Peggy Noonan

I bumped into a great artist on the morning of New Year’s Eve and he smiled and asked: “Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the coming year?” We were on the street in a little town and it wasn’t too cold and he and his wife looked beautiful in their wool hats. His question surprised me because I’d forgotten to think in terms of optimism and pessimism, and then realized I don’t when the year turns. I told him that, and then said that tonight at the party I will simply think I am here / I am here / I am lucky / I’m alive.

Someday you won’t be. So live life, enjoy it, roll with what comes. Make things better within your ken, however large or small that ken is. Do your best, not your lazy rote “I did my best” but your actual honest best. Keep your spirits up, don’t get down, it’s not all on you. “God is in charge of history.”

Every year at this time I think of two things. One is what the musician Warren Zevon said on the “Late Show With David Letterman.” I watched it, live, in 2002. Zevon was dying of mesothelioma, and Mr. Letterman asked how his illness had changed him. Zevon’s answers suggested he’d come to feel awe for the barely noticed gifts we’re given each day. “From your perspective now,” Mr. Letterman asked, “Do you know something about life and death that maybe I don’t know now?” Mr. Zevon answered: “I know how much you’re supposed to enjoy every sandwich.”

That is a gift, to know how good the sandwich is.

The other is a quote I read 40 years ago, from the writer Laurens van der Post in 1961: “We live not only our own lives but, whether we know it or not, also the life of our time.” We are all making history together, we are part of an era, and we are responsible to each other and to this great project.

These are the attitudes with which your columnist approaches 2020. Now, my sense of where we are.

On the impeachment of the American president, the story’s already been written, hasn’t it? It didn’t quite work, did nothing to help and little to hinder his position. The question whether to have witnesses in the Senate trial is a side issue. He can’t be proved more guilty. Even his supporters know he leaned on Ukraine for political gain. They judged this deserving of embarrassment but not removal. It will be the impeachment that didn’t move the needle, that history barely remembers.

On to the real action, the presidential election 10 months away.

The Democratic primary field is still flailing and doesn’t see it’s flailing. At the moment their theory of the country is wrong, and it’s wrong because it’s a theory, not a cold-eyed look at circumstances and facts on the ground. That is what good generals look at first. If there is a grinding war or an economic downturn people will want change and the out party has a good shot. If the economic downturn is severe they will consider deep structural change, even radical change such as socialism. It isn’t true that America will never go socialist. Maybe it will, but not under current conditions—full employment, rising wages.

Maybe all this will be settled at an open convention. But they ought to know by now they went too far left too quickly. And sometimes you have to stand up to the base.

President Trump is no doubt happy. He thinks he’s beating his domestic enemies. The great threats are North Korea and Iran. On the latter he will experience two conflicting impulses. On the one hand he sees himself as Mr. No More Benghazis—I’m the tough guy, I’m not afraid to take action. On the other, he sees himself as the unconventional president who doesn’t have wars, who thinks the Mideast is a loser’s game, who wants out.

Underlying his eventual decisions will be an unspoken theme of his re-election campaign: I’ve been president three years and the world didn’t blow up. My critics said it would because I’m crazy. I’m crazy like a fox! I kept things cool. That theme is about to be put to a test.

In the 2020s, the American position on China will harden—not the government’s but the country’s. Whatever happens with the administration and China, Mr. Trump will think it’s about him and lose interest when it appears not to be. But among the people, especially the business class, the perception will deepen that China is not our friend. Channeling this into the creation of an actual coherent China policy will be the big work of the next administration. This one doesn’t do coherent.

The belief that big tech needs to be corralled—to be broken up or declared public utilities—will grow on the left and right. The big companies are too powerful and have too insinuating an effect on our lives. This won’t be Mr. Trump’s issue—again he thinks it’s about him, and whether their algorithms are unjust to him and to conservatives. He wants big tech to bow to him, and they will. They’ll come for dinner, be his pals and work out deals. They think he can be had. He can. But the issue isn’t going away, and wise lefties and creative conservatives may fully seize it.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi made herself look ridiculous this year when she backed lowering the voting age to 16. This is an idiotic and destructive idea, an epic and hackish pander, and is offensive to the baseline reality that the adults of a great nation have the right to govern its affairs. It will go nowhere, but the coming decade may see some pushback against the 18-year-old vote, passed in 1971. A lot has changed since then. We know the brains of 18-year-olds are not fully developed and haven’t fully knitted. Young people are educated more poorly, and the screens that surround them and through which they learn encourage sensation, not thought. Their experience of the world is limited; most are financially and emotionally supported by others. All this as the questions we face grow more complex. We should raise the voting age, not lower it.

The past decade saw the rise of the woke progressives who dictate what words can be said and ideas held, thus poisoning and paralyzing American humor, drama, entertainment, culture and journalism. In the coming 10 years someone will effectively stand up to them. They are the most hated people in America, and their entire program is accusation: you are racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic; you are a bigot, a villain, a white male, a patriarchal misogynist, your day is over. They never have a second move. Bow to them, as most do, and they’ll accuse you even more of newly imagined sins. They claim to be vulnerable victims, and moral. Actually they’re not. They’re mean and seek to kill, and like all bullies are cowards.

Everyone with an honest mind hates them. Someone will finally move effectively against them. Who? How? That will be a story of the ’20s, and a good one.

When we think about current history we tend to be expecting or predicting something as opposed to experiencing something. But what we need to understand now is that the 21st century isn’t new. It still feels new, but it isn’t. We are entering its third decade. We have been waiting for the century to take its shape and fully become itself, but it’s already doing that.

The 20th century was shaped by the events of 1914-19, the Great War and Versailles. The past two decades have been shaping the 21st.

If we limit ourselves to domestic politics it’s been a time of big change with big implications.

Both parties have been overthrowing the elites and establishments that reigned for at least half a century. In doing so, both parties are changing their essential natures. In both cases the rebellion is driven largely by a bottom-line bitterness: You didn’t care about us, and now you will be gone.

Among Democrats it is the rising left, the progressives, kicking away from the old Clintonian moderates, from old party ways and identifications. They hate Clintonism almost more than they hate conservatism. And they are hated back. In a recent conversation with a politician who was a high official in the Clinton administration, I asked: When you go talk to progressives about your differences, how does that conversation go? “I don’t speak to them,” he shot back. The new New Left—we have to find a better name—is closer to socialism or proudly socialistic. What they feel for the old party establishment: “Thanks for standing up for the little guy while your trade deals made you and your friends rich.” “Thanks for creating a tax system in which you guys become billionaires while everyone else sank.”

The left-wing millennials will rise because the young always do. It’s tempting to compare the rise of the left in the party now with the 1970s and the rise of the old New Left. Boomer leftists then were mad at America over the war, and some of them had read Marx for the first time. But they loved America, and they went on to show that love as the workhorses they were—the first to put the lights on in the office or the institution in the morning, the last to put them off at night.

