Peggy Noonan

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.

It was four years ago this week, June 16, 2015, and a great professional gift was given me. I had just watched Donald Trump’s announcement speech and was pondering its impact. This guy isn’t going to be president; we’ve been reading about his tabloid antics for 30 years. But he’ll have some impact, some support. Who? How much?

At this point my phone rang. It was my elder sister Cookie, formerly of Staten Island, N.Y., now living down South, a person who’s lived a hard life and gotten through it with a spirit she does not fully see or credit. She’s not particularly political, not at all partisan.

She didn’t even say hello. She just said, “I loooooove him.”

I was startled. Who?

“Donald Trump. Did you see it?” She’d watched the announcement live. “He’s going to win.”

Cookie had voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and told me he would win, so I knew I was hearing something.

“Honey, tell me why you love him.”

“He’s telling the truth!” He described our political life as she experienced it: Washington doesn’t care about the people, both parties are full of it, they don’t even care enough to control the border. “He’s the one who can break through and clean that place up.”

We hang up and the phone rings again. It’s Uncle Patrick—early 80s, Brooklyn Irish, U.S. Marine, worked at a bank on Long Island.

He doesn’t introduce himself either.

“So how do you like my guy!” He’s pumped.

“Would that be Donald Trump?”

“Yeah! D’ja see it?”

We talked, the beginning of many such conversations between me and Pat and me and Cookie.

Their gift was alerting me, honestly and early, that something was happening in America, something big and confounding, something that deserved concentrated attention—and respect.

They were patriots; they loved America. They weren’t radical; they’d voted for Republicans and Democrats. They had no grudge against any group or class. They knew that on America’s list of allowable bigotries they themselves—middle Americans, Christians who believed in the old constitutional rights—were the only ones you were allowed to look down on. It’s no fun looking down on yourself, so looking down wasn’t their habit.

But they were looking at their country and seeing bad trend lines. In choosing Mr. Trump they were throwing a Hail Mary pass, but they didn’t sound desperate. They always sounded jolly. And I realized they hadn’t sounded jolly about politics in a while.

Below the jolliness I sense the spirit of the jailbreak. They were finally allowed to be renegades. They were playing the part of the rebel in a country that had long cast them as the boring Americans—stodgy, dronelike, nothing to say. The lumpen working and middle class, dependable heartland-type boobs. Everyone else got to act up and complain. They were just there to pay the taxes, love the country, send the boys to war.

Now they were pushing back, and hell it was fun. It was like joining a big, beautiful anti-BS movement. It was like they were telling the entire political class, “I’m gonna show a little juice, baby, brace yourself.”

As the months passed they wanted me to be jolly too, to join them in the rebellion. Here I came to experience real grief. (I suspect a lot of the tension and estrangement of the early Trump years had to do with people feeling grief and showing it in anger.) My heart was in sympathy, but my head? I’d read too much history, even lived it, to be jolly about it. Or to think this ends well.

Early on I’d said to Uncle Patrick, “I think we have to think twice about putting the American nuclear arsenal in the hands of a TV host.” I meant screwball, not TV host, and he knew it. It gave him pause, but he rallied: Mr. Trump will confer with the generals and diplomats if there’s trouble. I said I thought the matter was more complicated than that, and more dangerous. We let it go.

But it is a weakness of Trump supporters now that they still cannot take seriously the unreadiness of the White House for a sudden, immediate and high-stakes crisis. They do not see the chaos and the lack of professionalism of the unstaffed government as a danger. It is, a dreadful one.

Still, our conversations convinced me that something that had long been a preoccupation—the idea that those who govern America do not really care about, or emotionally affiliate with, the people of their own country—was right, and would bring electoral shocks.

And I remembered, as I watched Mr. Trump’s announcement for re-election on Tuesday, that day four years ago, and how important Pat and Cookie were to my thinking.

This time the president said two things that were not generally noted but will have impact down the road. He emphasized social issues in a way that Democrats cannot and will not. Those issues will have power. On abortion: “Virtually every top Democrat also now supports taxpayer-funded abortion, right up to the moment of birth.” He painted that grim fact grimly. Democrats and members of the media put their hands over their ears and sing “la la la” on this issue, but it is real and gives real discomfort. To some degree it will be a pusher in Trump’s direction.

Second, he revealed the underlying theme of his re-election effort: the runaway train. If Democrats win the White House and Congress, their governance will be deeply radical—a runaway train that will crash the country.

He of course has big things going against him. Among them: From the beginning he has had peace and prosperity—both relative, both provisional, but he has them—and it doesn’t show. They’re everything. He shouldn’t be polling in the high 30s and low 40s, he should be breaking 50. He’s not.

One reason is that in his speeches he rarely tries to persuade the uncertain, he only tells the certain they’re right. He does antagonism and aggrievement. But the American people are not only about those things, and young people with searching minds are not those things. He needs to give a sense of striving for something larger, if only to provide the idea we can strive for anything together, that we’re not so blasted to bits that we can never again have a common mission. He will not do this because he doesn’t have the tools, and thinks it’s for sissies.

He has many possible supporters but he exhausts them with his oddness. His embarrassments and crudities, his making trouble that doesn’t have to be made, his sloppiness and lack of professionalism—all give a sense that there’s no there there if trouble comes. He exhausts you not into submission but into ultimate aversion.

He has not, in three tempestuous, trouble-seeking years, lost his core.

Cookie and Patrick are still for him, as much as in the past. She texted: “He is a marauder, a maverick.” She occasionally texts “Hail Trump” to torment me, so I hereby retract my gratitude. Patrick said, “He has his imperfections,” but “he knows how to rev up a crowd!”

