Donald J. Trump and Boris Johnson: Is this how the era ushered in by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher finally ends?

It once looked as though the financial crisis of 2008 might even bring about the end of laissez-faire economics. “The idea of an all-powerful market which is always right is finished,” declared Nicolas Sarkozy, then the president of France. And Peer Steinbrück, Germany’s finance minister at the time, predicted that “the U.S. will lose its status as the superpower of the world financial system.”

Even Alan Greenspan, the former Fed chairman, once known as the “maestro” of capitalism, declared himself “in a state of shocked disbelief” at the collapse wrought by the unfettered markets he had championed throughout his life. “I’ve found a flaw,” he said. “I’ve been very distressed by that fact.”

But I suspect few would have guessed that the economic order built on Reagan’s and Thatcher’s common faith in unfettered global markets (and largely accepted by their more liberal successors Bill Clinton and Tony Blair) would be brought down by right-wing populists riding the anger of a working class that has been cast aside in the globalized economy that the two leaders trumpeted 40 years ago.