For a brief instant in the fall of 2011, the world's political and financial elites seemed wrong- footed to the point of overbalancing. That September, a small protest group in New York's Zuccotti Park began to swell as more angry young (and middle- aged) people joined their camp, defying official notices to leave. The movement did not literally Occupy Wall Street, being sequestered several blocks from it. But this and the parallel protest camps across the world conveyed a clear current of discontent – at the way rich financiers and businesspeople, with governmental connivance, had ‘crashed’ the global economy in 2008 and then forged further ahead through a publicly funded rescue effort that left ordinary people facing years of austerity. The previously inchoate ‘anticapitalist’ and ‘anti- globalization’ movements had found a unifying new target: ‘the 1 per cent’ of ultra- rich people and the financial markets that seemed to redistribute wealth from those who created it to those who merely placed bets on it, and that were ‘too big to fail’ when their gambles went wrong.

Five years later, anti- globalization had a new figurehead, who had grabbed not only attention but also real political power. Public disaffection with the free global movement of products and people, and the loss of secure unskilled jobs, drove Trump to the US presidency. Across the Atlantic, it led to the United Kingdom becoming the first country to vote itself out of the EU, with a majority believing that curbing immigration and reasserting national sovereignty would bring economic and social gains (Swales 2016); and to Hungary being proudly declared an ‘illiberal national state’ by an emphatically re- elected prime minister who had fought to rescue liberal democracy from the ashes of state- planned socialism 15 years earlier (Toth 2014).

Renounce and Renew

When enthusiasts for these changes were asked how the insurgency against elites had come to be led in the United States by a self- professed real- estate billionaire (surrounded by former chief executives and Goldman Sachs alumni), and a similarly wealthy group of former businessmen with rich commercial sponsors in the United Kingdom, they had ready answers. Only people with comparable wealth and power to the elite could take them on, electorally and once in office. And they were eager for such a contest because, while being the elites’ equal, they were also the opposite.