Peggy Noonan

Put aside the numbers for a moment, and the daily argument.

“Seven point one million people have signed up!”

“But six million people lost their coverage and were forced onto the exchanges! That’s no triumph, it’s a manipulation. And how many of the 7.1 million have paid?”

“We can’t say, but 7.1 million is a big number and redeems the program.”

“Is it a real number?”

“Your lack of trust betrays a dark and conspiratorial right-wing mindset.”

As I say, put aside the argument, step back and view the thing at a distance. Support it or not, you cannot look at ObamaCare and call it anything but a huge, historic mess. It is also utterly unique in the annals of American lawmaking and government administration.

Its biggest proponent in Congress, the Democratic speaker of the House, literally said—blithely, mindlessly, but in a way forthcomingly—that we have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it. It is a cliché to note this. But really, Nancy Pelosi’s statement was a historic admission that she was fighting hard for something she herself didn’t understand, but she had every confidence regulators and bureaucratic interpreters would tell her in time what she’d done. This is how we make laws now.

Her comments alarmed congressional Republicans but inspired Democrats, who for the next three years would carry on like blithering idiots making believe they’d read the bill and understood its implications. They were later taken aback by complaints from their constituents. The White House, on the other hand, seems to have understood what the bill would do, and lied in a way so specific it showed they knew exactly what to spin and how. “If you like your health-care plan, you can keep your health-care plan, period.” “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor, period.” That of course was the president, misrepresenting the facts of his signature legislative effort. That was historic, too. If you liked your doctor, your plan, your network, your coverage, your deductible you could not keep it. Your existing policy had to pass muster with the administration, which would fight to the death to ensure that 60-year-old women have pediatric dental coverage.

The leaders of our government have not felt, throughout the process, that they had any responsibility to be honest and forthcoming about the major aspects of the program, from its exact nature to its exact cost. We are not being told the cost of anything—all those ads, all the consultants and computer work, even the cost of the essential program itself.

What the bill declared it would do—insure tens of millions of uninsured Americans—it has not done. There are still tens of millions uninsured Americans. On the other hand, it has terrorized millions who did have insurance and lost it, or who still have insurance and may lose it.

The program is unique in that it touches on an intimate and very human part of life, the health of one’s body, and yet normal people have been almost wholly excluded from the debate. This surely was not a bug but a feature. Given a program whose complexity is so utter and defeating that it defies any normal human attempt at comprehension, two things will happen. Those inclined to like the spirit of the thing will support it on the assumption the government knows what it’s doing. And the opposition will find it difficult to effectively oppose—or repeal the thing—because of the program’s bureaucratic density and complexity. It’s like wrestling a manic, many-armed squid in ink-darkened water.

Social Security was simple. You’d pay into the system quite honestly and up front, and you’d receive from the system once you were of retirement age. If you supported or opposed the program you knew exactly what you were supporting or opposing. The hidden, secretive nature of bamaCare is a major reason for the opposition it has engendered.

The program is unique in that the bill that was signed four years ago, on March 23, 2010, is not the law, or rather program, that now exists. Parts of it have been changed or delayed 30 times. It is telling that the president rebuffed Congress when it asked to work with him on alterations, but had no qualms about doing them by executive fiat. The program today, which affects a sixth of the U.S. economy, is not what was passed by the U.S. Congress. On Wednesday Robert Gibbs, who helped elect the president in 2008 and served as his first press secretary, predicted more changes to come. He told a business group in Colorado that the employer mandate would likely be scrapped entirely. He added that the program needed an “additional layer” or “cheaper” coverage and admitted he wasn’t sure the individual mandate had been the right way to go.

Finally, the program’s supporters have gone on quite a rhetorical journey, from “This is an excellent bill, and opponents hate the needy” to “People will love it once they have it” to “We may need some changes” to “I’ve co-sponsored a bill to make needed alternations” to “This will be seen by posterity as an advance in human freedom.”

That was the president’s approach on Tuesday, when he announced the purported 7.1 million enrollees. “The debate over repealing this law is over. The Affordable Care Act is here to stay. . . . In the end, history is not kind to those who would deny Americans their basic economic security. Nobody remembers well those who stand in the way of America’s progress or our people. And that’s what the Affordable Care Act represents. As messy as it’s been sometimes, as contentious as it’s been sometimes, it is progress.”

