over America, and drops human waste on it.

You just laugh, when nothing like that ever would have made you laugh before, and in fact would have hurt your heart.

Nine months in we’ve got to be thinking about these things.

Give it to him. Give him your applause. Sometimes pessimism reaches a point of moral error. Sometimes hope is the only realistic approach.

So give it to President Trump, whose White House has produced the first progress in the Mideast since the grave crisis of Oct. 7 began. He announced Wednesday with typically Trumpian words. He called it, “a big, big day, a beautiful day, potentially one of the great days ever in civilization.”

Israel and Hamas have agreed to the first phase of a peace plan to end the Gaza war. It is a 20-point plan so a lot could go wrong, but the first phase includes a cease-fire, Israeli troop withdrawal to an agreed-on line and the freeing of the remaining hostages held by Hamas. Gaza will be governed by a Palestinian committee overseen by a marvelously named “Board of Peace,” chaired, marvelously, by Donald Trump.

When word broke in Gaza on Wednesday, they danced in the streets and chanted; they were still cheering on Thursday. In Israel they went to Hostage Square and sang.

Here any reliable pundit would counsel caution—it could all fall apart, joy may be premature. All true. But I’ll take my joy premature, bartender. If it turns out progress was illusory we will at least have reacquainted ourselves with what optimism in the Mideast feels like—it feels energetic, like something that can get you through the next day.

Sometimes you have to break away from heavy, sodden reality and go straight into joyful idiocy.

I like the Barnum & Bailey aspect of the Trump administration. Other things I don’t—chaos, vengeance, lack of thought about the deeper meaning of things. But I like the circuslike color. It’s human, and government doesn’t always seem human.

I think world leaders are still so shocked by Mr. Trump as a phenomenon that they overjudge his support, and that contributes to his power with them. He walks into the room at some Group of 20 meeting and he’s so outsize, he literally fills the doorway—big suit, big man, big tie, big hair, glower; he doesn’t even try to set his face in a smile. They look at him and think: That’s 70% of the American people. He doesn’t have that kind of support and they know it, but they can’t help thinking of him that way.

Why would a sleek and prowling operator like Bibi Netanyahu accept a deal? Because Mr. Trump scares him, because Mr. Trump is as big an animal as he is. Bigger. The president is aware of and careful with but not afraid of Bibi’s most reliable supporters in the U.S. Bibi has long thought that he essentially controlled and held all the loyalty of the biggest group of pro-Israeli Americans—evangelical Christians. But Mr. Trump, unlike his modern predecessors, has hooks into them and loyalty from them more than Bibi does, and would use it against him. Bibi respects this, being an animal.

Mr. Netanyahu was increasingly boxed in. Both of America’s great political parties are splitting over Israel, no longer in unified support. Democrats are besieged by the young and progressive, Republicans experiencing a pushing away from Israel on the right.

Bibi has a genius for politics and has lasted a long time. He’s been prime minister 17 years off and on since 1996. He knows how to survive.

As for Hamas, they are terrorists whom everyone hates but their own like-minded fanatics and young dopes in the West. They’re half-dead, their money lines less stable, their leadership gone. Time to show a little magnanimity! Of course we’ll free the hostages, we hate sadism!

But I want to pay tribute to the wonderful creative insanity Donald Trump can display on the international front. At moments when the Mideast is blowing up, American presidents always begin to ape the language, preoccupations and granular knowledge of the regional experts, some of whom follow from White House to White House. It’s always into the weeds with them. The settler issue may complicate the loan-guarantee schedule if the ’67 lines are even retrievable. It was all opaque and meaningless and meant to be.

That isn’t what Mr. Trump did in this crisis. He looked at the whole complicated picture, the long history, the writing etched on the stones of the oldest archeological sites, and said: That’s fabulous beachfront property going to waste. We can build a luxury resort with hotels, casinos, beaches, a slide for the kids, decorous bordellos with golden stairways. Actually, what he said, in February, was that Gaza could be “the Riviera of the Middle East” because it’s on the Mediterranean and has “the best weather.” He then posted on social media an AI-generated video showing a “Trump Gaza” tower.

A few days later I saw a friend who knows his foreign affairs and he said, “Do you believe the idiocy of this guy?” And I surprised him: “I kind of liked it. I think I love it.”

Because it was absurdist it changed the picture you have in your head. It was a reorienting thought. The world knows it’s ridiculous and yet—yeah, that land would come cheap, it could be a gold mine! It was so Trumpian, he thinks everything can be a big building with his name on it, but in his insane way he was saying: Imagine it differently. And for a second you did. The region is full of greedy grasping men on all sides, they feel more secure in their palaces when their people are employed, and an 18-year-old boy on the street would think, “I’d like to not live in a sand hole but wear a tuxedo in a casino with girls in sequins walking by.” Can’t we rely on simple human vice for progress anymore?

Here is something the world needs more of. It comes from the old parable of the prisoners in the cell. It has many variations.

A handful of prisoners are chained to a wall in a room and only one of them can see through the window high up. Instead of saying the truth—there’s nothing out there, just air—he describes for his cellmates beautiful scenes: people strolling on the street, a pretty girl, the sun is shining. He dies, a new prisoner is dragged in and put in his chains, he can see the window, they ask what’s outside today. He almost speaks, looks at them, realizes everything. He has a job: Give them something to live for. He looks out the window and says “There’s a parade, and a great princess is walking by in all her finery . . .”

It isn’t bad to give people something to live for.

