Paul Conway, a professor of psychology at Florida State University, argued that “evidence from history and the psychological literature suggests that under times of stress and uncertainty, there are a number of different effects.”

On the plus side, he wrote by email, “people pull together and support one another more,” adding that “when people endure shared fight against a common enemy, their interests are aligned and they’re more likely to see a bond of camaraderie that can blossom into reduced prejudice.”

There is, however, another side of the coin, Conway said:

When times are more uncertain and threatening, then strangers and outsiders and people different from oneself feel more threatening on an intuitive, gut level.

Extensive research, he wrote,

shows that fear of infection increases prejudice and distrust of outsiders. Hence, this pandemic also has potential to increase friction between social groups, thickening boundaries. We have already seen reinforcement of borders on a global scale not seen since the Second World War.

Along parallel lines, Conway argued,

the times we’re living in exacerbate economic tensions leading to greater pressure for left-wing policies, while at the same time exacerbating fear of contamination from others who seem different, which exacerbates support for right-wing policies.

The severe economic recession in Weimar Germany in the early 1930s led “not only to an increase in support for the Nazi Party but also for the Communist Party,” Conway wrote, just as the economic collapse in Greece at the start of the last decade “increased support for both Communist and National Socialist parties there.”

With this history in mind, Conway predicted that

for the next decade or so in America and around the world, there will be even more intense partisan division, including, on the right, increased support for some authoritarian policies.

Jonathan Haidt, a professor of psychology at N.Y.U., argued by email that

If we had good leadership — a president who could unify the country and turn our shared adversity into social solidarity, trust, and cooperation, then we could look to past national crises such as World War II and the boost it gave to social capital.

But, he continued,

We don’t have that. In fact, a marker of our political sickness is that taking the virus seriously has become itself a marker of tribal identity.

Along similarly pessimistic lines, Marc Hetherington, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina, told me by email that there were two reasons that “this moment holds the potential to resuscitate negative feelings that Americans have about government.”

First:

If the government actually succeeds in keeping the carnage to a minimum, it is unlikely to change much. Americans already think government can do this. If, however, the government doesn’t succeed — and I think there is every reason to think it will struggle with these problems — it has the potential to further undermine trust in government. People already don’t trust it to redistribute money and provide certain services, which is bad. If they come to think it is not competent to keep us safe, it will be even worse, much worse.

And second:

Republicans have internalized what used to be just a political strategy, which increases the chances that government will fail.

Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush “used to run against government, but they still took staffing it seriously. The Reagan and Bush 41 White Houses were full of excellent professionals,” Hetherington wrote.

Since then, however:

That cynical approach to campaigning seems to have infected their approach to governing. In 2016, the party nominated a complete political amateur, pointing up just how little governance means to the party. And, of course, Trump has failed to fill vacancies in key areas like the C.D.C., disbanded the pandemic task force in the N.S.C., and all sorts of other stuff.

The result, Hetherington wrote, is a government “characterized by poor leadership at the cabinet level and hollowed out expertise at the department level,” sharply increasing the “chance that government simply can’t come through right now.”

This assessment is, in large part, shared by David Autor, an economist at M.I.T. Under different circumstances, Autor wrote me, it would be

easy to tell a story in which this episode causes Americans to remember that their government is indispensable for marshaling expertise, coordinating emergency measures, guarding public safety, serving as an insurer of last resort, calming financial markets, and generally shepherding its citizens through an extraordinarily challenging time.

But these are very different circumstances:

After four decades of successful Republican effort to starve the U.S. government of resources and demonize its experts, our government is in fact less competent, less well prepared, and less agile than it used to be. Perhaps this event would have restored our faith in government were the government deserving of that faith. The picture is mixed at best, so far.

Autor argued that “the monetary and fiscal responses have been quite amazing,” but

the public health response has been a disaster — a poisonous cocktail of denial, incompetence, and failed leadership. There are still some great civil servants in U.S. agencies. But the foundation is shaky.

Most shaky of all is Trump’s vacillating stance toward the pandemic. He has lurched from complete denial (“One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear”) to “I am not responsible” to “We’re doing a great job” to “It’s going to disappear” to “It will go away” to awarding himself a 10 out of 10 to calling the unavailable tests “PERFECT” to claiming “We have it very well under control” to setting Easter, April 12, as the date to reopen the country “a beautiful time, a beautiful timeline” to boasting of high ratings as death projections soared. On Tuesday, Trump seemed to have come to his senses, at least for now: “This is going to be a very painful, very, very painful two weeks.”