The core will stay. Everyone else, 16½ months out, is in play.

Now and then a country needs to get slapped. England does, or rather the United Kingdom, but I say England because I really mean London. Its entire leadership class has been undone since Brexit passed, three years ago this month. They’ve been overwhelmed, not equal to the moment.

They are like the hysterical blonde in 1940s and ’50s movies. Something scary would happen, the monster was coming, and she’d start to scream and sob. Then another character, usually a man, would slap her hard across the face. In the shock of it she’d take hold of herself. I’m fairly certain this trope had to do with how directors saw their wives.

Anyway, London since Brexit has been the hysterical blonde. The British people passed Brexit in a national referendum many had requested for decades. It wasn’t close—it won by a 3.8-point margin. Turnout was huge, 72% of eligible voters. Then-Prime Minister David Cameron, who opposed Brexit but called the referendum in a stupendous and foolish bet that his people saw things as he did, was forced to step down. Theresa May, who’d opposed Brexit but with less focus and commitment, rose from the debris and had a good start. “Brexit means Brexit,” she said. And then she too misread the situation, on the ground and in Parliament. The argument didn’t end. The European Union did what everyone knew it would do and tried to stop the jailbreak. Everything got drawn out and dragged down. The whole political class floundered under the strain.

If leaving the EU was a radical decision, it was deliberately and consciously so: For six weeks the question consumed the nation, and a decision was made.

Is it not obvious what must be done? This matter has to be resolved. A great nation can’t function cut in two, with half the nation at the other half’s throats. It can’t go forward in history that way; it must be one thing or the other, as Lincoln said.

The people asked for Brexit. The government has to deliver it. You can’t insult the very idea of democracy and say, Oh, well, this is hard, so we’ll have a do-over on the vote and hope the people will deliver a different outcome. You have to accept the result and forge ahead.

Make Brexit happen, make the break. Move forward as the people instructed. If you can get EU cooperation, get it. If not, stop pleading and dragging it out. Settle this. If it works it will be apparent within a few years, so hold a parade. If it doesn’t, public opinion on a second referendum will be different.

But stop whingeing. You were hired to lead the people. If you’re not talented enough to do that, you can at least follow them.

In connection to this, the Conservative Party leadership race to replace Mrs. May began this week. Boris Johnson, the former foreign secretary and London mayor, made the case for his candidacy. “After three years and two missed deadlines,” he said, “we must leave the EU on Oct. 31.” He hopes for a deal, but the next government should prepare “vigorously and seriously for no deal.” “Brexit delay means defeat,” Mr. Johnson contends. “The paradox is that we have not allayed the divisions in our society by failing to deliver the outcome. . . . We made them worse.”

He’s right. He is also probably going to win. The problem is that he is famously slippery and no one ever knows if they can trust his word. Ken Clark, the Conservative former chancellor of the Exchequer, told the Guardian that Mr. Johnson “doesn’t have any policies, certainly none that are consistent from day to day,” and added: “I don’t actually think he knows what he would do to get us out of the Brexit crisis.”

Mr. Johnson is not an especially good man. His greatest fans admit he is dishonest, even for a politician. But he has wit, verve and intellectual quickness. He has a showman’s love of comedy. A friend who’s a historian of the royal family mentioned as a reason to support him that Queen Elizabeth II has been holding weekly audiences with her prime ministers since 1952: “After all these years she deserves a laugh.” She does.

But the reason Mr. Johnson will likely win is that he is the only serious candidate who understands the politics of the situation—that Brexit simply must be put through, finally and soon. On top of that he’s a compelling figure, with an appreciation of and talent for the show businesses of politics.

He’s never seemed to believe in much beyond his right to rise to the top; he is a born cynic. When Brexit, whose cause he led, surprisingly passed, he suddenly was responsible for a difficult situation. In response he fled for the hills and was incommunicado for days. But his cynicism, perversely, might make him a good match for the EU, which doesn’t seem to believe in much beyond its right to run things whether its constituent nations like it or not. Mrs. May is a very decent person, and she was outmatched. The great thing about cynics is that they tend to do the practical and obvious thing, and the obvious thing to do now is push the EU hard, then stop.

Mr. Johnson’s admirers have the grating habit of comparing him to Winston Churchill, a flawed outsider with imperfect judgment but the right man for 1939. But Churchill was an authentic genius who wrote a masterpiece of the English language while drunk and went to war hung over. He was a gigantic character. Boris Johnson is merely a big one, and a showman. No one knows what he will achieve, but he surely knows he must deliver. My friend the historian believes Mr. Johnson can reinvigorate Britain, “which has lost confidence in itself after spending the last three years on bended knee.”

*   *   *

The second country that needs a slap this week is China. It needs to be told no—colorfully, vividly, and in a great chorus. It needs to know the upset it is causing in trying to muscle the people of Hong Kong with extradition moves is not worth the gain—that it will ruffle things in a way that is not good for China. The world admires Hong Kong’s freedoms, bustle and success. China needs to be made to understand it damages its standing and stature by bullying that little city. It would be good if it saw it is causing a great clamor.

World, be roused. Push back through word, opinion and argument. Let Beijing know there’s a price for its moves.

Chinese rulers the past few years have seemed quite full of themselves. They pride themselves on taking the long view of history, and on their heavy competence, their ability to hold their balance amid domestic pressures and internal contradictions. They are willing to sacrifice in the day-to-day to achieve long-term objectives. They’ve enjoyed three decades of economic growth, moved forward in telecom, mining, energy, manufacturing. High military spending, military modernization, Huawei, 5G. They’ve been rising for decades, all the while giving the impression that they see the West as being composed of distracted materialists with their faces in screens.