I close with the special force of the idiotic idea. Sometimes in life you’re an idiot. You make the investment based on insufficient data because you got a feeling in your gut. You marry the guy you met three days ago. Sometimes you go broke and tell your funny story about the importance of due diligence to young investors. Sometimes you tell your story about the Elvis Chapel in Vegas on your 38th anniversary as your grandchildren eat chocolate cake.

It isn’t the worst thing to have a good story to tell. And some do end well.

A lot of people in the Trump administration think this is their moment and America’s last chance. They know what time it is, you don’t, it’s later in the game than you think, the damage is great and right now is the final hope of constructive national change. A sense of urgency is their central driving force.

But when people get into a “last chance” mindset, they become insensitive to, less mindful of and careful about, what they come to think of as “constitutional niceties.” When it is constitutional niceties—respecting the other branches’ authority, knowing the limits on your own, knowing what’s your lane and what the traffic will bear—that have kept us going since 1789, when the new government began functioning.

You can lose a republic while trying to save a republic. No matter what your level of idiocy, you don’t want that, you can’t want it, so you have to be careful. And serious.

When you are driven by a sense of urgency you must still try to act like a normal person—normal in your comportment, which means sober, judicious. Not like some pumped-up drama queen who makes everything more jarring and fevered, and who comes across as the living answer to the question, “What would it look like if Captain Queeg took Adderall?”

Which gets us to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. His unprecedented extravaganza this week, in which he summoned hundreds of generals and admirals from around the world to Virginia’s Quantico Marine Base to listen to him speak, shouldn’t be lost amid the government shutdown.

It was, as a former general said by phone, “just flat-out bizarre.” It was embarrassing to watch. He made everyone in the audience look smaller, which made their profession look smaller. How does that help America?

Mr. Hegseth instructed them as if from a great height. What he told them is that the woke progressive era in the U.S. military is over. He will have a reset to the “warrior ethos.” “No more identity months, DEI offices, dudes in dresses. . . . We are done with that s—.”

OK. Understood. Understood, in fact, since he was appointed. Mr. Hegseth could have reiterated all this by secure video conference, or just sent a video.

Instead he dragged commanders from their stations to be his audience. So he could pose with a giant American flag behind him like George C. Scott in “Patton,” only Scott delivered a great speech. Mr. Hegseth gave a TED Talk, a weirdly self-reverential one. He paced the stage like a strutting, gelled bantam, like an amped-up actor with rehearsed gestures and expressions and voice shifts.

“You might say we’re ending the war on warriors. I heard someone wrote a book about that.” Mr. Hegseth is author of a book called “The War on Warriors.” I guess he wants us to buy it.

There was braggadocio: “To our enemies, FAFO. If necessary, our troops can translate that for you.” He used “lethal” and “lethality” a lot, like a young Hollywood scriptwriter dreaming up some mad right-wing Army officer because he watched “Platoon” too much as a child, as perhaps Mr. Hegseth did. The frantic drama: “This is a moment of urgency, mounting urgency.” “We became the Woke Department.” “It’s completely unacceptable to see fat generals.”

The retired general later sighed on the phone and said: “I would like you to note that his hero, Norman Schwarzkopf, was fat. And George Patton wasn’t exactly a gazelle.” Sound military leadership has little to do with physical fitness and everything to do with strategic judgment.

Mr. Hegseth also seemed preoccupied with reimposing the military’s height requirement. There goes young Napoleon.

What are we doing in this dangerous world having the head of the Defense Department prance around like this and embarrass the generals he used as his backdrop? Why do his highly placed defenders in the administration think this is good for the White House, or even for Mr. Hegseth?

He is right that the U.S. military must be free of demands extraneous to its mission of keeping us and, yes, the world safer. They are the only Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines we have. We can’t jerk them around with our sudden cultural fevers, they aren’t a welfare agency, our defense structure can’t be the cultural left’s plaything. All of that got out of whack and carried away in the years leading up to and after 2020.

Here we must note we are a nation divided by algorithms. If your algorithm knows you as conservative and interested in military matters, you got a lot of videos of young soldiers and sailors acting out the past few years, and of service branches tweeting out showy political sentiments. You felt understandable alarm. If your algorithm knows you as liberal and not interested in military affairs, you haven’t seen that content, and will have been surprised by Mr. Hegseth’s reference to “dudes in dresses.” We are all getting different versions of reality every time we look at a screen, and it’s hurting us.

Mr. Hegseth is right that woke progressive policies have no place in a merit-based, competitive military, but the military follows the orders of civilian leaders. In any case it should have crossed his mind that he himself, when in service, never reached anywhere near the rank of those he was talking down to. They made military service their profession, stuck with it, rose and aren’t paid like TV hosts. All of them could leave and be better paid as board members and consultants. It wouldn’t be shocking if after Mr. Hegseth’s speech some of them moved up their retirements.

A correction to the past five or 10 years was inevitable and is legitimate. But you don’t want it to be an overcorrection; you want it done competently and with calm moral confidence.

You look at all this and say he’s just aping that vulgarian Donald Trump. Well, Mr. Trump does Donald Trump better. A Trump knock-off is cheaper and tackier than the original. You say Mr. Trump’s speech after Mr. Hegseth’s was even worse—a wild, incoherent and yet vaguely menacing mess. Yes, it was, and was worse because he’s president.

Mr. Hegseth has always had bad press, from the scandals that emerged after his nomination through fairly constant reports about chaos in his office. I thought and said early on he was a poor choice—a television host playing a culture warrior who lacked the weight and gravitas the Pentagon needed. This week the Daily Mail, not an immediate foe of all things Trump, had a story in which Mr. Hegseth was described as paranoid, “crawling out of his skin,” fearful and suspicious.

