Peggy Noonan

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

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

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

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

For instance:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To Thursday night’s debate:

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What a lot of wreckage.

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

Brexit is a real crisis.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do we want to forget what it is and was?

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

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

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

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

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

Mrs. Wharton:

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

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

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

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

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

Among the harassments I see you inflict on each other:

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

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

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

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

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

And you wonder why socialism is making a comeback.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is more to say but I must close.

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

Great nations have fallen over less.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which if I’m right is a story.

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

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

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

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

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.