Peggy Noonan

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.

Moon river wider than a mile
I’m crossing you in style someday

I’m in the waiting area of the doctor’s office and it comes on the Muzak system and I’m sitting peacefully, not scrolling or looking at headlines, and I hear the music and remember the lyrics and my eyes start to fill.

That old American song, mid-20th century, and those words . . .

Someone once said a hallmark of good music is that it is confident of the values it asserts. In this case those values include tranquillity, order, harmony. But really it’s a song about yearning.

It has always seemed to me such an American song. I see a lot of songs as “such an American song.” Here are two examples off the top of my head. Al Jolson’s “She’s a Latin From Manhattan,” is about a 1920s vaudeville hoofer. Sultry, glamorous Latins are all the rage on the stage, so she’s changed her name and walks around with a tambourine passing herself off as a mysterious lady from Madrid or Havana. A guy in the audience falls in love but then thinks: Wait, I remember her! “Though she does a rumba for us / And she calls herself Dolores / She was in a Broadway chorus / Known as Susie Donahue.” It’s about wanting to make it in America and being whatever you have to be to do it.

Another “such an American song”: “Tik Tok,” by Kesha. “Wake up in the morning feeling like P Diddy / Grab my glasses, I’m out the door; I’m gonna hit this city.” I guess it’s about a pretty worldly person, but in my imagination she’s a 15-year-old kid from Jersey, she’s on the Route 4 bus from Paramus, she’s from a beat-up family, no one’s taking care of her, she’s on her own, but she’s imagining an alternative self, this tough, careless, glamorous self she’s going to turn into when she gets to New York. It’s about the stories we tell ourselves to keep going, the worlds we imagine to keep up our morale.

But “Moon River”—I’ve always thought it such an American song because there’s not only yearning in it but loneliness. This comports with my sense of America as a vast place settled by people from somewhere else, most of whom were on a losing strain—no money, no prospects. Bandits who hadn’t been caught, adventurers, dreamers, earnest younger brothers who stood to inherit nothing, lost girls on their own. They got a chance and left families behind, left centuries of a certain way of being behind. In this way our parent-forgetting country was born and invented itself. They got to America, pushed west, lit out for the territories, searched for Sutter’s gold. Or, dragged from Africa, lived in the South, joined the great migration North. Always on the move, all of us.

“Moon River” is about how you’re going to move. It’s a promise to yourself: “I’m crossing you in style someday.” It’s not enough you’ll cross that river, you’ll cross it in style. “I will rise and everyone will see it, everyone will know. I’m going to make money and be respected.”

Oh, dream maker
You heartbreaker
Wherever you’re going I’m going your way

That’s America, the dream maker and heartbreaker, but you’re intertwined with it, you’re not alone.

Two drifters off to see the world
There’s such a lot of world to see

I’m nobody from nowhere but it’s all out there waiting for me. You’re not really American until you have a poignant sense of the bigness of things. When “Moon River” came out, in 1961, the American president had a little plaque on his desk: “O, God, Thy sea is so great and my boat is so small.”

We’re after the same rainbow’s end
Waiting round the bend
My huckleberry friend
Moon river and me

It’s all within grasp, all possible. Again, I’m not alone. The lyricist Johnny Mercer nodded to Huckleberry Finn, the abandoned boy who shoved off down the river and came upon the man who became his best friend, the escaped slave Jim. “The huckleberry reference was an attempt to engage in a suggestive, even protometaphorical manner with America’s central and founding dilemma, race,” Mercer said.

Actually he never said that. I made it up. But years ago that’s what I thought was on his mind, that we’re all on this journey together and have to get it right. And maybe it is what Mercer meant.

That song came from our culture.

And I’m thinking of what the words mean to me as they call my name and I meet with the doctor and have my exam.

Then, because this is America and we are citizens, our conversation turned to what has been happening.

The doctor is worried about his three kids in grade school. They see the headlines and hear everything. They do shooter drills in their schools. “And it’s everywhere.”

Yes. I said one of the painful things we’re witnessing is the loss of the fantasy worried parents had, the fantasy of “I can give all this up and move to Ketchum, Idaho. I can leave the unsafe place and go to a safe place and bring up my children apart from all this.”

I said the lesson of the last 20 years is that there is no safe place.

He agreed: “This is us.” Then he said, “So we’ll have to solve it.”

