The Bernie Sanders coalition is not just young. It is also rather white. This raises another question: Why would young, college-attending or college-educated white people—historically among the winners of the American system—be so eager to replace it?

Indeed, several older commentators have expressed horror that young people would embrace a revolution to make the U.S. more like a northern European economy. David Brooks’ exasperation is representative. “It’s amazing that a large part of the millennial generation has rejected” the American consensus that free markets are the way “toward individualism, achievement and flexibility,” he wrote.

The idea that young white Americans should be less revolutionary because their demographic has historically thrived misses two factors. First, it fails to reckon with the last decade—the rise in student loans, the rise in youth unemployment, the fall in wage growth, and social unrest. Second, it doesn’t acknowledge that a long period of economic progress followed by a concentrated period of financial strain is precisely what creates the perfect conditions for upheaval.

James Chowning Davies, a 20th-century American sociologist, observed that if you look at the history of political revolutions, it’s not the poorest who start them, nor is it the richest. Instead, the conditions for revolution are ripest “when a prolonged period of economic and social development is followed by a short period of sharp reversal.” Indeed, if you look at the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution, those whose felt the promise of hope felt the deepest indignation. Davies called it “the revolution of rising expectations."

Perhaps the members of this young generation, too, are in the midst of such a revolution. They are revolting, not just because they are disappointed and feel poor, but also because they feel gutted by great expectations. They remember the 1990s economy. They remember the “Hope and Change” stickers. They voted for Barack Obama. But they also recall stalled growth in the 2000s. They feel the embarrassment of bloated American exceptionalism after 9/11. They remember the Great Recession and, equally, the not-great recovery. They rue Obama’s failed promise to usher in a new age of consensus government, and bemoan the broken social contract around college, which no longer functions as an automatic elevator to middle-class comforts.

During the Occupy protests, researchers from the City University of New York visited Zuccotti Park in New York. They found that many activists had worked on Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, and their great hope had wrought great disappointment. “Disenchantment with Obama was a driver of the Occupy movement for many of the young people who participated,” they wrote.

More than ramming a political platform through Washington, the Occupy movement was about venting at an unfair system led by liars. Sanders is an antidote to system starved of integrity. When John Della Volpe, the director of polling at the Harvard Institute of Politics, asked young voters last year what they value most in a presidential candidate, half said “integrity." A quarter said "authenticity.” “Political experience” finished near the bottom of the list.