There are recent reports his Pentagon is putting forward new rules requiring journalists to have their work approved before publication. Where that stands is unclear, but it’s nuts. It makes America look like what our foes say we are, a place of make-believe freedom in which even the press is controlled by the government. Which really would be an urgent matter.

You know why people say something’s wrong with this guy? Because it appears something is wrong with this guy.

While watching the Charlie Kirk memorial Sunday, I was swept by a memory that yielded a realization.

The memorial, in State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Ariz., has been well described. There was a height to it, and a gentleness, with a few rhetorical exceptions. More than 90,000 people attended. TV and online viewership is estimated to have reached tens of millions.

Halfway through it struck me the memorial might have been the biggest Christian evangelical event since the first visit to America of Pope John Paul II, in October 1979. He was a year into his papacy. “Be not afraid!” he said, and took America by storm.

At the memorial there was an altar call—at a public memorial for a political figure. It was singular, and moving. So was the dignity and peacefulness of the crowd. They didn’t indulge their anger or cry out against the foe. It was as if they understood that would be bad for the country. I couldn’t remember a time a big Trump-aligned group did that, as a corporate act, in the past 10 years. It struck me as a coming of age. They were taking responsibility.

There is something you could have said at any time the past decade that is true now in some new way. It is that the GOP is becoming a more explicitly Christian party than it ever has been. A big story the past decade was that so many Trump supporters, especially but not only working-class ones, were misunderstood as “those crazy Christians” but in fact were often unaffiliated with any faith tradition and not driven to politics by such commitments.

But it looks to me as if a lot of those folks have been in some larger transit since 2015, as Kirk himself was. He entered the public stage to speak politics but said by the end that his great work was speaking of Christ. If he had a legacy, he told an interviewer, “I want to be remembered for courage for my faith.”

The secretary of state of the United States gave personal testimony on what Christ is in history and in his life. The vice president did the same. John Foster Dulles and Hubert Humphrey didn’t talk like this!

The whole thing was self-consciously and explicitly Christian. Kirk’s widow, Erika, talked of new converts and asked the crowd to help them. She said of her husband’s assassin, “That young man—I forgive him.” And she received a standing ovation.

As I watched I realized: This is the true sound and tone of the Republican Party right now. This is the takeover of the previously patronized.

Forty years ago in the Reagan White House, Christian activist leaders and people who spoke of “traditional values” were pretty marginalized. As a group they were treated as part of the GOP coalition: They had a seat at the table, respect was due them, especially at election time, but they were looked down on by many who ran the White House. (The speechwriters were by and large on their side, which was part of why we were often in trouble.)

Opposing them were the famous so-called pragmatists, who were generally moderate in their politics and had to keep an eye on the polls. Both sides felt misunderstood by the other and both were right; things sometimes got sparky.

In my first book, “What I Saw at the Revolution,” I wrote that I’d always detected a bit of “ye old class antagonism” in the split. The pragmatists in a general way came from some high-up backgrounds, the traditional-values folk generally didn’t, so both groups started out seeing America from different levels of observation.

In that book I wrote of a young man named Gary Bauer, who saw an America in which “the habit of religion” was being “removed from public life.” He was a domestic policy adviser, aligned with the Christian conservatives, and one day at a big issues lunch he departed from the topics to be discussed to tell the president of a kid in a public school down South who was valedictorian of her class and wanted to give her speech on the importance of God in her life. School authorities thought it might violate the separation of church and state, and said no.

As Gary spoke he looked around the table. His colleagues were embarrassed for him. We’ve got big things on our plate, and you’re going on about some kid in East Jesus. And they laughed. But President Reagan drew him out, asked what he could do, and sent a letter bucking her up.

As I watched the Kirk memorial I thought: The people in that audience are the sons and daughters of the patronized Christians of that old White House. They had a seat at the table then but are at the head of the table now.

Gary Bauer went on to run the Family Research Council and is now head of a group called American Values. I called and asked for his thoughts: “Over the decades what was taking root then has, I believe, produced the great movement we’ve been seeing, where men and women of faith are the biggest voting component of any Republican victory. What’s different now is that in terms of policy we don’t have to beg for a bone.”

He watched the memorial on television with his wife, Carol, at their home in Fairfax, Va. “I watched for four or five hours—every minute of it! I shed a tear more than once.” He said that what was said at the Kirk memorial wasn’t that different from what had been said at GOP conventions in the past. “What changed is the progressive movement in America has massively swung to the cultural left, and that has simply made the movement of faith-based voters a stronger movement.”

And when Mrs. Kirk spoke, “I don’t know why this especially grabbed me—she said, ‘Charlie wanted to save the lost boys of the West’—and that was just incredible. Young men robbed of their inheritance, taught their countries are worthless, told they’re toxic, they’re the cause of all the problems. We see all the impacts of that. If we can’t save our sons, it’s over.” He thinks America may be at the start of a religious revival.

In the Charlie Kirk memorial I saw a shift in some new way into a more self-consciously Christian GOP, one composed of Christians and those who like or don’t mind them, or feel what they stand for on policy is constructive. The other party will be everyone else.

Reservations? Of course. If it’s true, it feels European—the “Christian Democrats”—and not American. As a Christian I see things through a Christian lens, but big democracies demand many lenses to maintain peace in the political sphere. Modern democracies get through in part by not letting the lines get too vivid, the demarcations too sharp. A big blur can be helpful. But that would be another column. What I think I see evolving is big. That wasn’t just a memorial; it was a stepping forward in a new way of Christians and the Republican Party.