Someone said it lacked everything but a “Mission Accomplished” banner. It was political showbiz of a particular sort, asking whether the picture given of a thing will counter the experience of the thing.

There’s a brute test of a policy: If you knew then what you know now, would you do it? I will never forget a conversation in 2006 or thereabouts with a passionate and eloquent supporter of the decision to go into Iraq. We had been having this conversation for years, he a stalwart who would highlight every optimistic sign, every good glimmering. He argued always for the rightness of the administration’s decision. I would share my disquiet, my doubts, finally my skepticism. One night over dinner I asked him, in passing, “If we had it to do over again, should we have gone in? would you support it?”

And he said, “Of course not!”

Which told me everything.

There are very, very few Democrats who would do ObamaCare over again. Some would do something different, but they wouldn’t do this. The cost of the blunder has been too high in terms of policy and politics.

They, and the president, are trying to put a good face on it.

Republicans of all people should not go for the happy face. They cannot run only on ObamaCare this year and later, because it’s not the only problem in America. But it’s a problem, a big one, and needs to be hard and shrewdly fought.

It is not fully remembered or appreciated—to some degree it’s been forced down the memory hole—that a primary reason the American people opposed the Soviet Union and were able to sustain that opposition (and bear its costs) was that the Soviets were not only expansionist but atheistic, and aggressively so. It was part of what communism was about—God is a farce and must be removed as a force. They closed the churches, killed and imprisoned priests and nuns. Wherever communism went there was an attempt to suppress belief.

Americans, more then than now a churchgoing and believing people, knew this and recoiled. That recoil added energy, heft and moral seriousness to America’s long opposition. Americans wouldn’t mind if Russia merely operated under an eccentric economic system—that was their business. They wouldn’t mind if it had dictators—one way or another Russia always had dictators. But that it was expansionist and atheistic—that was different. That was a threat to humanity.One of the strategically interesting things about Vladimir Putin is that he has been careful not to set himself against religious belief but attempted to align himself with it. He has taken domestic actions that he believes reflect the assumptions of religious conservatives. He has positioned himself so that he can make a claim on a part of the Russian soul, as they used to say, that his forbears could not: He is not anti-God, he is pro-God, pro the old church of the older, great Russia.That is only one way in which Putinism is different. The Soviets had an overarching world-ideology, Mr. Putin does not. The Soviets had an army of global reach, Mr. Putin has an army of local reach. The Soviet premiers of old, as Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, noted in an interview, operated within “a certain sense of bureaucracy, of restraints.” Mr. Putin’s Russia is “so concentrated economically and politically that we don’t know what constraints there are on his autonomy.” There is cronyism, crackdowns on the press. Mr. Putin has weakened formal institutions—and “institutions are inherently conservative” because “they provide checks and balances.” Mr. Haass added that “Putin’s ambitions and limits are not clear.”

I think we got a deep look at Mr. Putin’s attitudes and goals in his speech last week at the Kremlin, telling the world his reasons for annexing Crimea. It is a remarkable document and deserves more attention. It was a full-throated appeal to Russian nationalism, and an unapologetic expression of Russian grievance. (The translation is from the Prague Post.)At the top, religious references. Crimea is “where Prince Vladimir was baptized. His spiritual feat of adopting Orthodoxy predetermined the overall basis of the culture, civilization and human values that unite the people of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.”

Crimea has always been an inseparable part of Russia. Yes, in 1954 “the Communist Party head, Nikita Khrushchev” decided to transfer it to Ukraine. “What stood behind this decision of his—a desire to win the support of the Ukrainian political establishment or to atone for the mass oppressions of the 1930s in Ukraine—is for historians to figure out.” But Khrushchev headed “a totalitarian state” and never asked the Crimeans for their views. Decades later, “what seemed impossible became a reality. The U.S.S.R. fell apart. . . . The big country was gone.” Things moved swiftly. Crimeans and others “went to bed in one country and awoke in other ones, overnight becoming ethnic minorities in former [Soviet] republics.” Russia “was not simply robbed, it was plundered.” Crimeans in 1991 felt “they were handed over like a sack of potatoes.”

