Populism Was Not Sparked by the Financial Crisis

Although 2008 has been designated Year Zero, US politics owes more to much older events

Anti-Vietnam war protesters march in Des Moines in 1968. Some 77% of Americans trusted the government in 1964, the year before US ground forces were sent to the country. That reading had fallen to 18% last year. Photo: Bettmann/Getty

By Janan Ganesh

News of mass Floridian mortgage defaults clouded 2006. The US entered a technical recession in 2007. Unemployment reached double-digits as late as 2009.

Because a date helps to concentrate the mind, a financial crisis that was experienced as a fragmented chain of events is being commemorated as just one: the fall of Lehman Brothers, 10 years ago next month.

The arbitrariness of the decennial can be excused. The emphasis on the crash as the cause of all that has followed is harder to defend. It has become a convenient Year Zero: the supposed beginning of the political distemper that carried Donald Trump to the White House in 2016. It “lit a match”, Steve Bannon, his former adviser, and usually a taker of the long view, said last month. “And the explosion was Trump.”

This neat account exaggerates the centrist idyll before the crash and the centrist rout afterwards. Rightwing populists had enjoyed breakthroughs as long ago as the Republican seizure of Congress in 1994. Democrat Barack Obama sauntered to re-election as president a full four years after Lehman.