The broader subject here is getting through times of national trauma, and I’m thinking mostly of parents and young people. I have my mind on three truths. They are about personal as opposed to political behavior.

• You are the gatekeeper. Our society can’t live without wise heads who set and maintain standards. In the past week of shock and mourning people mentioned the Zapruder film. They’d all seen the terrible, immediately available, widespread video of the shooting of Charlie Kirk, and his bleeding to death. In days afterward they’d say, “That must be like the Zapruder film when JFK was shot—you all had a lot to process.”

No. We didn’t have to process it because we never saw it. The gatekeepers of the media wouldn’t let the American people see the president’s head shot off. It would be too gruesome and demoralizing, and too inspiring for the mentally ill.

A heartbroken country didn’t need that extra helping of anguish. So they spared us.

Life magazine heard about amateur photographer Abraham Zapruder’s 26-second color film of the shooting of the president, and rushed to buy it. One week after the assassination, its editors rushed out an issue including selected frames of the film, in black and white. They didn’t include the head-snapping moment of the fatal bullet, and left out other bloody parts.

Hardly anyone saw the Zapruder film until ABC showed it in 1975. Since the rise of the internet the film has been uploaded interminably, giving the impression it was always there. But the gatekeepers saw to it that it wasn’t: They didn’t want shock to become rage and rage to become more sick actions.

I should note the gatekeepers in those days were a few dozen men who ran the big newspapers, magazines and broadcast news divisions. They are fairly accused, in retrospect, of a certain cultural narrowness and too-uniform political views. But they were real patriots, sophisticated, and they’d been through World War II and Korea and knew what death was. Even when it’s common it’s a thing of awe. It’s intimate, it has to do with your personhood, and when a man dies on the field you cover him up, you shield him even in death from someone’s gross or careless gaze. You respect death.

The gatekeepers are long gone and will never return, but we can’t live as a healthy society without them. We prove this every day.

So you have to be the gatekeeper for your family. You have to be the gatekeeper for yourself. You have to hit delete as the stain tries constantly to creep in, you have to look away and guide others to look away. The school has to be a gatekeeper (removing smartphones from class is a gatekeeping action).

We are all gatekeepers now.

• Hold the line. In spite of what we are seeing all over, how inundated we feel about bad actions and bad indexes, you have to maintain faith in yourself and your neighbors. Gratitude for them too: They’re under the same cultural and societal pressure you are, and hanging in. Keep healthy those parts of life you can have a real impact on. Be a leader of your family, friends, kin and colleagues.

All week I’ve been thinking of the impromptu remarks of Gen. James Mattis, the defense secretary, in August 2017. America was erupting—the end of a hard-fought presidential election, a new presidency, Charlottesville. Gen. Mattis was travelling outside the country and met up with some U.S. troops deployed in an undisclosed location, believed to have been Jordan. “You’re a great example for our country right now that’s got some problems—you know it and I know it,” he said. In times like this, “you just hold the line, my fine young soldiers, airmen, sailors, Marines. You just hold the line until our country gets back to understanding and respecting each other and showing it—being friendly to one another.” The only way this great big experiment you and I call America is gonna survive is if we’ve got tough hombres like you.”

What a cheer they gave him. It’s good to keep your values, do your duty, protect your own compass—and to be appreciated. All parents have to be tough hombres now, and hold the line.

• Class isn’t everything but it makes everything better. Class is a word old America used in a certain way, not as we use it now, as a socioeconomic designation. In the older meaning it spoke of a quality, a style, a quiet superiority of character. It existed at a distance from wealth or circumstances of birth. It had a moral quality. If you had class you did the right thing, you behaved in a way that was generous, courteous, conveyed inner stature.

Here are examples from history of class. Lincoln filled his cabinet with critics and old foes, forgave them, and enlisted them to use their critical powers to help him govern. Jackie Kennedy, in trauma, maintained physical and emotional elegance, and form—the catafalque for her husband had to be like Lincoln’s because history itself would be a guest at that funeral. George H.W. Bush refused to embarrass the leaders of the Soviet Union when their system fell, but offered a hand to help their nation recover. Winston Churchill, when his adversary Neville Chamberlain died, eulogized him in a way that explained him better than he’d explained himself, and located him in a line of English lionhearts.

Ronald Reagan in 1984, on his way to a historic 49-state election victory, and knowing he could make it the first 50-state sweep in US history, did . . . pretty much nothing to get that 50th state. A few visits, a quick appearance at the end. He could have zeroed in. But it was the home state of his opponent, Walter Mondale, and it’s good to beat a man when the stakes are high but you leave him his pride. The painful night of his loss, Mondale won Minnesota by 3,761 votes—0.18% of the total.

That’s what class looks like. The young don’t get to see it so much on the national stage, but that’s how it looks, at least in politics.

This Sunday there will be a memorial service for Charlie Kirk in a stadium in Arizona. Grieving, heartbroken people will attend. May they have and show dignity.

I think of the mourning styles of the Kennedys and Kings—strength, quietness, stricken faces.

Because JFK was a sitting president the great leaders of the world came—Charles de Gaulle, figures like Haile Selassie, “The Lion of Judah,” and old Éamon de Valera. A television producer on Pennsylvania Avenue yelled to the control room on an audio line: “Give it to me, I’ve got a street full of kings!”

In the march behind Martin Luther King’s casket were regular people. But the same mood prevailed—maturity, dignity, an acceptance of the pain of life, which comes to all, and a knowledge that grief doesn’t wave its fist and yell, grief etches itself on a face so that when you see it you will never forget. They were so above anger.

When you have real depth in such circumstances you’re a mourner, not a manipulator, and you’re not presenting yourself as a political being, because you’re bigger than that.

