Peggy Noonan

Things are more fluid than they seem. That’s my impression of Washington right now. There’s something quiet going on, a mood shift.

Impeachment of course will happen. The House will support whatever charges are ultimately introduced because most Democrats think the president is not fully sane and at least somewhat criminal. Also they’re Democrats and he’s a Republican. The charges will involve some level of foreign-policy malfeasance.

The ultimate outcome depends on the Senate. It takes 67 votes to convict. Republicans control the Senate 53-47, and it is unlikely 20 of them will agree to remove a president of their own party. An acquittal is likely but not fated, because we live in the age of the unexpected.

Here are three reasons to think the situation is more fluid than we realize.

First, the president, confident of acquittal, has chosen this moment to let his inner crazy flourish daily and dramatically—the fights and meltdowns, the insults, the Erdogan letter. Just when the president needs to be enacting a certain stability he enacts its opposite. It is possible he doesn’t appreciate the jeopardy he’s in with impeachment bearing down; it is possible he knows and what behavioral discipline he has is wearing down.

The second is that the Republican leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell, told his caucus this week to be prepared for a trial that will go six days a week and could last six to eight weeks. In September there had been talk the Senate might receive articles of impeachment and execute a quick, brief response—a short trial, or maybe a motion to dismiss. Mr. McConnell told CNBC then that the Senate would have “no choice” but to take up impeachment, but “how long you are on it is a different matter.” Now he sees the need for a major and lengthy undertaking. Part of the reason would be practical: He is blunting attack lines that the Republicans arrogantly refused to give impeachment the time it deserves. But his decision also gives room for the unexpected—big and serious charges that sweep public opinion and change senators’ votes. “There is a mood change in terms of how much they can tolerate,” said a former high Senate staffer. Senators never know day to day how bad things will get.

The third reason is the number of foreign-policy professionals who are not ducking testimony in the House but plan to testify or have already. Suppressed opposition to President Trump among foreign-service officers and others is busting out.

The president is daily eroding his position. His Syria decision was followed by wholly predictable tragedy; it may or may not have been eased by the announcement Thursday of a five-day cease-fire. Before that the House voted 354-60, including 129 Republicans, to rebuke the president. There was the crazy letter to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which was alternately pleading (“You can make a great deal. . . . I will call you later”) and threatening (“I don’t want to be responsible for destroying the Turkish economy—and I will”).

There was the Cabinet Room meeting with congressional leaders, the insults hurled and the wildness of the photo that said it all—the angry president; Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, standing and pointing at him; and the head of Gen. Mark Milley, the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, bowed in—embarrassment? Horror? His was not the only bowed head.

The president soon tweeted about a constitutional officer of the U.S. House, who is third in line for the presidency: “Nancy Pelosi needs help fast! There is either something wrong with her ‘upstairs’ or she just plain doesn’t like our great Country. She had a total meltdown in the White House today. It was very sad to watch. Pray for her, she is a very sick person!”

As the Democratic leaders departed, he reportedly called out, “See you at the polls.” Mr. Trump is confident that he holds the cards here—he’s got the Senate, and the base of the party says all these issues should be worked out in the 2020 election. But he is seriously weakening his hand by how he acts.

That meeting will only fortify Mrs. Pelosi’s determination to impeach him.

The president tweeted out the picture of that meeting just as the White House made public the Erdogan letter—because they think it made the president look good. Which underscored the sense that he has no heavyweight advisers around him—the generals are gone, the competent fled, he’s careening around surrounded by second raters, opportunists, naifs and demoralized midlevel people who can’t believe what they’re seeing.

Again, everything depends on the quality and seriousness of the House hearings. Polling on impeachment has been fairly consistent, with Gallup reporting Thursday 52% supporting the president’s impeachment and removal.

Serious and dramatic hearings would move the needle on public opinion, tripping it into seriously negative territory for the president.

And if the needle moves, the Senate will move in the same direction.

But the subject matter will probably have to be bigger than the Ukraine phone call, which is not, as some have said, too complicated for the American people to understand, but easy to understand. An American ally needed money, and its new leader needed a meeting with the American president to bolster his position back home. It was made clear that the money and the meeting were contingent on the launching of a probe politically advantageous to Mr. Trump and disadvantageous to a possible 2020 rival.

Everyone gets it, most everyone believes it happened, no one approves of it—but it probably isn’t enough. People have absorbed it and know how they feel: It was Mr. Trump being gross. No news there.

Truly decisive testimony and information would have to be broader and deeper, bigger. Rudy Giuliani’s dealings with Ukraine? That seems an outgrowth of the original whistleblower charges, a screwy story with a cast of characters— Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, natives of Ukraine and Belarus, respectively, who make you think of Sen. Howard Baker’s question to the Watergate bagman Tony Ulasewicz: “Who thought you up?”

More important will be a text or subtext of serious and consistent foreign-policy malfeasance that the public comes to believe is an actual threat to national security. Something they experience as alarming.

It cannot be merely that the president holds different views and proceeds in different ways than the elites of both parties. It can’t look like “the blob” fighting back—fancy-pants establishment types, whose feathers have been ruffled by a muddy-booted Jacksonian, getting their revenge. It can’t look like the Deep State striking back at a president who threatened their corrupt ways.

It will have to be serious and sincere professionals who testify believably that the administration is corrupt and its corruption has harmed the country. The witnesses will have to seem motivated by a sense of duty to institutions and protectiveness toward their country.

And the hearings had better start to come across as an honest, good-faith effort in which Republican members of Congress are treated squarely and in line with previous protocols and traditions.

With all that the needle moves. Without it, it does not.

One thing I think I’ve correctly observed about the U.S. military in the 21st century is that its leaders tend to be the last to want to go to war and the last to want to leave it. Political figures operate under public pressures and shifting geopolitical needs and goals; they’re surrounded by people who see the world a certain way; they get revved up, and say, “Go, invade.” Top military staff have reservations. They’ve studied the area, know the realities, the history—they have doctorates in it—and don’t want to get into anything America can’t win cleanly, decisively, relatively quickly. They’re skeptics.

In the end the commander in chief makes the decision and they do their constitutional duty. Troops are deployed and perform. They dig in and fight, they’re professionals—they commit.

The political figures then decide after a few years—or decades—that it’s time to come home. Military leaders are skeptical again. They’ve been in this thing a while, they’re committed to the battle space, they’ve lost men, they know and care about their allies in the fight, they have a sharp sense of the repercussions of withdrawal. They want more time.

I suspect the current habit of skepticism springs in part from the military’s generations-long reckoning with Vietnam. You can see it in Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster’s influential 1997 book, “Dereliction of Duty.” “The war in Vietnam was not lost in the field, nor was it lost on the front pages of the New York Times,” Donald Trump’s second national security adviser writes. “It was lost in Washington, D.C.” Responsibility for the failure rested not only with President Lyndon B. Johnson and his civilian advisers but also his military advisers, particularly the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Between the lines Gen. McMaster was telling the current military: Don’t claim to see lights at the ends of tunnels when you don’t really see them, play it straight. Be forthcoming with political leaders—and the public—about “likely costs and consequences.”

