The U.S. isn’t alone. For the first time in history the leading industrialized nations decided to close their economies and order citizens to stay home for months at a time. They shuttered schools and businesses, imposed mask and vaccine mandates, and disrupted virtually every institution on which modern life depends.

Unfortunately, the Great Confinement didn’t work. It neither stemmed the spread of Covid nor prevented large numbers of deaths. In many cases—the New York nursing-home horror being only one of the most extreme examples—it may have made the suffering worse. The governments responsible for the Great Confinement managed to do lasting damage to their nations’ economies. According to the consulting firm McKinsey, the global economy could suffer up to $35 trillion in losses by 2025.

In the Journal of the American Medical Association, former Clinton Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and Harvard Professor David Cutler called Covid “the greatest threat to prosperity and well-being the U.S. has encountered since the Great Depression.” They estimated the economic cost of the pandemic could run as high as $16 trillion—with barely a quarter ($4.4 trillion) attributed to premature deaths from Covid itself. At the same time, trillions of dollars in government spending to compensate for lost jobs and lost livelihoods has added fuel to another epidemic: inflation—the worst in 40 years.

The pandemic tempted governments and their elite allies to treat citizens as passive objects to be dictated to, bullied and coerced en masse—an attitude not unlike that found in China, Cuba and North Korea—instead of as active thinking subjects with whom government is in partnership. With few exceptions (the Nordic countries are the best examples), governments failed to find ways to affirm that despite the pandemic, citizens were still individuals imbued with inalienable rights and independent moral standing. This is, after all, how most people see themselves in modern society—as free autonomous beings rather than as laboratory rats in a series of social science experiments.

The models of governance used during the pandemic fly in the face of our own self-perception. This is a sure formula for sowing distrust, resentment and ultimately resistance. That resistance has already spilled out into the streets in Europe’s cities and the highways in Canada.

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.

Polls show two-thirds of Americans feel the country is on the wrong track. In a recent Axios poll, 66% of Republicans, 41% of Democrats and 46% of independents said they are more fearful than hopeful about what’s in store for 2022. A Politico/Morning Consult poll shows Democrats’ approval numbers dropping by 12 points since March and President Biden’s sinking lower than that.

A political earthquake may be coming. In the 1932 election Democrats gained 97 seats in the House, giving them nearly a 3-to-1 margin over Republicans. The Democrats also flipped 12 seats in the Senate and took the presidency. Two years later Democrats picked up another nine Senate seats. No one expects the 2022 midterms to show such a dramatic result for the GOP. But last November’s elections in Virginia and New Jersey were a sign that a realignment is in the offing. Will the political class realize what’s happening in time to get ahead of what’s coming, or will they be swept along in its wake?