By “great,” Kaczynski meant patriotic, traditional, Catholic, pro-life, able to stand it’s ground against the European Union, and deeply anti-Russian. But first and foremost, Kaczynski’s great Poland entailed ridding the government of “corrupt” elites, among which Kopacz was a prominent figure.
This probably sounds familiar to US readers. President-elect Donald Trump has talked a big game about his plans to “drain the swamp” in DC. He’s said the establishment in Washington is made up of criminals and that he would “lock them up. A year before Trump, Kaczynski promised the same thing called his own political opponents criminals, and also promised to throw them in jail.
Kopacz, along with the rest of the Civic Platform’s leadership and the Polish liberal media, never really saw Kaczynski coming. [...]
In the US, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton coined the term “deplorables” to describe the half of the Trump supporters she saw as “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it.” In Poland, liberals likewise bemoaned a group they called “Poland B,” the Law and Justice party crowd, who they saw as uneducated and rural, living barely above the threshold of poverty, struggling from one paycheck to another—in contrast with “Poland A,” living in big cities, drinking café lattes, and participating in the global exchange of culture and finance. Poland B was also deeply religious, xenophobic, homophobic, and racist. At least, that’s how the mainstream media depicted those people. [...]
In June 1989, Adam Michnik, one of the architects of the Round Table Agreement, explained the rationale behind it in an interview for a Belgrade, Serbia-based weekly NIN. He said that Communists, as owners of or shareholders in all those corporations, would be personally interested in the success of the newborn democracy, rather than in its demise. The argument sounded quite reasonable at the time. But 27 years later, it’s become painfully clear that capitalism only made some rich: Poland’s GDP per capita has doubled since 1989, making the country the sixth-largest economy in the European Union—but 6.2 million people still live in relative poverty.
And so “Poland B” began to wonder why they fought so hard for a country where they now struggle to get a job at a post office, while leaders and bureaucrats of the former regime that deployed tanks to keep them in check back in the 80s were now driving Porsches and sipping Martinis. [...]
I agree with Traub that the same sociopolitical mechanism was behind Law and Justice in Poland, Brexit in the UK, and Donald Trump in the US. But I disagree with Traub’s explanation. He traces it back to the 2007-08 financial crisis “which shook the faith of many working-class and middle-class voters in the wisdom of liberal elites.” I think it was about dignity.
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