Anyway, history is human. Military leaders have their ways and biases. But public military opposition to the president’s withdrawal of U.S. forces from northern Syria, after a Sunday telephone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, seems to me completely correct. Gen. John Allen, a retired Marine, said, “If we were going to draw a circle around a group of American troops who are more important right now to the stabilization of any place on the planet, it’s that thousand troops.” He said of Turkey’s incursion into Syria, “This is just chaos.” Retired Adm. James Stavridis said it will lead to the comeback of ISIS and embolden other U.S. adversaries. He noted that it’s some kind of policy that can unite, in opposition, Sens. Lindsey Graham and Bernie Sanders.

It is.

More compelling is what Jennifer Griffin, the respected national-security correspondent for Fox News, reported Wednesday night. She spoke to a “distraught” U.S. Special Forces soldier on the ground alongside the Kurdish forces that were about to be abandoned. “It was one of the hardest phone calls I have ever taken,” she tweeted. The soldier told her “I am ashamed for the first time in my career.” He said, “There was no threat to the Turks—none—from this side of the border.” The Kurds, who are guarding thousands of ISIS prisoners, had just prevented a prison break and were pleading for U.S. support. Without it, the soldier said, those detainees would likely soon be free. Of the president: “He doesn’t understand the problem. He doesn’t understand the repercussions to this.” “It’s a shame,” he added. “The Kurds are standing by us. No other partner I have ever dealt with would stand by us.”

I believe every word of this.

Why this decision? Why now?

To redeem a campaign pledge with another campaign looming? On impulse? What was behind the impulse? The president doesn’t seem to know much about the Kurds—that they’ve backed the U.S. since 2003 and fought ISIS since 2011. They have their reasons: They want their own state. But they are a gallant people, brave and sympathetic to the West.

The president, defending this decision, asked what we owe them. “They didn’t help us in the Second World War, at Normandy for example.”

Yes, I forgot. Reagan made that point in his Pointe du Hoc speech. He said, “Don’t forget to stick it to the Kurds for not showing up.” Oh wait, he didn’t say that, because he was quite the reader of history.

Mr. Trump, in defending his position, says he is against the “endless wars” that have marked the first two decades of this century. Fair and good, the right approach, he ran for president opposing them and Americans left and right agreed.

But there is too much craziness to the decision, both its substance and how it was made. The area has been functioning, the number of U.S. troops small and limited. Adm. Stavridis called it “a small investment with a big spring to it.”

The decision was done on the word of Mr. Erdogan, a particular kind of player—thuggish, duplicitous. He considers the Kurds on his border a security threat. He threatens to send Syrian refugees to Europe if European countries call his incursion an occupation. If they insult him like that, “We will open the gates and send 3.6 million refugees your way.”

Mr. Trump himself says if the ISIS terrorists the Kurds are holding in prison are freed or escape, no worry. “They’re going to be escaping to Europe,” he said. “They want to go back to their homes.”

That’s a viciously careless way to treat your allies. Who, by the way, were at Normandy.

Most unsettling was the president’s mad tweet assuring critics that his decision was right: “If Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (I’ve done before!).” This isn’t funny, it’s self-inflated nut stuff.

The president is misreading his base, which will have qualms. Their sons and daughters fought in the wars; they know who the Kurds are.

Why would he do such a dramatic, piercing thing at what is for him a dramatic, piercing moment, with impeachment looming and support for it rising in the polls? Why offend Republicans senators, whom the president needs to survive impeachment? Why give them an excuse to start peeling off?

Why give those of his supporters who are cable-news hacks an excuse to show some pride? I’m not a lackey, this is about principle, the president has made a misjudgment! Watch it, they could get in the habit of self-respect.

The Syria decision contributes to the hardened impression that in foreign policy he’s all impulse, blithely operating out of his depth. It adds to the hardening suspicion that in negotiations he’s not actually tough; he’ll say yes to a lot of things, and some very bad things, to get the deal, the photo-op, the triumphant handshake.

Foreign-policy decisions in this administration look like the ball in a pinball machine in some garish arcade with flashing lights and some frantic guy pushing the levers ping ping ping and thinking he’s winning.

We have grown used to the daily bedlam, the nonstop freak-out that is the Trump White House. Nevertheless it should be noted the president’s language and visage this week were especially wild. It’s “treason,” it’s “a coup,” it’s a “hoax” and a “fraud,” the whistleblower’s information came from “a leaker or a spy,” it’s a political “hack job,” it’s “bulls—.” He had a Travis Bickell moment—“You talkin’ to me?”—with Jeffrey Mason of Reuters. He’s careening around, growling and prowling like some preliterate King Lear. It’s a reality show about a reality you don’t want to be in.

The best description of him was low-key, from a former GOP congressional staffer: “The president is an unsettled person,” he said.

It is assumed the House will impeach the president. If that is so, how is the great question. If it is a straight party-line vote, if it’s shirts vs. skins, then the Democrats will have their victory in the House, quickly fail in the Senate, and not win in America.

This cannot be one party doing its one-party thing. I think Nancy Pelosi knows that.

The reason she did not put forward a formal resolution calling for an impeachment inquiry is said to be that she didn’t want to jeopardize her moderate members from districts that voted for Mr. Trump. There’s something in that, though a former member of Congress pointed out to me that most of the moderates aren’t all that vulnerable—they’re way ahead in fundraising; Mr. Trump didn’t win some of the districts by much; some don’t have opponents yet.

I suspect another reason Mrs. Pelosi didn’t call a vote is that she knew the outcome would have been completely down-the-line partisan: Dems on this side, Reps on that. And that wouldn’t look good. It would allow more than half the country to dismiss the effort as more party mischief.

Here is a very open question: Can House Democrats control themselves? Can they look like they’re not trying to kill their foe but trying to get the truth? I don’t know. There’s something about Democrats now that they seem embarrassed to reach out to Republicans, as if that’s not done by nice people.

Can they establish an air of earnestness and care, of fairness, of investigative depth?

Members of the investigating committees have to understand that in hearings they are not talking to the media, they are not talking to the Democratic base, and they are not talking to cable news. It’s not about the hot exchange with a witness or a dramatic sound bite. You’re talking to the American people. The impressions of fair-minded centrists and swing voters will be everything. And they will see right through your sound bites and Spartacus moments.

You won’t impress them that way. They will turn on you if you give them only showbiz.

Members of the committees really have to prove they’re operating in good faith. During the impeachment hearings for Richard Nixon you could honestly look at the Democrats and think: Most of them are trying to play it straight. It was still true of Republicans, though less so, in the Clinton impeachment.

But there’s a good-faith deficit in Congress now as it becomes more brutal and partisan. It leads to losing sight of the big picture, which is what is good for America.

For instance, the Democrats want access to more transcripts of the president’s phone calls with foreign leaders. That’s a dangerous area. Foreign leaders need to have confidence they can speak frankly and privately with a president. In a world crisis lacking that confidence could prove disastrous. Normal people would understand this right away, and not approve of irresponsible fishing.

Mrs. Pelosi keeps saying she’s moving forward more in sorrow than in anger and that she’s praying for the president. Maybe she’s overlarding it, but swing voters will see her calm in contrast to the president’s lunacy, and prefer it. Her members should be watching her.

