There are lessons to be learned in the COVID-19 crisis from the energy crisis, which broke in the winter of 1973 and extended into the early 1980s. Projections were dire. At a session of the Aspen Institute’s energy section one year, we looked at how the country could deal with an economic downturn to a negative growth rate of 23 percent. Aspen may want to look at that again.

In Washington, first under President Richard Nixon, then under presidents Gerald Ford and finally under Jimmy Carter, there was what might be called mobilization. It had two aspects: one was intellectual and the other was scientific. The brainy one was centered in the Federal Energy Office which attracted some extraordinarily gifted economists, geologists and managers. The rest of the government, from the Interior Department to the State Department, was also in the game.

Particularly there was mobilization of the system of national laboratories where, to my mind, the scientific muscle of the country could be found then and now. They had been primarily nuclear labs, led by the three big players in the atomic arsenal: Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore and Sandia.

Everything was tried and not everything worked. Who remembers in situ coal gasification, ocean thermal gradients, magnetohydrodynamics, hot rocks, low-head hydro or wave power?

In the mix were solar, wind and efforts to loosen oil in tight formations. These were the winners, but it was not clear at all then.

Gifted leadership emerged first at the Federal Energy Office, then at the successor to the Atomic Energy Commission, the Energy Research and Development Administration. Under Carter, all the energy agencies were rolled into the Department of Energy with its first secretary, a star in the Washington firmament, James Schlesinger.

That kind of mobilization is needed now, talent plus science.

The national labs, 17 strong, have some biological capability —  several having had some role in the Human Genome Project, and others looking at the treatment of cancer with radiation.

The COVID-19 virus will not be defeated just by medical science but by the whole panoply of science, including what might at first sound like kooky ideas. I recall the derision that greeted solar and wind concepts back in 1974. Now they are mother’s milk in the energy mix.

One of the highest challenges facing hospitals and medical facilities is to save the lives of their staff with superior sanitation of protective gear like respirators, the now well-known N95 masks and the ambient air itself.

I was excited to learn about a McLean, Va.-based company, airPHX, which has an off-the-shelf, air-scrubbing system using a cold plasma as the scrubbing agent. The units are about the size of a computer and each unit – they operate continuously from a three-prong plug — will clean the air of a 15,000-square-foot room, according to the company’s CEO William Pommerening.

The airPHX units, which were developed to combat mold, odors and pathogens in gyms and elsewhere, are in production on a modest scale, but this is set to ramp up with a new contract manufacturer in Tennessee.

Pommerening told me that he believes his machines will effectively destroy the COVID-19 virus both in the air and on surfaces. He said, “We have lab testing showing efficacy on over 30 health care-associated pathogens including bacteria, viruses and mold showing a 4 log [a technical measure in sanitation which equates to 99.99 percent effectiveness] reduction, or greater, in surface organisms in 30 minutes.” This, he said, included testing on a sister virus to COVID-19. For the air, the effectiveness was between 92 percent and 96 percent, he said. New masks are rated at 95 percent, hence their N95 designation.

If this proves out, it will be a boon across the spectrum of indoor trouble spots and will one day have a wide application in workplaces and recreation areas.

In my view, it needs government scientific review to confirm the data. But it is as promising as anything I have heard of, including hydrogen peroxide and ultraviolet light.

The need to be sure is paramount.

Nothing will be the same again.

Those are words that challenge the heart and the imagination. The heart because, as in a death or the loss of a job, some things will be very missed. The imagination because it needs inspired speculation to know how the present crisis will reshape the way we live; how we are governed, how we educate, how we do business, and how we play.

Some losses are somewhat predictable. Most of us may never sit in a movie theater again because there may be no movie theaters. They were already having a hard time with the competition from streaming services, now many may just not reopen.

Question: What will be done with those buildings? They are mostly part of shopping centers where many of the tenants for restaurants and specialty shops will also go out of business.

Here’s my answer: In that glorious time when we have licked COVID-19, many new entrepreneurs will get their start in those empty shells. A myriad of yet-unknown businesses will crop up, coming out of these times of ultra-difficulty. Failing shopping centers offer habitat to startups.

