It is time to attempt that hardest of things—to see ourselves for who we are, to see what it is we are doing and what is being done to us. Two things prompt the thought. We have the latest news on Washington’s confrontation with Russia, and we have a newly precipitous decline in the national conversation on this crisis. In my estimation, we reach dangerous new lows in both respects. It is always difficult for the living to see themselves as suspended in history. Being up against the rock face of events, being the stuff of which events are made,...