Russia “humbly accepted the situation.” It was rocked, “incapable of protecting its interests.” Russians knew they’d been treated unjustly, but they chose to “build our good-neighborly relations with independent Ukraine on a new basis.” Russia was accommodating, respectful. But Ukraine was led by successive bad leaders who “milked the country, fought among themselves for power.”

“I understand those who came out on Maidan with peaceful slogans against corruption,” Mr. Putin said. But forces that “stood behind the latest events in Ukraine” had “a different agenda.” They “resorted to terror, murder and riots.” They are “Nationalists, neo-Nazis, Russophobes and anti-Semites.” “They continue to set the tone in Ukraine to this day.” They have “foreign sponsors” and “mentors.”

He declared that “there is no legitimate executive authority in Ukraine now,” that government agencies are controlled by “imposters,” often “controlled by radicals.” In that atmosphere residents of Crimea turned to Russia for protection. Russia could not abandon them. It helped them hold a referendum.

“Western Europe and North America” now say Moscow has violated international law. “It’s a good thing that they at least remember that there exists such a thing as international law—better late than never.” And Russia has violated nothing: Its military “never entered Crimea” but was already there, in line with international agreements. Russia chose merely to “enhance” its forces there, within limits previously set. There was not a single armed confrontation, and no casualties. Why? Because Crimeans wanted them there. If it had been an armed intervention, he said, surely a shot would have been fired.

In the decades since the Soviet Union’s fall—or, as Mr. Putin called it, since “the dissolution of bipolarity on the planet”—the world has become less stable. The U.S. is guided not by international law but by “the rule of the gun.” Americans think they are exceptional and can “decide the destinies of the world,” building coalitions on the basis of “if you are not with us, you are against us”—Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya. The “color revolutions” have produced “chaos” instead of freedom, and “the Arab Spring turned into the Arab Winter.”

Mr. Putin cleverly knocked down the idea of European integration. The real problem, he said, is that the West has been moving against “Eurasian integration.” Russia over the years has tried to be cooperative, but the U.S. and its allies have repeatedly lied and “made decisions behind our backs.” NATO expanded to the east; a missile-defense system is “moving forward.” The “infamous policy of containment” continues against Russia today. “They are constantly trying to sweep us into a corner. . . . But there is a limit to everything.”

Russia does not want to harm Ukraine. “We do not want to divide Ukraine; we do not need that.” But Kiev had best not join NATO, and Ukrainians should “put their own house in order.”

What does this remarkable speech tell us? It presents a rationale for moving further. Ukraine, for instance, is a government full of schemers controlled by others—it may require further attention. It expresses a stark sense of historical grievance and assumes it is shared by its immediate audience. It makes clear a formal animus toward the U.S. It shows he has grown comfortable in confrontation. It posits the presence of a new Russia, one that is “an independent, active participant in international affairs.” It suggests a new era, one that doesn’t have a name yet. But the decades following the collapse of the Soviet Union were one thing, and this is something else—something rougher, darker and more aggressive.

It tells us this isn’t about Crimea.

It tells us this isn’t over.

What has been happening in Ukraine is not a wake-up call precisely but a tugging at the attention, a demand to focus.

There’s a sense that in some new way we are watching the 21st century take its shape and express its central realities. Exactly 100 years ago, in August 1914, the facts that would shape the 20th century gathered and emerged in the Great War. History doesn’t repeat itself; you can’t, as they say, step into the same stream twice. But it does have an unseen circularity.

Sept. 11 started the century and brought forward the face of terrorism. It is still there and will continue to cause grave disruptions. Since then we have seen we are living in a time of uprisings, from the Mideast to Africa to the streets of Kiev. We are learning that history isn’t over in Europe, that East-West tensions can simmer and boil over, that the 20th century didn’t resolve as much as many had hoped.

A Mideast dictator last year used poison gas on his own population and strengthened his position. He’s winning. What does that tell the other dictators? What does it suggest about our future?

I keep thinking of two things that for me capture the moment and our trajectory. The first is a sentence from Don DeLillo’s prophetic 1991 novel, ” Mao II “: “The future belongs to crowds.” Movements will be massive. The street will rise and push. The street in Cairo, say, is full of young men who are jobless and unformed. They channel their energy into politics and street passions. If they had jobs they’d develop the habits of work—self-discipline, patience, a sense of building and belonging—that are so crucial to maintaining human society. But they don’t, so they won’t.