The rising millennial left seems to love high abstractions—economic justice, global movements for change. But they weren’t raised in a patriotic age, they weren’t taught what in America is admirable, even noble. Do they love America? Do they love this thing we have and are part of in the same, moist-eyed way Americans have in the past? It’s unclear. But if they don’t, when they triumph we’re in trouble.

On the Republican side the rise of Donald Trump revealed the new party to itself. It is a big-government, antiwar, populist party that is conservative-leaning in its social policy. Any card-carrying Trump supporter will immediately say, after lauding the economy, that he has delivered on the courts and has aligned his administration, for all his personal New Yorkiness and indifference to social issues, with those who think conservatively.

Republicans in 2016 were to the right of party leaders, elders and professionals on essential issues—immigration, political correctness, the LGBTQ regime and the arguments it spurred in the town council about bathroom policies, and in schools over such questions as, “Are we still allowed in sports to have a girls team composed of biological girls and a boy’s team composed of biological boys? Will we be sued?”

They knew that on these questions and others the party’s establishments didn’t really care about their views or share them.

When Republicans rebel against the status quo, it’s a powerful thing. They produced in their 2016 rebellion something new: They changed the nature of the presidency itself. The pushing back against elites entailed a pushing against standards. It’s always possible a coming presidential election will look like a snap-back to the old days, a senator versus a governor, one experienced political professional against another. But we will never really go back to the old days. Anyone can become president now, anyone big and colorful and in line with prevailing public sentiment.

We have entered the age of the postheroic presidency. Certain low ways are forgiven, certain rough ways now established. Americans once asked a lot of their presidents. They had to be people not only of high competence and solid, sober backgrounds, but high character. In modern presidencies you can trace a line from, say, Harry S. Truman, who had it in abundance, to Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, who also did.

But the heroic conception of the presidency is over. Bill Clinton and his embarrassments damaged it. Two unwon wars and the great recession killed it. “If you like your doctor you can keep your doctor” buried it. When you deliberately lie like that, you are declaring you have no respect for the people. And the people noticed.

They would like to have someone admirable in the job, someone whose virtues move them, but they’ve decided it’s not necessary. They think: Just keep the economy growing, don’t start any new wars, and push back against the social-issues maximalists if you can.

In the last cycle we spoke of shy Trump voters—those who didn’t want to get in an argument over supporting him. I suspect this cycle we’ll call them closeted Trump voters—those who don’t want to be associated with the postheroic moment, who disapprove of it, but see no realistic alternative.

In time we’ll see you lose something when you go postheroic. Colorful characters will make things more divided, not less. They’ll entertain but not ennoble. And the world will think less of us—America has become a clownish, unserious country with clownish, unserious leaders—which will have an impact on our ability to influence events.

*   *   *

I close with another entity of American life that should be worried about seeming like it doesn’t care about its own country. It is what used to be called big business.

America has always been in love with the idea of success. It’s rewarded the creation of wealth, made household saints of the richest men in the world. We were proud they lived here.

But big business, especially big tech executives and bankers, should be thinking: In this century they’re coming at you left and right.

The left used to say, “You didn’t build that,” while the right said, “You did.” But now there’s a convergence, with both sides starting to think: This country made you. It made the roads you traveled; it made the expensive peace in which your imagination flourished; it created the whole world of arrangements that let you become rich.

You owe us something for that. You owe us your loyalty. And if you allow us to discern—and in this century you have been busy allowing us!—that you do not really care about America, that your first loyalty isn’t to us but to “the world” or “global markets,” then we will come down on you hard.

It isn’t only parties that can be broken up in this century, the one that isn’t coming but is here.

The Democrats think they’ve just had a big triumph. The president’s been impeached. But Republicans see themselves as gaining the upper hand.

The House couldn’t lift the event into an air of historical gravity. They dressed in dark clothes and never smiled, as at a wake, but the deceased was making kicking sounds from the casket and appeared to be tweeting, so it was incongruous.

There was no “debate” and no one tried to persuade anybody. The revealing moment was when Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the first article had passed and some Democrats apparently began to clap. She threw them her mother-of-five look: Don’t make me come up there. They were surely members of the Progressive Caucus. They wanted to applaud because they were happy, and they were happy because they are shallow.

What felt like news came the day after, when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who throughout the crisis had been relatively quiet and oblique, and who is never interesting by accident, suddenly became fiery. “The Senate exists for moments like this,” he said, rather menacingly. “Transient passion and violent factionalism” have swept the House. “The moment the framers feared has arrived. A political faction in the lower chamber have succumbed to partisan rage.” They have produced a “failed inquiry,” a “slapdash case” which is “constitutionally incoherent.” So “the Senate must put this right.”

This was, among other things, the leader of the Senate declaring war on at least the actions of the House and its speaker. Again, this is not some House blowhard but a serious man, and a careful one.

Why such charged language? Why isn’t he being boring and letting this dribble out over the holidays, letting the mood change, cooling the embers?

Maybe because for the first time since this drama began, Republicans are starting to think their position is gaining. Their thinking would have to do with the immediate picture and the broader national one.

The immediate picture: A Quinnipiac poll this week shows support for President Trump’s impeachment and removal from office has gone down since October, to 45%.

Why? Some guesses.

For one, in the past 10 days the latest jobs numbers came out, and America has functional full employment. A Quinnipiac poll released Dec. 10 showed that since February 2018, the share of the population who believe the Republicans handle the economy better than the Democrats has gone up seven points, from 42% to 49%. The share who say they are better off financially since 2016 is 57%.

That is a powerful number. When people have peace and prosperity they don’t like to make a change at the top. That’s what saved Bill Clinton when he was impeached. They knew he’d done what he was accused of, but they let it go.

In months of hearings the American people witnessed serious and credible testimony from officials of obvious stature who said, essentially: The president abused his power. None of this did the president any good. But there was no dramatic insider testimony from someone such as John Bolton, a Trump appointee who might have been astringent in his portrait of how the White House operates, and believed by the president’s supporters. The idea that America’s national security was endangered by the president’s actions with Ukraine did not take.

And the debate never moved beyond party lines.

My guess is that after the testimony, voters thought the president guilty but did not see this story as equal to the 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee or the cultural catastrophe of the Clinton scandals.

They figured: We have a presidential election less than a year away. Settle it there.

They also probably think he didn’t get away with it—because he didn’t. The president has been punished in the court of public opinion, punished every day in the hearings, and punished in the impeachment vote, which will now be in the first paragraph of all his obituaries. If he committed knuckle-dragging malfeasance, he paid the price.

But the broader reality helping the president, fortifying his position and that of his party, is one of the insufficiently noted stories of 2019. In terms of politics it is the story of 2019, bigger than impeachment. It is that, poised to defeat an unpopular president, the Democratic Party picked itself up—and placed itself outside the mainstream of American politics.

In almost every national public presentation this year, especially in their presidential debates, they branded themselves not as what they had to be—a sophisticated party with a working-class heart—but what they couldn’t be—extreme left-wing progressives.

It was a historic misjudgment.

