Many people concluded that for now there is nothing to do but suck it up. It won’t be surprising if some of those people eventually have an intense desire to spit out.

If so, this would be entirely consistent with the history of crises, both recent ones and more distant. Very often, after some cataclysmic external event, politics responds in ways that scramble normal divisions and create the impression—as in that recent 96-0 vote—that familiar ideological dynamics have been suspended.

Almost always, this is an illusion. Ideology hasn’t been suspended. It has been forcibly suppressed—in ways that inevitably will come roaring back, sometimes in highly toxic ways.

The most vivid example in American history likely was around World War II. As the world was aflame, but the United States not yet engaged in hostilities, the country was bitterly and intensely divided over the all-consuming question of that era: intervention or isolation. Then came Pearl Harbor, and the debate ended in an instant. Isolationism looked to be a defunct ideological force. Except it wasn’t really. The movement’s essential spirit—fear of corrupt and scheming interests beyond American borders—found new and malicious expression in McCarthyism in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

In the modern era, two other moments of crisis produced the illusion of ideological interruptus. Recall that the votes authorizing war with Iraq in 2002 and the bailout of banks during the financial crisis of 2008 were passed in the Senate with majority support of both parties. Both issues, Iraq and the bailout, generated fierce ideological backlashes that echo to this day.

We will learn over the course of 2020 what relevance these familiar ideological dynamics have to the politics of pandemic. Do you trust Trump and his impulsive, personality-driven style is the more flamboyant question. Do you trust interventionist government—supported by nearly all governors of both parties, following the dictates of health professionals—is the more fundamental question.