Read: The meaning of Boris Johnson’s illness

The trouble with arguments claiming long-term inevitability is that they cannot be disproved. “The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs,” the economist John Maynard Keynes observed. “In the long run we are all dead.” So let me first say that the resurrection of the left is not inevitable, despite mounting claims to the contrary. Just because extreme measures have been taken to tackle the pandemic does not mean voters will want lighter versions of such policies in the long term. One example should stand as a warning in this regard: After the Second World War, Labour’s failure to end food rationing and price controls quickly enough cost the party at the ballot box in 1951, when Winston Churchill was reelected as prime minister. History can surprise: Perhaps the coronavirus will push people to the right, and voters will rally for tougher borders and more restrictive social policies. We are already seeing this in Hungary. Perhaps the concepts of left and right will not adequately contain the political demands that will follow this crisis. We don’t know.

But much as Johnson biographer Robert Caro wrote that power reveals, so too does a crisis. Crises reveal the nature of power, the fault lines that run through societies, and the characters of leaders. They reveal the underlying realities of life: in the case of this pandemic, for example, that a functioning economy rests on a functioning society; that “key workers” and “wealth creators” are not so different after all; and that national borders have not been abolished, even in Europe. This pandemic has also revealed that governing during an outbreak is not simply a question of listening to experts, because experts can disagree. Instead, governing is fundamentally about judgment, the ability to communicate, to resolve, to show compassion and instinct.

The ideas of the left are likely to stick around this time, then, not because of the pandemic itself and the measures taken to contain its impact, but because of what the pandemic has revealed. The sudden, crippling economic downturn caused by the coronavirus outbreak has shone a light on systemic weaknesses that few fully understood, such as those of global-health control. But the crisis has also illuminated problems that we could already see but did not appreciate—and that were central to the left’s pitch for power under Corbyn and Sanders. Have we prized economic efficiency too much over national resilience? If a healthy economy is possible only in a healthy society, do we not need to devote more time (and funding) to the latter? How do we remove the corrupting influence of money from our politics? How do we protect living standards in the age of automation, global supply chains, and pandemics?

Like mold on a bedroom wall, the left is fed by the intrinsic damp in the system: politicians selling off shares while reassuring the public that everything will be okay; health systems too frail to cope with pandemics despite years of preparation; governments powerless to protect their citizens from events caused beyond their borders. None of this is to say that the left is correct in its analysis or solutions, but merely to state the obvious: The system isn’t working.