From their first debates in June, their major candidates announced themselves to be for sharply higher taxes, banning private health insurance, the Green New Deal, free college, complete student loan forgiveness, free health insurance for illegal aliens, and functionally open borders. They would ban fossil fuels and fracking. At least one candidate said America’s religious institutions should lose their tax-exempt status if they oppose same-sex marriage. They are extreme on abortion—no limits, ever—and in their support of identity politics, which sees not a country but a thousand warring tribes endlessly rewarded for being at each other’s throats.

Very much a part of all this, and sworn in just under a year ago, were Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and “The Squad,” enthusiastically held up by the Democrats’ friends and operatives in the press as the future of the party. If they are, the future is grim, with their Leninist insistence that you’ll do it their way or be flattened. It is not only policies that count but spirit. Theirs is one of accusation and division. Where they should be ardent they are only arrogant. Their approach speaks of a desire not to make progress but to unsettle and undo.

But the point is most of the most famous public faces in the party spent 2019 essentially supporting a reordering of arrangements that have lasted two centuries and allowed us, for all our mess and chaos, to be great.

Here is how the party’s lurch left has improved the president’s position.

It makes the 2020 race not “Trump vs. the Democrat,” a race he can lose, but “Trump vs. Lefty Madness,” which he can win.

The left is turning Donald Trump into a savior. He was not a savior before AOC. He was not a savior before Elizabeth and Bernie said they’d ban your health insurance.

But the past year has allowed the president’s supporters, and independents, to see him that way. It has given them something new to fight for, something better. They don’t have to say, “I’m for Trump because I love him,” or think, “I’m for Trump because I have sacrificed all standards for power.” They can say, “I’m going to defend the free-market system and our liberties by voting for Trump.”

The Democratic Party doesn’t seem to see or understand any of this. But 2020 is already printing its bumper stickers. “I’ll take the somewhat demented over the wholly destructive.” “The imperfect over the obnoxious.” “Vote for the barbarian, it’s important.”

After so disastrously branding their party throughout 2019, is it possible for Democrats to turn it around in 2020?

Cedar Rapids, Iowa

The famous caucuses are Feb. 3. Christmas is coming, the calendar tightening, and candidates zooming through the broad expanse in tinted-window SUVs.

A surprise is there’s little surprise. Reporters say interest in impeachment is minimal, and it’s true: in three days not a single question from the floor, not a stray comment from a voter in a forum. The candidates seem bored with the subject and don’t bother to fake passion if you ask. Impeachment is a reality show going on in Washington, and everyone knows the outcome, so it’s not even interesting. On my way to Waterloo I realized: We’re about to have the third impeachment of a president in American history, and the day it happens it’s not going to be Topic A in America. It will barely be mentioned at the dinner table. It is a coastal elite story, not a mainland story.

The Democratic race is as fluid as it looks. No one, even bright party professionals speaking off the record, knows what to expect. Biden was inevitable, then maybe Elizabeth, maybe Pete’s inevitable, but Bernie may be inevitable, and don’t write off Joe.

But “Beat Trump” is back. When 2019 began Democrats were thinking that was priority No. 1. Then other things became more important—Medicare for All, climate change, policy. But it feels like Democrats here are circling back to their original desire. “Who can beat Trump?” is again the most important question. They don’t know the answer. They’re trying to figure it out.

You can hear this in what the candidates say.

At a Teamsters forum in Cedar Rapids Saturday, Sen. Bernie Sanders was burly in his aggression. “This is a president who is a fraud,” “a pathological liar,” “a homophobe,” “a bigot.” Mr. Sanders said his campaign is about “telling the billionaire class that their greed is unacceptable.” He got a standing ovation.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar the day before, in Grinnell, spoke to about 150 people at the Iowa Farmer’s Union: “We’re not gonna let this Gilded Age roll right over us.” Donald Trump made promises he didn’t keep. After his tax cut passed, “he went to Mar-a-Lago and told his rich friends, ‘I just made you all a lot richer.’ And I can tell you none of them were farmer’s union members.”

“He thinks the Midwest is flyover country.”

Leaders are making decisions for seven generations, she said: “He can’t keep his decision seven minutes from now.”

Pete Buttigieg, at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, told a crowd of more than 1,000—lots of students but others too, many of them prosperous and middle-aged: Don’t just watch “the Trump show—help me pick up the remote and change the channel.”

Before he spoke, a handsome, gray-haired psychotherapist from Iowa City told me why she supports him: “I think he has empathy. His orientation, what he’s been through. Yet also the military and a Rhodes scholar.” She liked his liberal Christianity: “He hasn’t let anyone else co-opt his spiritual life.”

Mr. Buttigieg used to say his name was pronounced “Buddha judge.” When he went national he changed it to what his crowds now chant: “boot edge edge.” I suspect he did this because America wears boots and likes edginess, but no one wants to be judged by the Buddha. I mention this because Mr. Buttigieg has the air of someone who thinks through even the smallest questions of presentation.

In person he seems like the smart young communications director for a Democratic presidential candidate, not the candidate himself. Yet he gets a particular respect because people think whatever happens this year, he’s going to be president some day. The local congressman who introduced him said as much: “No matter who comes out of this . . . Pete Buttigieg is the future of the party.”

He is personable in an old-fashioned sense; he reminds me of Michael Kinsley’s description of Al Gore when he was 38: “an old person’s idea of a young person.”

Mr. Buttigieg is often painted as a moderate. After he spoke I asked about something I’m interested in, how people develop their political views, where they get them. Do most inherit them, swallow them whole? His father was a Marxist-oriented academic at Notre Dame; he himself, I said, is a man of the left. Had he ever kicked away from family assumptions? Did he ever feel drawn to conservatism, to Burke or Kirk? He had not, though “I will say this: I came to respect the ways in which, right around the time of Russell Kirk, conservatives came to be very much in touch with the relationship between their ideas and their politics and politicians. I think it was born out of a period when the left had universities already, and the right needed to construct a structure of think tanks and so forth.”

When he was an intern on Capitol Hill, every young Republican staffer had a copy of Hayek on his desk. “On our side, the academic left, particularly in the humanities, had gotten into really abstruse things around postmodernism and poststructuralism. There was, ironically, contrary to our self-image, I think less of a clear relationship between ideas and politicians on the left. We had our policy intellectuals, but there was less of a connection between our politicians and our political theorists.”

He came to respect “the organizing efforts of conservatives.” I asked if this was around the time Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, “Of a sudden the Republican Party is the party of ideas.” He smiled and shrugged: “Just a hair before my time.”

Ms. Klobuchar’s polls have been going up, from 1% in the Emerson College poll in October to 10% now. Her audiences are bigger. It has broken through that she’s a moderate, a senator, a Midwesterner: “I’m from Minnesota and I can see Iowa from my porch!” She has wit. She knows she has to prove that she’s tough, that she can go toe to toe with Donald Trump.

She’s had strong debates. In the last one, social media went crazy because her hair shook. Not her face or voice, her hair. She later joked on Twitter: “I’ll plaster my runaway bangs down for the next NBC debate.”

