Peggy Noonan

ometimes the most obvious thing is the most unnoticed. I find myself thinking this week about the destructive force of selfishness in our political life. This common failing is the source of such woe! Politicians call themselves public servants, so they should be expected to be less selfish than the average Joe ; their views and actions should be assumed to be more keenly directed toward the broad public good. But no one expects that of politicians anymore, and they know it and use the knowledge to justify being even worse than they’d normally be. “If I have the name, I might as well have the game.”

They are the locus of selfishness in the modern world.

Chris Christie’s problem isn’t that he’s a bully, it’s that he’s selfish. Barack Obama isn’t stupid and therefore the maker of mayhem, he’s selfish.

There isn’t a staffer on the Hill who won’t tell you 90% of members are driven by their own needs, wants and interests, not America’s. The former defense secretary, Bob Gates, has written a whole book about it, and the passages in which he speaks most plainly read like a cry from the heart. The chaplain of the Senate, Barry Black, made news a few months ago because he’d taken to praying that the character of our representatives be improved. “Save us from the madness,” he prayed one morning last October. “We acknowledge our transgressions, our shortcomings, our smugness, our selfishness.” The single most memorable thing I ever heard from a Wall Streeter was from one of its great men, who blandly explained to me one day why certain wealthy individuals were taking an action that was both greedy and personally inconvenient to them. “Everyone wants more,” he said, not in a castigating way but as one explains certain essentials to a child.

People in public life have become more grasping, and less embarrassed by it. But the odd thing, the destabilizing thing as you think about it, is that we’re in a crisis. We’ve been in it since at least 2008 and the crash, and the wars. We are in unprecedented trouble. Citizens know this. It’s why they buy guns. They see unfixable America around them, they think it’s all going to fall apart. In Washington (and New York) they huff and puff their disapproval: Those Americans with their guns, they’re causing a lot of trouble. But Americans think they’re in trouble because their leaders are too selfish to face challenges that will do us in.

What’s most striking is that in a crisis, you don’t expect business as usual. You expect something better from leaders, you expect them to try to meet the moment.

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Mr. Christie is a great talent, a political figure of real and natural gifts. What has jeopardized his position is not that he’s gruff, in-your-face, insistent—a bully. It’s that he’s been selfish. In 2012 he was given a star role, keynote speaker at the GOP national convention. His speech was strong, funny and ran about 2,340 words. But it took around 2,000 of them before he got to a guy named Romney. Everything else was “The greatest lesson that mom ever taught me . . . When I came into office . . . I have an answer.” The GOP nominee needed a boost from blue-state man, but there wasn’t much in it for blue-state man. He’d only get Republican cooties on him. So he played it like a vanity production and made a speech about himself.

That wasn’t a major sin—it’s only politics, not policy. But it fit in with his effusive embrace of Mr. Obama in the days before the 2012 election. Any governor would show strategic warmth for a president in charge of ladling out federal money after disaster. But Jersey was about to re-elect president Obama by nearly 18 points, and Mr. Christie wanted to win over Democrats when he ran the next year.

He was already going to win big. But he had to win bigger, had to have more.

Again, not much of a sin. But when Bridgegate came, it seemed to fit the pattern—he’ll ding you when he doesn’t have to, even if it makes local citizens cry, to gain an advantage, to get more. Whoever made the call, selfishness is at the heart of the scandal.

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There’s an increasing sense in our political life that in both parties politicians call themselves public servants but act like bosses who think the voters work for them. Physicians who routinely help the needy and the uninsured do not call themselves servants. They get to be called the 1%. Politicians who jerk around doctors, nurses and health systems call themselves servants, when of course they look more like little kings and queens instructing the grudging peasants in how to arrange their affairs.

Which gets us, inevitably, to the King of I, who unselfconsciously claims ownership of . . . everything. “My military,” “my White House,” “my cabinet,” “my secretary.” The president does first person singular more than Mr. Christie does. But his actions are so much more consequential, because they’re national and because they play out in the area of policy.

