After the global financial crisis in 2008, political discourse across North America and Europe began to shift. The recession had left a trail of destruction in its wake: home foreclosures, joblessness and collapsing wages were exacerbated by brutal austerity measures and deep cuts to social spending. People were hurting and angry, and their anger was exacerbated by the knowledge that taxpayer money was being pumped out of public coffers to prop up the very banks whose reckless corruption had caused the whole mess. The unfairness was too much to bear. Protest movements like Occupy and the Indignados swept through major cities in the years that followed, drawing attention to the problem of inequality. Thomas Piketty’s treatise on this issue – Capital in the 21st Century – became an instant bestseller after its publication in 2013. And Oxfam drove the point home with its now-famous claim that the richest one per cent had captured more of the world’s wealth than the rest of the human population combined.
All of this amounted to an unprecedented attack on the prevailing neoliberal consensus, and in some cases on capitalism itself, which was left with its legitimacy at historic lows. Leftwing politicians like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Jeremy Corbyn began to step into the breach, promising to confront inequalities head-on, and their ideas became popular to an extent no-one would have predicted just a few years prior.