What happened? She told me the debate hall had been reconfigured, overly air-conditioned, and unknown to her, a nearby air vent was blasting at the top of her head. She didn’t know there was a problem until the break, when a tech came by and said he was sorry.

“Now I guess hair spray,” she laughed as she told the story.

How difficult will it be to beat Mr. Trump? While I was in Iowa the new jobs numbers came out. America has functional full employment. It is a marvelous thing. We’re not in any new wars. With peace and prosperity, how can the incumbent lose?

The counterargument is that his approval is stuck in the low 40s with peace and prosperity, which tells you everything—he is vulnerable, more than half the country rejects him in what are for him ideal circumstances. This in turn brings back the familiar 2016 theme of shy Trump voters, people who don’t tell pollsters they’re going to vote for him, or even tell themselves.

Maybe the real story is that it’s all fluid.

During presidential scandals, members of the media often speak of the Iran-Contra affair. I’m not sure they really understand it

In retrospect that scandal was distinguished by two central, shaping characteristics. First, it was different from other scandals in that its genesis wasn’t low or brutish. It wasn’t about money, or partisan advantage, or sex; it was about trying to free American hostages in the Mideast, and attempting to pursue a possible, if unlikely, foreign-policy advance. It had to do with serious things. Second, when the story blew it eventually yielded a model of how to handle a scandal, though it didn’t look that way at the time.

In July 1985 President Reagan was in Bethesda Naval Hospital recovering from colon-cancer surgery when his national security adviser, Bud McFarlane, told him of a potential opening in efforts to free the seven American hostages the Iranian-dominated terrorist group Hezbollah had taken in Beirut. Among them were the Associated Press reporter Terry Anderson; Father Lawrence Jenco, the head of Catholic Relief Services in Lebanon; and William Buckley, the Central Intelligence Agency’s Beirut station chief. Buckley, who’d seen action in the U.S. Army in Korea and Vietnam and been much decorated, had been held since March 1984 and endured more than a year of torture. Reagan knew this, and he’d met with the families of other hostages.

Mr. McFarlane said Israeli contacts had told him that a group of moderate, politically connected Iranians wanted to establish a channel to the U.S. With the Iran-Iraq war raging and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in his 80s, Iran’s political leadership might soon be in play. The moderates would show their sincerity by persuading Hezbollah to give up the hostages. Mr. McFarlane wanted to talk. Reagan approved.

Thus commenced an initiative that its participants thought farsighted, its critics called almost criminally naive, and Secretary of State George Shultz later called “crazy.”

The moderates wanted the U.S. to permit Israel to sell them some TOW antitank missiles. They would pay, and the U.S. would replenish the Israeli stock. This would enhance their position in Iran by proving they had connections to high officials in Washington.

Reagan should have shut everything down at the mention of weapons. He didn’t. He later wrote, “The truth is, once we had information from Israel that we could trust the people in Iran, I didn’t have to think thirty seconds about saying yes.” It was only a one-shipment deal, he reasoned, and the moderates had agreed to his insistence that they get the hostages out. A shipment was made, and hostage Benjamin Weir was released.

In October 1985 the terrorist group Islamic Jihad announced it had killed William Buckley. (The White House National Security Council concluded he’d probably already died of a heart attack.) Reagan stayed hopeful, although when word got around of what was happening, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and Mr. Shultz opposed it. Mr. Shultz told Reagan that while it might not technically be an arms-for-hostages deal, it would certainly look like one—and it would blow sky-high as soon as it leaked, as it would leak.

By winter it was clear some of the Iranian go-betweens were dubious. No more hostages were being released. Mr. McFarlane resigned. His successor, John Poindexter, pressed for another shipment of missiles, to be followed by talks with Iranian moderates. CIA Director William Casey agreed it was worth the risk if there’s a chance they could deliver. Mr. Shultz and Weinberger pushed back. Reagan later said, “I just put my foot down.” In the spring, Mr. McFarlane returned for a secret trip to Iran, which he’d been told would free the last of the hostages. He went home without them.

That July, Jenco was released. Casey and the NSC asked for another missile shipment. Reagan approved.

Then a new terrorist group took three more American hostages in Lebanon.

A channel had been opened to a group that included a nephew of the speaker of the Iranian Parliament, who requested various gifts including a Bible inscribed by the president. Amazingly, he got them. Later, it was reported the Americans even brought a cake shaped like a key.

In November 1986, a Lebanese news outlet broke a story saying America was trading arms for hostages.

It was explosive. Reagan looked like a hypocrite—his administration had long pressed others not to sell arms to the Iranians. His people looked like fools gulled by gangsters.

Mr. Shultz later summed it all up this way: “The U.S. government had violated its own policies on antiterrorism and against arms sales to Iran, was buying our own citizens’ freedom in a manner that could only encourage the taking of others, was working through disreputable international go-betweens . . . and was misleading the American people—all in the guise of furthering some purported regional political transformation, or to obtain in actuality a hostage release.” Mr. McFarlane, Mr. Poindexter and Casey “had sold it to a president all too ready to accept it, given his humanitarian urge to free American hostages.”

Reagan was embarrassed, but once he saw the dimensions of the problem—he believed his motivations were right and the American people would understand once he explained—he took a series of constructive decisions. He kept Mr. Schultz, who’d been public in his criticism, in the administration.

When Reagan’s friend and confidante, Attorney General Ed Meese, announced he’d found evidence that Lt. Col Oliver North of the NSC had diverted part of the money the Iranians paid for the weapons to the anti-Communist Contras in Nicaragua, Reagan was originally sympathetic, less so when he was told Col. North was shredding documents. In the end he fired him. Mr. Poindexter resigned.

Reagan appointed a commission to investigate everything that had been done. The three members were sensitively balanced: chairman John Tower, a Republican senator; Edmund Muskie, a Democratic former senator and vice-presidential nominee; and Brent Scowcroft, the coolheaded former and future White House national security adviser. There were 50 witnesses, including the president. A joint congressional committee held public hearings. Reagan waived executive privilege. He accepted an independent counsel.

The Tower Commission’s 200-page report was delivered in February 1987, three months after the story broke. It was sharply critical of the president but found he did not know of the Contra angle.

Democrats in Congress and the media had exploited the mess for all it was worth, but on another level some Democrats quietly pitched in. A former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Robert Strauss, met with the Reagans and helped steady the ship.

Throughout the drama the president fell into a funk. The public turned on him; his poll numbers plummeted.

But he wasn’t over. There were great triumphs ahead—the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, signed in 1987 and ratified in 1988; “Tear down this wall” in 1987, and its fall in 1989, less than 10 months after Reagan left the presidency.

Our allies were offended by the scandal but impressed by its aftermath. Mikhail Gorbachev noticed too: The old lion didn’t die.

Iran-Contra was a big mistake, a real mess. But its deeper lessons have to do with how to admit and repair mistakes, how to work with the other side, and how to forge through and survive to the betterment of the country.

