“These are thy Gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.” Such were the words with which the Israelites greeted the Golden Calf furnished by Aaron during Moses’s absence, as the prophet ascended Mount Sinai to converse with God. The proverbial Golden Calf is a fetish, a false idol, an irrational obsession that afflicts a community and blinds its members to more sober and realistic habits of mind. The story is a reminder that, whether or not God himself exists, humans will always create a god to prostrate themselves before.

It just so happens that the 2016 election has ushered in a rejection of a similar Golden Calf, a god that has been imagined as offering a panacea for fundamental social and political problems. That Golden Calf has been the idea that economic growth and a constantly expanding gross domestic product are the ultimate bellwethers for economic and social health. “It’s the economy, stupid.” Just make it grow and the rest will fix itself.

Looking back at past elections, there is something remarkably quaint and simplistic about the terms of exchange between Republican and Democratic candidates on the issue of the economy. Setting aside the culture wars, politicians were identified by their respective strategies towards achieving economic growth (or restoring it to the halcyon days of the 1950s and 1960s), conceived as the expansion of the U.S. GDP and, by extension, the lowering of the headline unemployment rate.

But this has been an election in which the very language that has held together and circumscribed public debate since the 1980s has shown signs of dissolution and fragmentation. One of the most important developments of the 2016 cycle has been the challenge by counter-establishment forces against base assumptions of what makes a vibrant and equitable economy. Across left and right, we are witnessing the emergence of a new politics, a revolt against the growth fetish that has been propagated by the political leaders of the preceding decades.

The very language that has held together and circumscribed public debate since the 1980s has shown signs of dissolution and fragmentation.

Despite the fact that the United States’ GDP now exceeds pre-crisis levels by over $2 trillion, and the unemployment rate is at a post-recession low of 4.9 percent, a growing proportion of the American electorate is not impressed. Economic growth has returned, the voters have understood, but that has by no means correlated with an economic system that works for them.