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A funny thing happened just as Democratic voters were rejecting Bernie Sanders’ and Elizabeth Warren’s cases for structural change and political revolution in favor of Joe Biden’s reassuring pitch for cautious improvement on the status quo: The status quo got extremely bad.

It did so, too, in a way that reminds everyone that things were also quite bad not too long ago, after the 2007–08 financial meltdown. In a nice symmetry, that disaster was predominately the private sector’s fault, while this time, the blame lies mostly with multiple levels of government that weren’t prepared, willing, or able to execute their most basic responsibilities. In the United States, you never know which kind of creeping institutional rot is going to cause the floor beneath you to give way as you fall to a gruesome death.

This reality challenges the premises of the pitch that Biden and Hillary Clinton have made, successfully, to their party’s voters. While Democrats almost all agree that the country’s unequal and unfair distribution of nearly everything is bad in the abstract, the Biden-Clinton premise has been that “normal” is good enough for enough people, and Sanders-style reform so risky, that the best choice is to change one thing at a time, here and there, modestly. But a “normal” that involves once-a-decade Great Depressions and the widening inequality, mass shootings, and indefinite wars that we’re accustomed to starts to seem less appealing. Moderate and conservative voices have long said a radical Sanders or Warren presidency would result in catastrophe, but would such a thing be any worse than all of our regular, nonradical catastrophes? And what can an incrementalist point to as proof of concept when every step forward that’s been taken in the past two decades has been followed by one step back, and then many more steps back, off a cliff?

There are also abundant connections between the coronavirus crisis and what we’ve been conditioned to think of as normal American circumstances, even beyond the obvious ones related to health care. A government that has been starved for revenue by lobbying-enabled tax avoidance is less likely to be providing adequate funding to public health agencies. Markets that have been monopolized by corporate consolidation are more likely to, for example, suppress the manufacturing of low-cost ventilators and put local journalists out of work when the demand for public information is highest. (The market causing the problem in the latter situation is in online advertising, for those who don’t follow the ins and outs of the media business.) Individuals and families who are carrying debt related to the high costs of … let’s again say nearly everything are more likely to be threatened by eviction and bankruptcy when their income is interrupted.

These problems still exist after eight recent years under a competent and, for his time, ambitious Democratic president. They by definition have not been solved by Democrats working within conventional parameters of political possibility and using the centrist policy arsenal of loans, tax credits, subsidies, and subsidized loans whose interest can be deducted from your taxes. (They also will not be solved, it should be noted, by the many Democrats who get paid to argue that no one should solve them, like ex–Obama press secretary and current Amazon VP Jay Carney, who was recently revealed to have been involved in creating a strategy to disparage one of the numerous company warehouse workers who have said publicly that they’re being forced to work in dangerous conditions. Or Carney’s predecessor as press secretary, Robert Gibbs, who took the top “government relations” job at McDonald’s, whose workers across the country have been striking over what they say are unsafe working environments. Or another adviser, David Plouffe, who was a top figure at Uber while it was honing the dubious claim that its drivers are not employees, which resulted in making many of them ineligible for unemployment benefits when the crash hit.)

But in the past week or two, establishment-lane Democrats have … given signs that they realize this is a problem? It doesn’t sound plausible when I type it, but it’s true. Whether it is because of Biden’s widely discussed unpopularity with young voters, the dismal memories of the left-center party fractures that preceded Clinton’s loss, or simple pragmatic reaction to the conditions described above, the party’s more visionary figures and ideas are enjoying an leadership-endorsed renaissance at the precise moment when it seemed like they had been, for now, defeated.

Biden and Sanders, for example, announced jointly that their staffers will be working together on a number of policy issues. Biden adopted Warren’s bankruptcy reform plan shortly before she issued her own endorsement of his candidacy. Biden and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “teams” are purportedly “opening the lines of communication,” presumably about policy agreements that would seal an endorsement. In Congress, typically centrist Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan, who has long signaled his interest in being a party leader, has proposed that every American receive a $2,000 stimulus check each month for the duration of the pandemic. The big man himself, Obama, said in his video endorsement of Biden that his own 2008 platform would be inadequate to address current challenges; he even disparaged, dare I say belittled, the idea of responding to a crisis by proposing new tax credits.

One never wants to underestimate the Democratic Party’s ability to pull compromise from the jaws of not having a reason to compromise. But for now it is at least a moral victory that they’ve stopped trying to tell everyone who’s underwater that what’s accumulating over their head is a rising tide.