The second is the title of Tom Wolfe’s most recent book, “Back to Blood.” He was referring to tribalism, ethnicity, the enduring call of clan. But also just blood. Another enduring and even re-emergent force in human affairs.

We see Vladimir Putin as re-enacting the Cold War. He sees us as re-enacting American greatness. We see his actions as a throwback. He sees our denunciations as a strutting on the stage by a broken down, has-been actor.

Mr. Putin doesn’t move because of American presidents, he moves for his own reasons. But he does move when American presidents are weak. He moved on Georgia in August 2008 when George W. Bush was reeling from unwon wars, terrible polls and a looming economic catastrophe that all but children knew was coming. (It came the next month.) Mr. Bush was no longer formidable as a leader of the free world.

Mr. Putin moved on Ukraine when Barack Obama was no longer a charismatic character but a known quantity with low polls, failing support, a weak economy. He’d taken Mr. Obama’s measure during the Syria crisis and surely judged him not a shrewd international chess player but a secretly anxious professor who makes himself feel safe with the sound of his voice.

Mr. Putin didn’t go into Ukraine because of Mr. Obama. He just factored him in.

A great question for the future: Will Mr. Putin ever respect an American president again? He knows our political situation, knows we’re a 50-50 nation, would assume we’re blocked from consensus barring unusual circumstances such as a direct attack. He’s not impressed by our culture or our economy. He might also make inferences from America’s demographic shifts. If we are a more non-European nation than we were 30 years ago, might he think us less likely to be engaged by—and enraged by—unfortunate dramas playing out in Europe? Mr. Putin, as Henry Kissinger says, is a serious strategist acting on serious perceived imperatives. He would make a point of figuring out the facts of his potential foe.

Three points on his overall tactics, all of which suggest what we’ll be seeing more of in the future.

First, we tend to think the Big Lie in foreign policy as antique, pre-Internet, as dead as Goebbels. It is not. For days Mr. Putin insisted he went into Ukraine to protect innocent people from marauding fascists. To some degree it worked, including among a few foreign-policy professionals. Big lies can confuse the situation, fool the gullible, and buy time. Expect more of them.

Second, after the invasion Mr. Putin murked up the situation and again bought some time—and some tentativeness among his foes—by contributing to the idea that he was perhaps crazy—”in another world,” as Angela Merkel is reported to have told Mr. Obama. (Imagine the White House relief: It’s not our fault, you can’t anticipate a madman! I guess that’s why it leaked.) Mr. Putin helped spread the idea in his March 4 postinvasion news conference in Moscow. From the grimly hilarious account of The New Republic’s Julia Ioffe : “He was a rainbow of emotion: Serious! angry! bemused! flustered! confused! So confused. Victor Yanukovich is still acting president of Ukraine, but he can’t talk to Ukraine because Ukraine has no president.” It was apparently quite a performance.

But Mr. Putin isn’t crazy. Nor was Khrushchev when some of his communications were wild enough during the Cuban Missile Crisis that the Kennedy White House wondered if he was drunk or undergoing a coup. “We will bury you!” No, we will unsettle you. Mr. Putin may be psychologically interesting, but he’s not mad. Allowing the idea to circulate added to the confusion, bought time and kept people wondering. Expect more of this from Mr. Putin.

Third, there is the matter of the unmarked Russian troops. Reporters in the Crimea had to shout, “Where are you from?” to be certain who they were. That added a new level of menace.

And it had a feeling of foreshadowing the wars of the future. Normally nations make it clear: We are Japan bombing Pearl Harbor, look at the rising sun on our planes. We are the Soviets in Afghanistan, look at our lumbering tanks!

But we have entered a time of war by at least temporary stealth. If there were a huge, coordinated, destabilizing cyberattack on our core institutions, it could be a while before intelligence agencies knew for certain who did it, and with whose help. If an entity attempted to take down the electric grid it might be some time before we knew who exactly was responsible. The same with a chemical or biological attack on any great city. Who are you? Who sent you?

It could be hard to know unless someone quickly claimed responsibility, as al Qaeda did after 9/11. Otherwise we are looking at a new kind of war, in which the fog is thicker and aggressions cannot be responded to quickly.

The most obvious Ukraine point has to do with American foreign policy in the sixth year of the Obama era.