As I watched “The Irishman” a few weeks ago in a Manhattan movie theater I felt an ache, a kind of grief sneaking up on me, and toward the end I thought I knew why. I realized: I am watching John Ford’s “Cheyenne Autumn.” I am watching a great artist say goodbye to a world he knew, the world in which he’d risen, a particular kind of America. This is an artist’s farewell to his great subject. For Ford, America’s greatest movie director, it was the settlers who pushed West and the American Indians who lived there. It was his coming to terms with their suffering, and his treatment of it.

For Martin Scorsese, who’s had a similarly epic career, it was 20th century gangsters high and low, especially the Italian-American mob.

Both movies are a summing up and a kiss on the hand to a whole lost world.

Some time after I shared my thought with the great mob chronicler and screenwriter Nick Pileggi, a Scorsese collaborator. He agreed, and later in an email said the movie is the last act of “Marty’s mob quartet,” which forms “a morality tale about being a gangster.”

The first act is “Mean Streets,” in which “youthful exuberance winds up in a shooting and a fatal car crash.” Wanting to be a gangster turns out to be a nightmare. Then comes young manhood—“Goodfellas.” Then, the third act, middle age—“Casino.” In the end, the mob always screws it up. “In Casino, when the gangsters finally get to own casinos and a city, they overreach and collapse.” Finally, old age.

“‘The Irishman’ is about the end of it all. Death even comes to those who pull the trigger.” Their dreams are gone. “That’s the final wallop and why the nursing home, the wheelchairs, the semi confessional with a young priest, so powerfully evoke the end of that world.”

“The Irishman” left Nick Pileggi wistful too. “Watching DeNiro in the wheelchair made me think of him in ‘Mean Streets’ as young Johnny Boy, dancing into the bar with some girls he ‘picked up in the Village,’ the Rolling Stones crashing the juke box.”

*   *   *

“The Irishman” is great art and as such has stature.

But it is not, as we know, great history. It captures a world while blithely ignoring its facts. Frank Sheeran, the mobster on whose life the film is based, didn’t kill the flashy, up-and-coming gangster Joey Gallo, as he does in the film. And he surely didn’t kill Jimmy Hoffa.

Who did? There’s no reason to doubt the longtime consensus that mafia leadership OK’d the murder and a particular mobster, probably Anthony Provenzano, ordered it.

But who pulled the trigger? Over the years a lot of people have “confessed” or claimed they know. For some of the real story, and for a great American tale in itself, you want to go to Jack Goldsmith’s book, “In Hoffa’s Shadow,” which came out earlier this year.

It is some book. It is about the guy the FBI and everyone else, for decades, thought drove the union leader to his doom, and may have been involved in his killing. That man was a mobbed-up low-level union official named Chuckie O’Brien. He was Hoffa’s longtime gofer and like a second son to him. Coming under suspicion and never being exonerated ruined Chuckie’s life.

Mr. Goldsmith is a professor of law at Harvard Law School, a person of establishment respect, an Ivy League guy who was in George W. Bush’s Justice Department.

And he started his career with a secret. He was Chuckie O’Brien’s adopted son. His mother married Chuckie when he was a kid, and in his turbulent childhood Chuckie was the only solid source of love and support. “Chuckie was my third father, and my best,” Mr. Goldsmith writes.

As Jack O’Brien—as he was then—grew up, he became a good student, a reader. He got accepted at a respected college, then went on to Oxford and Yale Law. He came to understand that a connection to Chuckie wouldn’t exactly be a career enhancer. He came to see Chuckie as crude, gruff. He lived as a criminal, a man who broke the law. Which was now horrifying for Jack, who’d come to love the law and saw the value of order. So he changed his last name back to Goldsmith, his absent father’s name, and broke off relations with Chuckie. When the court where he hoped to clerk, and later the Justice Department, did security and background checks, he said he hadn’t seen or spoken to Chuckie in years. He had only contempt for the life Chuckie led. He threw him right under the bus. They let Jack in, and he rose.

Now it’s years later, the Bush era is over, and Jack Goldsmith is uncomfortable. His entire life had been that most American of things, a big class shift, a status shift: He’d started in one place, wound up in another, and felt the dislocation of it. He questioned things. He hadn’t spoken to Chuckie in years, hadn’t invited him to his wedding. He wanted to heal the breach, to make amends. He began a dialogue that produced a book about Chuckie’s life, and their relationship, and more than that.

Mr. Goldsmith rethinks not only his personal decisions but his intellectual predicates. He sees the irony in the decision of Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department to launch a massive federal investigation of Hoffa. Kennedy did it because Hoffa and the Teamsters were mobbed up. What Kennedy didn’t understand was that Hoffa dealt with the mob strategically, on his terms and at arm’s length.

After Hoffa was jailed, “The wall that Hoffa had maintained between the Teamsters union and organized crime collapsed,” Mr. Goldsmith writes. They hounded Hoffa to stop the mob from taking over the union. It turned out only when he was in jail could the mob take over the union—and its pension funds.

Chuckie saw a class element in Kennedy’s targeting of the Teamsters: Justice Department guys were a bunch of privileged Ivy League punks who under the guise of enforcing the law often broke it. Mr. Goldsmith’s research reveals that, in fact, they did break the law, with indiscriminate and illegal surveillance of Hoffa and his associates.

Tantalizingly, Mr. Goldsmith tells us at the end that the FBI now finally believes it knows who murdered Hoffa. “The killer was a low level family member in 1975, someone entirely off the early investigators’ radar. His status in the Detroit family rose almost immediately after the disappearance, and he died in January 2019.”

Mr. Goldsmith doesn’t use his name. “The person has not been associated with the Hoffa murder in the past 44 years,” he said in a telephone interview. “I didn’t want to do with this guy what had been done to Chuckie.”

Fair enough. An internet search matching Mr. Goldsmith’s exact descriptors yields the name Tony Palazollo, a Detroit mob figure who died in January 2019.

Is that who did it? After all these years the FBI should open its files, say what it knows, and close this case.

Last thought. All these people, from Ford to Scorsese, from RFK to Hoffa, from gangsters and pols to warriors and prairie saints—all these vivid, varied, colorful characters, these types, these humans—it takes some kind of country to make room for them, to make them all so possible, until they say goodbye.

And a happy Thanksgiving to the great and fabled nation that is still, this day, the hope of the world.

Look, the case has been made. Almost everything in the impeachment hearings this week fleshed out and backed up the charge that President Trump muscled Ukraine for political gain. The pending question is what precisely the House and its Democratic majority will decide to include in the articles of impeachment, what statutes or standards they will assert the president violated.

What was said consistently undermined Mr. Trump’s case, but more deadly was what has never been said. In the two months since Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced a formal impeachment inquiry was under way and the two weeks since the Intelligence Committee’s public hearings began, no one, even in the White House, has said anything like, “He wouldn’t do that!” or “That would be so unlike him.” His best friends know he would do it and it’s exactly like him.

The week’s hearings were not a seamless success for Democrats. On Tuesday they seemed to be losing the thread. But by Wednesday and Thursday it was restored.

Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman was not a persuasive witness and did not move the story forward, because in spite of the obvious patriotism reflected in his record he was annoying—smug and full of himself. He appeared in full dress uniform with three rows of ribbons. When Rep. Devin Nunes called him “Mr. Vindman,” he quickly corrected him: “Ranking Member, it’s Lieutenant Colonel Vindman, please.” Oh, snap. As he described his areas of authority at the National Security Council, he seemed to glisten with self-regard. You got the impression he saw himself as fully in charge of U.S. policy toward Ukraine. Asked if it was true that government offered to make him their defense minister he said “yes” with no apparent embarrassment. I don’t know about you but I don’t like it when a foreign government gets a sense of a U.S. military officer and concludes he might fit right in. (A Ukrainian official later said the job offer was a joke.)

Mr. Vindman—I’m sorry, Lt. Col. Vindman—self-valorized, as other witnesses have, and tugged in his opening statement on America’s heart strings by addressing his father, who brought his family from the Soviet Union 40 years ago: “Dad, . . . you made the right decision. . . . Do not worry, I will be fine for telling the truth.”

The committee has paid entirely too much attention to the witnesses’ emotions. “How did that make you feel?” “Without upsetting you too much, I’d like to show you the excerpts from the call . . .”

I am sure the questioners were told to take this tack by communications professionals who believe this is how you manipulate housewives. In fact a mother at home with a vacuum in one hand and a crying baby in the other would look at them, listen, and think: “You guys represent us to other countries? You gotta butch up.”

Later, as Col. Vindman returned to work, and clearly wanting to be seen, he posed grinning for photos in front of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

It is not only Donald Trump who suffers from Absence of Gravity.

On Wednesday Gordan Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union, was both weirdly jolly and enormously effective in doing Mr. Trump damage. He followed the president’s orders; there was a quid pro quo; “everyone was in the loop, it was no secret“; Rudy Giuliani was the point man, with whom Mr. Sondland worked “at the express direction of the president.”

It was his third try at truthful sworn testimony and it was completely believable. It was kind of the ballgame. He seemed like a guy with nothing to lose, or maybe a guy who’d already lost much.

On Thursday Fiona Hill, the former White House Russia expert, was all business, a serious woman you don’t want to mess with. She reoriented things, warning that those who excuse or don’t wish to see Russian propaganda efforts against America, and targeting its elections, are missing the obvious. The suspicion of the president and his allies that Ukraine is the great culprit in the 2016 election is a “fictional narrative.” They are, in fact, bowing to disinformation Russia spreads to cover its tracks and confuse the American people and its political class. She dismissed the president’s operatives’ efforts to get Ukraine’s new president to investigate his country’s alleged meddling as a “domestic political errand.” She and other diplomats were “involved in national security, foreign policy,” and the interests of the operatives and the diplomats had “diverged.” She warned Mr. Sondland: “This is all going to blow up.”

Truer words.

What became obvious in the hearings was the sober testimony from respectable diplomats—not disgruntled staffers with nutty memoirs but people of stature who don’t ordinarily talk—about how the administration operates. It became clear in a new and public way that pretty much everyone around the president has been forced for three years to work around his poor judgment and unpredictability in order to do their jobs. He no doubt knows this and no doubt doesn’t care. Because he’s the boss, they’ll do it his way.

But we saw how damaging this is, how ultimately destructive, not only to coherence and respectability but to the president himself.

After Thursday’s hearings I felt some free-floating sympathy for high Trump appointees who joined early. You can say they knew what they signed up for, but it’s human to have hope, and they surely had it when they came aboard. They were no doubt ambitious—they wanted a big job—but they probably wanted to do good, too. They were optimistic—“How bad can it be?” And there would have been vanity—“I can handle him.” But they couldn’t. He not only doesn’t know where the line is; he has never wanted to know, so he can cross it with impunity, without consciousness of a bad act or one that might put him in danger. They were no match for his unpredictability and resentments, which at any moment could undo anything.

As to impeachment itself, the case has been so clearly made you wonder what exactly the Senate will be left doing. How will they hold a lengthy trial with a case this clear? Who exactly will be the president’s witnesses, those who’d testify he didn’t do what he appears to have done, and would never do it?

Procedures, rules and definitions aren’t fully worked out in the Senate. But we are approaching December and the clock is ticking. A full-blown trial on charges most everyone will believe are true, and with an election in less than a year, will seem absurd to all but diehards and do the country no good.

So the reasonable guess is Republican senators will call to let the people decide. In a divided country this is the right call. But they should take seriously the idea of censuring him for abuse of power. Mr. Trump would be the first president to be censured since Andrew Jackson, to whom his theorists have always compared him. In the end he will probably be proud of a tightening of the connection.

A young foreign-affairs professional asked last week if the coming impeachment didn’t feel like Watergate. He was a child during that scandal, I in college. I said no, Watergate had the feeling of real drama, it was a reckoning with who we were as a people; it felt grave. This is more like the Clinton impeachment, grubby and small.

But watching the first day of hearings I thought that wasn’t quite right. There was something grave in it, and a kind of reckoning. This was due to the dignity and professionalism of the career diplomats who calmly and methodically told what they had seen and experienced. They were believable. It didn’t feel embarrassing to have faith in them.

Republicans on the panel didn’t know what to do. They know what this story is, and I believe they absolutely know the president muscled an ally, holding public money over its head to get a personal political favor. But they’re his party, they didn’t want to look weak, they had to show the base they had his back. In their interruptions and chaos-strewing they attempted to do some of what the Democrats did during the Kavanaugh hearings, only without the screaming meemies of Code Pink.

The Democrats were disciplined in their questioning and not bullying and theatrical, which was a surprise and unusual for them.

But the juxtaposition of the witnesses, the men of America’s diplomatic class, with the sullen, squirrelly, off-point Republicans, was what gave the hearing shape.

William B. Taylor Jr., acting ambassador to Ukraine, 72, was fifth in his class of 800 at West Point, where he was cadet battalion commander. Bronze Star, Vietnam, 82nd Airborne, 101st Airborne, 506th Infantry, Second Cavalry. After that, government work and diplomacy. He’s known for his modesty. You couldn’t be more impressive. Testifying along with him George P. Kent, younger and a different sort—studied Russian history and literature at Harvard and Johns Hopkins, speaks Ukrainian and Russian, 27 years in the foreign service.

They seemed to have capability and integrity. They weren’t deep state; they were old school, old style, not some big dope of a political donor, as all administrations have among their ambassadors, but the people who make it work, who maintain the standards, who keep it all up and running.

This is what I saw: the old America reasserting itself, under subpoena. They were American diplomats, with stature and command of their subject matter.

And the world was seeing it, and maybe thinking, “I remember them.” Older prime ministers and presidents in foreign capitals could be thinking, “I remember those pros, the bland Midwestern tough guys who knew their stuff. Good that they still exist.”

Quietly, smoothly, brick by brick, they gave their testimony and painted a picture that supports the charge that yes, Donald Trump muscled Ukraine.

