The owner of a Detroit hair salon teases and curls her client’s hair, gesticulating with her comb as she answers the BBC’s questions. Is US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed too left-wing for Michigan, the journalist wants to know. “Anything but what we have,” the salon owner replies, adding with nervous laughter, “we’re on our way to hell. Socialist, socialise, social – don’t matter to me. Lower my cost of living!“

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This clip resonated with many as it spread across social media ahead of Tuesday’s midterm elections. Americans are not alone in struggling with rising costs and unmet economic expectations. Since at least last spring, around the world, protest movements driven by affordability concerns have been popping up everywhere from Paris to Delhi to our own O’Connell Street. But something new and consequential appears to be happening in the US. Anger at the cost of living has fused with public concerns about corruption, with the two issues now seen, as many opinion columns across that country have put it, as “two sides of the same coin”.

“When a family reads a story about presidential crypto profits at the same time as they are deciding whether they should put off their expensive doctor’s appointment,” Jeremy Ney, a professor at Columbia Business School, told the Financial Times, “they see that the system is working for someone, just not for them”. NYU’s Daniel Weiner put it plainly in the same piece – “many Americans associate corruption........

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