people had had enough
I think that’s the key. It doesn’t have to be a depression, just a situation in which people stand up and say, “we’ve had enough”. They were doing that in 2016. And recently something like 4M people participate in the women’s march, which wasn’t even billed as a Hell No sort of thing.
Fox, Limbaugh, Breitbart, Stone, et al. fabricate fictitious situations to effect. We have an advantage here in that we have a real situation. U.S. is not far from becoming an oligarchy. We have people such as Thiel and Graham openly either calling for a return to oligarchy, celebrating the coming reign of oligarchy, and/or rationalizing why oligarchy is the normal order of things. We have Trump, repellent to most citizens, as nominal president, Bannon, an evil genius who publicly states that he embraces “the dark side” and that Satan is one of his role models.
I submit that we in fact do have a situation. And even before this, Sanders was a significant populist draw. People unify over principles better than they unify over specifics. That’s where populism has an edge…keep the specifics backgrounded and the principles front and center. Right focuses of grievance. Grievance is a motivator. That’s how the tea party unified. People only cling to minutia when they feel they have little to lose. I think an adequate unity of purpose is possible if the vision is compelling and the alternative is frightening.