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We Could Use a Return to Gallantry
This isn’t some old, dead virtue, a relic of the past. It lives, and today it is deeply countercultural.

By
Peggy Noonan
Dec. 31, 2025 7:32 pm ET

I don’t want to sum up the year, outline hopes for 2026, predict or warn. I want to say we all have to become better people.

You won’t get through the future without faith, you won’t get through life without courage, and if you want courage to spread (and you do—you’re safer in a braver world) you have to encourage it, give it a lift, give it style. That’s what gallantry is, courage’s style. Its class, its shine and burnish. As a virtue it is close to my heart.

We live in a culture of winners who must win, and if the others don’t know you won then you must tell them, over and over, like Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez. We are the wealthiest and most glamorous, we are living the best lives, Amal Clooney’s on line one, the pope’s on hold. Are you not impressed?

Gallantry never says it won.

When someone’s smart we say he has brains and if he’s brave he has guts, but gallantry isn’t assigned a human part and so must be a thing of the soul.

Courage faces danger but gallantry is the way you face it. Often it has to do with treatment of a weaker party; often it’s directed toward an individual or cause that can’t repay you. It involves self-discipline but isn’t grim. It travels light. It is modest, has no bombast. “It was nothing.” “We were all doing our best.”

A cold snowy night in late November 2012 in New York’s Times Square. Police officer Larry DePrimo was walking the beat and saw a homeless man standing barefoot on the sidewalk. Mr. DePrimo went to Skechers, bought a pair of insulated boots and socks with his own money, and helped the homeless man get them on. There was no expectation of notice, but a passerby took a photo and posted it online.

Reporters tracked down DePrimo. He said he didn’t expect the publicity, that his act “was something I had to do.” He kept the receipt for the boots in his pocket to remind himself some people have it worse.

Gallantry goes beyond duty.

I should underscore here that it isn’t some old, dead virtue, a relic of the past. It has nothing to do with knights or nostalgia. It is alive, it exists, you know people who are gallant, have witnessed gallantry and understand at this point that it is deeply countercultural.
If you say it’s old-fashioned maybe that’s because it requires effort you don’t want to make. If it’s increasingly rare then it’s increasingly precious.

Gallantry for beginners: When I was a child reading movie-star magazines, I read a story that gave me a window into an idea about how to behave. It was about Tony Curtis, new to Hollywood and unknown, a Bronx boy hoping for the life of an actor. He retells the tale in his 1994 autobiography, “American Prince.”

He and his wife, Janet Leigh, were invited to dinner at Cole Porter’s apartment. Ethel Merman picked up a wine glass and gently squeezed the top. “The wineglass was so delicate, and her touch so assured, that she could change its shape from round to oval without breaking it.”
Merman encouraged him to try it himself. “I squeezed, and this beautiful, delicate wineglass shattered in my hand. Ethel, who was dear and kind, said, ‘Don’t worry, kid, it could happen to any of us,’ and then she took her own glass and shattered it just to make me feel better.”
Gallantry takes responsibility.

On the morning of Jan. 15, 2009, US Airways flight 1549, its engines hit by a flock of birds, hit the Hudson river. Pilot Chesley Sullenberger landed the plane safely, brilliantly, and with his crew got the 150 passengers calmly disembarked and standing on the wings. As the plane began sinking, Mr. Sullenberger walked the cabin twice to make sure no one was left behind. All were saved. In the days afterward what struck people was not only that you can land on a river, or that an Airbus can float for a while, it was: Didja hear about the pilot? When asked what happened he always replied with factual precision and modesty. He redirected praise to the excellence of the crew and the sturdiness of the plane. There was a kind of public relief: We’re still making Sullenbergers, they aren’t just people in World War II movies.

Gallantry is being the victor and refusing to humiliate. It’s Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox treating Robert E. Lee with perfectly calibrated respect, letting Lee’s officers keep their sidearms and his men their personal horses. It is George H.W. Bush refusing to rub the Soviet Union’s face in it when the West won the Cold War. He did this not only for practical reasons—a humiliated foe is a dangerous foe—but out of decency.

Gallantry is male-coded and shouldn’t be. A history of gallant women is the history of the world. Famous examples: Jackie Kennedy, her life blasted away on a Friday afternoon, held her poise and on Monday maintained public ritual in the funeral of her husband, because the country needed it and history demanded it. Queen Elizabeth II was gallant throughout life but especially at the end when, old and unwell, often in discomfort, she continued to meet with new prime ministers, some of whom she would have understood to be silly, and did it smiling in a friendly way, in her cardigan and skirt. And in the end, her Jubilee video with Paddington Bear, confiding she keeps marmalade sandwiches in her bag, and keeping time with her spoon as “We Will Rock You” announced itself from the royal military band outside Buckingham Palace. Margaret Chase Smith taking to her feet in the U.S. Senate and telling the truth, knowing the price she’d pay, while the he-men in the chamber ran in terror from Joe McCarthy.

Sir Thomas More on the scaffold of Tower Hill comforted his executioner and was reported by a witness to have repositioned his beard on the block, joking it had committed no treason. On being asked by a pious official if he really knew God’s judgment, he is said to have responded, “He will not refuse one who is so blithe to go to him.” He didn’t say, “My actions were right,” he said God has a heart.

Why are we banging away on all this as the clock ticks down to a new year? Because gallantry is necessary. Modern life strips away too much, old protections aren’t honored, someone has to make things better.

Because we live in a cold political world of cocoons, bubbles and silos, and few feel safe to occupy the land between. It is a world in which people are obsessed with claiming their rights and not accepting their duties. Public speech is mean, strength is vulgar.
Gallantry goes against all this. It says you can push without humiliating, be decisive without being brutal.

It shows we can be better. It proves we are better.

Onward gallant ladies, gallant gentlemen of America. Welcome 2026 warmly, and save it modestly.