By Gail Collins and Bret Stephens

Ms. Collins and Mr. Stephens are opinion columnists. They converse every week.

Gail Collins: Bret, there was an old leftie saying: “Suppose they gave a war and nobody came.” I was thinking about that over the weekend when we were anticipating a big right-wing follow-up to the storming of the Capitol in January. And hardly anyone showed up.

What’s your analysis?

Bret Stephens: I can’t say I’m surprised that the rally fizzled: Donald Trump wasn’t there to light a fire and Mike Pence wasn’t there to get burned by it. Plus, all of the arrests and guilty pleas from Jan. 6 are probably having a deterrent effect.

On the other hand, the fact that Trump is publicly supporting the Jan. 6 rioters who, he says, are “being persecuted so unfairly relating to the January 6th protest concerning the Rigged Presidential Election” is a bad sign. The movement may be in remission but it isn’t going away. It’s like knowing that a deadly virus, capable of infecting millions of people and wrecking the country, is being handled by a mad scientist at an unsafe facility. You might even call it the “Mar-a-Lago virus.”

Gail: I do kinda like the idea of D.J.T. surrounded by beakers of deadly bacteria, with wild frizzy hair, laughing maniacally. But only for about 30 seconds. Let’s move on to a cheerier topic. Any further thoughts about the pandemic? Vaccine musings?

Bret: Well, leaving aside all the particular questions about the pandemic, I think the larger story is how these 18 months have exposed the shaky foundations of American civilization. Never mind the military-industrial complex. We’ve got a moronic-ineptitude complex.

I’m thinking about anti-vaxxers. About Jan. 6 deniers. About the Afghanistan exit fiasco. About conspiracy theorists on the right and the speech police on the left (and sometimes vice versa). About social media in general. About Congress’s unwillingness to get an overwhelmingly popular infrastructure bill to the president’s desk. About a border crisis in which the Biden administration can’t seem to come up with better solutions than the Trump administration did. About the Pentagon killing innocent civilians in a bungled attempt to stop another Kabul terror attack. About the French hating us yet again, this time for a perfectly valid reason.

How about you?

Gail: Not tough to make a list of dispiriting national problems, but this is one I don’t particularly pin on the military-industrial complex. It’s just the latest phase of a cosmic shift that began when regular folk acquired cellphones, computers, Twitter accounts and the like.

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