Watching the rise of populist movements such as the Tea Party, and more recently the Occupy Wall Street protests, in the U.S., as well as the party known as the Piratenpartei (the Pirate Party) in Germany, I was tempted to dismiss these phenomena as temporary reactions to uncertain times.

But now that the Wall Street protests have spread across the Atlantic, shrugging them off as incapable of influencing the political discourse would be a grave mistake. Only time will tell whether these movements have staying power. At the moment banks have come under public scrutiny again, because the public has finally realized that the sovereign debt crisis in the Eurozone is also a crisis of the banking sector. This has reignited the widespread post Lehman frustrations with the financial sector.

Still, there are key differences between the U.S. and German movements. In the eyes of many Germans, the banking sector in Germany is effectively represented by one person only, Deutsche Bank boss Josef Ackermann. He leads the only truly global big German bank and has been a lightning rod for those angered by the financial system for years. The Pirate Party is a dash of color in an otherwise dull political landscape that still fundamentally works − it will likely disappear over time. What is happening in the U.S., on the other hand, could be seen as a sign of much deeper concerns about a political system that is becoming increasingly dysfunctional.

Three years after the beginning of the Great Recession, America is suffering from what former president Jimmy Carter once called “malaise.” Using that word cost him the presidency, and no U.S. politician since has dared utter the word again. But the rise of the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street movements are clear signs of a growing anxiety amongst middle class Americans, a “malaise” that is deepening by the day.

On the surface, all this appears to be just a new expression of the traditional disenchantment with the nation’s capital and its government. Populism has always been part of the political discourse on the fringes of mainstream America. In fact, many observers have automatically dismissed these movements as “crazy.” Liberals have labeled Tea Party activists as extremists interested only in blindly destroying the government and its first black president. Conservatives tend to paint Wall Street protesters as a “mob” hungry for a good dose of class warfare against the bankers.

But every few decades, populism morphs with sentiments that are part of the mainstream. It happened in the late sixties when the anti-war movement eventually grew to represent the sentiments of a majority of Americans, and it could happen again now.

The reasons this time around are both economic and political. The spectacle of Congress’s inability to agree on anything, from how to deal with the debt ceiling to how to stimulate the economy, has undermined the confidence of Americans in their government.