When I asked Gordon Hanson what factors provoked the populist insurgencies in both parties in this particular election cycle, he emailed back:

The recipe for populism seems pretty clear: take a surge in manufacturing imports from China and continued automation in the US workplace and add a tepid macroeconomy. The result is a combustible stew sure to sour the stomach of party leaders nationwide.

The stew, to continue Hanson’s metaphor, began to boil over with the cataclysmic financial collapse in September 2008, which many people left and right felt was caused by reckless financial engineering on Wall Street. The collapse and the destruction it left in its wake was, without question, the most important economic and political event in recent years.

“It was the financial crisis, what it revealed about government-Wall Street links, and the fumbling of the response to it that put the nail in the coffin of trust in government,” Daron Acemoglu, an economist at M.I.T., wrote in reply to my questions. “Once trust in government was destroyed, those that had not benefited from the previous boom years became particularly easy pickings for populist rhetoric.”

On Oct. 3, 2008, Congress enacted, and President Bush signed, the Troubled Asset Relief Program. TARP funds bailed out major investment banks, and were also used, as the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis put it, “to make loans and direct equity investments to select auto industry participants, backstop credit markets, provide a lifeline to the American International Group (AIG) and provide ongoing support for government housing initiatives” – but in addition, TARP insulated the very institutions and executives that caused the collapse and the disastrous recession that followed.

“I don’t think you can underestimate or underemphasize the impact of the bailout,” Norm Ornstein, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think Washington think tank, told me in an email:

The widespread sense that all the elites in Washington and New York conspired to bail out the miscreants who caused the disaster and then gave them bonuses, while the rest of us lost our houses or saw their value, the biggest and often only asset of Americans, plummet, lost our jobs or saw them frozen and stagnant, and then saw gaping inequality grow even more, is just palpable.

On Jan. 10, 2010, the Supreme Court granted those in upper income brackets additional privileges in its Citizens United decision (buttressed by subsequent lower court rulings) that allowed wealthy individuals, corporations and unions to make unlimited political contributions. By opening the door to the creation of Super PACs and giving Wall Street and other major financial sectors new ways to buy political outcomes, the courts gave the impression, to say the least, that they favored establishment interests over those of the less well off.