You’re a person of dignity, acting as a gatekeeper, holding the line.

During recent national traumas we’ve heard the side argument over “thoughts and prayers.” Something terrible happens, someone sends thoughts and prayers, someone else snaps, “We don’t need your prayers, we need action.” They denounce the phrase only because they don’t understand it, and give unwitting offense. (I always hope it is unwitting.)

Prayer is action. It’s effort. It takes time. Christians believe God is an actual participant in history. He’s here, every day, in the trenches. He didn’t create the universe and disappear into the mists; his creation is an ongoing event, he is here in the world with you. When something terrible happens and you talk to him—that’s what prayer is, talking to him, communicating with concentration—you are actively asking for help, for intercession. “Please help her suffering, help their children, they are so alone.” “Help me be brave through this.”

It’s active, not passive. Catholics, when they’d pray over and over or with friends, used to call it storming heaven. It isn’t a way of dodging responsibility, it is (if you are really doing it and not just publicly posing) a way of taking it.

So pray now for America. We are in big trouble.

We all know this. We don’t even know what to do with what we know. But the assassination of Charlie Kirk feels different as an event, like a hinge point, like something that is going to reverberate in new dark ways. It isn’t just another dreadful thing. It carries the ominous sense that we’re at the beginning of something bad. Michael Smerconish said on CNN Thursday afternoon that normally after such an event the temperature goes down a little, but not in this case, and he’s right. There are the heartbroken and the indifferent and they are irreconcilable. X, formerly Twitter, was from the moment of the shooting overrun with anguish and rage: It’s on now. Bluesky, where supposedly gentler folk fled Elon Musk, was gleefully violent: Too bad, live by the gun, die by the gun.

But what a disaster all this is for the young. Kirk was a presence in the life of a whole generation of young conservatives, and he set a kind of template for how to discuss politics—with good cheer and confidence, with sincerity and a marshaling of facts. He was literally willing to meet people where they are. Mainstream media has understandably presented him as a political person, but he was almost as much an evangelical one, a Christian unembarrassed to talk about his faith’s importance to him. All the young who followed him saw the horrifying video of the moment the bullet hit him. They will remember it all their lives, it will be part of their understanding of politics in America. They will ask: If you are killed for speaking the truth as you see it, are you really free? Is this a free country?

For young conservatives who have felt cowed or disdained on campus, Kirk’s message was no, don’t be afraid, stand and argue your position. That he was killed literally while doing that—I am not sure we understand the generational trauma there.

The political violence of the 21st century is all they’ve ever known—the shooting of Rep. Gabby Giffords in 2011, of Rep. Steve Scalise in 2017, riots on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021, the attempted assassination of Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2022, the attack on Paul Pelosi the same year.

We like to say that something happened gradually and then suddenly. It’s from Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises”: A character, asked how he went bankrupt, says, “Two ways, gradually and then suddenly.” That’s how political violence in America has been growing in this century. I would say the 2024 assassination attempts on Donald Trump, and now the assassination of Kirk, are the “suddenly” moments. The reality continues while the dark tempo is picking up.

We know this can’t continue and we don’t know how to stop it. That is our predicament.

For those of us who remember the 1960s and the killing of Medgar Evers, both Kennedys and Martin Luther King, it feels like we’re going through another terrible round of political violence. It’s tempting to think, “That was terrible but we got through it.” But the assassinations of the 1960s took place in a healthier country, one that respected itself more and was, for all its troubles, more at ease with itself. It had give. Part of why this moment is scary is that we are brittler, and we love each other less, maybe even love ourselves less. We have less respect for our own history, our story, and so that can’t act as the adhesive it once was. The assassinations of the 1960s felt anomalous, unlike us. Now political violence feels like something we do, which is a painful thought.

What to do? Every suggestion—“lower the temperature,” “don’t be so quick to judge”—seems necessary but insufficient, and may not be doable. There are 330 million of us. It’s hard to hold us together when times are easy.

It has occurred to me that when a country stops making things like cars and toasters it turns its attention to making words, endlessly, sometimes brilliantly and constructively, often idiotically and offensively. People on social media think the words have to be sharp and dramatic. It sure would be nice to see us throttle back on the expressions and throttle forward on the reflection, at least for a while.

In the short term, increase security on everyone in our political life and maybe public life. Spend the money, public and private. Violence multiplies, it wants to increase, it imitates itself. Each incident excites the unstable. When it starts to speed up the first thing you have to do is slow it down.

We have to force our public officials—including judges—to get serious about confining the mentally ill.

The night before Kirk’s murder a friend sent a note about where we are as a country. His subject was how people in and around politics now will do anything for money—they even write tweets for money. He said that he kept thinking about the Benicio del Toro character, a prosecutor turned assassin, in the 2015 movie “Sicario.” “This is the land of wolves now,” he says. I can’t get it out of my head.

We’re going to have to be strong, not lose our heads, and not give in to demoralization. William F. Buckley used to say, “Despair is a mortal sin.” You wouldn’t feel it if you had faith that God is living through history with you. Hold your hope and faith high and intact, keep your perspective in the long term.

An assassination is the intentional and deliberate killing of a person for political reasons. It has a purpose: to alter events, to remove a leader, to intimidate and punish enemies.

What we all have to do now is not let that purpose succeed.

I asked Father Gerald Murray what advice might be hopeful. Charlie Kirk, he said, wanted to share “the eternal truths that make life meaningful and joyous. He did so by reasoned argument and dialogue. His example should inspire us to pick up the baton that fell from his hand.”