Not being George W. Bush is not a foreign policy. Not invading countries is not a foreign policy. Wishing to demonstrate your sophistication by announcing you are unencumbered by the false historical narratives of the past is not a foreign policy. Assuming the world will be nice if we’re not militarist is not a foreign policy.

What is our foreign policy? Disliking global warming?

What a small and politically vicious man New York’s new mayor is. Bill de Blasio doesn’t like charter schools. They are too successful to be tolerated. Last week he announced he will drop the ax on three planned Success Academy schools. (You know Success Academy: It was chronicled in the film “Waiting for Superman.” It’s one of the charter schools the disadvantaged kids are desperate to get into.) Mr. de Blasio has also cut and redirected the entire allotment for charter facility funding from the city’s capital budget. An official associated with a small, independent charter school in the South Bronx told me the decision will siphon money from his school’s operations. He summed up his feelings with two words: “It’s dispiriting.”

Some 70,000 of the city’s one million students, most black or Hispanic, attend charter schools, mostly in poorer neighborhoods. Charter schools are privately run but largely publicly financed. Their teachers are not unionized. Their students usually outscore their counterparts at conventional public schools on state tests. Success Academy does particularly well. Last year 82% of its students passed citywide math exams. Citywide the figure was 30%.

These are schools that work. They are something to be proud of and encourage.

Mr. de Blasio’s move has caused considerable personal anxiety and widespread public anger. The Daily News on Thursday called the nearly 200 Success Academy students who now have no place to go the mayor’s “educational orphans.” A reporter spoke to distraught families. “I wanted the best for my daughter,” said Rakim Smith, 40, a cable technician from Harlem whose daughter Dymond is a sixth-grader at Success Academy Harlem Central Middle School. “Now they’re trying to take it away.” “I don’t know where else I can send my son so that he can have the same level education,” said Fatoumata Kebe of the Bronx, whose 11-year-old son, Ousmane, goes to Harlem Central.

On Thursday Mr. de Blasio went on a sympathetic radio station and couldn’t have been clearer about what is driving his actions. Charter schools may help the poor and those just starting out in America, they may give options to kids who’ve floundered elsewhere, but a lot of them are supported by rich people. There is a “strong private-sector element” in their funding, he said. The mayor agreed with host Ebro Darden that “a lot” of charter schools are funded by big business: “Oh yeah, a lot of them are funded by very wealthy Wall Street folks and others.” When Mr. Darden and co-host Peter Rosenberg suggested that a “campaign” to portray the mayor as anti-charter-school was also funded by big business, Mr. de Blasio, as the New York Post noted, didn’t disagree. “I think you’re providing a keen political analysis there.”

Clever people usually try to hide their animus. This one doesn’t care if you know how he feels about that “element.”

It is true that wealthy and public-spirited New Yorkers, out of loyalty to the city and its future generations, give a lot of money, care and time—the last, time, doesn’t get noted enough—to create and help run many of the city’s charter schools. They should be thanked for this, every day. Again, they do it because they care about children who would otherwise be locked into a public-school system that doesn’t work.

But the people who run the public-school system that doesn’t work—the one where you can’t fire teachers who sexually prey on students and principals who don’t even show up for work, which is to say the public schools run by the city’s huge and powerful teachers union—don’t like the charter schools. And they are the mayor’s supporters, a significant part of his base.

The very existence of charter schools is an implicit rebuke to the public schools. It means they are not succeeding, and something new must be tried. That something new won’t be perfect—no charter school is, and some are more imperfect than others—but people still line up to get into them. And there’s something to the wisdom of crowds. When a school exists for the students, you can tell. When it exists for the unions, you can tell that too.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is not politically inept, made clear this week that he will stand with the charter schools. Mr. de Blasio had come to Albany Tuesday on what is called lobbying day. He brought more than 1,000 people and held a rally to press state lawmakers to increase city income taxes to pay for prekindergarten education. Mr. Cuomo, who had already told Mr. de Blasio that he backs pre-K but not a tax hike, decided to hold his own rally. His crowd, full of charter school students, teachers and families, was much bigger than de Blasio’s. Mr. Cuomo had fiery words. “They say it’s cold out here, but I don’t feel cold, I feel hot. I feel fired up,” he said. “You are not alone. . . . We will save charter schools.”