She is also trying to wire this thing without the help of committee chairmen of conspicuous stature. Here we get to Adam Schiff, chairman of the Intelligence Committee. He is an intelligent, focused and strikingly partisan figure. He will be a face, maybe the face, of the impeachment hearings.

He has already stepped in it with his tendentious paraphrasing of Mr. Trump’s conversation with the president of Ukraine, a so-called parody that was bizarre, unserious, embarrassing. This was followed by reports he was misleading in denying prior knowledge of the whistleblower’s complaint.

Mr. Schiff’s weakness, at least in public, appears to be lack of judgment. You could see it last week in his questioning of the acting director of national intelligence.

Joseph Maguire had been on the job in this high-turnover administration for all of six weeks. He’s a serious looking guy, joined the Navy in 1974, was 33 years a Navy SEAL, rose to vice admiral. Speaking under oath he said, “I am not partisan and I am not political.” He’s from a long line of those who’ve served: “When I took my uniform off in July of 2010, it was the first time in 70 years that an immediate member of my family was not wearing the cloth of the nation.”

This guy is a citizen. He said he supports whistleblowing, that he got the whistleblower complaint a few weeks into his tenure, reviewed it, consulted with lawyers, tried to determine if the complaint was subject to executive privilege. The day before the hearing, the White House had released the transcript of the call, and he felt that allowed him to reveal the complaint, unredacted.

He said he believed the whistleblower and the inspector general did nothing wrong, did everything by the book. He believes this matter is “unprecedented.” Deeper in his testimony he said “I believe the whistleblower is operating in good faith,” and “I think the whistleblower did the right thing.” He expressed no skepticism at all.

It was pretty explosive!

Mr. Schiff didn’t see it for what it was and rise to the moment. He proceeded to beat Mr. Maguire around the head, grilling him and interrupting answers. You went to the White House. You told the president’s lawyers. Why didn’t you come to me sooner? He fixated on “sequencing” and “chronology.”

He seemed to miss the story totally and have no sense of how people at home would experience it. He was weirdly hostile.

I was watching at home like an American and thought: What’s wrong with you? The nation’s top spy, who appears thoroughly upstanding, is expressing no skepticism about a complaint that alleges his boss, the president, is kind of a bum.

How could you miss that? You’d have to be blinded. By what?

During Watergate there was a guy called Peter Rodino of New Jersey, head of the House Judiciary Committee—Democrat, Newark, pretty tough guy. He was no child, he was no naïf, he was a party man. But he was judicious and capable and ran his committee well. After it voted to impeach Nixon, he got on the phone with his wife and wept. “You know, he was our president,” he told Susan Stamberg of NPR in 1989.

That’s what the Democrats need, someone who’d be genuinely sad at taking out a president.

Every time I imagine Elizabeth Warren debating Donald Trump, I picture him rumbling onto the stage like a big white bear—roaring “Grrr grrrr,” towering over her, paws flailing, claws extended. She’ll stand there looking up at him in the lights, and you’ll wonder if she’s trembling, cowering, because clearly she’s about to be crushed. And then she’ll take a brisk step forward and punch him hard and sharp in the kidney. And he’ll howl—“Aarrrrggg!”—because he’s surprised and it hurts and he assumed he’d easily chase her around the stage.

She’ll say, “Mr. President, I know everyone’s supposed to be afraid of you and your rough ways, but I don’t find you so tough. And I’m not afraid of you.” (Transcript: “Applause, cheers.”) Then she’ll call him soft, corrupt, incompetent—a phony martyr who doesn’t respect his own supporters enough to fake respectability.

He’ll call her a left-wing nut who’ll ruin the economy, destroy capitalism, kill our greatness, steal our private health insurance.

We’ll be off. And no one will know where it’s going.

That is my impeachment thought: Nobody knows where this is going. The politically obsessed may think they do, but something wild and unpredictable has been let loose. The charges are serious and credible. But America is as divided as it was in 2016, America is still in play, and it’s all up for grabs.

Everything, the entire outcome, will depend on public opinion.

The charge is that the American president went to the leader of Ukraine and invited him to take part in the 2020 presidential election by investigating one of the president’s likely competitors. Mr. Trump might have added pressure by delaying U.S. aid.

What is immediately striking is that no one who has spoken in defense of the president, including his spokesmen, has said these words: “Donald Trump would never do that!” Or, “That would be unlike him!” That will be the president’s problem as public opinion develops: everyone knows he would do it, everyone knows it is like him. There’s no mystique of goodness to be destroyed.

If everything depends on public opinion then a lot depends on how the House comports itself. Will the Democrats be sober, steady, fair-minded? Or will they be disorganized divas who play to their base and win over no one else? Are they capable of rising to the moment?

The guess here is that articles of impeachment will be drawn, presented and pass the House.

Impeachment is a grave constitutional and governmental act, but it is also a political one that requires public support. Speaker Nancy Pelosi has calculated that the case is strong and the people will come along. She wouldn’t have moved forward if she didn’t think she was going to win. The president is wrong when he says she’s finally bowed to the mad progressives of her party, who are so colorfully belligerent, who last summer pushed to impeach William Barr and last week wanted to impeach Brett Kavanaugh. Mrs. Pelosi is an attentive vote-counter and a practical pol. I think she’s moving now because she thinks she got him and the jig is up.

At an off-the-record meeting in New York Monday, the night before she announced the impeachment push, she looked like someone whose old hesitation was gone. In its place was the joy of the hunt.

As for the Senate, the understandable and previously reliable common wisdom was that Republicans there will keep the needed 67 votes for conviction from materializing. That’s probably still likely, but it’s no sure thing. Tuesday the Senate voted unanimously for the whistleblower’s complaint to be made public. (On Thursday it was.) Senators didn’t say, “This is just another partisan witch hunt. Grrr grrr.” Why not? Because the charges were serious and they couldn’t refuse to ask for more information. Because they wanted to signal to the White House that they couldn’t accept the idea that aid to Ukraine could have been held up over something like this. Because they had to assume more bad information was coming. And because they’re four years into the Trump era and are tired of having to excuse and explain everything the president does that is surprising, illogical, unprofessional, dubious.

Most of them wouldn’t miss him if he were gone. They’d happily peel off if public opinion back home seemed to shift.
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Among Trump supporters right now, the Ukraine story would look like a Washington-centric phony drama—more partisan nonsense, business as usual, ignore it. But if the story gets bad, if it comes to be thought of as a real national-security question, as the whistleblower charged in his report, they will pay attention and care.

So much depends on who’s called to testify and what they say and how ugly a picture they paint.

Wholly anecdotal but perhaps significant, I heard this week from two separate Trump supporters, one in the past passionate, the other whose support was always softer, who shared their dismay at the Ukraine story. Both said these words: “Maybe Pence wouldn’t be so bad.” They were exhausted by the drama and wrongness. Why not the man with the soft white hair?

In the end, in purely practical political terms, the one person who will be hurt by this story will be Joe Biden. Every telling of this story necessitates pointing out that Mr. Biden’s son Hunter had cozy financial relationships with other countries, including Ukraine. It’s real swamp stuff. It looks bad, say the former vice president’s friends. No, it is bad.