This would be a good time to make a mighty roar, and surprise them with some energy and feeling.

I’ll start with a personal experience and then try to expand into Republicans and big tech.

In the spring of 2016, Facebook came under pressure, stemming from leaks by its workers, over charges of systemic political bias. I was not especially interested: a Silicon Valley company that employs thousands of young people to make decisions that are often ideological will tilt left, and conservatives must factor that in, as they’re used to doing.

My concerns about Facebook had to do with its apparently monopolistic nature, slippery ethics and algorithmic threats to serious journalism.

Soon after, I received an email from Mark Zuckerberg’s office inviting me and other “conservative activists” to attend a meeting with him to discuss the bias charges in an off-the-record conversation. I responded that I was not an activist but a columnist, for the Journal, and would be happy to attend in that capacity and on the record. That didn’t go over too well with Mr. Zuckerberg’s office! I was swiftly told that wouldn’t do.

What I most remember is that they didn’t mention where his office is. There was an air of being summoned by the prince. You know where the prince lives. In the castle. Who doesn’t know exactly where Facebook is?

In February 2018 Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein of Wired wrote a deeply reported piece that mentioned the 2016 meeting. It was called so that the company could “make a show of apologizing for its sins.” A Facebook employee who helped plan it said part of its goal—they are clever at Facebook and knew their mark!—was to get the conservatives fighting with each other. “They made sure to have libertarians who wouldn’t want to regulate the platform and partisans who would.” Another goal was to leave attendees “bored to death” by a technical presentation after Mr. Zuckerberg spoke.

Predictably, the conservatives “failed to unify in a way that was either threatening or coherent.” Many used the time “to try to figure out how they could get more followers for their own pages.”

After the meeting, attendees gushed, calling Mr. Zuckerberg and his staffers humble and open. Glenn Beck praised the CEO’s “earnest desire to ‘connect the world.’”

Never were pawns so happily used.

I forgot about it until last summer, when Mr. Zuckerberg’s office wrote again. His problems were mounting. I was invited now, with an unspecified group of others, to “an off the record discussion over dinner at his home in Palo Alto.” They used that greasy greaseball language Silicon Valley uses: Mr. Zuckerberg is “focused on protecting” users and thinking about “the future and how best to serve the Facebook community.”

I ignored the invitation. They pressed. Their last note reached me at an irritated moment, so I wrote back a rocket, reminding him of the previous meeting and how it had been revealed to be a mischievous and highly political enacting of faux remorse. I suggested that though it was an honor to be asked to cross a continent for the privilege of giving him my time, thought and advice, I would not. I added that I was sorry to say he strikes me in his public, and now semiprivate, presentations as an imperious twerp.

For a second I actually hesitated: The imperious twerp runs the algorithms, controls the traffic, has all the dark powers! But I am an American, and one with her Irish up, so I hit send.

And I’m still here, at least at the moment, so I guess that’s OK.

Facebook’s famous sins and failings include the abuse of private data, selling space to Russian propagandists in the 2016 presidential campaign, starving journalism of ad revenues, monopolistically acquiring or doing in possible competitors, political mischief, and turning users into the unknowing product. I once wrote the signal fact of Mr. Zuckerberg’s career is that he is supremely gifted in one area—monetizing technical ingenuity by marrying it to a canny sense of human weakness.

None of this is news. We just can’t manage to do anything about it.

Now there are moves to push back. The House Judiciary Committee will hold antitrust investigations into big tech. Speaker Nancy Pelosi is warning that “unwarranted concentrated economic power in the hands of a few is dangerous to democracy.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren has made a splash with her pushback on big tech; Sen. Amy Klobuchar included it in her presidential announcement speech.

The New York Times this week had a breakthrough report, from Cecilia Kang and Kenneth Vogel, on how the tech giants are fighting back. They are “amassing an army of lobbyists.” Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple spent a combined $55 million in lobbying last year, about double what they spent in 2016. They “have intensified their efforts to lure lobbyists with strong connections to the White House, the regulatory agencies, and Republicans and Democrats in Congress.” Facebook hired Mrs. Pelosi’s former chief of staff. The speaker herself has received major campaign money from employees and political-action committees of all the tech giants. Google pays lobbyists who worked on the Republican staff of House Judiciary.

They’ve got it wired, haven’t they?

But the mood in America is anti-big-tech. Everyone knows they’re too powerful, too arrogant, loom too large in public life.

And something else: This whole new world of new technology was born in the 1970s and ’80s. We still think it’s new and we’re figuring it out, but we’re almost half a century into it and we can see what works and what doesn’t, what’s had good effects and hasn’t. It is time to move.

We’re Americans and we love money and success and the hallowed story of the kid in the garage who invents the beautiful product that changes the world.

And Republican officials—they can’t help it, they don’t just rightly love business; they love big business, they love titans. It’s almost romantic: Look what people can do in America! He started it in his dorm room! And now we’re at lunch!

It’s all too human, and of course greedy: Maybe these guys will start giving me money! I mean Pelosi-size money!

Here’s what they should be thinking: Break them up. Break them in two, in three; regulate them. Declare them to be what they’ve so successfully become: once a pleasure, now a utility.

It all depends on Congress, which has been too stupid to move in the past and is too stupid to move competently now. That’s what’s slowed those of us who want reform, knowing how badly they’d do it.

Yet now I find myself thinking: I don’t care. Do it incompetently, but do something.