You’re hating that I left the music, aren’t you? I hate it.

But here a responsible person would note that we are in a crisis, as the doctor suggested. It’s not a problem, it’s a crisis, it’s continuing, it has a hundred causes, we have to chip away at it hard. In a crisis you try this thing and then that; you experiment, boldly. You become daring.

We argue about which solutions are right, but all the solutions are part of the solution. We are in a mental health crisis; it’s not a right-wing talking point. We need more hospitalizations and more hospitals. We do need red-flag laws so that those who are potentially harmful to themselves or others have their guns taken. We do need deep national background checks, and let judges adjudicate disputes. We do have to help the single mother who knows her son is a ticking time bomb—she needs a better response than “There’s nothing we can do until he hurts someone.” We should try banning assault weapons. I don’t care if we don’t have statistics proving it will help—do it anyway, as a crisis measure, do it for 10 years again and see if it helps. If the National Rifle Association were wise, it would be supple now, in crisis. If the president were wise, he’d look to the country and put distance between the NRA and himself. If Democrats were wise they wouldn’t turn this into a game.

I want so badly on this pretty August day to tie this back to the old songs and their confidently asserted values. I can’t. There’s no nice song about people scared for their kids and afraid for their country.

A few points on round two of the Democratic debates in Detroit. The first night was good, full of fight and clarifying. The second was sour, with candidates jumping around with their small strategies.

Parties forget that in such debates an aggregate impression emerges. Here is the less important and perhaps temporary one:

The Democrats are showing little hopefulness; they’re not voicing any expansive sense of faith in their country. I understand it is the job of challengers to lambaste the status quo, to criticize, to say, “This isn’t working.” But the rhetorical atmosphere of the administration has been grim for some time. American carnage, cities are dead and swimming in garbage, violent rats are eating our feet, throw ’em out, lock ’em up.

So you’d think challengers would quickly follow their critiques with a certain modified strategic confidence. Instead they’re out-grimming the president. We chain and cage women and children, no one here has ever seen a doctor, if you have a heart attack on the street you’ll be lucky if they bother to step over your body, they’ll probably use you as an ashtray, cops are racists who hope you commit crimes so they can beat you, corporations have rape rooms.

It is extreme and weirdly negative. You’d think someone would pop out with, “Jake, let me tell you why America doesn’t constantly make me want to throw up in my mouth.” Or, “Dana, I’ve actually met a few Americans and we’re painting them a little darkly here.”

The more important aggregate policy impression is also extreme. In each debate they are branding themselves that way.

I never minded the phrase “Medicare for All” because I figured it meant this: “We would like Medicare or some other governmental entity to be available to all who need it, and will come up with ways to ease them in and give people in trouble a break. What everyone wants is the plastic card in the wallet that says you’ve got coverage, so the ambulance isn’t turned away and the kids are treated. We can work this out. We’re America.”

America would respond to that. A great nation must take care of its stressed, its incapable, its unlucky.

But I don’t think that the American people understood, at least until the first debates, that Medicare for All means this: “All private insurance is abolished, we’re taking it away, you’re going to be forced into a program we’ll run, we’re going to squish this down on your head, the hospitals will have to conform with our directives whether they bankrupt it or not, and the health-insurance industry and its jobs will be extinguished.”

And on top of that we will all have to pretend the cost of this will come from savings due to reduced paperwork, or a tax on the wealthy.

It’s all so crazy. I heard no one in the debates say, “Guys, you are making a mistake to give the state all the power in this area. The government can rarely make things dramatically better in huge and complicated matters like this, but it is always capable of making it worse.”

I would be very surprised if most people watching didn’t think that’s exactly what they’ll do, make it worse.

I didn’t hear anyone say, “As you revolutionize the entire health sector, you have to be leery of upsetting all the things that make American medicine, for all its flaws, the most advanced and cutting-edge system in the world, with the greatest doctors and scientists.”

Some candidates pointed out that such sweeping plans were impractical, unrealistic, unworkable. I didn’t hear any philosophical or historical reservations.

Only three years ago there was a presidential election in which 129 million people voted for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. The 63 million Trump supporters are probably not going to support, this year, the creation of a huge new national health service, which is what we’re talking about. But there’s no reason to believe most of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters would support it either.

Have we changed so much in three years?

