The Coronavirus Killed the Revolution
There was a before and an after. Before the seriousness of the pandemic set in, Democrats—and Americans more generally—were divided on whether the moment required deep, structural change. Perhaps it required something less ambitious: a return to normalcy, to the quiet comforts of calm and stability. In that theory, represented by former Vice President Joe Biden, Donald Trump was at once the problem and an aberration in the American story’s broader sweep. This wasn’t a time for radical moves. There was only a need for removing Trump from the presidency. And once he was gone, the country would regain its footing, and we could return to our insistent, if somewhat boring and stubbornly incremental, path to progress.
[Read: All the president’s lies about the coronavirus]
The “structuralists,” represented by Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, had a very different reading. They argued that Trump wasn’t the problem or the cause. Rather, he was the symptom of long-standing inequities and injustices in the economic and political system. The way to handle Trump was to address the structures