Why are Republicans so slow to lead? The Times quoted Republican Sen. Josh Hawley as saying “the dominance of big tech” is a “big problem.” They “may be more socially powerful than the trusts of the Roosevelt era, and yet they still operate like a black box.”

He’s right.

But I read about lobbyists coming at Republican congressional leaders and I think, it’s going to be like Mr. Zuckerberg’s meeting with the conservatives in 2016. A tech god will give them some attention, some respect, and they’ll fold like a cheap suit.

If they are as stupid and unserious as their critics take them to be, they will go to the meeting and be used.

They should say no and hit send.

The investigation is complete, his office is closed, he returns to private life. And Robert Mueller leaves in his wake a great murk, doesn’t he?

Even in his statement this week, presumably aimed in part at making things clearer, he spoke between the lines. What did he say, between the lines? Apparently I was too subtle for you. Apparently you are a large, balky mule in need of being hit over the head with a stick. So let me try again. I cannot bring federal charges against a sitting president because I believe it is constitutionally prohibited. And since there couldn’t be a trial, it would be unfair to leave him unable to defend himself. But someone else, according to the Constitution, can bring charges. Someone else can hold a public trial. Who? It rhymes with shmongress. Good luck, shmongressmen.

Mr. Mueller is a serious man who in a long career has earned the respect in which he is held. But he’s slipped out of public life on a banana peel, hasn’t he? He was the investigator. He led the probe. He should have advised Attorney General William Barr of his views as to whether the actions of the president merited federal charges, and let Mr. Barr take it from there.

If Justice Department guidelines had been otherwise—if federal charges could be brought against a sitting president—would Mr. Mueller have recommended them? That’s the question. Instead we get “If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.” Oh.

Independent counsel Ken Starr wasn’t so shy with Bill Clinton: His 1998 report outlined to Congress 11 possible grounds for impeachment.

I’m sure Mr. Mueller was trying to demonstrate probity. But it looked to me like a loss of nerve. You can have probity plus clarity, and clarity was what was needed.

The spirit of impeachment is now given a boost.

It is still a terrible idea.

It is a grave matter to overturn an election result. Why more cuttingly divide an already divided country? There is no argument that impeachment would enhance America’s position in the world, and no reason to believe it would not have some negative impact on the economy, meaning jobs. The presidential election is in 2020. What is gained from devoting the coming year to an effort that will fail in the Senate? There’s no reason to believe the public is for it. It won’t move the needle—those who like President Trump, like him; those who do not, do not; everyone already knows what they think. For Democrats it could backfire, alienating moderates and rousing those of the president’s supporters who care little for him personally but appreciate his policy achievements, such as his appointment of judges. Why rouse their wrath? If Mr. Trump is acquitted he will pose as the innocent but unstoppable victor over a witch hunt led by a liberal elite.

At this point, could Democrats even do it? Impeachment is “a heavy lift,” as Chris Matthews said on MSNBC the other day. It takes time and focus to organize it politically and legally, to get the committee chairmen on board and investigators mobilized.

And Speaker Nancy Pelosi is famously not on board. She will continue to play her careful game. “Nothing is off the table,” she said a few hours after Mr. Mueller spoke Wednesday. Democrats must investigate fully so they can find the truth and make the case. She will support hearings and subpoenas, slow and deepen the process, and, I suspect, move to impeach only if he is re-elected.

This is a way of playing for time. Progressive Democrats likely won’t be as hot for impeachment in the fall, when the 2020 contenders are taking full flight and party energy goes to helping them. Mrs. Pelosi is a practical woman.

She is always underestimated by Republicans as the Shaky Lady. She doesn’t seem shaky to me. She is running rings around Mr. Trump and her own conference.

Mr. Trump is obsessed with looking competent and in control. She actually is competent and in control. She’s held on to leadership a long time.

“She knows how to count,” they say, but it’s more than that. The young progressives in her conference who are not shy to be aggressive against others, never want to get crosswise with her. She inspires respect and fear, which is what she needs to inspire. She is said to know where everyone in her conference stands, what they need, and how to keep them or flip them. She apparently gets first-rate intel from her staff and is an epic fundraiser. She takes pleasure in the game, handles Donald Trump like a boss—she is the sole figure in Washington who seems unfazed by him—and does all this as a woman in her 70s with a public presentation that is not compelling. If she’d been born British and was a Conservative, they’d probably have Brexit by now.

History should pay more serious attention to this unique figure.

She is especially disliked by Republicans, and has been knocked in this space, for having said, during the ObamaCare debate, that Congress would have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it. I always thought it was a Washington gaffe as per Michael Kinsley, something that should never have been said because it was true. ObamaCare was a thousand-page sentiment devised by technocrats, an impulse with numbers and graphs. Few who voted for it knew or were interested in knowing how it would be executed, administered, interpreted. It was a ramshackle mess and they’d figure it out later. They seemed as surprised as anyone when it turned out if you wanted to keep your doctor you couldn’t. A lot of them lost their jobs over it in 2010. Mrs. Pelosi’s sin was not that she said it; her sin, and her party’s, was that they didn’t care. Their sentiment was more important than your reality.

But she’s Mr. Trump’s most effective foe and he’s lucky she’s there because she’s what stands between him and impeachment.

What is the best way forward? There’s a good idea floating around Washington. It is congressional censure of the president.

The harrowing part of the Mueller report is part 2, on obstruction of justice. Reading it, you feel sure the president would have loved to subvert the investigation but wasn’t good at it and was thwarted by his staff. There are seemingly dangled pardons and threatened firings. There’s a hapless small-timeness to it, a kind of brute dumbness, and towering over it all is a grubby business deal in Moscow.

