Description
20th century political economist Karl Polanyi described the ongoing development of market society as a “double movement” in which the imposition of liberal market disciplines by governmental and economic elites is met with a corresponding demand for social protection from below. After World War II, the compromises made with embedded liberalism were designed to limit illiberal movements. Post-Cold War liberalism ignored this compromise with predictable consequences.
Right populism is often theorized as the inevitable response to the abandonment of the welfare state. This paper shows how Polanyi’s theory offers a way to understand the crisis of the American order beyond the populist/institutionalist debate. White Christian nationalists, an influential coalition in the MAGA movement, demand social protection through the transformation of the liberal order into a moral economy that protects and elevates the ‘chosen people.’ Rather than seeking protection in a welfare state that was never fully developed, they demand lower taxes, the redirection of public revenues to parochial institutions, and the freedom to discriminate. Unlike earlier movements that embraced progressive politics, Christian nationalists use religious and ethno-nationalist supremacy to push back against marketization from above.