Joe Biden is considered the big moderate and leads in the polls. He is not for Medicare for All but for a fully restored ObamaCare. But he is chipping away at his own moderation every day. On Wednesday night alone he said there will be no fracking or fossil fuels in a Biden administration. Earlier he’d gone back on his longtime support for the Hyde amendment, which forbids federal funding of abortion. I guess he assumes these bows to progressives are politically required, and his moderate base will forgive him or assume he doesn’t mean it. He may be correct, but it is disappointing to those who respect him. Mr. Biden, however, has something I haven’t seen remarked on that sort of buttresses the perception that he is moderate. It is that he bothers to be a gentleman. He pats your arm, he has a kindly way and smiles wryly at his notes as somebody attacks him. I feel warmly toward that old style, which appears to be disappearing because men now fear, or rationalize, that the huge daily effort of being a gentleman will be seen as patronizing, patriarchal or class-based.

Of the lower-tier candidates it can be said after four debates that three should leave and declutter the stage, and three should stay and get louder.

Beto O’Rourke is bringing nothing to the conversation and his candidacy will not succeed. The sense he’s a flake is so broadly held that it was a relief Tuesday night when he didn’t jump on the podium and denounce himself for being a slave owner in a former life. You get the impression that if he admitted to himself that this isn’t working it would become a self-extinguishing event that he could not tolerate. But at some point optimism becomes narcissism. He has reached that point.

Mayor Bill de Blasio similarly adds nothing. Everyone in New York sees right through him. His reputation is one of a lazy gym rat with no sense of responsibility and no moral weight. Recently in some crisis someone started drumming up a “Where’s de Blasio?” campaign to embarrass him for being in Iowa when he was needed back home. It went nowhere because nobody in New York thinks anything would be better if he came back. Why is he on a national stage?

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s candidacy is similarly without meaning or point. The only rationale for her candidacy is that she apparently thinks she invented standing up for women.

All of them keep more-serious people from getting more time.

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, on the other hand, has serious, principled foreign-policy views and interesting domestic ones, and continues as an impressive underdog. You get the impression she’s out there on her own. Good for her, she’s got guts.

Former Rep. John Delaney is trying to be a voice for common sense. He’s centrist and knows his financial stuff. More, please, and louder.

Marianne Williamson is bringing an unusual spiritual approach and an arguably eloquent voice on where and who we are. She wants a Department of Peace. I am not being sarcastic when I say it can be hard in life to stay exactly who you are. She has. Onward, Aimee Semple McFearless.

We often make historical parallels here. History doesn’t repeat itself but it does rhyme, as clever people say. And sometimes it hiccups. Here is a hiccup.

We start with the moral and political catastrophe that was the French Revolution. It was more a nationwide psychotic break than a revolt—a great nation at its own throat, swept by a spirit not only of regicide but suicide. For 10 years they simply enjoyed killing each other. They could have done what England was doing—a long nonviolent revolution, a gradual diminution of the power of king and court, an establishment of the rights of the people and their legislators so that the regent ended up a lovely person on a stamp. Instead they chose blood. Scholars like to make a distinction between the Revolution and the Terror that followed, but “the Terror was merely 1789 with a higher body count.” From the Storming of the Bastille onward, “it was apparent that violence was not just an unfortunate side effect. . . . It was the Revolution’s source of collective energy. It was what made the Revolution revolutionary.”

That is from Simon Schama’s masterpiece “Citizens,” his history of the revolution published in 1989, its 200th anniversary. It is erudite, elegant and heroically nonideological.

John Adams, across the sea in America, quickly understood what was happening in France and voiced alarm. In contrast his old friend Thomas Jefferson egged on the revolution and lent it his moral prestige. Faced with news of the guillotines, he reverted to abstractions. He was a genius with a true if hidden seam of malice, and rarely overconcerned with the suffering of others.

The revolution had everything—a ruling class that was clumsy, decadent, inert; a pathetic king, a queen beyond her depth, costly wars, monstrous debt, an impervious and unreformable administrative state, a hungry populace. The task of the monarchy was to protect the poor, but the king had “abdicated this protective role.” Instead of ensuring grain supplies at a reasonable price, Mr. Schama notes, the government committed itself to the new modern principle of free trade: “British textiles had been let into France, robbing Norman and Flemish spinners and weavers of work.” They experienced it as “some sort of conspiracy against the People.”