It’s unseemly.

Congressional censure would be a formal registering not of Congress’s political disapproval but its moral disapproval. It is a rarely used form of shaming. Congress has censured its own members over the years, including Sen. Joseph McCarthy in 1954—but no president since Andrew Jackson in 1834.

Republicans, who control the Senate, wouldn’t vote to remove the president, but to morally disapprove of him? They would. There’s plenty of suppressed resentment there at how he’s mortified them and lowered things.

That is the less invasive path, the less damaging to the country, the less pointlessly polarizing.

A friend trying to help me work through a problem once told me the story of life is competition: Everyone’s trying to beat everyone else, and I should give more weight to this fact. There’s some truth in what he said, yet I thought his comment contained more autobiography than wisdom: He was the most competitive person I’d ever known, and he usually won. I lean toward the idea a lot of us are running our own races, trying to rise to the occasion and beat some past and limited conception of ourselves by doing something great. The paradox is that you’re running your own race alongside others running theirs, and in the same direction. You’re doing something great together.

This holiday weekend I find myself reflecting again on the boys who seized back the continent of Europe, and the boys and girls now graduating college and trying to figure out what history asks of them.

The week after next marks the 75th anniversary of the Normandy invasion. People will be thinking of D-Day and seeing old clips of the speechifying that marked its anniversaries. I will think of two things. One is what most impressed Ronald Reagan. He spoke at the 40th anniversary, on June 6, 1984, at the U.S. Ranger Monument, and seated in the front rows as he spoke were the boys of Pointe du Hoc.

“Forty summers have passed since the battle that you fought here,” he told them. “You were young the day you took those cliffs; some of you were hardly more than boys.” Many were old now and some wept to remember what they had done, almost as if they were seeing their feat clearly for the first time.

Reagan spoke with each of them afterward, and what moved him most wasn’t all the ceremonies. It was that a bunch of young U.S. Army Rangers had, the day before, re-enacted the taking of the cliffs, up there with ropes and daggers, climbing—and one of the old Rangers who’d been there on D-Day and taken those cliffs 40 years before got so excited he jumped in and climbed along with the 20-year-olds.

“He made it to the top with those kids,” Reagan later told me. “Boy, that was something.” His eyes were still gleaming. Doesn’t matter your age, if you really want to do it you can do it.

A second thing I think of: My friend John Whitehead once told me, in describing that day, of a moment when, as a U.S. Navy ensign, he was piloting his packed landing craft toward Dog Red sector on Omaha Beach. They’d cast off in darkness, and when dawn broke they saw they were in the middle of a magnificent armada. Nearby some light British craft had gone down. Suddenly a landing craft came close by, and an Englishman called out: “I say, fellows, which way to Pointe du Hoc?”

Jaunty, as if he were saying “Which way to the cricket match?”

On John’s ship they pointed to the right. “Very good,” said the Englishman, who touched his cap and sped on.

John remembered the moment with an air of “Life is haphazard, a mess, and you’re in the middle of a great endeavor and it’s haphazard, a mess. But you maintain your composure, keep your spirit. You yell to the Yank, ‘Which way to Pointe du Hoc?’ and you tip your hat and go.’ ”

He would think of the Englishman for the rest of his life, and wonder if he’d survived. But of course he survived in John’s memory, then in mine, and now, as you read, in yours.

Now to the young today, the college graduates beginning heir hazardous climbs. I was with some of them last weekend, at Notre Dame in South Bend, Ind. They were so impressive. They have grown up in a fairly strange country in a fairly strange era, yet their personal joy and optimism were almost palpable. The students of architecture wore on top of their graduation hats foot-high buildings, rockets and what looked like a cathedral; when their school was called they shot off sparkling confetti, and everyone cheered.

The young men were vibrant, smart. The young women have a 4.0 in neuroscience, are on their way to Cambridge, and look like movie stars.

But they’re earnest, all of them, like people who can surprise you—can surprise themselves—by meeting a historical test. And surely they’ll be given one, given many.

I’d been invited to give the commencement address, and for me this had a certain weight. I had never been to Notre Dame, but it has lived in my head since I was a child watching on television the movies of the 1930s and ’40s. And so in my mind Notre Dame is Knute Rockne and the Four Horsemen, it’s the Hail Mary pass and Touchdown Jesus. It is the Golden Dome.

The day before commencement I went over to see the intended stage, and walked through the shadowed Rockne Tunnel with the banners above marking the championship years. To emerge from that tunnel and walk out onto that field—all I could say was: Wow.

In the unseen circularity of life, Notre Dame is a place deeply associated with my old boss, who early in his career played George Gipp, and ever after was called the Gipper. It is the first school he visited, in May 1981, after he was shot in March. Notre Dame that day, having a sophisticated sense of what he’d been through, wore its heart on its sleeve.

In his speech he had touched on great themes of 20th-century conservatism—America was economically bound down and needed unleashing. I would speak on 21st-century conservatism—America is culturally damaged and needs undergirding.

Before I spoke a friend teased me: Reagan would be proud. I said I thought so but actually I thought of Nancy, who would have given me a look with three layers in it and said: “Good.”

The day before commencement I met with scholars at the university’s Center for Ethics and Culture, which is devoted to the Catholic intellectual tradition within all disciplines. The students and teachers were learned, steeped in the meaning of things. I told the students the most important thing to remember as they enter the rough old world: Keep your faith. If you lose it, get it back. It is the thing you will need most, the thing without which nothing is real. “Everything good in your life will spring from it.”

“You were born into a counterculture. It is the great gift of your life. The world needs this counterculture because even the world knows it needs something to counter itself.” Halfway through I realized I didn’t have to say this, because they already knew.

