Peggy Noonan

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?”

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.