It is infuriating that members of America’s leadership class so often show themselves to the world as self-enriching. As a nation we spent the 20th century presenting ourselves to the world as a truly moral leader, a self sacrificing country, one to be looked up to. In the 21st century our political figures and their families too often look like scrounging grifters—Americans with connections who can be hired, who leverage connections to fame for profit. There’s a fairly constant air of soft corruption, of an easy, seamy reality of big-power back scratching.

It makes America look bad. It makes us look weak and craven, like we can be bought.

There should be something called the Class Act. If you have any class, you don’t profit financially from a relative in power in the world’s greatest democracy. You don’t embarrass your country that way. Because, you know, you have class. You’re lucky to be from a respected family. A president or vice president might say, “It’s unfair to make my child sacrifice a deal because of what his father does!” Actually, no one asked you to ask for power; no one told you to want it. If you get it, it’s an honor. Do your job. Yes, your family should sacrifice, as should you.

The story of Hunter Biden and his business adventures isn’t new, and yet sometimes stories come alive in new ways. This one will probably come into focus for a while and be emblematic of the swamp.

Joe Biden probably thought it was old news, already dissected and dismissed. But it’s back, and will hit him like a kidney punch.

Here are the reasons, in no certain order, that the accusations against Justice Brett Kavanaugh will never stop and his foes on the progressive left never let up.

Because progressives have to prove they were right to advance the sexual-assault accusations of Christine Blasey Ford. They lost that battle; Justice Kavanaugh sits on the court. They won’t stop the assault until they can prove they were right to launch it.

Because people become fixated on their targets. Because #MeToo continues as a potent cultural force. Because as the court assumes an ever more powerful role in American life, confirmation hearings and their aftermath will become more brutal and never-ending.

Because the authority and legitimacy of future rulings that are not pleasing to progressives (most prominently, perhaps, on Roe v. Wade) can be undermined through footnotes that say “the 5-4 decision was joined by a justice credibly accused of sexual assault.”

Because the steady drum of allegations diminishes not only Justice Kavanaugh’s stature but that of the court itself, which will be helpful when Democrats attempt to pack it.

Because the crazier parts of the progressive left increasingly see politics as public theater, with heroes and villains, cheers and hisses from the audience, and costumes, such as outfits from “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Because modern politics is, for the lonely and strange on all sides, entertainment and diversion. And one’s people must be entertained.

Because many progressives believe deep in their hearts that conservative men are both sexually obsessed and repressed, that conservatism is a way of looking at the world in which women are lesser, mere prey. They think this is behind everything, including conservative reservations about or opposition to abortion. In this view, conservative jurists who say things like “60% of my clerks were women” and “I coach the girls’ soccer and debate teams” are engaged in an elaborate cover. They hate the modern world. Behind closed doors they’re always swinging caveman’s clubs.

Because where there’s smoke there must be fire. There was Ms. Ford, then the Yale rumors. There’s no way there isn’t something to it.

So it will never end.

For Democrats, it is not “good politics,” and most of them know it. What was done to Justice Kavanaugh had a positive impact on 2018 Senate outcomes—for Republicans. There was a backlash. Women worried their sons and husbands would be targeted in a prosecutorial atmosphere that had abandoned due process.

People are complicated. Jill Abramson, who covered the 1991 Clarence Thomas hearings as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, told a story years later. Anita Hill had just testified. During a break, Ms. Abramson went for lunch in the Supreme Court cafeteria. As she stood waiting to pay for her food she chatted with another reporter about how Ms. Hill’s testimony had been lethal for Judge Thomas. The cashier, a middle-aged black woman, overheard, gave Ms. Abramson a baleful look, and said: “They’ll do anything to bring down a black man.” It was clear she supported him. In Ms. Abramson’s view it was an early sign of broader public opinion.

In an excerpt from a new book by two of its reporters, the New York Times this week famously reported another allegation of sexual misconduct by an undergraduate Mr. Kavanaugh. The Times later corrected its story to note the purported victim refused to be interviewed for the book and friends say she has no memory of such an incident. Democratic presidential contenders had already called for Justice Kavanaugh’s impeachment. Soon they changed the subject. But they’ll return to it.

What is kind of horrifying is the extent to which all this stems from the charges brought last year by Ms. Ford. Mr. Kavanaugh, she said, had drunkenly attempted to force himself on her at a high-school party.

I watched her testimony, as I’ve written before, with a bias. In my experience women in such matters are telling the truth. I assumed her charges would be substantiated.

And yet they were not, not at all, not even after a year. Not a single witness emerged to corroborate her account. The woman Ms. Ford described as a close, lifelong friend who could back up her account said she remembered no such party or gathering and had in fact never met Brett Kavanaugh. Now she admits she does not herself believe Ms. Ford’s story.

Throughout the drama those who believed Judge Kavanaugh’s denials operated at a disadvantage: Any criticism of Ms. Ford would be treated as a smear, so there was almost none.

I’m reminded of this by the riveting book “Justice On Trial,” by Mollie Hemingway and Carrie Severino. Most such investigations are written by liberal journalists for a liberal audience; Ms. Hemingway and Ms. Severino are conservatives who went forward with journalistic seriousness and paid attention to information others might ignore. They suggest “where there’s smoke there’s fire” can’t be applied to the Kavanaugh case because from the moment he was nominated to the court he was targeted by pyromaniacs.

A leftist feminist group linked him to allegations of sexual harassment against another judge, for whom he’d clerked a quarter-century before. An activist group accused him of supporting the “problematic trope that the Constitution should be ‘colorblind.’ ” Another group said his judicial philosophy amounted to supporting the “white supremacist patriarchy.”

This was par for the course for a Republican nominee, but soon after Ms. Ford’s charges came the New Yorker story in which a Yale classmate of Judge Kavanaugh said that during her freshman year he exposed himself at a drunken dorm party and caused her to touch his genitals. But the story didn’t hold—the reporters were unable to find a witness to corroborate it, the accuser had “significant gaps” in her memories, and it took six days of “carefully assessing her memories” and consulting with an attorney provided by Democrats, to name Judge Kavanaugh.

The since-disgraced lawyer Michael Avenatti then brought forward a woman who claimed she was gang raped at a high-school party by Mr. Kavanaugh and his friends, as were other young women. Her story fell apart too.

Then a charge came in through Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse. A constituent had called his office to say a man believed to be Mr. Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted a woman on a boat in Newport, R.I., in 1985. Now there was a fourth accuser! Eventually the Judiciary Committee tracked down the constituent, an anti-Trump activist who’d called for a military coup. He later recanted his accusations on Twitter and apologized.

A letter to Sen. Kamala Harris’s office claimed Judge Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted a woman while driving home from a party. The accuser was a political activist who later admitted her charge was “just a ploy” made because she was angry. Asked if she’d ever met Judge Kavanaugh she said, “Oh Lord, no.”

In both cases the accusers seemed shocked you couldn’t just . . . lie.