Now they push off, into whatever challenges history gives them. And what’s inside them, from sheer attitude to mere style, will affect all outcomes.

Which way to Pointe du Hoc? It’s the question for them and for all, isn’t it? What will our great achievement be? And who will be there with us, climbing alongside, as we seize crucial terrain together?

I am watching Washington and thinking this: We have reached a new crisis point in Donald Trump vs. the Democrats. They are speaking of contempt citations, subpoenas, executive privilege, hearings. It’s a daily barrage. The Democrats are inching closer to impeachment, at least rhetorically, perhaps actually. We’ll see how well Speaker Nancy Pelosi can dance right up to the edge to appease some in her caucus, and not over it.

But there is such a thing as context, and the Democrats seem to be ignoring it. This is a country divided.

Almost half the country is for Mr. Trump—truly, madly, deeply. Half is against him—unequivocally, unchangeably. There is no resolving this. Or rather to the extent it can be resolved, it will be resolved at the ballot box. The presidential election is 18 months from now, on Nov. 3, 2020.

Until then, people are where they are and hold the views they hold, and don’t push them too hard.

Democrats unveil charges and accusations—the president is a liar, he’s a tax dodger, an obstructor of justice. But in a way Mr. Trump’s supporters accounted for all this before they elected him. They are not shocked. They didn’t hire him to be a good man. Their politics are post-heroic. They sometimes tell reporters he’s a man of high character but mostly to drive the reporters crazy. I have never talked to a Trump supporter, and my world is thick with them, who thought he had a high personal character. On the other hand they sincerely believe he has a high political character, in that he pursues the issues he campaigned on. They hired him as an insult to the political class, as a Hail Mary pass—we’ve tried everything else, maybe this will work—and because he agreed with them on the issues.

Supporters give him high marks for not looking down on them as they believe most members of the media, who are always trying to “understand” them, do. Their attitude is: “Don’t try to understand me, like you’re the anthropologist and we’re the savages. I’m an American, what are you?” They factor the cultural animosity in. When they jeer the press during rallies at the president’s direction, they don’t really mean it. They’re having fun and talking back. They’d be happy if their kids became reporters—an affluent profession, and half of them are famous. The president doesn’t really hate the press either, he wants their love and admiration. You don’t need the admiration of people you truly disdain.

Trump supporters now are looking around and thinking: Things are looking up. The economy is gangbusters, everyone can get a job, good people are on the courts. Something good is happening with China—it’s unclear what, but at least he’s pushing back. As for illegal immigration, he at least cares about it and means to make it better, though no, it doesn’t seem improved.

To take all Congress’s time right now and devote it to attacking the president, or impeaching him, will be experienced as a vast, disheartening insult by half the country, and disheartening. It will simply damage the country and be seen as extreme and destructive. It will keep good things, such as an infrastructure bill, from happening.

As a purely political calculation it will do the Democrats no good. Nonstop scandal theater starring the theatrically indignant will only make people who hate Mr. Trump hate him a little more, and people who support Mr. Trump hate his foes a little more. It will not move any needle.

Robert Mueller, often praised in this space, didn’t resolve anything, did he? People wanted clarity, not subtlety and indirection. So yes, as a last hurrah let him speak. What did he think his report was saying and implying? What in his view would be a just outcome to the story of Mr. Trump and the Russians and 2016?

Beyond that, enough already. We have to have a greater appreciation for how split we are as a nation, and how delicate this all is. And we have to remember we’re not only split, we’re conjoined. We share this country.

We are like Chang and Eng, the 19th century Siamese Twin brothers who worked for P.T. Barnum. They could not be separated and went through their long lives together, married to different women, living in different houses—a few days a week in this one, a few in another.

It wasn’t easy for them to walk through life together, but they did. We have to, too.

Now I wish to switch subjects. Don’t you?

“How to do it” is the hardest question in life after “what to do.” It’s hard enough to make the decision. Then you have to execute. A right decision poorly executed might as well be a wrong one. This is in a way the subject of a small book called “Kissinger on Kissinger” by Winston Lord. It is composed of transcripts of Henry Kissinger’s first and only oral history, based on six interviews conducted by Mr. Lord, President Reagan’s ambassador to China, and K.T. McFarland, who served as Mr. Trump’s deputy national security adviser.

“Like all oral histories, this is a brief for my case,” Mr. Kissinger writes in the introduction. “I did not go out of my way to be self-critical.” He doesn’t. But there is a lot of how-to for diplomats—how the opening with China occurred and was made to occur, how the Soviets were handled as that breakthrough became real, what drove Nixon-era Mideast shuttle diplomacy.

I should note here that Mr. Kissinger is always called “deeply controversial” because he is, that his diplomatic efforts with and under President Nixon were often bold and creative, certainly deeply consequential, and that one of the most remarkable things about him is that he is 95 and has, for 50 years, remained a major public figure and retained his status as a major thinker. Foreign leaders treat him with the gravest respect. Mr. Lord calls this “a remarkable performance of savvy, stamina and sway.”

At his 90th-birthday party, which I attended as a friend, former secretaries of state of both parties lined up to thank him for his advice, wisdom and encouragement. I admit I cannot see his public self without thinking of the 16-year-old immigrant who worked in a shaving-brush factory in New York. The tough Italian-American men he worked with teased the German refugee and took him to Yankee Stadium to learn to be an American. There he first saw the man who years later on meeting him struck him dumb: Joe DiMaggio

But I’ve gotten away from the book.