One does see parallels. But they’re not what I mean.

It was a revolution largely run by sociopaths. One, Robespierre, the “messianic schoolmaster,” saw it as an opportunity for the moral instruction of the nation. Everything would be politicized, no part of the citizen’s life left untouched. As man was governed by an “empire of images,” in the words of a Jacobin intellectual, the new régime would provide new images to shape new thoughts. There would be pageants, and new names for things. They would change time itself! The first year of the new Republic was no longer 1792, it was Year One. To detach farmers from their superstitions, their Gregorian calendar and its saints’ days, they would rename the months. The first month would be in the fall, named for the harvest. There would be no more weeks, just three 10-day periods each month.

So here is our parallel, our hiccup. I thought of all this this week because I’ve been thinking about the language and behavioral directives that have been coming at us from the social and sexual justice warriors who are renaming things and attempting to control the language in America.

There is the latest speech guide from the academy, the Inclusive Communications Task Force at Colorado State University. Don’t call people “American,” it directs: “This erases other cultures.” Don’t say a person is mad or a lunatic, call him “surprising/wild” or “sad.” “Eskimo,” “freshman” and “illegal alien” are out. “You guys” should be replaced by “all/folks.” Don’t say “male” or “female”; say “man,” “woman” or “gender non-binary.”

In one way it’s the nonsense we’ve all grown used to, but it should be said that there’s an aspect of self-infatuation, of arrogance, in telling people they must reorder the common language to suit your ideological preferences. There is something mad in thinking you should control the names of things. Or perhaps I mean surprising/wild.

I see in it a spirit similar to that of the Terror. There is a tone of, “I am your moral teacher. Because you are incapable of sensitivity, I will help you, dumb farmer. I will start with the language you speak.”

An odd thing is they always insist they’re doing this in the name of kindness and large-spiritedness. And yet, have you ever met them? They’re not individually kind or large-spirited. They’re more like messianic schoolmasters.

Offices and schools are forced to grapple with all the new gender-neutral pronouns. Here a handy guide from a website purporting to help human-resources departments in midsize businesses. It is headlined. “Gender Neutral Pronouns—What They Are & How to Use Them.”

He/She—Zie, Sie, Ey, Ve, Tey, E

Him/Her—Zim, Sie, Em, Ver, Ter, Em

His/Her—Zir, Hir, Eir, Vis, Tem, Eir

Himself/Herself—Zieself, Hirself, Eirself, Verself, Terself, Emself

It’s wrong, when you meet a new co-worker, to ask his pronouns. (We don’t say “preferred” pronouns—that “implies someone’s gender is a preference”!) You don’t want him wondering if you think he’s transgender or nonbinary. Instead, introduce yourself in a way that summons his pronouns: “Hi, I’m Jim and my pronoun is he/him.” Use “they” a lot. It’s gender neutral. Suggested sentence: “I spoke to the marketing director and they said they’d get back to me.”

This is grammatically incorrect but so what? Correct grammar, and the intelligibility it allows, is a small price to pay for inclusion and equality.

We are being asked to memorize all this, to change hundreds of years of grammar and usage, to accommodate the needs or demands of a group that perceives itself as beleaguered.

There’s a funny but painful spoof of all this on YouTube. A seemingly friendly but dogmatic teacher of adult immigrants in English as a Second Language class introduces them to the 63 new pronouns. They are understandably flummoxed. An Asian woman announces she identifies as a girl and then shrinks in fear this might not be allowed. A confused Eastern European man asks the pronoun of his desk. The Central American asks if the new pronouns mean gay. “You’re not learning English so you can be a bigot, are you?” the teacher demands.

And there are the office arguments about bathroom policy, which I gather are reaching some new peak. There can no longer be a men’s room and a women’s room, so we can have one expanded bathroom everyone can use. No, we’ll have three. But there may be a stigma to using the third, so keep two bathrooms but remove all designations. But the women don’t want to put on their makeup with men coming in and out. But the men don’t want women walking in on them—that’s a harassment suit waiting to happen!

It’s all insane. All of it.

But we’re moving forward, renaming the months and the sexes, reordering the language.

You wonder how the people who push all this got so much power. But then, how did Robespierre?

I want to kick away from the daily and get to something larger.

