Nationalist myth functions as collective insurance that lets populists embrace radical uncertainty

Evidence

The politics of neoliberalism might seem at first sight more aligned with the globalized logic of finance, but as the rising tides of right-wing populism endorse finance’s deeper speculative orientation, nationalism provides the insurance needed for uncertainty to “embed itself” in speculative communities. Disavowal of the neoliberal promise and anxiety on the individual level are hedged by shared nationalist myths circulating in the community, energizing imagined bonds among its members and allowing them to “short” their governments (thus administering some of George Soros’s own medicine). It is precisely in this tension between the closure of nationalist myth and the openness of the speculative imagination that the convergence of financial capital and neopopulism takes place. Seen through this prism, the epoch’s culture and trade wars, and its populist leaders’ “govern-by-chaos” mantra, are far from contradictory to globalized market principles—rather, they fundamentally embrace finance’s intrinsic speculative imagination. President Trump’s sustained offensive against the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate policy since 2018 (allegedly in response to his own trade war) included the infamous statement “they are going loco,” which turns the disruptive logic of populist “irrational crowds” on its head: chaos-mongering is business as usual, while central bankers’ monetary tightness is “wild.” In this context, the type of speculative neopopulism ushered in poses the most effective challenge to the logic of There Is No Alternative. This is the terrain of victory over centrist, liberal cosmopolitans, who also draw increasingly to the collective insurance of nationalist myths but remain conspicuously alien to speculation’s other constitutive dimension: its full-throated endorsement of radical uncertainty. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 294

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sketches the core mechanism where national myth serves as insurance (‘hedging’) against individual anxiety under financialized uncertainty.
• XREF: The claim that centrist cosmopolitans are ‘alien to speculation’s endorsement of radical uncertainty’ connects to the reader’s stated aim of showing how speculation migrated into politics from trading floors. — connects to: Nationalist myth functions as insurance hedging individual anxiety about uncertainty — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 454