The Church, state and Peggy Noonan

Late last October, just before the November election, conservative wordsmith Peggy Noonan penned a column for The Wall Street Journal that spooked a few of us.

Late last October, just before the November election, conservative wordsmith Peggy Noonan penned a column for The Wall Street Journal that spooked a few of us.

The column, “A Separate Peace,” posited the belief that “in some deep and fundamental way things have broken down and can’t be fixed, or won’t be fixed any time soon.” She even confided that pollsters like me couldn’t capture her angst with the formulaic “right direction or wrong track” question.

Noonan’s intuition was that elites of journalism and politics know something’s terribly wrong in America but aren’t doing anything about it. Instead, they stand by idly while “wheels are coming off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks.”

I started getting e-mailed copies of this column from various sources. It was reminiscent of the good ol’ days when I’d receive multiple e-mails with attached copies of the latest Bill Clinton joke or Monica expos

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