Yesterday afternoon, once Sanders made his exit official, I texted Larry Cohen, Sanders’s friend and the president of the political group the senator founded, Our Revolution, to ask whom he saw as the next leader of the movement.

“Too hard!” Cohen wrote back. He said he’s optimistic about grassroots groups mobilizing to advance Sanders’s agenda. But isn’t the lack of a clear successor a problem? His response: “Not yet.”

Read: What Sanders supporters are telling themselves now

This is an odd moment for Sanders-style progressivism. Without the coronavirus pandemic, the past month would have been politically humiliating for the senator. For all the boasting that he did in his exit speech about how many people agreed with him on the issues, he didn’t get the votes. His theory of the race, and of Democratic primary voters, was wrong. He managed to do worse in this campaign, which he came into as a front-runner with huge support and name recognition, than he did as a much lesser-known candidate in 2016. He spent significantly more money than Biden, who’s now the presumptive Democratic nominee. In fact, he spent more money losing the presidential nomination than anyone in history other than Michael Bloomberg.

But you don’t have to be out of a job, or be trying to homeschool your kids, or be thanking minimum-wage workers in face masks for driving the trucks and stocking the grocery shelves while billionaires hole up at their beach compounds with maid service, to know that the world is going to be different now. It is already. Nationalized health care, a Green New Deal, and student-loan forgiveness used to be as hard to imagine happening as the stockpiling of toilet paper. Congress recently passed the biggest relief package in history, and it’s clearly going to do more, soon. Unemployment is headed toward Great Depression levels. Ideas that the supposedly smartest people in Washington, in both major parties, wrote off as too expensive or impractical are getting pulled into the mainstream. (“When we talk about essential people, we’re not talking about hedge-fund managers,” Sanders put it in an interview with the late-night host Stephen Colbert yesterday evening.)

The crisis has prompted the broadest embrace of New Deal–style policies since the New Deal itself, Representative Chuy Garcia of Illinois, a Sanders supporter, told me: “The rest of society is being refocused on issues that working-class people have been talking about for a long time.”

Garcia said he didn’t think that much of what was in the stimulus bill would have been possible without Sanders shifting popular opinion through his campaigns. That’s the kind of optimism Sanders’s allies are holding on to as they try to look ahead.

“It is a movement moment, because basic things are in question,” Cohen said. “Can we wrestle with some things together? Even though we’re isolated socially, we’re all experiencing the same thing. To the extent that I have any optimism, it’s that people are hungry, they want to do something.”