What people will remember from this extraordinary episode isn’t the experience of Covid itself, terrible though that’s been. It will be the ineptitude and incompetence of governing institutions that are supposed to protect citizens—and the indifference, as this was happening, of the media and scientific establishment.

In the U.S., the Great Confinement has left scars on the national psyche comparable to the effects of the Great Depression. This loss of faith has been compounded by government failure to deal with spiking violent-crime rates and the shocking dereliction of duty on the part of the nation’s teachers. Children and families feel as if they’ve been left stranded by the school systems they pay for with their tax dollars.

In 1932 Franklin D. Roosevelt called those left stranded by the Great Depression “the forgotten man.” Today the Great Confinement has created a nation of forgotten Americans. In 1932 Democrats used national disillusion with big business to create a powerful new political coalition that gave them control of the White House for 20 years and a virtual stranglehold on Congress that lasted more than half a century. Today the Republican Party has a similar opportunity. If the GOP can capitalize on disillusion with big government by affirming its commitment to the interests of those forgotten Americans, regardless of racial or religious or regional labels, it will own Washington for a generation.