We are a nation of just under 330 million. We have a lot of disputes, always have, argument is one of our traditions. To make it all work, to keep this thing going, we have to give each other a little room, a little space. We have so many different thoughts and ways. We have to be easy with each other, not pick on each other all the time.

Three small points we labor mightily to connect:

Joe Biden has me thinking about . . . Julius Caesar. The political class of Rome wanted Caesar gone and successfully dispatched him with 23 wounds. But the conspirators themselves came to unhappy ends—Caesar’s base hated them and chased them out of town! Nobody loves an assassin. The only political survivors were Caesar’s designated heir and the leaders who didn’t join the conspiracy.

That is the predicament of the 23 contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination who are not named Joe Biden. They want the front-runner gone. But they don’t really want to be the one who does him in. Pete Buttigieg doesn’t want you saying he has a lean and hungry look! Amy Klobuchar doesn’t want it said she really is mean. The safe course for them is to let someone else do it, then mourn, with poignant words, the end of an epic 20th-century career.

Kamala Harris got a boost from wielding her switchblade in the debates, but that’s a moment, not a sustainable primary lifestyle, and it left a mark, not a fatal wound.

So how are they thinking? If in time they feel they have to, they’ll do what Caesar’s foes did and all join together and take a stab. But again, that didn’t work out well. So for now they’ll make small feints on Mr. Biden’s statements and record, have their people be as poisonous as possible off the record, and wait for him to stab himself to death. Which in his previous presidential primary races he’s tended to do.

What they’re banking on is self-sabotage and deteriorating cognitive abilities, as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sweetly suggested in an interview with the New Yorker’s David Remnick: “I think there are some folks that are of a certain age where you can kind of question their capacity.”

Donald Trump, she said, is an example. And Joe Biden? “I think . . . his performance on the stage kind of raised some questions with respect to that. But I don’t want to say, just because someone is 79, they can’t or shouldn’t run for president.”

“Just because he’s 79.” Well done, missy.

And so to Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s public fight with Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and the three other members of “The Squad”—Reps. Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley. I gather many on the left are lauding their cool defiance, but to me they look surprised, flummoxed and resentful.

Shortly after being elected, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez seemed to think she had Mrs. Pelosi under control—she’s the future, after all, and Nancy’s the past and surely knows it. She curled her hand around the speaker’s arm in the famous Rolling Stone cover, as you might with a grandma to whom you enjoy showing particular warmth and who happens to have a big estate and no designated heir. Someone has to inherit it!

What do I suspect The Squad may know now that they didn’t know then? That grandma has been observing them and sees what others see. She doesn’t mind that they’re hot, aggressive and ideological, but they don’t confine their fire to outside the tent. They attack moderates as sellouts, racists, child abusers.

And no one who disagrees with them ever operates in good faith. There is a disrespect there. They’re tough, they’re bringing it, not winging it; but they’re so immersed in ideology that they never give a thought to mercy. With Ms. Omar and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez especially, it’s all identity politics and the accusing finger—you’re criticizing me because you’re greedy, misogynist, classist. And they always claim victimhood—they receive death threats and are called bigoted things, people are mean to them.

People are mean to everybody.

AOC especially is not without skill and talent. She is energetic, determined, verbally fluid, has a gift for acting, for seeming ingenuous. She weeps when she hears tragic testimony at committee hearings. She feels for everyone. Well, for some people. Not for Mrs. Pelosi. “I think sometimes people think that . . . we have a relationship,” she said, slyly, to Mr. Remnick. “I was assigned to two of some of the busiest committees. . . . Sometimes I wonder if they’re trying to keep me busy.” Oh Einstein, they may be!

The more serious Democratic Party problem with Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and Ms. Omar is not that their great talent seems to be for political manipulation, or that they constantly set fires, portray the universe as consisting of angels and demons, and put people off with their arrogance while exciting them with their ferocity—though all these things are true.

It is that in doing these dramatic things, and amplifying them through their impressive social-media skills, or compulsions, they have fully broken through and made their mark. In their fame and celebrity they altered the face and feel of the party into something that appears more radical, more hissing and accusatory, more hard-left.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s success last June scared fellow Democrats across the country into thinking she is the future, that they must get aboard and get with her program, which many of the party’s presidential nominees have. She has very effectively changed the ideological shape of the Democratic Party with her de facto open-borders policy and other extremisms.