This was centrist and politically clever, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that Mr. Cuomo showed not all Democrats are on the same page on education reform, and some are passionately for it.

*   *   *

We close with a little red meat because there’s something in this story—frightened children, cold political operators—that gets our blood up.

Nice liberals who back school reform are saying some very strange things about what Mr. de Blasio is doing. They’re being awfully understanding. They’re saying you have to appreciate that compared with his political base, the mayor is really staking out a middle ground. He is not going as far as the progressive left wants him to. They want to block all charters. They’re disappointed! The teachers union doesn’t want any charter expansion. And they’re his base!

It is not the job of nice liberals to make excuses for pols who take a good thing from kids just to satisfy a political agenda. It is not the job of nice liberals to forgive a politician acting in a brutish way, throwing poor children from hard circumstances out of good schools.

It’s not the job of liberals to explain that away. It’s their job to oppose it, because this move against charter schools is an opening feint, a showing of mood, and a sign of things to come

The nice liberals of New York are sounding on this very much like frightened French aristocrats in 1792: “You have to understand, Marat is pretty ideological and we’re lucky he’s only cutting off our ears and nose and not our heads.” No, he came for their heads later.

You say,: “He’s not Marat, he’s just a slob.” That’s true. But even slobs need to be opposed now and then.

In this move more than any so far, Mr. de Blasio shows signs he is what his critics warned he would be—a destructive force in the city of New York. When a man says he will raise taxes to achieve a program like pre-K education, and is quickly informed that that program can be achieved without raising taxes, and his answer is that he wants to raise taxes anyway, that man is an ideologue.

And ideologues will sacrifice anything to their ideology. Even children.

The constant mischief of the progressive left is hurting the nation’s morale. There are few areas of national life left in which they are not busy, and few in which they’re not making it worse. There are always more regulations, fees and fiats, always more cultural pressure and insistence.

The president brags he has a pen and a phone. He uses the former to sign executive orders. It is not clear why he mentioned the latter since he rarely attempts to bring legislators over to his side. Who exactly is he calling? The most hopeful thing he’s done is signal this week what he’ll be up to after he leaves. He will work with young minority men. Good. He is a figure of inspiration to them, and they need and deserve encouragement. This also leaves us understanding for the first time the true purpose of his so far unsuccessful presidency: to launch a meaningful postpresidency. I’m glad that’s clear.

But to American morale. Here one refers to recent polling data. Gallup in December had 72% of those polled saying big government is a bigger threat to the future than big business and big labor—a record high. This may be connected to ObamaCare, an analyst ventured. Rasmussen this week had only 32% of those polled saying the country is headed in the right direction, with 61% saying we’re on the wrong track. Both numbers fluctuate, but the right track is down two points since this time last year and the wrong track up three. Gallup also had only 39% of respondents saying they saw America in a positive position, with less than half thinking it will be better in five years.

None of these numbers are new, exactly, as they reflect long-term trends. But they never lose their power to startle. The persistent blues, the lack of faith, the bet that things won’t get better—it just doesn’t sound like America.

We are suffering in great part from the politicization of everything and the spread of government not in a useful way but a destructive one. Everyone wants to help the poor, the old and the sick; the safety net exists because we want it. But voters and taxpayers feel bullied, burdened and jerked around, which again is not new but feels more intense every day. Common sense and native wit tell them America is losing the most vital part of itself in the continuing shift of power from private to public. Rules, regulations, many of them stupid, from all the agencies—local, state, federal—on the building of a house, or the starting of a business. You can only employ so many before the new insurance rules kick in so don’t employ too many, don’t take a chance! Which means: Don’t grow. It takes the utmost commitment to start a school or improve an existing one because you’ll come up against the unions, which own the politicians.It’s all part of the malaise, the sclerosis. So is the eroding end of the idea that religious scruples and beliefs have a high place that must culturally and politically be respected. The political-media complex is bravely coming down on florists with unfashionable views. On Twitter Thursday the freedom-fighter who tweets as @FriedrichHayek asked: “Can the government compel a Jewish baker to deliver a wedding cake on a Saturday? If not why not.” Why not indeed. Because the truly tolerant give each other a little space? On an optimistic note, the Little Sisters of the Poor haven’t been put out of business and patiently await their day in court.