“Normally the burden of proof is on the accuser,” write Ms. Hemingway and Ms. Severino, “but the media were not even paying lip service to that principle.”

They weren’t.

The charges will probably never stop, but at this point many of us, having seen what Justice Kavanaugh was put through because of ideology and politics, will never find them believable.

“Everybody knows everything.” That mordant observation is the first of Burnham’s Laws. James Burnham was a significant mid-20th century figure, a public intellectual and political philosopher who started out on the left—as a young follower he carried on an extensive personal correspondence with Leon Trotsky —and became in time an eloquent foe of totalitarianism in whatever its manifestation. While at National Review, which he helped found, he gave his colleagues 10 maxims or laws about the realities of life. No. 5 is the wholly true, “Wherever there is prohibition there’s a bootlegger.” No. 10 has become well known: “If there’s no alternative, there’s no problem.”

But most arresting, and richest in inference, is No. 1, which I always pare down to EVERYONE KNOWS.

The big secret is that it isn’t a secret.

In its personal application Burnham’s No. 1 Law suggests you can’t successfully or forever conceal anything bad about yourself and your nature, it will all come out and probably has. People see more than you know. Don’t focus on concealment but creation. In political terms it suggests: everyone knows your essential position and future necessities; your close-hold campaign strategies are actually obvious.

For instance:

Everyone knows Donald Trump can be taken in 2020, but everyone doubts the ability of the current Democratic field to do it. Everyone knows Elizabeth Warren has successfully created and inhabited a persona—the determined, high-energy fighter full of plans—and is killing it. She knows she has gone too far left for the general electorate and will introduce nuance and an air of greater moderation once she gets the nomination. Everyone knows this.

Everyone knows the Democratic moderates are going nowhere and cluttering up every stage, but no one minds their being there because they make the party look sane.

Joe Biden may have about 30% in the polls, but that means all the candidates to his left have about 70%. Mr. Biden’s front-runner status as a perceived moderate (changes in his stands leave him to the left of Hillary Clinton ) doesn’t demonstrate that the party’s primary-goers tilt moderate. It shows they’re mostly progressive, and the perceived moderate is getting that part of the base. The Democratic Party really HAS gone sharply left, and everyone knows.

Shall we be rude? Oh, let’s. Everyone knows Donald Trump is a mental case, including I believe Donald Trump. Why else does he keep insisting he is an “extremely stable genius”? It’s as if he knows a lot of people are certain he’s neither.

It would be nice here to say, “I don’t mean mental case. I mean his mind is a raucous TV funhouse; that he is immature, unserious, and at the mercy of poor impulse control; that he doesn’t exercise power intelligently but emotionally, and with an eye, always to personal needs.” But mental case will do.

He just fired his third national security adviser, by Twitter , under contested circumstances. They had apparently argued: the president was going to invite the Taliban, that band of gangsters, mooks and morons who housed the terrorists who killed 3,000 of us 18 years ago this week, to Camp David. Camp David! The august retreat where presidents host great nations and great allies. Where FDR met with Churchill and Reagan walked with Thatcher.

No one who knows what history IS would do this. No one who knows the American people would do it. No one who felt 9/11 in his bones would do it. But a guy going for a cheap handshake and a triumphant photo would. It’s the kind of idea a mental case might readily entertain.

By my observation something is going on with Mr. Trump’s supporters. They now concede much more about him in private than they did in the past. They use words like “unpredictable” or “emotional” or “a little chaotic.” They say, “Well, he may be crazy but maybe that’s what’s needed to keep his enemies hopping.” He may not be a good man, they concede, but the swamp has defeated good men.

What is interesting is that they no longer say what they used to—“You’ve got it wrong, he’s stable, a successful businessman, a realist.” And they no longer compare him to Reagan.

His most frequent public defenders now believe he’s a screwball, which is why they no longer devote their time to lauding him but to attacking his critics.

They’re uncomfortable. He is wearing his own people down.

To Thursday night’s debate:

The great question isn’t who got the most time or who got in a good shot, those things are rarely as important as they seem at the moment. The real question is: Did the candidates in the row of podiums show any sign that they are aware they’re going too far left? That they have come across in previous debates as extreme and outside the mainstream?

Maybe a little. There seemed to be some recalibrating. No one bravely declared they’ll outlaw all private health insurance. Ms. Warren in fact repeatedly and rather brazenly ducked the question. It must be showing up in her polls that telling more than 100 million people you’ll take away their health insurance isn’t a “popular idea.” No one called for open borders, or federal funding for abortions for transgender women. There was a lot of identity politics and autobiography.

My first impression was that so many of the contenders are such accomplished TV performers with such rounded, practiced sentences that are so dramatically delivered. It is hard to remember but JFK and Nixon were a little shy to be on TV in their 1960 debate, and a little formal. Jimmy Carter, too, 20 years later, with Reagan—they had a certain muted tone. Up until 2000 or so, national TV was a place where you would appropriately feel nervous. Now candidates are so smooth, so TV-ready. Performers in their natural habitat.

This isn’t new, of course. But each cycle it seems a little more so, and a little more unsettling.

Ms. Warren was relatively quiet, almost recessive during the first half, and emerged unscathed as Bernie Sanders and Mr. Biden went at each other. Mr. Biden was fine. As Mr. Sanders spoke and gesticulated in his wide and ranty way I remembered that sometimes the thing that works against you is also what works for you. He comes across like your angry Menshevik uncle in the attic, but like that uncle he means what he says, is sincere and convinced, and that has its own power.

*   *   *

I close with a last thing everyone knows, if they only think a minute. When we talk about politics we all obsess on alt-right and progressive left, those peas in a sick pod, and no one speaks of the center, which is vast and has something neither way-left nor way-right has, and that is a motivating love for America itself, and not for abstractions and ideologies and theories of the case. As a group they are virtually ignored, and yet they are the center of everything. They include those of the left who are no longer comfortable in a new progressive party. And rightists not comfortable with Mr. Trump, or with the decisions and approaches of the Bush era. It includes those experiencing ongoing EID—extreme ideological discomfort.

In this cycle they continue to be the great ignored. And everyone knows.

This is on the danger of pushing it too far. It is a delicate business knowing what the moment will allow. You can be right in intent and wrong on execution, and if you’re wrong on that it may not matter you were right in intent. A great woman in business and the arts once told me the most dangerous place to be is significantly ahead of the curve. People will dismiss you as too far out. Better to be just a little ahead of the curve, which allows people to wonder if you might be a visionary. She in fact was a visionary, and careful not to seem too many steps ahead.

A great challenge in politics and diplomacy is to see in real time the line between the opening that should be pursued and the trap that must be avoided. And, once you’ve made that calculation, not to push things too far. It can be delicate. You have to be like a safecracker who files down his fingers so he’ll feel every click.

China pushed Hong Kong too far the past few years, bullying it, trying to pull it into a closer, more smothering political embrace. Hong Kong pushed back. Are the demonstrators now pushing it too far? I hope not but fear they may be. They’ve already won—humiliating the chief executive, who this week backed down on the issue that sparked the rebellion, and embarrassing China, which found itself with a World Opinion Catastrophe on its hands. The demonstrators made a statement, successfully—not easy to do in this world. They asserted certain implicit boundaries for Chinese behavior. They gave it a warning: push Hong Kong around and the price will be unrest and humiliation.