Most of us see autumn as the real new year, involving a return to life and a reignition of things. A good time to step aside the fray and consider what propels you. We’re in a history-rich time, not a thin one, and restating your premises can be reorienting.

Some of what drives this column is a belief that reading history—bothering to know it and reflect on it—is good. Remembering its helpful and even inspiring parts is constructive, not sweet. Seeing and naming various current deteriorations isn’t reactionary or nostalgic and can function as at least an attempt at correction.

This summer I read the historian David McCullough’s 1995 speech accepting the National Book Foundation’s highest honor, the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. It constitutes the brief first chapter of “History Matters,” a collection of McCullough’s essays, interviews and speeches, out this month from Simon & Schuster. Collections that include some previously unpublished work (McCullough died in August 2022) can have a barrel-scraping feel but this one doesn’t—its seriousness and simplicity reflect the author and make for beauty. At the time of the address McCullough had written “Mornings on Horseback,” “Truman” and “The Johnstown Flood”; “John Adams,” “1776” and “The Wright Brothers” would follow. There couldn’t have been a worthier recipient.

Why does history matter? “History shows us how to behave,” McCullough begins. “History teaches, reinforces what we believe in, what we stand for, and what we ought to be willing to stand up for.”

It is not only the dry recording of facts, it has a moral quotient. “At their core, the lessons of history are largely lessons in appreciation.” Everything we have, he says, all the great institutions, the arts, our law, exists because those who came before us built them. Why did they do that? What drove them, what obstacles did they face, how are we doing as stewards and creators? “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude.” This is a wonderful sentence because it is true and bluntly put. Ignorance is a form of ingratitude.

History encourages “a sense of proportion about life,” gives us a sense of scale. “What history teaches, it teaches mainly by example.”

To live in an era of momentous change and huge transitions is to experience great pressure. Knowing history, reading it, imparts “a sense of navigation,” a new realization of what we’ve been through and are made of. Those who came before us were tough: “There’s no one who hasn’t an ancestor who went through some form of hell.”

In the end, knowing history “is an extension of life. It both enlarges and intensifies the experience of being alive.”

McCullough looms large in my life both as professional whose work I could aim my arrow at, and as spur. I would hear from him when a column spoke to him. After one mentioned the importance of great formal ceremonies marking the passing of the famous dead, he wrote to say yes, such things, “remind us of our dignity.” That dignity, which he sensed and portrayed in his work, and which he knew was aligned with and not poised against finding the truth, was important to him.

Here I jump to an aspect of this column, which is the importance of what was.

Earlier this summer I wrote that we now routinely say and do things in our public life that are at odds with our history, that are unlike us. I focused on President Trump’s language and imagery when speaking to the troops at Fort Bragg, N.C., in early June. His remarks were partisan in the extreme, even for him; it was a Trump rally, not a president addressing the troops. Elsewhere, on sending the National Guard into Los Angeles: “When they spit, we hit.” All of it, the rally and what he said, was, I said, the kind of thing we don’t do. And we mustn’t lose sight of what we don’t do.

Soon after I got a note from a veteran political consultant who’d prospered in both the old political world and the new. He wanted me to know he “agreed with every word.” He then explained with some patience and yet a kind of proud shame that things have changed: “Today people like me raise money and put activists on the payroll to pour kerosene on the fires they ignite.” Protests in the previous political era were organic and natural. “They are now a division of political campaign structure.” The young people he works with know no other reality. “I’m saddened that the political world I have in some part helped construct has come to this.”

He was trying to help me: I had perhaps not noticed our politics had become increasingly malevolent. I replied that I knew quite a bit of what he and his colleagues on both sides are up to, and that as I work I often have the young of politics and media in mind. I am trying to tell them something, to give them a template. I said it is our job, in our generation, to bring the sturdier public values of the recent and distant past into the current moment. We have to put forward those ways from the past that helped, that were superior, or no one will know they existed. And no one will be able to imitate or absorb or reflect them.

“I write for those 33-year-old operatives you speak of who have actually never seen grace.” If they don’t know what it looks like they can’t emulate it, they can’t adopt it and give it new life because they don’t know what it was.

What I didn’t say but meant: When you see a decline in public standards that were once fairly high, when you see our public life become rougher and uglier, you can accept it, even go with it, or you can fight, you can push hard against what’s pushing you, as Flannery O’Connor put it.

And what I’m saying is this is our way of pushing hard. McCullough might say it’s ungrateful not to.

You can’t be dreamy about the past and say, “It was nice then.” It was never nice, it was made by human beings. You can’t say, “People were better then.” They weren’t. But in even the recent past the allowable boundaries of public behavior were firmer, and the expectations we held for our leaders higher. And their public behavior (not private, or not necessarily private) was often preferable to the public behavior we see today. So you don’t want to live in the past, but you do want to bring the best of the past into the present.

History goes only one way, forward, and the history we’re living won’t be getting less rough with time. Neither will our political manners. Neither will the strains under which we are put as a society and a political culture.

But my generation owes those who follow more than “Here’s some cash,” “Toughen up” and “Get off my lawn.”

It’s hard to think of anything more helpful as the new year begins than reading history, spying out the moments of dignity and grace, seizing them and trying to pull them into the future.

I spent time this week talking to people about how to think about the burst of U.S. diplomatic activity surrounding the Ukraine war. I wasn’t sure how to view it but began with certain predicates. Movement to end war is generally good, new initiatives can be constructive, new focus can encourage things in the right direction. If talks and meetings yield nothing, so be it, but would the world be worse for the effort? Russian President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov have amused themselves the past few years signaling their openness to the use of tactical nuclear weapons. At the moment, we’re talking about the exact nature of security guarantees in an overall peace plan. That is a better conversation.