The president’s health-insurance reform had to be breathtaking, mind-bending, historic. It had to be a Democratic Party initiative only. It required a few major lies to gain passage, but what the heck.

It was political selfishness that blew up the American health-care system. And it’s the public, in this and other messes, that’s left holding the bag. But as government gets bigger the bag gets bigger, and people will get tired of carrying it. They’re already tired.

I close with the selfishness story of the week, the stunning New York Post expose on Public School 106 in Far Rockaway, a neighborhood in the borough of Queens. The grade school is a poster child for the indifference of those who are supposed to be helping the country. There are no gym or art classes, the Post’s Susan Edelman reported. The library is a junk room; the nurse’s office lacks essentials; there are no math or reading books for the Common Core curriculum. Kids are left to watch movies. Kindergartners are shunted off to dilapidated trailers. The principal, Marcella Sills, often doesn’t show up for work, or swans in near the end of the day. School staff were afraid to speak up because they feared retribution from Ms. Sills or the teachers union.

When the Post broke the story, the city’s Department of Education sent an inspector. The principal actually showed up early that day. The school took delivery of some books. Everyone was in high spin mode.

The union will look to the union’s interests, Ms. Sills will no doubt see to hers, the new city administration will try to limit embarrassment, handle the fallout and change the subject. But you couldn’t read the stories without thinking: Who’s looking out for the kids? And what’s happening to us?

Someday history will write of our era, and to history the biggest scandal will be the thing we all accepted in our leaders, chronic and endemic selfishness. History will be hard on us for that.

Gov. Chris Christie acquitted himself well in his “Bridgegate” news conference, and emerged undead. He said he had “no knowledge or involvement” in the apparent scheme by his political operatives to take revenge on a New Jersey mayor who refused to back him in the 2013 election. He had “no involvement,” in the four-day-long traffic jams they arranged on the George Washington Bridge. Learning of it left him feeling “blindsided,” “embarrassed,” “humiliated” and “stunned by the abject stupidity that was shown here.” He claimed personal responsibility, announced the firing of a top staffer, apologized to the state, and said he’d go to Fort Lee to apologize to the town and its mayor. Instead of leaving the podium at the end of his statement he stayed for a barrage of questions. The appearance went almost two hours. You can make mistakes, lose your focus and poise, when you let the press exhaust itself asking questions of you; it took guts and brains to pull it off.

Cities sometimes make swerves. That’s what New York did in November when it elected a left-wing Democrat, Bill de Blasio, as mayor. The city was saying, “Enough with the past, let’s try something new.” There’s no doubt they will get it.

Mayors Rudy Giuliani (1994-2001) and Mike Bloomberg (2002-13) led a renaissance of the city, which had half-killed itself in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s with bankruptcy, labor unrest and high crime rates. The city was thought to be unworkable, finished. For Mayor Giuliani the job was to stabilize, get the criminals off the street, let people feel safe again. Once that was done New York’s natural hunger and high spirits would reassert themselves, businesses would thrive and hire. He left behind a safer, more prosperous city. And there was the parting gift of his last days as mayor, during 9/11 and its aftermath, when—love him or hate him—he showed what a leader looked like.

Mike Bloomberg, sworn in weeks later, had to lead the city as it righted itself, got over the trauma and refound its confidence. His job was to shake off the ashes and dust, expand and diversify the economy, help create jobs, lower crime rates even further, move forward. He succeeded. The other night at his last dinner as mayor, one of his daughters’ eyes filled with tears as she thanked him, in a toast, for leaving behind a city that her son could be proud of, love, and live in forever.

These imperfect men with their imperfect administrations and their big mistakes—they made a masterpiece. In the past 20 years, other American cities were going down—Detroit most famously—while New York not only became again what it was, the greatest city on the face of the Earth, but it looked like it, and felt like it.