We are in a state of war, and in war — despite its horror — there is invention. As we try to defeat this pandemic, there will be inventions aplenty.

War has always spurred creativity, in art and in science, and in its aftermath, a time of optimism and opportunity. Catastrophe shakes up society and reorients it. There is a high price but a great reward.

Needs must, there will be a re-evaluation of values and the goods and services that are essential. High on that list will be electricity. Over and over again we will be asking ourselves if the electric grid is safe and if so, how safe?

As Morgan O’Brien, co-founder of Nextel and now CEO of Anterix, which offers utilities secure communications systems, told me, “The coronavirus pandemic is putting more stress on the infrastructure which keeps our society functioning. Critical infrastructure like the electric grid will be more stressed as it is the essential lifeline for Americans sheltering in place.”

A loss of all or part of the grid is an existential fear that has had experts worried since the first computer hackers had a go at it. Utility presidents have told me that it is grid security that keeps them awake at night. It should. CPS Energy, the utility in San Antonio, gets more than 2 million hits a day, I believe.

Late last year the president’s National Infrastructure Advisory Council warned strongly of the dangers of cyberattack. It said the electric utility industry is good at tackling small, short-term outages but it is essentially unprepared for catastrophic outages lasting a long time.

Earlier this year James Woolsey, a former CIA director and an honorary co-chair of the Secure the Grid Coalition, wrote to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission demanding it order more physical security for transformers, pylons, etc.

Woolsey cited a lack of improved physical security since that became an issue with the sophisticated disabling of Pacific Gas & Electric’s substation in Metcalf, Calif., in 2013.

John Savage, professor emeritus of computer science at Brown University, who is writing a book on cybersecurity, raises a less-mentioned dimension of threat to the grid: the role of GPS. With the advent of global positioning satellites, he explained, the utility industry switched from using atomic clocks to using GPS timing as the basis for its nationwide synchronization.

Savage told me, “Dependence on GPS for timing is a security risk. If GPS timing signals are distorted or lost, serious damage may be done to the grid.

“GPS signals can be lost due to a local jamming, blackouts, produced by a solar flare, or spoofing. A GPS anomaly alone or a cyberattack combined with one can cascade and bring down a large portion of the grid for an extended period of time.”

Gen. James Jones, a retired Marine commandant and NATO commander, told me, “For the past several years, I have been preoccupied by the proximity of threats, particularly in the cyber realm.”

Much will change, but the need for reliable electricity will remain paramount.

There is plenty of time in Botswana. I mention this because suddenly many people around the world are finding time hanging heavily as the coronavirus rages.

But there are cultures where time is part of the ethos, where filling it is an art. For example, look to shepherds in the Middle East, building complex cairns out of loose stones to fill in time. Look to parts of the world where people sit together in companionship but not conversing. You see it in the Middle East and Africa.

For most of the 1970s my father lived in Botswana. He loved the country; and from what I could see on annual visits, the country loved him. He was one of a small population of expats in the capital Gaborone. He had gone there from neighboring Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to work at his trade as a mechanic.

When he grew too old to handle the demands of the work, he switched to teaching simple mechanics at the local high school. These consisted of things like why a hammer needs to be balanced, the difference between British and American threads on bolts and how to ground an electrical installation.

One day he, a mild man, told a student that he needed to do something a bit quicker. The student, one of his favorites, replied, “Rra [Sir], you have no time. There is no time in Rhodesia where you come from, there is no time in England, and there is no time at all in America. But in Botswana, there is plenty of time.”

Indeed, there was — and I am sure there still is plenty of time in Botswana.

Activities had to be crafted to take time.

One morning Dad told me he had to make a telephone call to his friend Peter Robbertse. “Good,” I said, expecting him to go to the phone across the room. Instead, he suggested yet another cup of tea, a staple of life among Brits in Africa.

Breakfast followed with more mentions of the need to make the phone call. So it went, “I must call Peter” and no call made.

Finally, just before 8 p.m., he picked up the phone and talked to his friend. After hanging up, he said, “There. That is something accomplished.”

Social visits were about the same.

We would go to “tea” — with cake and bread and butter. The town baker was skillful, and the cake was good. But, oh, the conversation.