Mature liberals and moderates know this will come back to bite them.

She does this from a completely safe district. She can’t be primaried from the left. She feels a job security no Democratic moderate can feel. Nancy Pelosi said a glass of water could be elected in her district if it were a Democrat, and it’s true.

For all these reasons Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has been destructive to her party’s chances in 2020. She is a one woman Committee to Re-Elect the President.

The way I read it now, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has been dunked on by a pro and schooled by Big Mama. If she were capable of observing, reflecting and absorbing, as opposed to aggressing, reacting and accusing, she could learn something.

She will not learn a thing. And, a prediction: AOC may look for richer fields back home in rising lefty New York, where mayoral candidates can’t possibly be too progressive and where the revolution will be won!

Here I quickly note what others often tell me: Nancy Pelosi is usually not very clear in public. You listen and walk away uncomprehending. When she takes questions from the press, she is almost never not confusing. Here is a favorite: “I don’t support it, but it’s not, you know—in other words, there is an emergency. There is a burning building. We have to put out the fire. I’m not having to have a conversation about the color of the buckets that the water is in.”

Observers tell me this is not inadequacy but strategy. Publicly she benefits from murk—it gives her a place to hide as she plans her next move. (Eisenhower was like this: He enjoyed vagueness; it maintained his freedom.)

But in private, Pelosi couldn’t be clearer. To her caucus’s progressives at the closed-door meeting Wednesday morning: “Some of you are here to make a beautiful pâté, but we’re making sausage.” “You got a complaint? You come and talk to me about it. But do not tweet about our members and expect us to think that that is just OK.” On attacks on moderates: “Think twice. Actually, don’t think twice. Think once.”

Really, this is a clever woman.

I’m not really big on purple mountain majesties. I’d love America if it were a hole in the ground though yes, it’s beautiful. I don’t love it only because it’s “an idea,” as we all say now. That strikes me as a little bloodless. Baseball didn’t come from an idea, it came from us—a long cool game punctuated by moments of high excellence and utter heartbreak, a team sport in which each player operates on his own. The great movie about America’s pastime isn’t called “Field of Ideas,” it’s called “Field of Dreams.” And the scene that makes every grownup weep is when the dark-haired young catcher steps out of the cornfield and walks toward Kevin Costner, who suddenly realizes: That’s my father.

He asks if they can play catch, and they do, into the night.

The great question comes from the father: “Is this Heaven?” The great answer: “It’s Iowa.”

Which gets me closer to my feelings on patriotism. We are a people that has experienced something epic together. We were given this brilliant, beautiful thing, this new arrangement, a political invention based on the astounding assumption that we are all equal, that where you start doesn’t dictate where you wind up. We’ve kept it going, father to son, mother to daughter, down the generations, inspired by the excellence and in spite of the heartbreak. Whatever was happening, depression or war, we held high the meaning and forged forward. We’ve respected and protected the Constitution.

And in the forging through and the holding high we’ve created a history, traditions, a way of existing together.

We’ve been doing this for 243 years now, since the first Fourth of July, and in spite of all the changes that have swept the world.

It’s all a miracle. I love America because it’s where the miracle is.

In celebration of that miracle, three books that touch on the why, how and what of loving America.

Start with E.B. White on why. America should be loved, tenderly, for a large and obvious reason: because it is a democracy. In July 1943, at the height of World War II, he tried to define what that means.

“Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time,” he wrote in the New Yorker. “It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is a letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn’t been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad.”

That’s from the recent book “E.B. White On Democracy.” In the introduction Jon Meacham notes that Franklin D. Roosevelt loved White’s short essay. One of his speechwriters, the playwright Robert E. Sherwood, said FDR read it aloud at gatherings, in his unplaceably patrician accent, often adding a homey coda at the end: “Them’s my sentiments exactly.”

There’s a lot of sweetness in this collection.

Here’s an argument on how to love America:

There was a young man in 1838, an aspiring politician almost too shy to admit his ambition to himself or others, who gave a talk to a Midwestern youth group. It was a speech about public policy, but it showed a delicate appreciation of psychology, of how people feel about what’s happening around them.

America’s Founders—“the patriots of ’76,” he called them—were now all gone, James Madison having died 19 months before.

