Should-Read: Henry Farrell: The Thousand Day Reich: The Double Movement
Should-Read: Henry Farrell: The Thousand Day Reich: The Double Movement: “A simple Polanyian account of Trump and right wing populism would explain it… http://crookedtimber.org/2017/05/01/the-thousand-day-reich-the-double-movement/#comment-708419
…as a backlash to the renewed efforts of… neoliberals… to free the economy from the social restraints that make it bearable for human beings. It would argue that we are again seeing a ‘double movement,’ as right wing populist politicians take advantage of popular anger to restore a social and moral order which may look appalling to liberal eyes, but which reinstitutes (or, at least, claims to reinstitute) much desired social protections.
The best evidence for this perspective comes from the rhetoric of Trump and other right wing populists… a detestation for foreigners… anger towards a perceived cosmopolitan elite… a promise to protect ordinary Americans from both. Irrationalist philosophies. Racialist esthetics. Anticapitalist demagogy. Heterodox currency views. Criticism of the party system. Widespread disparagement of the ‘regime.’ Und so weiter. Orban and Kaczynski, pari passu, offer much the same blend. So, for that matter, does Theresa May in a watered down form. They may or may not deliver… but each bases their appeal on it….
Polanyi’s arguments about great transformations differ from civil society oriented approaches like Gellner’s in some important ways. Gellner is, in the end, on the side of the cosmopolitans…. Civic nationalism, for Gellner, is the homage that virtue pays towards vice–an identity politics homeopathically diluted…. Polanyi, in contrast, values community attachment and accompanying ‘thick’ notions of society as good things in their own right. While he also sees great virtue in some aspects of liberalism, he seeks always to prevent it from overwhelming society, both because of the devastation that it wreaks itself, and the corresponding devastation that may be wreaked by Society taking its revenge…