The protesters have sustained their demonstrations and vow they will continue. They demand firmer autonomy and more democracy. China, angry at the disruptions, some violent, and shutdowns, had already moved forces closer. Will Beijing again push things too far? Will it intervene militarily? Is a collision with world-wide implications coming?

I hope the demonstrators know what they’re doing and aren’t pushing it too far.

The Democratic presidential candidates are pushing it too far. No left-wing idea is too much. Nothing, no sense of political reality, is hemming them in. They are like progressive Barry Goldwaters : Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue. The president meanwhile is so crazily taken with his own power that he redraws hurricane maps.

Everyone is pushing it too far. My way of explaining this to myself is that everyone now making decisions grew up in the past 60 years, a time of historic wealth creation, human growth, relative stability. And they can’t help it, they think this is normal. They think life is nice! They’ve lost a tragic sense about history. They often accuse those who disagree with them of being on “the wrong side of history,” as if it has a side, as if it flows ever upward.

It’s odd but in this cynical age they’ve grown too trusting of good fortune.

They assume no one will, through accident, miscalculation or madness, launch a nuclear missile. They assume these robots we’re inventing, the artificial intelligence, will ultimately be benign—the authorities will make sure they don’t make life monstrous. And so the busy geniuses in their genius campuses, all born in stability, mostly born in a postpatriotic and post-Christian West in which old loyalties not only lessened but came to be seen as wicked, are doing their thing, largely unregulated and in secret.

Don’t you think it will all turn out well and only benefit mankind?

No. You think they’ll push it too far.

One thing I miss is the Professional Worriers who populated previous generations in government. They were a special type in foreign affairs, men who were by nature concerned that some international move or eruption would result in “heightened tensions” and “instability” and who counseled “prudence.” They were usually veteran diplomats. They were extremely boring. They were always cautioning. They were worth their weight in gold. They didn’t trust history—they’d seen it go bad before World War II, in Korea and Vietnam. So they were careful. They never wanted to push it too far.

I end with Britain and the Brexit saga, which turned chaotic this week in Parliament with a series of defeats for the new prime minister, Boris Johnson, and defections and expulsions on the Conservative side, including the resignation of Mr. Johnson’s brother.

What a lot of wreckage.

A real crisis isn’t about “someone will lose and someone will win”; it’s about “something will be changed—a reality that reigned in the past won’t be reigning anymore.”

Brexit is a real crisis.

The cultural composition of the Conservative Party is being changed. Out are the great and stately— Winston Churchill ’s grandson Nicholas Soames and former Chancellor of the Exchequer Kenneth Clarke. In are the crazy-haired and bodacious, technocrats and internet gurus. Out is austerity, in is high spending. All this echoes changes in American conservative thinking and style.

When Boris Johnson was elected I wondered: Is he the brute and brilliant force who can resolve this thing? Is he the only animal big enough to fight European leaders who will do anything to stop the jailbreak?

This week the only question was: At this extraordinary moment is Boris playing some grand and subtle strategy only he can see? Or is he flying by the seat of his pants, making it up as he goes along. Is he operating on anything that might be called a plan?

The question reached one of his most committed parliamentary supporters, who replied: “Bismarck never had a plan, he always improvised.” Meaning, I think: Mr. Johnson doesn’t have a plan, sometimes you can’t make one.

His objective isn’t wrong. A great nation cannot be at its own throat forever. Britain has endured destructive uncertainty for more than three years. Enough: It must be one thing or another, in Europe or not. The voters chose not. Exactly how Britain leaves it must be legislated.

Leadership in such a moment needs not only wit, presence and charisma, which Mr. Johnson has. It requires judgment, trustworthiness—that people have confidence in your thinking, your word. It is in those areas that Mr. Johnson fails.

Almost everything he did this week looked like pushing it too far.

A month ago he seemed the solution. He looks now the problem.

At this point Mr. Johnson should remember that politics is a game of addition, not subtraction, and limit the wreckage of the past week by taking back into the party those he threw out.

Sooner or later he’ll get the election he’s asking for, and it will likely put him against Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn, whose ideology amounts to a daily pushing-it-too-far. Mr. Johnson would be the favorite. Britain is always stronger than it thinks: It has a thriving economy and tough, capable economic players. And as it showed when Mr. Soames’s grandfather was in charge, it knows how to fight for its life. It can take Brexit. What it can’t take is Mr. Corbyn and Brexit.

So ends my paean to moderation—to not assuming things will go well, to a kind of watchfulness toward history. To not pushing it too far.

We feel the coolness of the mornings now. The school year has begun. Students are entering or returning to colleges and universities with a busy buzz of hope and anticipation.

The only way to begin any new endeavor is with a sense of excitement about life.

In connection to that, Anthony Kronman has a bracing book on American higher education, its purposes and problems. Mr. Kronman, a professor and former dean at Yale Law School, observes the academy in which he’s spent his career and doesn’t like everything he sees. He is generally progressive yet opposes the leveling produced by the steamroller of prevalent political, cultural and educational attitudes. It is a rich book, densely argued. I want to call it a cry of the heart, but it’s more like a cry of the brain, a calm and erudite one.

I focus on two points. One is an idea that has largely been lost, that was once so broadly held that it barely had to be voiced, and on which he performs a rousing rescue operation.

It is that higher education is a fundamentally moral enterprise whose purpose is to help students become better human beings. Universities should be devoted to not only the “transmission of skills” but the “shaping of souls.” Part of their great work “is to preserve, transmit and honor an aristocratic tradition of respect for human greatness.”

Higher education now tends toward specialized disciplines and “the accumulation of ever more recondite knowledge.” The core curriculum is largely gone; educators have no confidence in a required canon of great works. Mr. Kronman argues, echoing Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. , that students need to be directed toward the great questions as expressed in science, philosophy and art.

“Could it be,” he asks, “that there are better and worse ways of living—that there are grades of excellence in the work of being human—even if there is no single way that is demonstrably the best of all? Could it be that there is a form of education that increases a student’s chances of becoming an excellent human being, just as there are educational programs for those who want to be outstanding flute players and mechanics? And could it be that those who receive an education in human excellence are . . . better equipped to play a special and needed role in our democracy?”

Yes, he says. He praises the humanities, which “put the question of the meaning of life at the center of attention.” Among them: “What is love? Does death make life meaningless or is it, in Wallace Stevens ’ words, ‘the mother of beauty’?” “To what extent can we transcend the circumstances of our birth and join the company of others, living and dead, whose social, political and psychological situation is remote from our own? Does modern science illuminate the human condition or obscure it? And perhaps most important, among the diverse examples of lives in which these questions have been pursued with unusual courage and clarity . . . is there one or some that might serve as an inspiration for my own?” A statesman or saint whose life you just read? A poet, a physicist?

Even to consider such an education involves believing certain things. First, “that there is such a thing as character; that a person’s character can be better or worse; that character is shaped by education; and that one of the goals of higher education is to instill in the student a love of those things for which a person of fine character should care.”