*   *   *

To the week’s other attempt to make a case against the president:

I don’t like to beat up books, because they’re books; you can’t have enough data and argumentation and art; if you don’t like it, don’t read it. But “A Warning,” the White House insider exposé by “Anonymous,” is a poor piece of work, and something false at its heart shows a deep disrespect for the reader.

What we especially need in the political world now is guts, brains and sincerity. Anonymous does not offer them.

There’s nothing here that hasn’t already been said in a dozen books and a thousand articles. There is little first-person testimony telling us what the author saw, what was said, what happened, what it meant.

Halfway through I realized: Anonymous isn’t really hiding his identity, he’s hiding the major fact of that identity, which is that he is not a significant figure. The premise of the original article in the New York Times, of which this book is an expansion, was that he was a major player—a “senior official of the Trump administration”—who’s giving you what history needs, eyewitness testimony. But you get the impression the author wasn’t actually in the room where it happened, or not often. Not having new, first-person information he relies on high-class padding (thoughts on Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, the role of Congress) and style. The style is midlevel ad agency, clean but with no ballast. It is by the end irritating—shallow yet haughty, common yet pretentious, and full of clichés. His Trump “takes no prisoners” and “behind closed doors” damages “the fabric of our republic.” The president is historically and politically uninformed, inattentive in briefings, vengeful and dangerous, gets harebrained ideas, and says stupid things. Yes, we know. But you have to do more than assert.

Anonymous suggests he can’t be specific because it would blow his cover. But without specificity the work becomes contentless and devolves into mere rhetoric and polemic. And why not be specific and let people know who you are? It would make the truths you feel demand urgent expression more credible and concrete. There’s nothing dishonorable about thinking you are witnessing a catastrophe and telling the American people. But you have to look history in the face and take its punishments.

And in this case what punishments, anyway? You’ll be fired? You hate where you work! You’ll be insulted in tweets? So what? There are two Trump tweet lists in America, one with the names of those who’ve been attacked and the other with those who haven’t. The first is longer, and they’re still alive.

It is all so disguised, self-valorous and creepy.

Why was Anonymous there? He doesn’t really say. Since he saw the emptiness and danger early on, why didn’t he leave? “God knows,” he says, “it would have been easy.” He says he stayed because Mr. Trump is “a mess” and he wanted to help. But he gives no examples of how he helped. The fact is it’s hard to leave a White House. You’re unemployed, your office is gone, your old colleagues cool on you, and the neighbors are no longer impressed. Better to stay and simmer.

He claims “senior advisors and cabinet-level officials pondered a mass resignation, a ‘midnight self-massacre’ ” to draw the public’s attention to the White House disarray. But they didn’t go through with it. Why? “It would shake public confidence.” But diminishing public confidence in the administration was the point, no?

He refers to sensitive conversations that have not been declassified and vows not to speak of them—“such details have been omitted.” But it’s hard not to suspect he didn’t “omit” them, he didn’t know them.

“Trump wanted to use a domestic presidential power to do something absurd overseas, which for security reasons I cannot disclose.” Oh come on.

This book is as edifying as Omarosa’s White House memoir, but without the leavening air of insanity.

At one point Anonymous reports that at a Group of Seven meeting Trump threw some Starburst candies at Angela Merkel and said: “Here, Angela. Don’t say I never gave you anything.” I’d never heard that. That’s news! But I Googled the quote and there it was, rows of citations attributing the anecdote to Ian Bremmer of the Eurasia Group.

My only advice to Anonymous is for the good of your reputation, stay that way. And if you feel such heavy daily repugnance, leave already.

It is all so very grave, yet it feels only like a continuation of the past three years of fraught and crazy political conflict. But impeachment of the American president came much closer this week.

I believe retired Gen. John Kelly, President Trump’s former chief of staff, when he told the Washington Examiner that he had told Mr. Trump that if he did not change his ways he would get himself in terrible trouble. “I said, ‘Whatever you do don’t hire a yes-man, someone who won’t tell you the truth—don’t do that. Because if you do, I believe you will be impeached.’”

He knew his man. Mr. Kelly was in the White House for 17 months, from July 31, 2017, to Jan. 2, 2019. I ask Trump supporters, or anyone with even a small knowledge of what a White House is, to consider how extraordinary it is for a chief of staff to say such a thing to the president. Can you imagine James Baker saying to Ronald Reagan, “Keep it up, buddy, and you’ll break the law and be thrown out”? You can’t because it does not compute, because it isn’t possible.

When Mr. Trump first came in I would press his supporters on putting all of American military power into the hands of a person with no direct political or foreign-affairs experience or training. They’d say, confidently, “But he’s got the generals around him.” His gut would blend with their expertise. But though they went to work for him with optimism and confidence in their ability to warn him off destructive actions or impulses—though they were personally supportive, gave him credit for a kind of political genius, and intended to be part of something of which they could be proud—they found they could not. This president defeats all his friends. That’s why he’s surrounded now, in his White House and the agencies, by the defeated—a second-string, ragtag, unled army.

In fact the president wasn’t so interested in the generals’ experience and expertise. In fact he found them boring but with nice outfits. One by one they left or were fired. This should disturb the president’s supporters more than it does. And they should have a better response than, “But they’re jerks.”

To impeachment itself. It received a powerful push forward when the House voted Thursday for a new, public phase in the inquiry. This means among other things that the Democrats think they have the goods. They wouldn’t go live unless they did.

They feel the great question is clear. That question is: Can we prove, through elicited testimony, that the president made clear to the leader of another nation, an ally in uncertain circumstances, that the U.S. would release congressionally authorized foreign aid only if the foreign leader publicly committed to launch an internal investigation that would benefit the president in his 2020 re-election effort?

The odd thing is I think most everyone paying attention knows the answer. It’s been pretty much established, from leaks, reports, statements and depositions. Can I say we all know it happened? I think the definitive question for the hearings will turn out not to be “Did he do it?” but “Do the American people believe this an impeachable offense?”

The president’s defenders have argued that in the transcripts of the phone call the White House released, he never clearly lays out a quid pro quo. I suppose it depends how you read it, but in a book I wrote long ago I noted that in government and journalism people don’t say “Do it my way or I’ll blow you up.” Their language and approach are more rounded. They imitate 1930s gangster movies in which the suave mobster tells the saloon keeper from whom he’s demanding protection money, “Nice place you have here, shame if anything happened to it.”

In the past I’ve said the leaders of the inquiry will have to satisfy the American people that they’re trying to be fair, and not just partisan fools. So far that score is mixed. Republicans charge with some justice that it’s been secretive, the process loaded and marked by partisan creepiness. If I were Adam Schiff now I wouldn’t be fair, I’d be generous—providing all materials, information, duly inviting the Republicans in. That would be a deadly move—to show respect and rob Republicans of a talking point.

It should be communicated to the president’s supporters that they must at some point ask themselves this question: Is it acceptable that an American president muscle an ally in this way for personal political gain? If that is OK then it’s OK in the future when there’s a Democratic president, right? Would your esteem for Franklin D. Roosevelt be lessened if it came to light through old telephone transcripts found in a box in a basement in Georgetown that he told Winston Churchill in 1940, “We’ll lend you the ships and the aid if you announce your government is investigating that ruffian Wendell Willkie”? You’d still respect him and tell the heroic old stories, right?

