It seems possible that part of the reason Trump and Sanders surprised people this year is that we forgot what the world looked like four years ago. We forgot how ripe America was for a populist alternative back then. The Democrats didn’t really have a chance to vent this pressure; they were stuck with Obama. But Republicans flirted with populism for months—that’s what all of those boomlets for Michelle Bachman and Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich were. That’s why Santorum, who merged social conservatism with populism in a pretty attractive and responsible way, came within a few points in Michigan of wresting the nomination away from Mitt Romney.
In the end, the power of the Republican party establishment was enough to put down the populist surge, and they instead nominated the most anti-populist candidate imaginable. Which meant that the populist pressures that were building four years ago were denied release. And so they grew.
The populist fervor grew to such size that it began to exert a warping gravitational pull. At the Republican convention in Cleveland, the party’s nominee refused to mention God or faith or the Constitution and instead insisted that “only he” could fix America’s ills. At the Democratic convention in Philadelphia, the parents of a dead American soldier waved a pocket version of the Constitution from the podium and rebuked the Republican nominee for being a draft dodger.
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