The vocational approach, in contrast, involves the idea that life is all about work and the business of higher education is to prepare you for a profession. This approach ranks students, but in a limited way: It abstains on the question of who the student is. It has a restricted sense of excellence. It asks, Kronman says, “What do I need to learn to be a successful lawyer or computer scientist?” and ignores the more important, “What makes a whole life honorable and fulfilling?”

Wouldn’t you feel better if your son or daughter had gone off to study things like this?

Mr. Kronman offers a calm-minded perspective on the controversies colleges have been facing over the removal of statues and the renaming of buildings named for those who were admired by their contemporaries and now are seen as especially destructive sinners. The controversies usually focus on race and slavery. As I read Mr. Kronman’s book this week, NPR was reporting on universities taking down the pictures of their distinguished scientists who were white males. At Rockefeller University a visiting Rachel Maddow had asked: “What is up with the Dude Wall?” Everyone on it had won a Nobel Prize or Lasker Award. Yet the wall will be rearranged or redesigned, and other schools are following suit. The assumption is that the portraits send a message that to be thought great you must be white and male. This is assumed to be disheartening for the young. I wonder why it is not instigating of achievement. When I joined an overwhelmingly white male profession my thoughts ran more along the lines of “I’ll show you!” Which was human if not especially admirable. A more admirable response would have been, “One day, gentlemen, I’ll join you on that wall and, by expanding the parameters of achievement, inspire the young.”

Mr. Kronman comes down on the side of addition, not subtraction—for building new memorials, not toppling old ones. He’d like more context. But essentially he asks: Why erase history? Why not face it? Are we really “disfigured by emblems of unrighteousness”? Must everything be leveled and scrubbed clean?

He quotes Milan Kundera ’s “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting”:

“You begin to liquidate a people by taking away its memory. You destroy its books, its culture, its history. And then others write other books for it, give another culture to it, invent another history for it. Then the people slowly begins to forget what it is and what it was.”

Do we want to forget what it is and was?

Keeping names and statues serves as “a stimulus to modesty.” It reminds us how hard it has been to reach the more advanced position we hold today. It reminds us that even we, “with our more enlightened ideals, are human beings, with the same imperfections as our predecessors, bedeviled by the same tendency to overestimate ourselves.”

Shouldn’t we remember that we are no more able to see things in a perfect light than our ancestors were? The impulse to tear down “destroys the bridge of sympathy between the present and the past” and “invites a swaggering pride that weakens the power of moral imagination itself.”

Such memorials are like “thorns in our side,” reminding us “that others in the past, with human shortcomings like ours, have not always lived up to the better angels of their nature, and that we shall fail to do so as well. They remind us our moral achievements are hard-won and never entirely secure.”

I found all this thoughtful and refreshing. Happy Labor Day to the laborers who built the great and fabled nation that is still this day the hope of the world.

8/22/2This week we turn the column over to Edith Wharton, (1862-1937), the great woman of letters and author of the Gilded Age novels “The Age of Innocence,” “The House of Mirth” and “The Custom of the Country.” She was the first American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. She was also named a chevalier of the Legion of Honor for her valiant assistance to her beloved France during the World War I.

Mrs. Wharton:

I have been invited this late August evening to speak to the American people about the decline in their public manners, which has reached crisis stage.

I would have preferred a radio address by what is called nationwide hookup but I am told my voice, which is reminiscent of that of Eleanor Roosevelt, carries inferences of another age, which might undercut the pertinence and urgency of my message.

I freely admit that there are several ways to describe me, and fabulous old battle-ax is one. But I know some things about human society, and can well imagine the abrading effect of a widespread collapse of public courtesy.

You have all become very rude. Not from ignorance, as Americans were in the past, but from indifference and amid affluence.

In your daily dealings you have grown slovenly, indifferent and cold. A great nation cannot continue in this way. Nations run in part on manners; they are the lubricant that allows the great machine to hum.

Among the harassments I see you inflict on each other:

It is discourteous to walk down a busy sidewalk with your eyes trained on a cellphone, barreling forward with disregard for others who must carefully make way and negotiate their bodies around yours so as not to harm you. You must think you are more important than the other citizens of the sidewalk. Who told you this? Who lied to you in this way?
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Eyes on a phone and pods in your ears—have you no sense of community? You have detached from the reality around you, which is a subtle rebuff of your fellow citizens. You enter your own world. When Leonardo and Dr. Einstein entered their own worlds they encountered richness, a fierce originality that ultimately benefited all. Is that what you encounter?

You must have a sense of community! Take part, be part, see and hear. Share responsibility. Stop assuming everyone will work their way around you. That is the summoning of a calamity you will deserve.

You must come to understand that other people can hear you on the cellphone in confined public spaces such as the elevator. You must come to understand: Other people have a right not to hear your sound. They have a right not to hear your grating voice, your huffy exchanges that convey the banality of your interests, all of which, on a bad day, when spirits are low, can make those around you want to ruffle in their purse for a pistol with which to shoot themselves in the head.

It might be better if you were instead “there”—to make brief eye contact and nod, as if you are human beings on earth together. At the very least, understand you should delay the call until the elevator doors open.

Last week I was in a nail spa, as they’re called, idiotically. A woman in her 30s was screeching into her phone, which was on speakerphone mode. After a few moments I informed her she was disturbing others. She literally said: “I am closing a deal! I don’t care!”

And you wonder why socialism is making a comeback.

You have apparently forgotten that “Excuse me,” is a request, not a command. “Excuse me” is an abbreviated question: “Would you excuse me, please? Thank you.” All in a soft voice. It is not a command to be barked as you push down the aisle at Walgreens.

There is the matter of “No problem.” You perform a small courtesy, I thank you, you reply “No problem.” Which implies: If it were a problem, lady, I wouldn’t do it. “If it were at all challenging I would never be courteous.” Why would you admit this to a fellow citizen? Why demoralize her in this way?

Similarly with “No worries.” A young person emails and asks me to do something, perhaps attend an event. I reply carefully, with gratitude and honest regret, that I am unable. The response? Two words: “No worries.” I’m tempted to answer, “You don’t worry me, dearie.” Of course I don’t; it would be like slapping the maid. But “no worries” claims a certain precedence—“I am in charge and instruct you not to feel anxiety about frustrating my wishes.” Child, you’re not in charge. Try, “Thanks, I understand, I hope another time.”

First-name culture is fully established. It is vulgar and inhuman. It shows disrespect for person and privacy, and the mature experience it as assaultive. A first name is what you are called by your intimates, by friends and lovers. It does not belong in a stranger’s mouth. I may grant you permission to use it, that is my right. But you cannot seize permission—that is not your right.

I receive solicitations from people I’ve never met, “Dear Edie.” I honestly wonder: Do I know you? And then realize that’s what they want me to wonder, because if I think I might know them I’m more likely to respond. It’s not democratization, it’s marketing.

They take something from you when they take your name. And once they’ve taken that they will be taking more.

On the phone with the bank, regarding a recent transaction:

Bank worker: “Yes, Edith, how can we help you today?”