At that time, there was no newspaper, no radio and no television in Botswana, so news was by word of mouth. As there was sunshine every day, there was not even the weather as a topic of conversation.

Our conversation went like this, “Jim got a new tire for his truck.”

“Yes, I heard it came on the train from South Africa. Only took about a month. Not bad.”

Long silence. Maybe some desultory remark like, “He needed it: The old one was always losing air.”

It would go on like that for an hour and a half or longer — people having nothing to say and yet enjoying each other in silence.

At the end of one such tea, my father got up, we said our thanks and farewells and went back to his cinderblock flat. He said something like, “I really enjoy these get togethers. Good to hear what is going on.”

I held my tongue, not mentioning that I had had better conversations alone in the bath.

No one ever said they were bored. Neither, noticeably, were they interested in the outside world.

Perhaps that might have upset them. I was not asked to hold forth on my racy life in Washington. Knowledge of the bigger world would not have sat well: It might have drawn attention to what their lives lacked and to the silence.

Fast forward to 1998. I am back in Botswana, sitting in the beer garden of the spanking new Holiday Inn in Gaborone. Things have sped up for Gabarone since its designation as the capital in 1966, when it was more of a village.

I am there this time covering President Bill Clinton’s Africa tour. I and four other reporters order lunch: hamburgers for all. But the waiter, instead of taking our order to the cook manning the grill, went to talk to other waiters.

Time went by. An irritated guy from a network said, “What is she doing? She has not put our order in.”

I explained, “She thinks we will want to be here for a very long time. This is a nice place to pass time in her view. She is being considerate. In Botswana there is plenty of time.”

I went to tell her that we were Americans and had no time. She understood.

For more than a decade, I’ve been writing about the isolated, the lonely, the abandoned: Those who feel that the world has no place for them.

Now all of us will know something of their isolation and, in the case of people who live on their own, loneliness.

Those I’ve been writing about are the luckless hundreds of thousands in the United States — millions around world — who suffer from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, now known as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis. They are sentenced to live separately by their illness and its debilitating fatigue. They are a kind of living dead. Now I have a glimmer, no more to be sure, of how it must be every day for these sufferers.

What will it be like for the rest of us in two weeks when we’ve exhausted the pleasures of home life and yearn to see our friends, go to a restaurant, a play or a concert? Just to live normally?

I’ve always tried to console myself with what I call “adventure therapy.” Like most pop psychology it isn’t very profound, but it does help. Will it help now? I have no idea.

Anyway, the therapy is that you try to find the adventure in any situation you’re in, which can include some hairy ones, like facing surgery. (Who will you meet? What’s all the equipment? How will they perform the surgery? Do the doctors like doctoring? What kind of life do the nurses live?)

In my own home — mercifully which I share with my ever-cheerful wife — I wonder where the adventure lies in this crisis.

First, I know I won’t write the Great American Novel or any work of fiction. I won’t write my life story, as I’m constantly advised to do. My ego is robust, but I’m not sure it’s robust enough for that.

Oscar Wilde worried about “third-rate litterateurs” picking over the lives of dead writers. Of course, it seems to me some lives are lived with an eye to posterity.

I’m always amazed at people who in the middle of great trauma or great events have time to sit down and write what they think and feel. I’m glad they do, but I don’t think we’re entitled. The world loves Shakespeare’s works and knows nothing much about him.

We know too much about people of minor achievement whom we call celebrities. We watch them and their petty lives with the attention of a fakir watching his snake. Yeah, I’m no better. I want to know what’s to become of Meghan and Harry, where will Lindsay Lohan settle and, only somewhat less trivially, what are the late-night comedians doing with their spare time now that we learn that they need huge staffs to be funny?

I do think we need a record of our times, often informed by memoirs.

Unfortunately, and inexcusably, when the Trump era is behind us, we’ll know too little about what went on in the inner councils of the White House. President Trump has shown near contempt for the Presidential Records Act, inspired by the fall of President Richard Nixon. Trump writes little and destroys much that it written, we’re told.