It has many good things. In the formation of foreign policy successful international negotiations, “everything depends . . . on some conception of the future.” The bias of bureaucracy is toward dailiness: there are communiqués to answer, immediate decisions that require response. In this atmosphere a leader must develop an overall sense of where he wants to go and how to get there.

Every diplomatic effort must begin with an articulated intention. He and Nixon “spent hours together asking ‘What are we trying to do, what are we trying to achieve, what are we trying to prevent?’” The “end state” is the goal, not the process.

In a way it is a tribute to order. Oh, I miss that.

I want to say something big, quickly and broadly.

This week I talked with an intelligent politician who is trying to figure out the future of the Republican Party. He said that in presidential cycles down the road, it will be a relief to get back to the old conservatism of smaller government, tax cuts and reduced spending. I told him what I say to my friends: That old conservatism was deeply pertinent to its era and philosophically right, but it is not fully in line with the crises of our time or its reigning facts. As Lincoln said, the dogmas of the past are inadequate to the present: “As the cause is new, so we must think anew, and act anew.”

Here is how I see it:

The federal government will not become smaller or less expensive in our lifetimes. There is no political will for it among elected officials in Washington, many of whom privately admit this. Nor is there sufficient will for it within the Republican or Democratic party, or among the majority of their voters. Even if there were such a will, both parties in Washington have trouble working together on such big things.

But beyond that fact is something bigger. America needs help right now and Americans know it. It has been enduring for many years a continuing cultural catastrophe—illegitimacy, the decline of faith, low family formation, child abuse and neglect, drugs, inadequate public education, etc. All this exists alongside an entertainment culture on which the poor and neglected are dependent, and which is devoted to violence, sex and nihilism. As a people we are constantly, bitterly pitted against each other, and force-fed the idea of America as an illegitimate, ugly, racist and misogynist nation. Even honest love of country isn’t allowed to hold us together anymore.

America to my mind is what Pope Francis said the church was: a field hospital after battle. We are a beautiful and great nation but a needy, torn-up one in need of repair.

All that takes place within a larger historical context. You can’t see all the world’s weapons and all its madness and not know that eventually we will face a terrible day or days when everything will depend on our ability to hold together and hold on. Maybe it will involve nuclear weapons, maybe an extended, rolling attack on the grid, maybe bioterrorism. But it will be bad; there will be deep stress and violence. The great question in those days, under that acute pressure, will be: Will we hold together? Will we suffer through and emerge, together, on the other side? Which is another way of saying: Will we continue as a nation, a people?

My belief is that whatever helps us hold together now, whatever brings us together and binds us close, is good, and must be encouraged with whatever it takes.

If these are your predicates—America in cultural catastrophe, and hard history ahead—you spend your energies on a battle not to make government significantly smaller, but to make it significantly more helpful.

That would mean a shift. Republicans should stand for a federal government whose aim and focus are directed toward conservative ends, a government focused on concerns that have to do with conserving. They should do this not furtively or through strategic inaction but as a matter of declared political intent, in a way that is driven by moral seriousness, not polls and patter about populism.

What would a large government harnessed toward conservative ends look like?

Judging by what its presidential candidates are saying on the campaign trail, the Democratic Party intends to aim its energies in a progressive direction—global climate change, free college, reparations for slavery. A conservative path would address the immediate crises Americans on the ground see all around them.

On domestic issues this would include the following:

• Whatever might help families form and grow.

• Teaching the lost boys of the working and middle classes, black and white, how to live. The infrastructure bills floating out there are good because we need better bridges, tunnels and roads, and the pride that would come from making them better. But also because they could provide a stage for a national mentorship program in which men teach boys how to do something constructive. Heck, they should go out and recruit in the poorest neighborhoods, drag teenage boys out of the house and integrate them into a world of dynamism and competence.

• Resolving the mental-health crisis. We need a vast overhaul of services so families can get the help they need. We deinstitutionalized sick people and closed the hospitals in the 1960s through ’80s. Liberals pushed it for reasons of ideology and conservatives accepted it for reasons of savings. It marked a great denying of reality: We need hospitals for the mentally ill.

• Helping immigrants become Americans. However the illegal-immigration crisis is resolved, or not, there are tens of millions already here. Who helps make them Americans? We used to have settlement houses for the great waves of immigrants who came in the early 20th century. Why not now? They need instruction on the meaning and history of America. Here it should be noted that we have some of the best immigrants in the world, who work hard and have no hostility to American religious culture. In fact, they’re part of that culture. Help Americanize them in other ways.

• Help revitalize small towns. Whatever will help, do it. We lose a lot when we lose those old shared ways and values. We can’t all live in cities and suburbs; we need diversity.

• Protect religious freedom. The threats are real and will grow. Americans may not always be breaking down the doors to go to church, but they respect religious life and don’t want to see it under siege.

Really, the point of conservatism is to conserve.

Here we degenerate into mere practical political advice for the GOP.

Americans would respect the Republican Party if it gave the impression its leaders are actually noticing America and have a farsighted sense of its real plights. If the government is going to be large, people might be inclined to see sober-minded Republicans as the best stewards of it. It is still only the GOP that can perform the fundamental mission of protecting the system that yielded all our wealth and allowed us to be generous with the world and with ourselves—free-market capitalism. Only the GOP can do this, because Republicans genuinely love economic freedom. You fight hard for what you love. Progressives do not love it. They just accept it.

Republicans will be expected to foster and encourage the economic growth that can at least make a mild dent in our deficits. When you are understood not to be hostile to all spending you have greater leeway to see it coolly, and go after waste and fraud in spending. Republicans naturally enjoy that.