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Why did New York swerve from that path instead of continuing on it? A lot of reasons. You have to have some years on you to remember New York when it didn’t work—to even know that it’s not magically ordained that it will. You have to be older than 30 or so to remember when it wasn’t safe.

In 1991, there were 2,245 murders in New York. In 2013, there were 333. If you’re a 20-year-old voter, or a 40-year-old voter who came to the city from elsewhere, you don’t remember 1991, and how it felt. You don’t remember garbage strikes and grime. Your vision of the city is as it was in the Giuliani-Bloomberg era, a city ever rising.

And New York is a Democratic town. Sooner or later it was going to swerve. Though the largely untold story is that voter turnout in November was historically low. Only about a million of 4.3 million registered voters showed up at the polls. Bill de Blasio won in landslide, but it was a landslide from a severely reduced pile of voters.

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No one knows exactly what’s coming, but Mr. de Blasio’s inaugural address on Wednesday was not promising. Whether you are a conservative or a liberal, you can choose, as a leader, to be a uniter or a divider. Mr. de Blasio seems very much the latter. He is on the side of the poor and the marginalized, which is good, but he took every opportunity to jab at those who are not poor and don’t live on the margins. “Big dreams are not a luxury of the privileged few,” he said. Whoever said they were? He is a political descendant of those “who took on the elite.” New York “is not the exclusive domain of the One Percent.” Who said it was? His campaign promises—more spending, higher taxes—are not, he said, just “rhetoric.” There was a repeated refrain: “We won’t wait. We’ll do it now.”

This mayor will “reform” the stop-and-frisk policy of the New York Police Department. Exactly how, he didn’t say. But stop, question and frisk has been part of the kind of policing that helped New York reduce crime.

“We will ask the very wealthy to pay a little more in taxes so that we can offer full-day, universal pre-K and after-school programs for every middle school student.” The wealthy should not complain. “Those earning between $500,000 and one million dollars a year, for instance, would see their taxes increase by an average of $973 a year. That’s less than three bucks a day—about the cost of a small soy latte at your local Starbucks.”

Ah, those latte-swilling debutantes and malefactors of great wealth.

There was no mention of the most famous impediment to educational improvement and reform: the teachers unions.

Mr. de Blasio acknowledges that his “progressive vision” is not supported by everyone. “Some on the far right continue to preach the virtue of trickle-down economics. They believe that the way to move forward is to give more to the most fortunate, and that somehow the benefits will work their way down to everyone else. They sell their approach as the path of ‘rugged individualism.’ ” But don’t worry, he doesn’t want to “punish success,” he wants to “create more success stories.”

It isn’t hard to unpack this. Those who oppose Mr. de Blasio are greedy and uncaring. They don’t offer a point of view, they “preach,” and what they preach is that the poor should be satisfied with the crumbs that fall from the tables of the rich. They “sell” this argument—my goodness, they’re trying to make money even while discussing politics—but the flawed product they peddle is “rugged individualism,” a phrase that hasn’t been used in this city in a century. But even rugged individualists, he quotes former New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia as saying, can’t survive in the midst of “collective starvation.” And you thought Mike Bloomberg left New York in pretty good shape.

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An inaugural address is a big thing. It declares an agenda but also sets a tone. An attitude. The tone Mr. de Blasio set was that of a divider.

A uniter’s approach would have been one that was both more morally generous and more honest. It wouldn’t set one group against the other, it would have asserted that all New Yorkers are in this together. Something along this approach: “To those who earn half a million dollars or more a year, we know and understand that your weekly paycheck is already subject to federal, state and city taxes. Which means we know you already contribute a great deal, and not only through taxes. So many of our citizens are deeply civic-minded. They give their time and effort to helping their local churches and synagogues; to building civic organizations; to raising funds for the poor and the hungry; to volunteering for literacy programs; and donating their wealth to keep the arts and the museums going. In our town, much has always been asked of those to whom much has been given—and they have come through. They have helped build a ladder. And now we are going to make that ladder sturdier, stronger, higher and wider so more of our young can use it.”

