As a lonely critic who dared to challenge Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan during the stock market mania of the late 1990s, then congressman Bernie Sanders received recognition from the political left and dismissive coverage from the mainstream media. Sanders subsequently won significant national attention as an outspoken populist critic of the banking system in the wake of the 2007–8 financial crisis. After declaring his presidential candidacy in 2015, he cemented this reputation as the nation’s preeminent critic of bankers, using the campaign to express the anger that many Americans shared about the financial crisis and the resulting bailout. “If elected president,” Sanders pledged, “I will rein in Wall Street so they can’t crash our economy again.”

Hillary Clinton conceded the appeal of this campaign promise when — panicked by the popularity of Sanders’s attack on finance and unable to respond effectively to his criticisms — she sought to change the subject by exclaiming, “If we broke up the big banks tomorrow . . . would that end racism? Would that end sexism? Would that end discrimination against the LGBT community?” The stand that Sanders took against the banks was compelling, true to the contemporary moment, and appeared novel. But although unfamiliar to the times, opposing the excesses and power of bankers was hardly original. Sanders emerged as the successor to an influential strand of American political culture with deep historical roots that has motivated far-reaching economic demands in the past and could do so again in the future.

As the Sanders campaign demonstrated, while banking is widely considered to be dry and dull, it’s nevertheless an issue that can energize working-class politics. Discussing and debating banking calls attention to opposing material interests, which promotes a politics that is attuned to questions of class. Workers confront the relevance of banking to their daily lives every time they check their account balance or pay a bill. When Sanders presented financial policy as a clash between Wall Street on the one hand and “working families” on the other, he articulated a class-based populist message that could reach a diverse spectrum of working-class voters. In the past few years, local single-issue groups promoting public banks made real headway in several heavily Democratic cities and states. Among other issues, their campaigns foregrounded green energy projects and unequal credit access due to racial discrimination. This messaging excites liberal Democratic politicians, but its capacity to forge broader coalitions and inspire the solidarity that sustains working-class politics is more limited.