Beyond that, be skeptical but not cynical, and don’t secretly hope for bad outcomes for those you politically oppose if what benefits them would be good news for the world.

What follows is a combination of the best thoughts and observations, on background, of two non-MAGA foreign-policy professionals of significant achievement.

Don’t dismiss the current initiative as mere showbiz or posturing. The war in Ukraine has caused devastation, disruption, probably a million casualties. Give Donald Trump credit, he lit a fire under the diplomatic dimension.

People don’t know what to think because the story changes every day. You can’t follow the balls and strikes every minute, you can’t follow every pitch. The story’s moving all over the place because it’s not linear because Mr. Trump is not linear.

An appropriate attitude is tentative hopefulness. Mr. Trump appears to know Mr. Putin isn’t someone easy to bring to agreements. Mr. Trump tries to charm him, but Mr. Putin’s behavior has led him to understand progress will take time.

Mr. Putin is in no hurry. The next two months are still fighting season. In November comes the mud. Russia will use this time to inflict more damage, demoralize more Ukrainians, maybe gain ground. But Mr. Putin has been getting bad economic soundings from his experts and central bankers. The war has cost him plenty in blood and treasure, and Russia hasn’t gained much. There’s a high cost to perpetually grinding it out. The pieces are there for some kind of a stoppage of the war.

The meeting this week of the major leaders of Europe, President Volodymyr Zelensky and Mr. Trump was a historic ten-strike, more than is probably appreciated. Mr. Putin didn’t want to see that meeting, that unity. It was brilliant to have them come to the White House. It underscored America’s enduring convening power, and was an admission of their calculation as to Mr. Trump’s stature. France, Germany, Britain, Italy, Finland, the European Union and Mr. Zelensky pulled together—they want Ukraine saved and the war over. They don’t know if Mr. Trump can handle Mr. Putin, but they badly want him to, because while Mr. Putin lives the future of Europe is in play. That is a terrible fact and from outward appearances they are facing it.

Mr. Trump’s foreign-policy team is coming into its own. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine—they are the forces around U.S. foreign policy, behind the careful negotiating of things. John Ratcliffe, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, has also emerged as a voice.

The devil is in the details, and some details are essentials. What exactly do the Europeans, and Americans, mean by “security guarantees” for Ukraine? What will Mr. Zelensky accept, and Mr. Putin? The definition of success can’t become peace at any price; it has to be a peace that establishes a certain order and stability so it can settle in. What if Mr. Putin endlessly plays things along?

It may well prove true that Mr. Trump was too quick to stop his own push for a cease-fire, accepting instead an aim for a peace agreement. A cease-fire means everyone stops shooting. You don’t have to drop your demands or claims, even your delusions; you just put down your arms and begin negotiations toward negotiations toward peace. Cease-fires don’t have to be short-term. Some last 50 years. Many Ukrainians and Russians will die without one.

There are those saying Mr. Trump is a naïf, a fool propelled by his own vanity. If that’s true, and it wouldn’t be shocking—really, would you be shocked?—it will be apparent soon enough, and the overall effort will likely fizzle. They make fun of him for wanting to win a Nobel Peace Prize, but so what? It’s a prize for peace, not war, it would be a better world if every leader competed for one. Mr. Trump told Fox News’s Sean Hannity this week that he’s pushing for peace in part because he wants to go to heaven. That’s what we call a new one. Whether he was serious or the line just jumped into his head, or it was the kind of gassy formulation to which Mr. Hannity especially seems receptive, heaven is not a terrible reason to want to do something. And is preferable to “See you in hell, suckers.”

It is hard to imagine the effort succeeding. But why begrudge Trump for trying? Instead, he could have spent the last few months telling Mr. Zelensky he’s on his own and good luck with maintaining your status as a sovereign nation. And much of his base would have liked it just fine. He isn’t playing to it.

When JD Vance was running for the Senate in Ohio three years ago, he reacted to news of Russia’s invasion with “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other.”

I am told the vice president isn’t playing the part of the hard-line isolationist now but having constructive talks with Russians and Ukrainians. This might be because he hopes to be part of building something helpful, successful and significant. It also may be because if you want to be president the last thing you need is for Ukraine to collapse in, say, 2027 or ’28.

In any case things are breaking in interesting ways.

I close with an attitude toward history that can be a helpful attitude toward life. It’s an old folk tale. A horse thief is arrested and found guilty, the king sentences him to death at dawn. The thief says wait, please, there’s something I’ve never told anyone—I not only steal horses, I have the power to make them laugh. It’s a gift! Give me a month and I’ll train the king’s horse to laugh at all his jokes.

The king agrees. Days later a guard, seeing the thief get nowhere with the horse, asked why he’d made such a stupid promise. The thief said, “Well, in a month the king may die and everyone forget why I’m here and release me. Or I may die. Or the horse may laugh.”

Take a chance, try something, you never know.

There will be plenty of time to laugh at Mr. Trump in coming months and years. Madeleine Albright once observed that when Americans talk foreign policy, everything always comes down to either Munich or Vietnam. If this is Munich we’ll know it soon enough, but we don’t know it now. Hope for the best. Maybe the horse will laugh.

Wistful August tapers down. Headlines feel far away but stalk us by phone. The writer Philip Howard calls the news cycle “both terrifying and tedious.” He’s right. So I’ve decided it’s a good time for an homage to the HBO series “The Gilded Age.”

We begin with what’s wrong with it, just to show we’re not carried away. It is not golden-age television. It’s not even first-rate television. It’s not even drama, it’s melodrama.

