...Today’s Democrats are also not the same voters who backed Clintonian centrism. In 1994, based on the Pew Research Center’s political values index, 30 percent of Democrats held liberal views. Today, 56 percent of Democrats have a liberal outlook on issues ranging from the role of government to cultural politics. Yet, in the electorate writ large, few voters are critical of President Obama for being too conservative. For example, according to a CNN poll, only 17 percent of the public opposes the health care law because they believe it is “not liberal enough.”

Populism has gone mainstream, however, and to a degree unseen in more than a half century. Last year, Gallup did find that a slim majority of the public still believes there is “plenty of opportunity” for “anyone who works hard” to succeed, but that was the lowest level of belief found since the question was first asked in 1952. By comparison, 43 percent agreed, “the average person doesn’t have much chance” (in 1998, less than a fifth said that; in 1952, less than a tenth). In fact, Warren’s hallmark line, that the “game is rigged,” has become rather un-radical. Six in ten Americans believe that the “economic system unfairly favors the wealthy.” This week, the Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll reported that three in four Americans “do not feel confident” that their children’s generation will have a better life than them. It was a record high since the question was first asked a quarter century ago. A recent Marist survey found that a majority of Americans still believe the nation is in a recession.

And they have their reasons. Economists’ declared the recession over in 2009. Emmanuel Saez, of the University of California, Berkeley, helps explain what’s happened since. In a paper published in 2013, he found that inflation-adjusted income per family rose 6 percent between 2009 and 2012. But where did that income go? The earnings of the top one percent amounted to 95 percent of the total gain. The incomes for the bottom 99 percent amounted to 0.4 percent of the total rise in income. The examples of remarkable economic growth over that period raise similar issues. Most glaringly, WhatsApp was founded in 2009 and sold for $19 billion this year. It also created only 55 jobs. This is why most Americans view a recovery with scant wage growth as economic stagnancy. The key question of these times is not whether there is economic growth, but whose growth?

That question provides a window into why the attraction to Warren is about her, but also larger than her. By the modern standards of this hyper-capitalist nation, America is teeming with populist movements. On the political right, amid tea party activists and libertarian insurgents, old-time cultural populism has been energized by the cause against cronyism. That energy is dispersed between the new icons of the Grand Old Party. Names like Paul and Cruz hold even with a Bush in presidential polls. On the left, however muffled beneath the Obama presidency and the Clinton consensus, there is a populist energy in search of its champion....

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