All this will happen within a context of political change. Progressives see opportunity. They lost on Bernie Sanders but will seek a bigger breakthrough in a restive, battered country full of people reconsidering their loyalties. They won’t let this crisis go to waste. Right now I’d watch the Democratic Party. Tara Reade’s allegations, true or not, offer cover for the left to try to dislodge a non-revolutionary. Also for a party establishment that fears Joe Biden will blow up in the general election because he has trouble following his own thoughts.

That takes place within another, possibly countering context. Right now, in political terms, the federal government doesn’t look so good: failures to mobilize early, claims that didn’t materialize, chaotic and divisive daily briefings.

Who led most strikingly, most vividly? Governors, who, though they may not know it, have provided a daily commercial for federalism—for the states as independent entities, 50 different laboratories of democracy operating within a constitutional structure of separated powers. Remember when the president announced that he was in charge of ending the quarantine, not the states? In response, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo gave a classic lecture based on federalist principles, on the rights and responsibilities of the states. He won. There’s been a whole shifting of the argument there.

Columnists often say things like “the tectonic plates are shifting.” They are shifting as never before and all at the same time. We have never seen this earthquake.