With all of that said: The Left might pine for a George Floyd redux. (We’re only six months out from an election, after all; and these days, what’s an election year without a few good old-fashioned race riots?) But they shouldn’t hold their breath. The simple fact is that the conditions that enabled the rolling revolution of 2020 were specific and unique — and while they may have left a legacy that endures to this day, they are unlikely to fully resurface anytime soon.

The most obvious of those novel conditions was the pandemic — and specifically, the fact that the spark that lit the wildfire came during the most draconian period of lockdowns, when large swaths of the country had been marinating in something akin to mass solitary confinement for months. Another factor was President Donald Trump, who invited a unique hatred from the left-wing base and an unprecedented hysteria from left-wing elites, and who served, in the minds of both demographics, as a constant, ever-present reminder of America’s white supremacist evil. (Once Democrats took back the White House, of course, the U.S. miraculously became a good and decent country again).

But the most interesting difference lies in the disposition of the Right. For all its impotence, the conservative movement is unlikely to tolerate another summer of love on the scale of the George Floyd riots — or, at least, to tolerate it to the extent they did in 2020.