Democrats have a lot of soul-searching to do in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s shocking loss to Donald Trump. Many will blame Clinton’s hazy personal background. Some will blame FBI Director James Comey. Others will blame racist and sexist white Americans for voting Trump into office. Some will blame media outlets for giving Trump so much free press. Some progressives will even blame the party for not nominating Bernie Sanders, who they think was more electable than Clinton.
All of those factors probably deserve some blame, but there’s one factor that definitely holds some responsibility: the recession, which fueled the populism that made Trump possible.
Although the populism sweeping the nation feels unprecedented, it’s actually normal for populism to rise up roughly eight years after an economic recession like the one that started in 2008.
“What we see today has happened many times before,” Arthur Brooks, president of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, wrote in an October op-ed. “Indeed, political populism has often followed economic meltdowns like the one America has endured over the past eight years. … the financial crisis and the long, uneven recovery sowed the seeds for the current populism.”
Of course, it’s not easy to find people or certain policies to blame for that recession either. It’s just one of the many factors that combined for a perfect political storm that led to the election of one of the most unorthodox candidates in American history: Trump.
Jason Russell is the contributors editor for the Washington Examiner.