One has always dreamed of a time when there was enough leisure to read, maybe plow through Tolstoy, give Proust another go, or try to understand Chinese literature. But I think that won’t happen. I’ll read the same kind of books I always read: biographies and crime stories. Most likely I’ll read a bit more, curse television a bit more, and squander my time watching and reading the news about COVID-19.

As I struggle to avoid the temptations of the refrigerator and that reproving word processor (It whispers, “Write a book.”), I’ll wonder about those who existed before this pandemic in a long, dark tunnel of isolation without hope of light at the end: Those who can hardly hope to break out one day into what Winston Churchill called the “sunlit uplands.”

A dark cloud is passing across the nation and the world. When it passes, how will we have changed? How will we react after this national jolt?

In Britain after World War II, there was a period, at the end of the 1940s and into the 1950s, of idealism and common purpose. It ushered in as its prime minister not Winston Churchill, who had won the war, but milquetoast Clement Atlee. One lasting and revered reform of the Atlee government was the introduction of the National Health Service.

In America there was a new confidence, aided by legislation like the GI Bill, which led to the expansion and general contentment of the 1950s.

The tumultuous, jolting 1960s left us changed. Sex was considered an entitlement, the environment an ethic, civil rights a moral obligation, and women gained nominal equality. Reverence for institutions was out and all expertise was suspect. “Some things are too important to be left to the experts,” said the young people who had hated the Vietnam War.

In the 1970s, the revolutionaries of the 1960s were gradually absorbed into the bourgeoisie. Mostly, they seemed slightly embarrassed about who they had been and what they had done.

The killing of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 and the riots that followed, engulfing major cities from Baltimore to Los Angeles, looked momentarily like a national wake-up call that would unite the nation. Instead, we got a measurable jolt with white flight to the suburbs.

The energy crisis of 1973, which remained with us for two decades, also jolted the American body politic. Here was an external force that could not be internalized: The oil we needed could not be produced domestically. We were at the mercy of foreign powers, like Saudi Arabia and Iran. All the raw materials we had needed up that point appeared to be domestic. Now we had joined the world community in a way frightening to us. Fortress America was breached.

We thought that crisis would change the way we lived. Amitai Etzioni, then a professor at Columbia, and a Wall Street Journal columnist, predicted that we would all have less of everything – and be just as happy, if not happier. We would all wear jeans as daily dress, ride bicycles and drive very small cars. Detroit-made some small cars  — and they were awful. But the move to smaller cars — no more land yachts with acres of chrome and fins — can be seen on the streets today. Something seminal had jolted us and spurred our engineers to do better.

Another jolt was 9/11: an attack of wartime proportions. It fed a new nationalism, an inward turn, with a profound distrust, even dislike for people of different cultures who want to come here from elsewhere. It stirred a somnolent patriotism.

Now, in the time of COVID-19, we are enduring another great national jolt which will have consequences in the decades ahead.

After this pandemic, it is a fair guess, we will be more inclined to believe the experts and to value medical science the same way we have worshiped computer technology. In addition, stock markets might come to be eclipsed by a more representative measure of the national well-being.

Particularly, the indifference we have felt to predictions of existential calamity may be taken way more seriously than before COVID-19. Predictions of disasters that did not happen, like the Y2K computer alarm, have lulled us into thinking bad things will not really happen: A fix would be found.

Now we are struggling with an assault that will be seminal in its impact, personally frightening and economically devastating. We cannot buy or fight our way out of the COVID-19 pandemic. An immunization is a year and half away. Will it work?

I would put at the top our list of existential threats climate change and cyberattack. Sea levels are rising, and coastal cities are under pressure. That will get worse. The security of the electric grid also is under a daily attack. Experts are and have been warning of the possibility of parts of the country being blacked out for long periods. A new bipartisan congressional cyberattack threat report has just been released.

Going forward, we dare not think it cannot happen here because it can. It is happening here now.

“ … until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword…” — President Abraham Lincoln, second inaugural address

 

Often when there is an intimidating mountain of books, one needs something else: another book. One such book was Martin Gilbert’s “In Search of Churchill: A Historian’s Journey,” published in 1994.

