Yet that was not clear to primary voters in Arizona, Florida and Illinois, who voted to bury Bernie’s revolution in overwhelming numbers in the middle of a pandemic.

Still, do the socialists have a point? Is there something about the pandemic that will, over the course of the next several months, persuade more Americans to embrace their agenda? The evidence for that is thin. It’s true that the devastation of coronavirus is prompting people all over the world to question what needs to happen for our planet to be livable. Socialists certainly have an opportunity to contribute to that conversation. But to most voters, a pandemic does not make it clearer than ever that it is time for a revolution. It only makes it clearer than ever that we need leaders who know how to prevent pandemics.

And democratic socialists have yet to convince the public they know how to manage a government as well as they can criticize one.

Some democratic socialists see the Republicans’ surprisingly eager embrace of massive government stimulus as a sign that the winds have shifted in their favor. On Thursday, Sanders’ press secretary Briahna Joy Gray said in a campaign video that “people who have long opposed Bernie’s ‘Medicare for All’ plan and his New Deal-style social programs now support a suite of solutions to the corona crisis which could accurately be described as ‘socialist.’”

But we are not seeing a bipartisan consensus for socialism. We are seeing a bipartisan consensus for a robust Keynesian stimulus in response to a sudden economic crisis.

That’s not nothing in these polarizing times. In 2009, when Barack Obama began his presidency with a near-trillion dollar stimulus proposal to blunt the impact of the global market crash, most congressional Republicans insisted the “Recovery Act” was egregiously wasteful spending that would fail to jump-start the economy.

For Republicans to sing such a different tune now is a tacit admission that, 11 years ago, they were wrong. In other words, Obama’s stimulus—which some on the left, such as The Week’s Ryan Cooper, still deride as “a conservative, timid attempt to restore the pre-crisis status quo”—has set a critical precedent: that the solution for economic crises is sizable and speedy stimulus from our government is no longer up for debate.

But temporary stimulus is not socialism, which at least one democratic socialist understands. Writing in Jacobin, Peter Frase critiqued the proposal from Republican Senator Mitt Romney to cut $1,000 checks for every American: “The fact that cutting checks is suddenly such a popular idea across the political spectrum demonstrates how much the Left has shifted what’s considered possible over the past decade. But it also shows us a ruling class and a political order that is desperately trying to find a stopgap measure to prevent social collapse, in the vain hope of returning to ‘normal’ in short order.”

Frase expressed hope that any such stimulus would provide a political opening to push for broadly socialistic proposals, including “free health care.” Many socialists are now insisting that the pandemic makes the case for single-payer open and shut. But it’s not. Despite Sanders’ claim that America is uniquely disadvantaged, at least two European single-payer countries—Italy and Spain—are being devastated by coronavirus; Italy’s death toll is at 3,400 and rising, and Spain just breached 1,000.

Each country has widely praised health care systems. But there was nothing about having a government-run health insurance program that ensured an expansive testing regime, sufficient inventory of ventilators or hospital beds, or aggressively enforced social distancing policies.

That doesn’t mean single-payer in Spain and Italy somehow made their pandemic worse. America has a largely private health care system, yet is suffering from similar mistakes. To channel the technocratic spirit of Michael Dukakis, this crisis isn’t about ideology. It’s about competence.

Consider this: Who is the political figure earning the most trust from the public in this colossal disaster? New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. Long known as a pragmatist at best, a soulless Machiavellian at worst, Cuomo has attracted vocal left-wing primary opposition in his past two reelection campaigns. But he is winning plaudits even from his critics with his commanding crisis management news conferences. Rebecca Fishbein, a progressive writer for Jezebel, confessed, “Help, I Think I'm In Love With Andrew Cuomo???” She explained, “He is the only one telling me what to do, where I can and cannot go (anywhere), who I can and cannot see (everyone), who I can and cannot listen to (President Trump, Bill de Blasio)…”

The New York Times’ Ben Smith heaped praise as well: “Mr. Cuomo holds news conferences filled with facts and (accurate) numbers almost every day. He explains systems and challenges and decision-making with a command that Mr. Trump lacks … But the governor’s great strength has always been his capacity to bend the bureaucracy to his will, and he has done that in recent days: pushing to get tests running in state labs, nudging the mayor to shut schools, coordinating a tristate shutdown of most commerce.”

Cuomo has read the room better than Sanders and his fellow socialists. As ideologues, democratic socialists see a crisis and immediately move to exploit the crisis in order to advance their ideology. But most people, in the middle of a crisis, just want their leaders to address the crisis, not exploit it.

Not being a governor, Sanders isn’t in a position to bend any bureaucracy to his will. Nevertheless, he made the odd choice Sunday night of hosting an online coronavirus briefing from Vermont, while his Senate colleagues took an important procedural vote on an economic relief package, and are frantically trying to negotiate a compromise. Beyond being distanced from the legislative action, Sanders was also distanced from expertise. The livestream didn’t include any public health experts offering wisdom on how to contain the spread of the virus, but instead featured congressional “Squad” members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib and collectively, they largely focused on economic solutions to the crisis.

Of course, stripping ideology out of politics is not possible, nor desired. Sound philosophy guides effective political action. Moreover, the maxim “never let a crisis go to waste” is not heresy; important social change is often enacted during the response to crises. Socialists need not abandon their socialism when proposing measures to help people in need.

But socialists who want to be trusted with the keys to the White House should spend far less time blasting hot takes about the imminent demise of late-stage capitalism, and more time showing an interest in the nuts and bolts of effective crisis response. A deadly virus is ravaging countries with and without single-payer systems, so maybe this isn’t the best time to insist that a single-payer system is a pandemic panacea. You can shelve that debate for another day, and focus on how to make our existing public health agencies ramp up on testing, now.

Compare the coronavirus response plans from Sanders and Joe Biden. Sanders’ plan has three prongs, the first of which is “Empower Medicare to Lead Health Care Response.” Sanders eyes tasking Medicare with providing “universal emergency health care coverage for all,” and of course, once you do that, you’re halfway to establishing Sanders’ end goal of “Medicare for All.” The other two prongs cover a wide range of economic proposals, such as strict conditions on government loans to corporations, which include requiring the installation of workers on corporate boards, fundamentally altering the nature of corporate governance. Sanders would also prevent pharmaceutical companies from earning any profits with the drugs they produce to combat coronavirus, requiring “that the medicines that they manufacture for this crisis will be sold at cost.” That’s a step toward nationalization of the pharmaceutical industry. Sanders touches on measures to stop the spread of the virus, but he does not go in much detail.

Biden’s plan digs into what the bureaucracy can actually do. For example, he would have the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention establish “at least 10 mobile testing sites and drive-through facilities per state” and use “sentinel surveillance programs” to “offer tests not only to those who ask but also to those who may not know to ask.” Both Sanders and Biden call for more personal protective equipment, but only Biden’s plan directs the CDC to create “real-time dashboards” to track “supply chain information” to best allocate available personal protective equipment resources. And while Sanders turned to the Squad for his livestream, Biden tapped his adviser Ronald Klain—who managed the Obama administration’s response to the Ebola virus—to appear in an online video detailing the campaign’s plan. (Sanders’ livestream attracted 780,000 views on Twitter, while the Klain video got more than 4 million.)

The coronavirus crisis is a stark reminder that we need government leaders who know how to govern. In case there was any doubt before, reality TV stars should not be assumed to know the basics of public health policy. But neither can ideological movement leaders, even if one used to be a mayor more than 30 years ago.