Beneath the disarray of the White House’s response and amid all the uncertainty the crisis has brought about, we’ve been treated to a legislative process straight out of a grade-school civics book. Democrats came into each negotiation with broad and expensive asks on relief programs and other priorities but compromised to get money out the door to the American people quickly. Republicans opposed to broadening eligibility for full stimulus payments and the generosity of the CARES Act’s unemployment benefits voted unanimously for the bill anyway. For the first time in a very long time, Democrats and Republicans sat down, agreed to policy compromises a little disappointing to both sides, and passed a series of massive bills addressing significant problems facing the American people. This may be bipartisanship’s finest hour in at least a generation, and members of Congress would have been within their rights to expect high hosannas from every editorial board in the country. They haven’t arrived. Why not?

Some of the largest initiatives in Congress’s relief packages include one-time stimulus checks that will take months for the IRS to finish distributing, an unemployment benefit that will expire in July, and a broken small business loan program. Many renters still face eviction. The U.S. Postal Service is still running out of money. The integrity of November’s election is still in jeopardy. State and local government finances are still in crisis. To top it all off, Republican states are considering winnowing aid to force people back to work, and Republicans on the Hill are signaling that the window for large bills may be closing.

What would it actually take for the government to “get out as much money to as many people as quickly as possible,” as the New York Times editorial board urged last month? For starters, you would need a Democratic president and a Democratic supermajority in Congress willing to steamroller over objections from the right and deny Republican lawmakers a meaningful amount of influence over legislation. This is not the kind of policymaking the most broadly respected voices in political commentary tend to endorse, and no one has ever been admitted into the canon of hallowed ex-presidents for saying we should smash our opponents. Abraham Lincoln did it violently, but the public hazily remembers him as a bridger of divides: This, we’re taught, is how good leaders solve problems. But we cannot hoist ourselves out of the hole we’re in now or address any other issue demanding major public investment by mutual partisan agreement. Everyone knows it. Few at the center of political discourse say it. Instead, even now, they pine for a great coming together—some sunny day when Democrats and Republicans, animated by a national crisis, or public service, or some quasi-spiritual awakening, might deign to work together once again. Well, they just have, and they’ve failed.

As long as it serves that purpose, appeals to bipartisanship and compromise will continue to pad out columns and fill out the speeches of figures with nothing else to say—those who need to convince voters, readers, and themselves that they bear commitments to loftier, more flattering ambitions than the ones implied by their actions and the policies they support. However mediocre or actively counterproductive the average politician’s platform might seem, they can always claim that they want to bring about a united America—one of the few grand projects most Americans agree with. Since the pandemic struck, more and more voices in the press have tried to merge it with a more substantive project—repairing the inequities and deficiencies the crisis has exposed in our economy, our institutions, and our way of life.

But what we build after the crisis, if we build anything at all, won’t be built together. Ideological differences entirely aside, there’s no particular reason why a party led by a man thinking aloud about the merits of bleach injections should have a hand in crafting the next New Deal or Great Society. A recent Times column from Frank Bruni, perhaps the thousandth in its genre, asked whether the Republican Party’s willingness to indulge the president might truly be bottomless. “[F]rom the start of his presidency, I have waited, in all my optimism and innocence, for a pause in the cycle,” Bruni wrote. “For the moment when Republican lawmakers realize that to prop up Trump is to take down America.” While he and similarly minded pundits continue their wait, the rest of us should hold fast to reality. Nothing worth happening is going to happen without an epochal realignment of political power in America—one that sees the Republican Party defeated and disempowered in November, in the next decade, and forever. We’ve tried bipartisanship. We’ve tried conservative governance. Now we must work to give progressive hegemony a chance.

See the original publication in The New Republic here