What was absent in Mr. de Blasio’s remarks was a kind of civic courtesy, or grace. The kind that seeks to unite and build from shared strength, the kind that doesn’t demonize. Instead, from our new mayor we got the snotty sound of us vs. them, of zero-sum politics.

It was not a promising beginning. Or rather what it promises is unfortunate. I already miss Mike.

A small thought on an essential fact as 2014 begins:

Washington

What’s the political word of the year? For months journalists couldn’t settle on how to describe the rollout of ObamaCare. “Failed,” disastrous,” “unsuccessful.” In the past few weeks they’ve settled on “botched.” References to the botched rollout have appeared in this paper, The Hill, NBC, Fox, NPR, the New Republic, the Washington Post and other media outlets.

When I was new in the Reagan administration, a colleague would worry aloud to me about the bad things he was hearing about the budget negotiations on the Hill. We’re giving away the store, the negotiators aren’t tough enough, they’re throwing in the towel. I tried to study up so I could be alarmed too. But it was hard because my background was Democratic—a Reagan Democrat before that term was popularized—and we just never thought about “the budget.” It wasn’t strictly economic issues that made us conservative; it was a constellation of issues, including taxes and spending.

I didn’t see the trajectory of life through “the budget,” and in that respect I was a normal American. That’s how we were, and are. We hire people to make budgets but we’re not accountants, that’s not the American DNA. Anyway my alarm remained insufficient and finally I admitted to my colleague that the way I see it history is long and textured, and specific and discrete legislative actions rarely make or break a great nation. A series of bad, bad budgets can harm a country. A series of good, good budgets can help it. End of story.

Two things have changed since those days. The first is that we used to worry the government would go bankrupt, and now we worry that it is bankrupt and no one’s admitting it. This has created an air of considerable crisis. The second happened in the past few years. It is that the government is now unable even to pass a budget, to perform this minimal duty. Instead Congress and the administration lurch from crisis to crisis, from shutdown to debt-ceiling battle. That gives a sense the process itself is broken, and this lends an air of instability, of Third World-ness, to the world’s oldest continuing democracy. We can’t even control our books. We don’t even try.

That’s my context for the Ryan-Murray budget deal.

Should it be passed? Yes, yes and yes. The good things about it are very good. The idea that Republicans and Democrats are capable of coming to a budget agreement is good. The idea that they can negotiate and make concessions and accept gains is good. The idea the U.S. government is able to produce anything but stasis and acrimony is good. That we can still function even in the age of Obama —good.

America looks like a great fool in the world when we have such division and dysfunction we can’t produce a budget. We were the guys who used to make it work! Now our friends are embarrassed for us and our adversaries gloat.

The agreement moves us an inch or two in the right direction. Let me tell you what that’s better than: It’s better than moving a few inches in the wrong direction! And it’s better than where we’ve been, in a state of agitated paralysis.

It is moderate progress. When the only progress you can win is moderate, take it.

The bill contains a little entitlement reform, a little federal worker and military pension reform. These are helpful and, as we say when wearing green eyeshades, the savings will compound in the out years. The reforms are achieved without tax increases—an achievement.

The deal breaks the caps for discretionary spending but fortunately leaves most of the sequester intact. Half the new spending will go to defense, which could use some relief, and half to pork. This is not ideal. But it’s real and it’s a budget and it goes in the right general direction, not the wrong one.

Some critics have said, bizarrely, that this takes the steam out of a future grand bargain. But where was that elusive bargain? Was anything happening there? It is equally arguable that Ryan-Murray will function as what diplomats call a confidence-building measure. If it passes both houses and garners support in the polls it could encourage both parties toward bigger agreements, such as tax reform. Which America desperately needs in order to grow.

