The Icelanders put the bankers in jail. The Icelanders crowdsourced a new constitution. The Icelanders refused to bail out the banks. The Icelanders held a national referendum on sovereign debt. Anyone with a mild interest in current events has come across these claims, spread for years by online memes and snappy editorials.

In reality, however, the responses to the 2008–9 Icelandic banking crash were only modestly progressive and failed to bring about any kind of shift to the left. They have also been much more contested locally than most international media accounts reflect.

Iceland’s famed but ambiguous policies of debt management have only been partially carried out by the country’s left parties. In some cases, debt-relief policies have been outright reactionary in their upward redistribution of wealth.