Its story lines until the season just ended, and especially given the material—the clang, clash and fire of industrial America being born and high society being invented—were unimaginative. It’s largely without wit. Actually it has the rhythm of wit without the content. The quips of Christine Baranski, as Agnes van Rhijn, are underwhelming, but she carries them off because she is Christine Baranski and carries everything off.

The dialogue is often hopeless. From memory, Gladys Russell to her husband, the duke: But I have not had word as to my father’s condition since receiving the telegram alerting us to his shooting as we left the port of Southampton en route to the reunion. Not from memory but word for word, one businessman to another: “I’m like a cockroach with a thousand lives!” No, you idiot, you’re a cockroach that can’t be killed or a cat with nine lives.

The show’s creator, Julian Fellowes, the justly celebrated English writer and producer, isn’t American, doesn’t speak American, doesn’t have it in his bones and doesn’t get the whole ethnic brew.

But the awfulness of the dialogue sharpens your admiration for the actors who have to say it. Carrie Coon as the scheming Bertha Russell seemed at first miscast but fully conquers. Every time she’s in a scene, she’s the one you watch. Morgan Spector as her husband, George, has a truly beautiful stillness and command. Cynthia Nixon for once is given an attractive character to inhabit and is nervously endearing.

Much has been made of the treatment of race, which is fresh, with no special pleading but a lot of knowing looks. New York had a vibrant, glamorous black upper middle class of entrepreneurs and intellectuals, but it has been largely lost to history. Mr. Fellowes refinds it and gives it a stage. The biggest snobs on the show are the Baranski character, who traces her family back to before the American Revolution, and the black matriarch Elizabeth Kirkland, played by Phylicia Rashad, who doesn’t want her doctor son to marry the writer Peggy Scott, also of the high black bourgeoisie but with less standing and a secret past. We love Peggy, love the doctor, find mother’s apparent comeuppance delightful.

So is the subplot of a husband and wife in an arranged marriage she desperately resisted and he oafishly, greedily negotiated. They appear to be beginning to fall in love. My friend, a young playwright I will call Brendan, captures the transgressive nature of this twist. “A more old-fashioned or woke show would have the Duke beat her, berate her—she would run away and get divorced, throw her bra in a garbage can and run for Congress. And that is not real life! Propaganda allows no depth, a woman must be victim until she overthrows her male oppressors. Here it can go all kinds of ways—and that makes it interesting.”

Variety has called the show a hit, its numbers each episode climbing. Here are thoughts on why.

Because it’s beautiful. It fills not only a longing for glamour, which people always have, but for a glamour that is recognizable, discernible. It isn’t the freakish glamour of the Met Gala but a glamour secure in the values it asserts, confident in its definitions. Men dress like men, dark clothes and sharp lines; women like women, color, texture and line. They are all so beautiful, the women in their gowns and bustles, hats and jewels. The men in their three-quarter-length suits, bright silk waistcoats, white shirts whose collars are never loosened.

All this implies discipline. You don’t rig yourself up like that to present yourself to the world without effort. That effort is a kind of tribute to the world, a way of showing it respect. We all notice this without noticing we notice.

I think we like its picture of a society that had brute but recognizable rules that, in some weird way, were democratic. Make a whole pot of money, be generous with it to gain notice but enact modesty when thanked, learn to imitate personal dignity and a little refinement, and you’re in. It wasn’t much tighter than that. Now it’s more just the money, no one has to bow to some phony old value system, and the money spurts in all directions, creating a themeless chaos, and tech billionaires in sweatshirts give us moral lectures from Jeffrey Epstein’s plane.

I like the show because in it America isn’t over. America, as the 20th century came to know it, was just beginning. This is in contrast to HBO’s “Succession,” a true golden-age show that features piercing speeches about America as a fading power. Logan Roy to tech titan Lukas Matsson: “America . . . I don’t know. When I arrived there were these gentle giants smelling of f— gold and milk. They could do anything. Now look at them.”

In “The Gilded Age” they are still gold and milk and can do anything. The footman invents a new clock and is suddenly wealthy, with staff of his own. The city official thinking to make a killing in a shady stock deal goes bust instead and shoots himself in the head. It’s all up and down, rise and fall. It’s all movement.

The show is fiction but famously based on real characters and events. As everyone who follows it knows, the poor, married-off Gladys is based on Consuelo Vanderbilt Astor, the American heiress who married the duke of Marlborough to less happy effect. George Russell seems an amalgam of pirates, including rail tycoon Jay Gould. Ward McAllister (1827-95) really did exist and saw himself as gatekeeper of the society he and Caroline Schermerhorn Astor cooked up out of new money and old bloodlines.

We end with ideas for seasons 4 through 6, if the actors stay on board.

Here is a real-life character ripe for a subplot. A plain, earnest, book-reading girl of old New York society is maneuvered into what seems a good match with a sporty, wealthy older man who proves emotionally unstable and financially reckless. They part with great pain on her part but for many years don’t divorce. She goes into the world alone to become who she is: Edith Wharton, the great Gilded Age novelist and the first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel. Among her themes: personal desire thwarted by societal expectations.

Build an episode around London’s Oscar Wilde, who visits the great houses of New York on tour. I see a brief, eyebrow-raising love affair, possibly with Oscar van Rhijn. Mrs. Winterton won’t like it a bit. “The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past and every sinner has a future,” Wilde said. That is what the show is about.

And the Industrial Revolution reaches its peak as political reaction intensifies. A winsome anarcho-communist schemes to bomb the New York Central. Call him Zohran, just for fun.