In their absence Americans felt lost. Those men stood for this country, they modeled what it was in their behavior. Admiration for them had united the country. Now, without them, people felt on their own. First principles were being forgotten, mob rule was rising. In Mississippi, they were hanging gamblers even though gambling was legal. “Next, negroes, suspected of conspiring to raise an insurrection, were caught up and hanged in all parts of the State; then, white men supposed to be leagued with the negroes; and, finally, strangers from neighboring States, going thither on business.”

It was madness, and it threatened the republic. If people come to understand “their rights to be secure in their persons and property” were now at the mercy of “the caprice of the mob,” their affiliation with the American government will be destroyed.

The answer? Transfer reverence for the Founders to reverence for the laws they devised. “Let reverence for the laws . . . become the political religion of the Nation.” Let all agree that to violate the law “is to trample on the blood of his father.”

Unjust laws should be replaced as soon as possible; the citizenry has the means. “Still while they continue in force, for the sake of example, they should be religiously observed.” But only “reverence for the constitution and laws” will preserve our political institutions and retain “the attachment of the people” now that the founding generation has “gone to rest.”

You have already guessed the speaker was Abraham Lincoln, then only 28. It is from his address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Ill., and it is a small part of a stupendous compilation of the best things said by and to Americans called “So Proudly We Hail,” edited by Amy and Leon Kass and Diana Schaub. Its diverse contributors include Philip Roth, Ben Franklin, Willa Cather and W.E.B. Du Bois.

My friend Joel, an America-loving New York intellectual, gave me the book as a gift. He opens it every night at random and always finds something valuable. Now so do I.

As I read I thought of those who today oppose illegal immigration. They are often accused of small and parochial motivations. But I believe at the heart of their opposition is a delicate understanding that when the rule of law collapses, as it does daily on the southern border, everything else can collapse. Many things are more delicate than we think, and those most inclined to see that delicacy are most dependent on responsible leaders who will keep the laws of the nation strong and operable.

Here, quickly, on what you love when you love America.

A few years ago the historian David McCullough was asked to be commencement speaker at the 200th anniversary of Ohio University. In researching the school’s background and the area’s history, he came upon a rich trove of stories of the largely unknown Americans who in 1788 went to the Northwest Territory and settled “the Ohio.”

“The Pioneers” is about the remarkable New Englanders who insisted from the beginning that there would be absolute freedom of religion, that there would be a major emphasis on public education, and that slavery would be against the law.

It is an inspiring story, harrowing too. They suffered and caused some suffering, too. And yet, Mr. McCullough notes, historians would see that the ordinance that allowed the pioneers into Ohio “was designed to guarantee what would one day be known as the American way of life.”

To read it is to feel wonder at all the sacrifice that went to the making of: us. And our continuing miracle.

A happy 243rd Fourth of July to the great and fabled nation that is still, this day, the hope of the world.

I’ve received tens of thousands of letters and other communications from Trump supporters the past few years, some of which have sparked extended dialogues. Two I got after last week’s column struck me as pertinent to this moment, and they make insufficiently appreciated points.

A gentleman of early middle age in Kansas City wrote to say he’d sat out the 2016 election because he was dissatisfied with both parties. But now he’s for Donald Trump, and the reason “runs deeper than politics.”

America’s elites in politics, media and the academy have grown oblivious to “the average Joe’s intense disgust” at being morally instructed and “preached to.”

“Every day, Americans are told of the endless ways they are falling short. If we don’t show the ‘proper’ level of understanding according to a talking head, then we are surely racist. If we don’t embrace every sanitized PC talking point, then we must be heartless. If we have the audacity to speak our mind, then we are most definitely a bigot.” These accusations are relentless.

“We are jabbed like a boxer with no gloves on to defend us. And we are fed up. We are tired of being told we aren’t good enough.” He believes the American people are by nature kind and generous—“they would give you the shirt off their back if you were in trouble”—and that “in Donald Trump, voters found a massive sledgehammer that pulverizes the ridiculous notion that Americans aren’t good enough.” Mr. Trump doesn’t buy the guilt narrative.

“It’s surely not about the man at this point. It stopped being about Trump long ago. It is about that counter-punch that has been missing from our culture for far too long.”

The culture of accusation, he says, is breaking us apart.