The deal benefits both parties. It allows the Democrats to look serious. They haven’t in a while. It makes them look capable of something that is both modest and constructive—unlike ObamaCare, which is neither. They’re trying to get out from under the sullying of their brand. The policy implications are good for the country, so let ’em have what they need.

The Republican gain is substantial. The deal avoids upcoming fights over funding the government. The Democrats were going to win those, and in fact would have gotten a twofer. Republicans would be painted, again, as shut-down-the-government nihilists, and everyone’s eyes would have been taken off the ongoing disaster of ObamaCare. Avoiding another shutdown is a big fat Christmas gift for Republicans. They should thank themselves and accept it.

More important, the deal helps them look again the way Republicans used to look before they spent a dozen years squandering their reputation. It makes them look like a governing party. Look Ma, they can do something. They can put together an agreement that allows the government to run. They are not only the yelling, hog-stomping opposition, they can still build things that work.

You know, Republicans used to be known for that. It was their strong suit—sober at home and sober abroad. Then they got romantic and confused and decided big dramatic things were the way. But the American people, who enjoy drama in their actors, artists and even lately in popes, don’t require drama right now from their government. They are happy for some calm there. Republicans forgot they were the calm center.

The Democrats meanwhile spent the past five years on a toot, passing multi-thousand-page bills they didn’t read whose consequences they didn’t even bother to guess at. Now, to the consternation of the American people, they have blown up the American health-care system. That system was a road with a lot of potholes and not enough lanes. It needed repair and strengthening. Instead Democrats attacked it like the Bridge on the River Kwai and are now standing there scratching their heads like Alec Guinness, asking: “What have I done?”

That whole mess will have to be cleaned up. Maybe a budget deal will give Congress a little space—and confidence—in which to attempt it.

The deal’s foes can’t just say it isn’t good enough. Of course it’s not good enough! They’re never good enough. “The budget” is just a thing going in the wrong direction or the right direction. This one goes right. Have a good 2014 and it will go righter still.

Tea-party lawmakers and their supporters should recognize an opportunity when it appears. They suffer from a reputation of selfishness. They only have to look to their base, they only have to take care of themselves, and do. The Republican Party must operate nationally and make an impression on a big and various nation of 315 million. There are moments when the tea party has to tug the Republicans right. This is a moment when cooperating—backing a deal that is better than the absence of a deal—would be statesmanlike. The thing about statesmen is they’re taken seriously. And it isn’t only Democrats who would benefit from looking serious.

We’re not a year into his leadership, but it’s Christmastime and the pope has been much in the news. Let’s look at how he’s doing.

He continues to capture the imagination. When he says something, people look and listen. His approach is not to lecture on the finer points but to embrace, and through the embrace communicate the essentials. An image of the first nine months: Francis on the phone, calling strangers. “Hello, it’s the pope, I read your letter!” He famously eschews the special—the regalia, the car, the palace, the shoes. He wears a cross made not of gold but of common metal. That seems in line with his tastes and nature but carries a symbolic punch: The church should not use its dignity and greatness, its art and finery to separate itself, unconsciously, from the people.

In a world full of loneliness and poverty he says: We are all equal, and equally loved.

Somehow you get the impression that even though he is 76—everyone thinks he’s younger—he’s going to be around a long time. And his papacy is going to be big.

His apostolic exhortation released last week set out general guidelines for the church as it tries to bring people to it. I read the controversial economics section twice, and to me it sounded pretty much like how modern popes talk and think. The world is swept by “consumerism,” by the worship of things, which leaves our hearts “complacent yet covetous.” The desire to acquire blunts the conscience, crowds out God’s voice, and keeps us from hearing the only invitation that will make us happy.

