Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

by Adam Tooze

The crisis fighting of 2008–2009 scrambled American politics. The Bush administration lost the backing of much of the congressional Republican Party. The crisis snapped the fragile bond between the GOP’s managerial, big-business elite and its right-wing mass base. As the popular wing of the party, backed by maverick oligarch donors, moved increasingly toward indignant antiestablishment opposition, mainline conservatives like Bernanke and Paulson were left to complain that it was not they who left the party, but the party that left them.8 The Bush administration’s crisis-fighting effort was carried by the Democratic Party’s majorities in Congress. That contradiction would be resolved by Barack Obama’s election victory on November 4, 2008, only weeks after the crisis reached its peak. But the fracture of the American Right would in due course have profound consequences both for America and for the wider world.