Or this crisis will change very little, and a year or two from now we’ll be right back where we started, with all the weaknesses and pathologies we had before, as we find ourselves in the midst of a new conservative attack on government that succeeds in making us less secure and more unequal.

Neither one of those futures is assured. But Republicans have already seen the threat the coronavirus pandemic poses to their long-term political project and have begun working to fend it off.

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Democrats, I fear, are assuming that this crisis will naturally prove them right about the role of government, and they don’t actually have to do much for their vindication to occur.

“I think it could be paradigm shifting,” former Federal Reserve chair Janet L. Yellen tells The Post’s Dan Balz, and many Democrats surely agree. Republicans are being forced to accept trillions of dollars in government spending to rescue the economy, as well as the shared assumption that it’s government’s job to make sure we don’t all get sick and die.

We’ve been here before, and not that long ago. After the 2008 election but before Barack Obama took office, Time magazine put him on its cover photoshopped as FDR, under the headline “The New New Deal.” But while he did pass a string of significant legislation utilizing government power early in his presidency — a large stimulus bill, Wall Street reform, saving the auto industry, ending bank profiteering on student loans, the Affordable Care Act — two years later Republicans took back the House and ground it all to a halt.

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That is precisely what Republicans are planning to repeat, especially if Joe Biden becomes president next year.

You can see it in the “Let’s all come to the state capitol and infect each other” protests against stay-at-home orders that are attracting small crowds but huge media attention. Like a miniature version of the tea party, it’s a phenomenon of genuine sentiment that is shaped and organized by right-wing elites, promoted relentlessly by Fox News, and in this case, validated by President Trump himself.

It may not be much yet, but this is just beginning. You can bet that Republicans will be holding strategy meetings and fielding polls and writing reports to determine not just how to stop Americans from becoming more open to expansive government action, but how to turn this crisis into anger at government itself — assuming Biden becomes president in January.

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They may have added a couple of trillion dollars in debt to finance tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, and are now going along with trillions more in spending to rescue the economy. But if you think that will lessen their willingness to cry that deficits are a mortal danger to America and demand the evisceration of the safety net once a Democrat is in the White House, you know nothing about the GOP.

Right now it’s Democrats who want to do the most to rescue the economy, even though a quick recovery represents Trump’s only hope of winning reelection. Republicans are fighting every step of the way to make the rescue packages as small as possible; they may be worried that if we do too much and Trump loses anyway, Biden could be left with an economy getting back on its feet and a population that remembers how the government gave them generous unemployment benefits and a stimulus check or two.

Which is why Republicans will deploy a strategy that includes both sabotaging the economy by demanding brutal austerity policies and a sweeping anti-government PR effort. The latter will feature promoting a tea party II with angry protests that are catnip to the media; fake scandal-mongering to portray the Biden administration as corrupt (Solyndra! Fast and Furious!); and every effort they can devise to throw sand in the government’s gears to make it difficult for the administration to actually solve today’s problems, let alone prepare for tomorrow’s.

If it all goes well, the success of that effort, combined with what has become the nearly inevitable swing of the political pendulum, will allow them to take back Congress in 2022 just as they took the House in 2010.

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Which is why Democrats also need to begin planning now — not once the crisis is behind us, not once the election is over, but now — for how they’re going to defeat that Republican effort. They need to devise policy plans for Biden’s first year in office that not only help the country but are hard for Republicans to reverse, such as creating automatic stabilizers to make economic sabotage more difficult.

And they need to mount a rhetorical assault not just on Trump but on small-government philosophy itself. It would be a terrible mistake to assume that the public will naturally come to realize that it’s foolish to leave the country without a strong safety net and a public health infrastructure ready to respond to a pandemic.

You have to tell them, over and over again: America’s response to this pandemic was so awful not just because Trump is incompetent, but because conservative you’re-all-on-your-own philosophy was put into practice in ways that left us all vulnerable. In so many ways what we’re suffering through now, both in public health and economically, is a failure of conservatism.

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Republicans know that the public might arrive at that conclusion — and they’re working to make sure it doesn’t happen. Democrats need to work just as hard to make sure it does.