Reading tea leaves

Or maybe chicken bones

We learn most from our critics. Paul Greenberg used to say that all the time. And he always seemed like he meant it. We learn from our failures, he’d tell us. Adding that he hated to brag, but he’d had many.

The best critic of the Republican Party these days might be Bret Stephens, the writer for The New York Times. The paper must’ve hired him to be the conservative. His columns aren’t just well-reasoned, they’re wickedly biting.

(And his dueling-banjo column with Gail Collins every week is a must-read.) Now that Paul Greenberg and Dr. Charles Krauthammer are gone, if you want the smart conservative point of view, in this day of populism, we point you to Mr. Stephens.

There are others who’d fight the good fight from the inside. To paraphrase LBJ so much that it doesn’t sound like him anymore, it’s better to have somebody inside the tent spitting out than outside the tent spitting in. For the Democrats, the best critics might be one of its biggest stars.

Some might say that James Carville is a “former” star. That the Day of Clinton has passed, and years ago. But tell that to TV audiences. If the number of his appearances on cable talk shows are a sign, people still want to hear what he says. Or maybe it’s the accent.

In the wake of this past week’s elections in Virginia, New Jersey and elsewhere — in which Democratic candidates didn’t do nearly as well as predicted, and some even lost — James Carville could be found giving his point of view. And his party would be mistaken to ignore it.

On PBS, the day after the election, Judy Woodruff asked Mr. Carville what happened. How did a first-time gubernatorial candidate, Glenn Youngkin, beat the old pro, Terry McAuliffe, in Virginia’s gubernatorial race?

“What went wrong,” James Carville said, “is just stupid wokeness. Don’t just look at Virginia and New Jersey. Look at Long Island. Look at Buffalo. Look at Minneapolis.

Even look at Seattle, Washington. I mean, this ‘ Defund the Police’ lunacy, this take Abraham Lincoln’s name off of schools. I mean that — people see that!”

And continued: “It’s just really — has a suppressive effect all across the country on Democrats. Some of these people need to go to a ‘woke’ detox center or something. They’re expressing a language that people just don’t use, and there’s backlash and a frustration at that.”

He said, in his style, that the Republican candidate in Virginia just let the Democrats pull the pin and watched as the grenade went off.

“We got to change this and not be about changing dictionaries and change laws. These faculty lounge people that sit around mulling about I don’t know what . . . . They’re not working.”

We learn most from our critics. When we bother to listen.

After his own party was shelled back in his day — and his day was 1958 — Whittaker Chambers sent this message to a young man named Bill Buckley, who was just opening up a political journal you might have heard of:

“If the Republican Party cannot get some grip of the actual world we live in, and from it generalize and actively promote a program that means something to masses of people — why, somebody else will. There will be nothing to argue. The voters will simply vote Republicans into singularity. The Republican Party will become like one of those dark little shops which apparently never sell anything. If, for any reason, you go in, you find, at the back, an old man, fingering for his own pleasure some oddments of cloth. Nobody wants to buy them, which is fine because the old man is not really interested in selling. He just likes to hold and to feel.”

Substitute “Democrat” for “Republican” and see if the statement still makes sense.

One party in this two-party system has been woke for a few years now. After Tuesday, maybe it’s awake.