Some of the evidence in the hearings will be colorful and stick in the mind. There will be phrases from testimony or questioning that encapsulate the scandal, such as “What did the president know and when did he know it?” and “There’s a cancer growing on the presidency.” That will have impact. If White House workers attempted to deep-six evidence of the president’s conversation, doesn’t that suggest consciousness of guilt?

There is John Bolton’s testimony, if he testifies. He’s not known as a shy man. He is a conservative who has made his career as a professional (worked for four presidents, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, head of the National Security Council), a foreign-affairs tough guy, a Fox News contributor. Some, perhaps many conservatives were heartened when he came aboard with the president in the spring of 2018.

He would know a great deal about the issues at hand. Did the president act in a way he disapproved of on Ukraine? Was there a side-game foreign policy? All that would be powerful. But what if he was asked to think aloud about what he saw of the way Mr. Trump operates, of what he learned about the president after he came to work for him, of what illusions, if any, might have been dispelled? To reflect (as the generals who used to work for the president reflect, off the record)? What if he is questioned imaginatively, even sympathetically, with a long view as to what history needs to be told?

If he did this under oath and answered as he thought right, honest and helpful, if he was asked the question, “After all you’ve seen, is it good for America that Donald Trump is president?” “Tell us about what you’ve observed about the nature and mind and character of Donald Trump.” “Share your thoughts as a respected professional who has worked with presidents and who knows what the presidency is.”

Public candor would take plenty of guts and could have reputational repercussions.

But it would not just be powerful, it could be explosive. History, at least, would appreciate it.

I was writing a rather stern column about the mess in Washington, but I got kind of swept Thursday by the beautiful bipartisan tribute to Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings, in Congress’s Statuary Hall, a ceremony held just before his burial back in Baltimore.

I want to get beyond the merely sentimental. Everyone seems to have liked him a lot; I knew him slightly and liked him too. I would only add to his enumerated virtues the power of his warmth. I met him at an event five or so years ago and when we were introduced I went to shake his hand. He’d have none of that and enveloped me in a hug. I don’t remember what we talked about but it seemed important to the two of us, in one of those nice moments that sometimes happen, that we show a mutual appreciation for who the other was. We did, and held hands. I just found to my shock that remembering this leaves me a little choked.

There was something not sentimental but poignant and half-grasped in the tribute to him. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell spoke movingly about how Cummings came to Washington not to be a big man but to do big things. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said, “He was strong, very strong when necessary. . . . His voice could . . . stir the most cynical hearts.” Cummings’s friend Republican Rep. Mark Meadows said he had “eyes that would pierce through anybody standing in his way,” and like the others read Scripture. It was nice to hear the Bible read in Statuary Hall; the religiosity had a great sweetness to it. “In my father’s house are many mansions,” Mr. Meadows read, and suggested the Baltimore boy was in a grand new home.

What was poignant was how much the speakers enjoyed being their best selves. Congress knows how hapless it looks, how riven by partisanship and skins-vs.-shirts dumbness. For many of them it takes the tang out of things. They know it lowers their standing in America. They grieve it. It embarrasses them. They’d like to be part of something that works, something respected.

It wouldn’t be lost on the brighter of them that they were enacting in the Cummings ceremony a unity and respect, a shared purpose, that they wish they could sustain but are unable to.

They believe they are forced into their partisan positions by several things, among them that America is badly divided and the politically active on both sides, in their mutual loathing, pull toward the extremes.

As I watched the ceremony I thought of a dinner two weeks ago with a close friend. It was just the two of us and we found ourselves going deep about how we feel about everything. She is a spirited lefty, a longtime Democratic donor, I am a righty, a conservative as I define it, but neither of us has ever cared much about that because the essence of friendship is . . . essence. Who you are, which fairly enough includes politics but is not limited to politics. We’ve had 30 years of teasing and occasional sparring but this night we went to the thoughts behind our views. She asked me how I see my own political views; am I more lefty than I was? I found myself saying something I’d never said, that all my political thinking comes down to this: I am for whatever will hold America together, full stop. I see it breaking in a million pieces and my every political impulse has to do with wanting it to hold together, to endure, to go forward in history and the world. If that means compromise, fine. She thought about this, nodded and said softly that that makes complete sense right now. “That’s a program.”

But don’t most of us kind of think like this? Even if we haven’t articulated it or even noticed it’s what we think. But isn’t it the right primary intention?

A deep impediment is the air of political maximalism that careless people who never know the implications of things encourage. Years ago Rep. Bella Abzug of New York would point out that her father was a butcher, who owned the Live and Let Live Meat Market. I always liked that. Nobody says that phrase anymore, live and let live, but long ago everybody did. Now it’s part of what’s missing—a sense of give. So many people feel bullied, pushed around by vague and implacable forces. They fear the erosion of central freedoms.

Here is the first example that springs to mind. It reflects my cultural views and indignations, but I ask you to take it on its own terms.

In early October CNN had a town hall on LGBTQ issues for the Democratic presidential candidates. They said the sort of things they say, you can imagine them, you don’t need your neighborhood pundit to tell you. But at one point the essential nature of the new progressivism jumped out.

Don Lemon asked Beto O’Rourke: “Do you think religious institutions like colleges, churches, charities, should they lose their tax exempt status if they oppose same-sex marriage?”

“Yes,” said Mr. O’Rourke, not missing a beat. “There can be no reward, no benefit, no tax break for anyone or any institution, any organization in America that denies the full human rights and the full civil rights of every single one of us. So as president we’re going to make that a priority and we are going to stop those who are infringing upon the human rights of our fellow Americans.”

Regular readers know we do not especially admire Mr. O’Rourke, that we believe the past year he has been having not a campaign but a manic episode. But he said what he said because he wanted to please a significant part of the Democratic base, and he received big applause.

Can we agree his is a radical, maximalist stand? Under his standard the Catholic Church would be ruined, and with it a whole world of charities, schools, hospitals, orphanages, other agencies, all of which help those with limited resources. Let’s just posit without bothering to defend the proposition that an America without the Catholic church would be a poorer, sicker, colder place, and one less likely to continue.

At almost the same time as the CNN town hall, the Little Sisters of the Poor, who serve the elderly and impoverished, were again in court asking for protection from the ObamaCare mandate that tells them they must include contraceptive coverage in their employee health plans. It’s been a long legal journey: The Supreme Court has already been involved. So has the Trump administration, whose directives regarding religious protection have been challenged by certain states, which got injunctions, which have been upheld by the appellate courts. The Sisters are forced to appeal to the high court again, which will, please God, affirm, with clarity and force, the constitutional rights without which they cannot exist.

Oh, progressives, if you only had the wisdom to back off, to see your demands as maximalist, extreme, damaging to the fabric, the opposite of live and let live. When you push in this way to control the culture of the country, do you ever ask, “When I win, will there be a country left?”