Gilbert, author of Churchill’s eight-volume, official biography, must have felt that a smaller book was needed as a guide. Or, more likely, he realized that big works on his subject abounded, so he wrote an informal book about how he wrote the official biography. It is a quick guide to the man Churchill, his habits and eccentricities.

Now comes an important book that, I think, will be invaluable for people who are overwhelmed by the 15,000-plus books on President Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War: “Every Drop of Blood: The Momentous Second Inauguration of Abraham Lincoln” by Edward Achorn. It is a small masterpiece, brilliant in concept and exquisite in execution.

Achorn has taken just one day, March 4, 1865, the day of Lincoln’s second inauguration, as the keyhole through which he gives us a 360-degree view of the Civil War: the players, the issues, the bloodshed, the misery, the sacrifice — and the folly, nobility and the cruelty of the war.

By that March, when Lincoln had been re-elected, the war was drawing to a close. It had claimed an incredible 700,000 lives, left families shattered, and the South in ruins.

At the center of it all was Lincoln, the gangling, ruminating, rube-like figure who wrote with biblical grandeur. Though torn by the war, he ordered that the Confederacy be crushed by whatever means to bring the war to an end — an idea that Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s men executed with sometimes barbaric zeal, especially in South Carolina and Georgia.

For me, the sorry plight of the prisoners of war is especially hard to take. On both sides, they suffered and died in degradation of disease and starvation. Yet Lincoln stopped the prisoner exchanges for two and a half years, adding to the death and misery on both sides.

The author — a deft hand at scenes and people — paints a vivid picture of the Washington of 1865, from a society party thrown by the rich Chief Justice Salmon Chase and his beautiful daughter, Kate Chase Sprague, which lacked nothing in sumptuousness, to the romance between Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, and Lucy Lambert Hale, the daughter of Lincoln’s ally and confidant New Hampshire Sen. John Parker Hale.

Achorn tells us of the mud that oozed and sloshed everywhere for the inaugural, as it had rained hard that day and the previous one. He details the permanent stench that came from the Washington City Canal, near Capitol Hill, which was failing as a commercial waterway. The canal was filled with human and animal feces, dead animals and other detritus of the city.

He also tells us of the social life, where young people met each other at fashionable tea dances at the National Hotel.

All this while the wounded lay in terrible pain in inadequate hospitals. This suffering recorded by the poet and reporter Walt Whitman, who went daily to comfort the hurting soldiers, and the pioneering nurse Clara Barton, who sought to talk to Lincoln about the missing.

Washington was a cauldron of a place that year. A place of hopeful African-Americans, freed from slavery but owning nothing, as well as profiteers, social climbers and office seekers, deserters and those who had fought and had been wounded.

There were those aplenty who hated Lincoln with passion and thought a second term would destroy the country. At the Capitol on that day of inauguration, when Lincoln delivered one the great pieces of American oratory, just 701 words long, there were admirers, like another great orator of the time, the freed slave Frederick Douglass, and haters who wanted him dead, including Booth, who had originally hoped to kill Lincoln during the ceremony.

Achorn is journalist, and he uses the skills of his trade to bring us as much of the flavor from contemporary accounts as he can find in letters and newspapers without, as academics often do, weighing down the narrative with whole letters and articles. This is a book that moves on efficiently, parading its characters, from politicians and newspaper editors to actors and prostitutes (a Booth weakness).

With skill and massive research, Achorn brings it all into one place on one day for us to see, feel and ponder.

A “scram” is the emergency shutdown of a nuclear power plant. Control rods, usually boron, are dropped into the reactor and these absorb the neutron flux and shut it down.

President Trump, a supporter of nuclear power, has in a few words scrammed the whole nuclear industry, or at least dealt its orderly operation a severe blow.

Scientists see nuclear waste as a de minimus problem. Nuclear power opponents — who really can’t be called environmentalists anymore — see it as a club with which to beat nuclear and stop its development.

The feeling that nuclear waste is an insoluble problem has seeped into the public consciousness. People, who otherwise would be nuclear supporters, ask, “Ah, but what about the waste?”

For its part, the nuclear industry has looked to the government to honor its promise to take care of the waste, which it made at the beginning of the nuclear age.

