Noam Scheiber

There doesn't appear to be a bailout for them.

Yeah, this is a moment where the country really shifts in a kind of populist direction.

On the right, you had the rise of the Tea Party movement, people who saw the government intervene and bail out the big banks and really start to turn against government.

And then on the left, you have this sense that the government is bailing out the fat cats and the Wall Street billionaires are doing great, but the rest of the country is really struggling and the government isn't doing much for them.

And this really starts to crest with the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011.

This was a group of folks who start to protest in Zuccotti Park in New York City.

They really start to identify the 1% as the kind of bait and wires of the country, and it's the other 99% of Americans who are doing the right thing but getting left behind by the economy.

And it turns out that young college grads are a huge part of this movement.

There have been studies showing that about three quarters of the people involved in Occupy were college grads.

Eat the rich!

And this is a moment where you start to hear a whole variety of populist chants that are probably familiar to a lot of people.

There's just a whole new vocabulary that we hadn't really seen when it came to economic issues before.

I think that's right.

I think this is a moment where you have a real shift in their consciousness.

So instead of seeing themselves as the people who are either at the top or who are going to be at the top pretty soon, they start to identify with everyone else.

They start to identify with people who have been exploited by the people at the top.

And of course, the Occupy movement eventually fizzles out.

People leave Zuccotti Park and they go back to their homes and their jobs.

But this turns out to be the opening act of a pretty dramatic shift that will play out across the next 15 years.

It's the beginning of this realignment in American politics that really changes the way people who went to college thought about where their allegiances lie.