I think a lot of people right now, certainly Republicans and conservatives, feel like a guy in a batting cage taking ball after ball from an automatic pitching machine. He’s hitting the ball and keeping up and suddenly the machine starts going berserk. It’s firing five balls a second, then 10. At first he tries to hit a few. Then he’s just trying to duck, trying not to get hurt.

That’s how people feel about the demands and dictates. The balls keep coming at them politically, locally, culturally. Republicans and conservatives comprise at least half the country. That’s a lot of people.

*   *   *

In the dark screwball comedy that is ObamaCare, the Congressional Budget Office revealed last month the law will provide disincentives to work. Don’t worry, said Nancy Pelosi, people can take that time and go become poets and painters. At first you think: Huh, I can do that, I’ve got a beret. Then you think: No, I have to earn a living. Then you think, poor hardworking rube that you are: Wait a second, I’m subsidizing all this. I’ve been cast in the role of Catherine de Medici, patroness of the arts. She at least had a castle, I just get a bill!

The IRS is coming up with new rules making it harder for independent groups to organize and resist the constant messages and claims of government. Meanwhile it warns taxpayers they must be able to prove they have insurance coverage when they file their 2014 taxes or they’ll face a fine (or tax, or fee), which the government has decided to call a “shared responsibility payment.” It is $95 per adult and $47.50 per child to a maximum of $285, or 1% of your household income, whichever is higher. People already enraged by canceled coverage, higher premiums, huge deductibles, lost doctors and limited networks, fume. And the highest-ranking Democrat on Capitol Hill, Majority Leader Harry Reid, goes to the floor of the Senate to say of the ObamaCare horror stories that “all of them are untrue.” They’re “stories made up out of whole cloth” spread by “the multibillionaire Koch brothers.”

Imagine that—you have real problems caused by a bad law, and Mr. Reid tells you that what you are experiencing in your own life is a lie made up by propagandists. He sounded like Lenin. There is no cholera in the new Russia.

The NSA is a real and present threat to your privacy, HHS actually never has to come up with a true number on ObamaCare enrollments or costs, and at the EPA no one talks anymore about why Al Armendariz, a top regional administrator, felt free to brag in a 2010 speech that his “philosophy of enforcement” could be compared with the practice by ancient Roman soldiers of crucifying random victims. When it surfaced, he left the agency. Did his mind-set?

People feel beset because they are. All these things are pieces of a larger, bullying ineptitude. And people know, they are aware.

Conservatives sometimes feel exhausted from trying to fight back on a million fronts. A leftist might say: “Yes, that’s the plan.”

But the left too is damaged. They look hollowed out and incoherent. Their victories, removed of meaning, are only the triumphs of small aggressions. They win the day but not the era. The result is not progress but more national division, more of a grinding sense of dislike. At first it will be aimed at the progressive left, but in time it will likely be aimed at America itself, or rather America as It Is Now. When the progressive left wins, they will win, year by year, less of a country.

A great confusion has set in about what American political figures should and should not say when confronted with violent political events in other countries. Exemplifying the confusion, as he does on so many issues, is President Obama.

Kiev is in crisis. Protesters have taken up arms to fight the government, whose security forces fire into the crowds. The government says dozens have been killed; unconfirmed reports suggest the number is more than a hundred, with many hundreds wounded. At issue is whether Ukraine will tug West or East. The protesters, with broad public support, want to align their country more closely with Europe. They don’t want Russian economic and political dominance, Russian corruption, Vladimir Putin’s authoritarianism. They want to push away from all that. Which of course is their right.

Mr. Putin sets himself as the strongman, the Last Czar. What he wants to do is hold on to what he sees as his asset base, and keep Ukraine, with all its economic potential, within Russia’s sphere of influence.It’s all very dramatic and nobody knows what will happen. If the protests continue, spread and intensify, President Viktor Yanukovych may well fall. He’s already bleeding political support. He may declare a state of emergency and formally call in the military, which could trigger civil war. What would civil war in a modern, technologized, militarized, quasi-Western state look like? No one knows. Mr. Putin could send Russian troops. He’d pay a heck of a price in world opinion, which he’s courted so assiduously with the costly Sochi games. But he sent troops to Georgia in 2008.