In the early days of civilian nuclear power — with the startup of the Shippingport Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania in 1957 — the presiding theory was that waste wasn’t a problem: It would be put somewhere safe, and that would be that.

Civilian waste would be reprocessed, recovering useful material like uranium and isolating waste products, which would need special storage. The most worrisome nuclear byproducts are gamma, beta and X-ray emitters, which decay in about 300 years.

The long-lived alpha emitters, principally plutonium, must be put somewhere safe for all time. Plutonium has a half-life of 240,000 years. It’s pretty benign except that it’s an important component of nuclear weapons.

If you get it in your lungs, you’ll almost certainly get lung cancer. Otherwise, people have swallowed it and injected it without harm. It can be shielded with a piece of paper. I have handled it in a glovebox with gloves that weren’t so different from household rubber ones.

But it’s plutonium that gives the “eternal” label to nuclear waste.

Enter President Jimmy Carter in 1977. He believed that reprocessing nuclear waste — as they do in France, Russia, Japan and other countries — would lead to nuclear proliferation. Just months in office, Carter banned reprocessing: the logical step to separating the cream from the milk in nuclear waste handling.

Since then, it’s been the policy of succeeding administrations that the whole, massive nuclear core should be buried. The chosen site for that burial was Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Some $15 billion to $18 billion has been spent readying the site with its tunnels, rail lines, monitors and passive ventilation.

In 2010 Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) — then the majority leader in the Senate — said no to Yucca Mountain. It’s generally believed that Reid was bowing to casino interests in Las Vegas, which thought this was the wrong kind of gamble.

The industry had pinned all its hopes on Yucca Mountain being revived under Trump: He had promised it would be. Then on Feb. 6, and with an eye to the election (he failed to carry Nevada in 2016), Trump tweeted, “Nevada, I hear you and my administration will RESPECT you!”

In the Department of Energy, which was promoting Yucca Mountain, gears are crashing, rationales are being torn up and new ones thought up, even as the nuclear waste continues to pile up at operating reactors. No one has any idea what comes next.

Time, I think — after watching nuclear waste shenanigans since 1969 — to take a very fresh look at nuclear waste disposal. Most likely, a first step would be to restart reprocessing to reduce the volume.

I’ve been advocating that to leave the past behind, a prize, like the XPRIZE — maybe one awarded by the XPRIZE Foundation — should be established for new ideas on managing nuclear waste. The prize must be substantial: not less than $20 million. It could be financed by companies like Google or Microsoft, which have lots of money, and a declared interest in clean air and decarbonization.

The old concepts have been so tinkered with and politicized that nuclear waste is now a political horror story. Make what you will of Trump being on the same side of nuclear waste management as presidents Carter and Barack Obama.

It’s hard for me to believe that Donald Trump is president. Really hard. Equally hard for me to believe that Bernie Sanders is the Democratic front-runner, especially after the Las Vegas debate.

I can take Sanders’s passion, although it’s so consuming it gets to be frightening. I can take his calling himself a democratic socialist, although I don’t know to what extent his form of socialism pits him against capitalism. Enough, I fear.

Some of what Sanders had to say in Las Vegas was downright risible, or has been tried and failed, or, worse, would set in place a series of negative dynamics, damaging the country in many ways without bringing about any of the gains he wishes to achieve. Listening to him, I think, “This donkey wants his feedbag.”

In his way, Sanders is as committed to conspiracy theories as is Trump. Sanders sees vast, secretive forces in fossil fuel companies, lobbyists, bankers and billionaires as being united in a scheme to keep the rest of us poor and ill-served by government.

Here are three of his big fallacies:

1. Companies would be better if they were partly owned by the workers. This is real socialism and it hasn’t worked when it’s been tried.

Sanders would be well-advised to read up on the history of the cooperative movement in Britain. The very first casualty would be innovation because worker governance isn’t risk-taking.

I say this having been very familiar with the British coop movement and having headed a trade union local, the Newspaper Guild, in Washington. Collective decision making is not creative, risk-taking or forward-looking.

2. The technology of fracking to extract oil and natural gas from tight rock formations should be stopped in order to combat global warming. That would deal the economy a body blow while doing nothing for global warming.

