There is no doubt that without direct and swift government intervention, the financial crisis in the fall of 2008 would very likely have led to a global credit freeze, and a resulting depression that would have eclipsed the 1930s. To their great credit, George W. Bush, Hank Paulsen, congressional leaders of both parties, and the two presidential candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama, endorsed that swift action. But in a major warning sign, their package created a populist backlash among House Republicans, who at first rejected the package, before a precipitous drop in the Dow brought enough around to get it passed.

The effect of the bailout package was huge and still reverberates today—even more because of the actions and inactions of the Obama administration’s economic team in the still-shaky economic turmoil that followed Obama’s inauguration in January 2009. Both Paulsen and his successor, Tim Geithner, focused on saving major agents in the financial system, but refused to countenance any actions to punish, or at least bring to the dock, any of the miscreants who had caused the collapse. What Americans saw was elites conspiring to protect their fellow elites—who got off scot-free, along with bonuses, while the rest of the country suffered, losing homes or seeing their home values drop precipitously, losing jobs and nest eggs. No one went to jail. In the meantime, the Obama administration put forth a tepid plan to protect homeowners from foreclosure, which was not fully implemented, and put no significant pressure on banks to free up the huge amount of capital they held in reserve to help out middle-class homeowners.

No surprise: It produced a huge populist surge. The Tea Party movement blossomed on the right, and Occupy Wall Street exploded on the left. Bernie Sanders’s strength in the Democratic presidential nomination battle is one reflection of that anger. But the Tea Party has been much stronger and more organized. Its immense support from talk radio hosts like Limbaugh, Ingraham, and Levin and from bloggers like Erickson, has helped it to defeat powerful House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a primary, push Speaker John Boehner out of office, and block his designated successor, Kevin McCarthy. It has also fueled the anti-establishment mood that has enabled Donald Trump to flourish.