Europe and America can do little beyond considering, threatening and imposing economic and political sanctions against the Ukrainian government. But it’s all very high stakes and carries big implications for the future. So shouldn’t we be making it clear where we as a nation stand? Shouldn’t we make clear where our sympathies are?

The world is watching. Part of the story in Ukraine is that the people are rebelling against their elites, which have cozied up to Russia for their own purposes. We won’t be seeing less of this kind of thing in the future but more. Don’t we want to be understood to be on the right side of that battle?

I think our leaders are now so anxious about appearing to support entangling America in another conflict that they’ve become afraid to voice full-throated support for those who fight for principles completely in line with our own—the right of people to choose their own economic and governmental arrangements, and their right to resist any illegitimate limiting of their freedoms.

We have always stood for those things. Isn’t this a good time to make it clear again?

The Higher Reticence is, I suppose, intended to show how sophisticated and peaceable we are. But it doesn’t look peaceable, it looks weak. It is one thing to be militarily prudent, it is another to be, in expressing our sentiments, timorous and detached.Here is what Mr. Obama said Wednesday, as the moment approached crisis in Kiev: The U.S. holds the Ukrainian government “primarily responsible” for restoring peace. “We expect peaceful protesters to remain peaceful.” The U.S. is “monitoring very closely the situation.” The Ukrainian military should “not step into what should be a set of issues that can be resolved by civilians.” The U.S. will continue to “engage with all sides.”

With all due respect, this was not so much calibrated as meaningless, crouching and process-driven. Which side are we on?

The president then warned there will be “consequences” if people “step over the line.” This sounded like a man who is peripheral to the drama insisting he is very, very relevant. Is this like the “red line” in Syria that Mr. Obama warned Bashar Assad he’d best not cross, and he crossed it, and nothing happened?

It is embarrassing when the president makes statements like this. He is like the father who poses on the bottom of the stairs and says in a deep voice, “Don’t make me come up there!” And for a moment there’s silence and then the kids erupt in giggles. Because there’s no price to pay if he comes up there, and because he doesn’t come up.

I thought, as he spoke, that he is destroying the American brand in the world.

It is particularly important now for us to show the people of Ukraine, and of Europe, that America is not some exhausted shell of itself with no adherence to anything larger than the daily concerns of its welfare state, but still a nation with meaning. That it still stands with those who risk all for greater freedom, that it cares. That it is not left mute by fantasies of a “reset” with Russia that Moscow itself derides. “You got it wrong,” the Russian foreign minister told an embarrassed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton when she gave him the famous button that incorrectly translated the word “reset.” He seemed to enjoy her discomfort. Last June, Mr. Putin was theatrically rude to Mr. Obama at a joint press conference, turning from him like a bored student who knows his professor isn’t marginally capable of operating in the real world. It reminded me of something a diplomat who has dealt with him said. What Mr. Putin longs for is a Nixon with whom he can do business. Instead he has Mr. Obama, for whom he appears to have little respect.

*   *   *

Part of leading—just part, but a true part—is talking.

America circa 1945-89 did not send in troops to liberate the Warsaw Pact countries and lift the Iron Curtain. But it consistently made clear whose side it was on and what it stood for, and its insistent clarity on these points, especially in the 1980s, ultimately helped liberate those nations.

Democrats seem essentially uninterested in the drama in Kiev. Maybe they think it’s just another distraction from the minimum wage. But Republicans have gotten all bollixed up in the past 12 years of wars, and they’re still concussed by the telephone uprising in which their constituents overwhelmed the Capitol switchboard to say they didn’t want a war in Syria. It has left some of them feeling whiplashed, defensive and fearful of being misunderstood.

But you can’t lead when your greatest fear is that you’ll be misunderstood. Conservatives who understandably and legitimately want no more military interventions have forgotten the power of articulated encouragement. That means saying what side you’re on and why, and what principles you back.

In this case they should stand with the people in Independence Square in Kiev just as much as their predecessors stood with the people of the Warsaw Pact.

Just because it doesn’t seem there’s much you can do doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot you can say—and in the saying, show to the world that your country, for all its woes, limits and distractions, still has a beating heart.

Sen. Rob Portman said the other day: “I think we need to stand with people who are supporting democracy and freedom.” That, he said, is our tradition, our history.

It is. We should stick with it. And not only for the world but for ourselves, to remember who we are.