The coronavirus pandemic has exposed the rot behind the facade of American society like no other event in modern history. The richest nation in history has demonstrated an utterly incompetent response to the crisis. Some aspects of the response, like the idiot nationalism behind refusing to use the high-quality World Health Organization test for the virus, are surface level. Others, like a health-care system built around protecting profits by denying care, are structural.

In this way, the pandemic is making Bernie Sanders’s case for a political revolution even more vivid. Already, almost half of US adults are already saying that the virus is making them more likely to support Medicare for All. Given that the United States is still at least a week behind the disaster stage of the outbreak, it is likely that this number will only grow.

The pandemic’s full impact, both medical and economic, will expose the need for a policy response on a scale unlike anything in recent history. Already, analogies are being drawn to the economic mobilization during World War II.