His concerns in this section are classically Catholic and, in their emphasis, economically liberal: “Today we have to say ‘thou shalt not’ to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills. How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?” That struck me as a rebuke not only of “Wall Street” but of the media, which report the latter but not the former. Francis continues: “Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest.” He scores “trickle-down” economic theories “which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world.” This view reflects “a naive trust” in the economically powerful.

He must have heard about the carried-interest tax break, and corporate welfare.

All this has been portrayed as an attack on free-market economic thinking, but it struck me more as an attack on mindless selfishness, greed and go-with-the-flow acceptance of the unrightness of the world. It made me think of Charles Dickens. The pope’s message in part is: Don’t be Scrooge. He cared only for money, had no respect for the poor—he thought they should die and decrease the surplus population—wasn’t the least bit interested in treating his employees justly or with compassion, and missed out on all the real joy of life, until he wised up.

But is Francis saying more than that? Is he hostile to capitalism, and do we see this hostility in the pointed use of phrases such as “trickle-down,” a term the left uses to disparage the idea that created wealth, when invested or spent, spreads and benefits others?

I don’t know, I don’t think so, and we’ll see. I don’t think he’s saying be a leftist but something more revolutionary and fundamental: Be a saint. Be better, kinder, more serious and loving, and help create systems that reflect good, kind, loving people.

The pope has a way of colorfully saying, through words and actions, that the church is on the side of the poor—the materially and spiritually poor—and always has been. I think he’s saying that here: that the Church has a bias for the poor and impatience toward those who would abuse them. And he is speaking not infallibly but as a matter of a worldview rightly shared.

The popes of the modern era have been more or less European social democrats, of the economic left. I’ve never heard a pope worry about the depressive effects of high tax rates, have you? Or the dangers of high spending? Popes are sometimes geniuses but not economists.

And priests are like soldiers. I’ve never met a member of the military who cared much about taxing and spending. Their general view is that taxes should be high enough to allow a great nation to support a first-rate military and keep you safe, end of story. Soldiers aren’t really paid commensurate with their responsibility and importance; it’s not as if they’re in the 60% bracket. Priests tend to be like that, too. They’re not paid much, they’re housed and fed by their order or parish. Taxes are more or less abstract to them. How high should taxes be? High enough for a first-rate country to help its citizens get the good things they need, end of story.

Priests know what’s important in life, and it isn’t money. You have to factor that in when you talk economic policy with them, just as you have to factor in that soldiers would give their lives for you.

Back to Francis, previous popes and economic policy. Our experience forms us. It shapes our thoughts and assumptions. John Paul II and Benedict XVI came from a particular 20th-century European experience. In their youth it was the rise of Nazism, and through their adult lives it was the constant threat of Soviet communism, which was both expansionist—it took John Paul’s Poland and half of Benedict’s Germany—and atheistic. They saw communism as a limiter of freedom and a distorter of the human heart.

The great foe of Soviet communism? America and the West, which had the wherewithal and spiritual strength to resist it. The West brought with it—was rich because of—free-market capitalism. John Paul and Benedict, whatever their private thoughts on how nations should arrange themselves economically, came to have a natural appreciation and respect for what made the West wealthy. They understood its positive utility.

Francis may turn out to be different in this regard. It is possible his appreciation for the wider apparatus of economic freedom does not run so deep. He is from Argentina, not a frontline state in the Cold War, and not necessarily a place—Peronism, corporatism, the military’s influence, the intertwining of money and government—that would give you a dreamy sense of free-market potential. Trickle-down didn’t always work so well there.

We’ll see the implications, if any, of all that.

For now, Francis really has a way of breaking through the media clutter, doesn’t he? At a dinner the other night a smart young priest referred to how Francis’s comments can often be taken a number of different ways. He said, “Maybe he’s just unclear. But he’s a Jesuit, so I assume it’s deliberate.” You mean strategic ambiguity, I said. We laughed because that’s what we both thought. Francis wants to get us thinking about what we should be thinking about. He wants to invite thought.

And he’s succeeding, isn’t he?