When you think like this—we are in a crisis, it will get worse, we must accentuate what holds us together and helps us muddle through—it helps you prioritize. These are my priorities as a conservative.

“How did things ever get so far? I don’t know. It was so unfortunate, so unnecessary.”

—Don Corleone, “The Godfather”

I keep thinking about the dynamics the past few years between the president and what used to be called official Washington. That relationship is ugly and broken, but it could have been otherwise.

Trump supporters have long held, and deeply believe, that none of the people in what they call the swamp were ever anything but unalterably opposed to him and meant, from day one, to remove him by whatever means possible.

This was true of about half of official Washington. They were predominately Democrats, though there were Republicans too, and certainly the media were against him, overwhelmingly.

But the other half of official Washington, though to varying degrees disapproving of Trump, often for reasons that were almost aesthetic, was willing to be surprised. They were open to persuasion. They didn’t say this but they thought it. They’d give him time and watch events closely.

I’m thinking of the old ambassadors, mostly men in their 60s, 70s and 80s. They’re woven into the town, solid citizens, friends of journalists, occasionally sources, and they know things. They’re mostly retired, and at lunch at clubs in town often begin sentences with “And so I told Zbig . . .” There’s a bit of lost glory with them, but they care about America, are personally invested in it, love it with an old-school love, and respect systems, knowing that creativity—in art, science and diplomacy—can only be born within a certain immediate order.

Donald Trump was not their type. But early on they were willing to give him a chance.

When he came in he was a shock to the system, almost literally. He didn’t act like a liberal or a Democrat, or a conservative or a Republican. It was not clear he thought, as opposed to felt. It was clear he was emotional—lots of resentments, wounds and complaints. As the first year went by and then the second the stories were out there, sometimes from his own aides. He doesn’t read, doesn’t like his briefings, he’s spending time tweeting and watching television. He’s picking fights with celebrities and haranguing the Boy Scout Jamboree about our rotten media. He’s firing people or they’re resigning—the chief of staff, chief strategist, then the generals. The travel ban, Charlottesville, he’s a “stable genius,” he’s shoving the prime minister of Montenegro and blowing up immigration talks.

Pretty quickly and to the entire edifice of Washington, it became clear Donald Trump was not a Jacksonian shock to the system, which is what his supporters think he was. He was a daily system overload, a one-man frying of the grid.

One by one the ambassadors shut down and turned away. Their objections were not about policy, they were about behavior. What they feared was not extreme conservatism or extreme liberalism. They didn’t fear originality or a new synthesis. They feared Madness of King George-ism. They’d come to think the president was, irredeemably, a screwball. In the nuclear age this is a dangerous thing.

Their fears about him weren’t assuaged by trusty old hands inside the White House because those hands weren’t there. They didn’t join the administration, because they didn’t want their résumés tainted or they thought wise counsel would never be heeded. Or because they’d signed a letter opposing him in 2016 and would never be forgiven.

So a lot of good people didn’t come in or weren’t allowed in. And those who did work for the president came to seem strange—fierce, emotional, half mad themselves. There were good people there—the generals were solid—but one by one they left.

Mr. Trump fulfilled every fear a Trump skeptic would have. So they stayed skeptics, or became active opponents. Strangely in a political figure, the president had no particular respect for his critics’ concerns or anxieties. He never understood they could be brought into the tent. They were all enemies; it was all black and white. Some supporters were like that too, but that was understandable: The job of supporters is to fight. He’s the leader, and leaders are forced to deal with reality. He would not lessen his critics’ fears through behavioral change. Heck, he won the election by not changing, why mess with his swing?

He thought he didn’t need the ambassadors. “Experts” are just guys who marinated in a little subset and memorized its clichés. If they were any good we’d be in better shape!

It was all this—the president’s disdain, his well-fed resentments—that not only left Washington thinking Mr. Trump was crazy. It made Washington itself a fertile field for crazy. It was in this atmosphere that the Steele dossier, with its whacked out third-rate spy fiction, became believable, that sober-minded officials reportedly wondered if they should wear wires when they met with the president.

He destabilized the entire town.

That, in my view, is a small sliver of how we got here.

And so a closing word on the Mueller report. I have thought since the beginning that appointing a special counsel to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election was right and justified; that Robert Mueller was an excellent choice because of his experience and integrity. Also his age and stage. He was a patriot looking to finish a distinguished career with integrity. He hired killers, tough lawyers and investigators who were hunting the whale and intended to harpoon it. They did everything they could to get the story. What they produced is a more dreadful portrait of Mr. Trump than his supporters will know, because most Americans won’t read it.

In the end, Mr. Mueller did not bring charges. He left it to Congress.

Should the Democrats move to impeach? No, not for reasons of merit but of national interest.

Progressives will want to proceed with their usual blithe rage. But the investigation lasted almost two years. It was exhaustive and consumed daily headlines. Trump supporters, almost half the country, will feel, understandably, that its work is complete. They would experience an impeachment attempt as proof of what they always assumed: that this whole thing was a cynical attempt by the left to achieve by other means what it could not achieve at the ballot box.

They would see it as subverting democracy. And anything that damages faith in democracy at this point in our national life should be rejected. We need to build trust and faith, not lessen it.

It is 2019. We elect a president in 2020. Democrats would be wise to spend the next year showing America that their party is capable of governing, up to leadership, that its ideas are not crazy but pertinent, that it actually has a philosophy.

Seriousness and calm would be nice, and after the past few years would serve as a welcome counterpoint. There is an unarticulated wish out there to return to some past in which things were deeply imperfect and certainly divided but on some level tranquil, and not half mad.