Me: “Ah. I am certain you are a very nice person and if I knew you I would quickly ask you to call me by my first name, but since we’re not old friends yet I would appreciate—”

Him (sullen, impatient, flat): “I’m-sorry-about-that-how-would-you- like-me-to-address-you?”

Me: “As your enemy. As the implacable foe of all you represent. Does that work?”

What the new world doesn’t understand is that when you address us as Miss, Mrs., Ms. or Mr., we usually say, “Feel free to use my first name.” Because we are democratic, egalitarian, and fear the guillotine. But we’re pleased when someone asks permission, and respond with the grateful effulgence of the losing side.

There is more to say but I must close.

I am not calling for a new refinement. That is beyond my capacity and your ability. It is possible you’re entrenched, as I said of the Vanderbilts, in a sort of Thermopylae of bad taste from which no earthly force can dislodge you.

Great nations have fallen over less.

I am merely suggesting a less selfish and vulgar way of being. Surely you can consider that.

If a political figure should come by whose slate consisted of “America, reclaim your manners” he would “break through” and win in a landslide. Because everyone in this country suffers—literally suffers—from the erosion of the essential public courtesies that allow us to move forward in the world happily, and with some hope.

Thank you. I am grateful to have you as a reader.

This week we turn the column over to the late Mike McAlary (1957-98), tabloid star and journalistic tough guy. Here’s Mike:

So I’m talking to this political guy, holds a significant office which I won’t tell you because it’s none of your business. We’re having breakfast in a high-end midtown hotel. Gleaming silver buffet, steam rising, nervous, deferential waiters. He’s right at home. They have everything—waffles, eggs benedict, golden hash browns.

Naturally he orders fresh berries and I have cantaloupe with a little china cup of cottage cheese. We sort of laugh, like we’re admitting. We’re so important, we must maintain our health for the good of the republic. Pols used to look like pigs, which was often an outer representation of an inner reality. It was all very honest! Now they’re gym rats, on our dime. “Vote for me, I’m completely fit!”

My business went to hell when it started maintaining its health. The old newsrooms—the whiskey in the lower-right drawer of the copy desk, the guy who’d call in sick in a blackout and the next morning forget, bump into his substitute, and scream at his editor: “You’re scheming to replace me!” The sound of the wires, hysterical with news. The nerve-jangling bedlam. Now it’s the dry tap-tap-tap in the gray felt cubicle when anyone’s in the newsroom, which they aren’t because they’ve all got a cable hit.

Anyway we’re talking and I ask about Epstein. You guys in Washington really interested in this story? He says, “First I have to tell you my Epstein joke: I was stunned to hear about the suicide of Jeffrey Epstein. And so was Jeffrey Epstein!”

I give him a laugh. Good try. But what are you saying? He shrugs. It’s a big subject at Hamptons fundraisers. Otherwise, eh, not really.

I’m thinking but this is the story with everything. Wealth, power, darkness. Princes and presidents. People with secrets. Rumors of spying. Even an English aristo moll on the lam.

He’s the most famous prisoner in America! They put him in a jail, where he supposedly tries to kill himself. So they move him to a special cell, heavily guarded 24/7. Don’t worry, he’s safe, he’s gonna face the music!

Then dawn on a Saturday in high August. Everyone important is away. It’s an entire city run by the second string—novices, kids and pension-bumpers at the police desk, the news desk, the hospital. It breaks like sudden thunder: Epstein is dead, he committed suicide in his cell!

And then, like, silence. Thunder’s followed by fog.

Government dummies up, no one knows nothin’. Finally on Monday the attorney general has a news conference. He’s very upset! What incompetence! That jail don’t work right!

But incompetence proves nothing, right? If Epstein killed himself, he chose the time he knew the guards were asleep. If Epstein was murdered, his killer chose the time he knew the guards were asleep. Incompetence is completely believable but insufficient.

The papers are doing their stories about those strange Americans with their quirky ways burning up the internet with their quaint conspiracies. But who would not wonder about foul play? With all the people who’d want him dead?

This whole thing is a big stinkin’, fumin’ hunk of foul-up. And there’s still time to get this story. I miss the tough, crazy beat reporters of yore. Like me. I got cancer and was on chemo when I got a tip about a police-brutality story. I tore the IV out of my arm and ran to the sound of the crap!

So Jimmy Breslin it. McAlary it. Hell, Steve Dunleavy it. There was a story, too good to check: Dunleavy gets there early when the Berlin Wall’s starting to fall, sees the kids dancing in the streets. He wires home, says send me a dozen sledgehammers. Next day he hands them out to the kids, they jump on the wall and start hammering. The photographs were beautiful! Caught an existential truth! That’s a reporter!

Work every source and angle, every prison guard and cop you know—you’re supposed to know them! Pete Hamill would have known the estranged sister of the night nurse at the ER. He’d wait at her house, she’d tell him the EMTs came in laughing about “Who do you think killed the guy who suicided?” Or maybe she’d say they were nervous and just plopped him down and scrammed. But he’d have gotten the color, the feel. And it would suggest something.

Where is this Maxwell lady hiding? You believe nobody knows where she is? You’re an idiot. Go find Maxwell House! Live on the stoop! Ask her: Did you flip? Because I figure she went state’s evidence on Epstein and he knew. “Are you in hiding in fear for your life? Who wants to kill you, Ms. Maxwell?”

It’s like reporting now takes place in green rooms. People say it’s all gossip but it’s not, because gossip is fun. It’s more like data points formalized around some vaporous Official View.

It’s like every great media organization is tied up in this complicated, soul-crushing, virtue-signalling fearfulness, this vast miasma of progressive political theory and ideology and correctness and “please report to HR”—and it has nothing to do with the mission. The mission is to get the story!

Reporters and editors, they’re not the fabulous old drunks and girl reporter miscreants, they’re like—like normal people! Reporters aren’t supposed to be normal! And they’re very tidy because they’re extremely important! You get the impression they became reporters to affect the discourse. “I’m going into journalism to press for cultural and political justice.” These—these deconstructionist intellectuals! These twinkies with soft hands from Phillips Exeter Andover whatever. These mere political operatives. These people with grievances, who’ve never had anything to grieve because their lives were the red satin lining of a music box.

If I was in charge I’d say, “Thank you for your boundless efforts to secure the greater progress for the polity. But I was wondering if, in your spare moments, you could be troubled to help us cover the biggest scandal of your blanking lifetimes?”

The editors don’t honor old shoe-leather ways. The owner wants you out there branding the brand on cable so the brand is being branded.

And those losers in Washington. Lemme tell you what they’re thinking. They’re thinking New York cares and L.A. cares but nobody else in America cares about this pervert and his fancy friends. They’re thinking it’s August, play it out, let the story sink in the sands of time. Because it’s a story they don’t like. My hunch, they have no real confidence in themselves or the system. They don’t think they themselves are gonna find out if Epstein was killed or committed suicide.

Which if I’m right is a story.

Get me a drink. In the drawer in the desk over there.

I bet you miss me. And Breslin and the rest. Because we gave it all color. Because deep down we respected life, which has color and facts.

Stories, yarns. The feel of it, the old romance of it.

Bled right out by the theoreticians. Good luck with the brand.