A reader who grew up upper-middle-class in the South writes on the politics of the situation. His second wife, also a Southerner, grew up poor. She is a former waitress and bartender whose politics he characterizes as “pragmatic liberal.” They watched Mr. Trump’s 2015 announcement together, and he said to her, “He doesn’t have a chance.” She looked at him “with complete conviction” and said, “He’s going to win.”

As the campaign progressed, she never wavered. At the end, with the polls saying Hillary, “I asked my wife how she could be so certain Trump was going to win.” He found her response “astute and telling.”

“She told me, ‘He speaks my language, and there’s a lot more of me than there is of you.’ ”

I have to say after a week of reading such letters that emotionally this cycle feels like 2016 all over again. Various facts are changed (no Mrs. Clinton) but the same basic dynamic pertains—the two Americas talking past each other, the social and cultural resentments, the great estrangement. It’s four years later but we’re re-enacting the trauma of 2016.

And the Democrats again appear to be losing the thread.

They’ve spent the past few months giving the impression they are in a kind of passionate lockstep with a part of their base, the progressives, and detached from everyone else.

And in the debates they doubled down. Both nights had fizz. There was a lot of earnestness and different kinds of brightness.

But what Night One did was pick up the entire party and put it down outside the mainstream and apart from the center.

This is what the candidates said:

They are, functionally, in terms of the effects of their stands, for open borders.

They are in complete agreement with the abortion regime—no reservations or qualms, no sense of just or civilized limits.

They’re all in on identity politics. One candidate warned against denying federally funded abortions to “a trans female.”

Two said they would do away with all private health insurance.

Every party plays to its base in the primaries and attempts to soften its stands in the general. But I’m wondering how the ultimate nominee thinks he or she will walk this all back. It is too extreme for America, and too extreme for the big parts of its old base that the Democrats forgot in 2016.

It was as if they were saying, “Hi, middle-American people who used to be Democrats and voted for Trump, we intend to alienate you again. Go vote for that jerk, we don’t care.”

Another problem: America has a painful distance between rich and poor, but it is hard to pound the “1%” hammer effectively in a nation enjoying functional full employment. Our prosperity is provisional and could leave tomorrow, but right now America’s feeling stronger.

“Grapes of Wrath” rhetoric resonates when people think they’re in or entering a recession or depression. The debaters Wednesday night looked like they were saying, “Who ya gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?”

After these big facts, candidate-by-candidate analysis seems secondary. Beto O’Rourke’s fatuous, self-actualizing journey makes the Democrats look sillier than they have to. Elizabeth Warren was focused and energetic, and her call to break up concentrations of power, including big tech, was strong and timely. She made a terrible mistake in holding to her intention to do away with private health insurance. An estimated 180 million Americans have such policies. Why force potential supporters to choose between her and their family’s insurance? Who does she think is going to win that? Why put as the headline on your plan, “This is what I’m going to take away from you”? Why would she gamble a serious long-term candidacy on such a vow? It is insane.

If she is extremely lucky Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won’t endorse her soon and make it worse.

Bill de Blasio had the best moment in the first half-hour, suggesting Democrats shouldn’t bicker about policy differences but instead unite as progressives. He has that air of burly, happy aggression that is the special province of idiots. Tulsi Gabbard broke through when it became clear she was the only explicitly antiwar candidate on the stage; this had the interesting effect of showing the others up.

Night two was more raucous but similarly extreme. The first 15 minutes included higher taxes, free college and student-loan forgiveness. Most candidates agreed on free health insurance for illegal immigrants. They also appeared to believe that most or all U.S. immigration law should be abolished.

The big dawgs did OK. If Kamala Harris was not a big dawg, she is now. Joe Biden sort of held his own but seemed to flag. Bernie Sanders seemed not as interesting as last cycle, more crotchety and irritable.

Eric Swalwell’s uncorking of a memory from when he was 6—ol’ Sen. Biden came to town and talked about passing the torch to younger leaders—was an attempt at slyness that so widely missed its mark, was so inelegant and obvious, that it was kind of fabulous. By the end of the night Mr. Swalwell had flamed out from sheer obnoxiousness.

The nonpolitician Marianne Williamson was delightfully unshy, sincere and, until her daffy closing statement, sympathetic. Kirsten Gillibrand yippily interrupted—“It’s my turn!”—and did herself no good.

It was an odd evening in that it was lively, spirited, at moments even soulful, and yet so detached from reality.