Carbon emissions from fossil fuels are coming down, and on the horizon is the technology of carbon capture, utilization and storage and other technological fixes for carbon emissions.

Technology has enabled fracking and technology, not cessation, will clean up emissions.

3. The current health care mess should be replaced root-and-branch by a national health system. That we need a stabilizing public option in health care is more apparent daily. But health reform needs to be introduced like good medicine, prudently with the dosage corrected in relation to the progress of the patient.

Sanders’s approach to most issues can be summed up by what author H.G. Wells, a socialist, said of playwright G.B. Shaw’s ideas. He said the trouble with Shaw, also a socialist, was that Shaw wanted to cut down the trees to erect metal sunshades. Quite so.

In Las Vegas, Sanders was out to cut down every tree he could see. These included what is part of the American Dream: Anyone with pluck and hard work can improve their situation, and maybe grow rich.

Sanders’s assault of Mike Bloomberg was that Bloomberg didn’t accept some mythical belief that money is inherently bad and that those who’ve made a lot of it are evil and constantly conspiring to keep the rest of us in penury — at least those who earn up to the Senate salary of $174,000 a year.

The long-term evil of money isn’t in the generation that makes it, but in the families that will inherit it down through the generations, creating an oligarchy the likes of which we haven’t seen since the fall of the serf-exploiting Russian nobility.

Someone should take Sanders on one side and tell him about failed experiments in worker ownership, the value of evolution over revolution, and that every American would like to be rich.

We are an optimistic people. And in today’s world, there’s the rub.

By nature, we are sure that the extremes of any given time will be corrected as the political climate changes and elections bring in new players. The great ship of state will always get back on an even keel and the excesses, or omissions, of one administration will be corrected in the next.

Maybe not this time.

The norms uprooted by President Donald Trump are possibly too many not to have left lasting damage to this Republic.

Consider just some of his transgressions:

— We have abandoned our place as the beacon of decency and the values enshrined in that.

— America’s good name has gone up in smoke, as with the Paris climate agreement and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear forces treaty.

— The president has meddled in our judicial system by intimidating prosecutors and seeking to influence judges.

— The president has blown on the coals of prejudice and sanctioned racial antagonism.

But above all, Trump has tested the constitutional limits of presidential power and found that it can be expanded exponentially. He has expanded executive privilege to absolute power.

Trump has done this with the help of the pusillanimous members of the Senate and the oh-so-malleable Attorney General Bill Barr — his new Roy Cohn.

The most pernicious of Trump’s enablers, the eminence grise behind the curtain, gets little attention. He is Rupert Murdoch, a man who has done a lot of good and incalculable harm.

The liberal media rails — indeed enjoys — railing against Fox News but has little to say about the 88-year-old proprietor who, with a single stroke, could silence Sean Hannity and tame Tucker Carlson (whom I know and like).

But Murdoch remains aloof and silent. The power of Fox is not its editorial slant but that it forms a malignant circle of harm. It is Trump’s daily source of news, endorsement, prejudice and even names for revenge.

There are two conservative networks, OAN and Newsmax. But neither has the flare that Fox has as a broadcast outlet, nor acts as the eyes and ears and adviser to the president.

I am an admirer of Murdoch in many ways. But like a president, maybe he should get a lot of scrutiny.

Murdoch’s newspapers in Australia, where they dominate, have rejected climate change, and possibly played a role in the country not being prepared for the terrible wildfires.

In Britain, he has stirred feeling against the European Union for decades. His Sun, the largest circulation paper, is Fox News in print and was probably the template for Fox having campaigned ceaselessly and vulgarly against Europe.

After long years of watching Murdoch in Britain and here, I know the damage he can do and why he should be named. I must say, though, that Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal is a fine newspaper, better than before he bought it.

The Democrats, to my mind, present a sorry resistance. None of their presidential candidates has delivered a speech of vision, capturing the popular imagination.

Democrats search the news for the latest Trumpian transgressions and get a kind of comfort by seeing, by their lights, how terrible he is. But there is none of the old confidence that the president will be trounced in the next election and the ship of state will right itself because it always does.

Maybe it will list more.