The financialization-neopopulism convergence is widely framed as a paradox requiring explanation.

Evidence

However, the unmistakably financialized type of today’s nationalist populism appears to be a contradiction in terms. Global capital’s speculative character is most often associated with its tendency to erase national and territorial borders and to upend the nativist mythologies fostered within such borders. What is more, some of the constituencies that come to endorse such seemingly heterogeneous programs are among the most adversely affected by years of continuing market deregulation-and, as a consequence, vulnerable to the risk and debt plights suffered in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis. For these reasons, the historical convergence between financialization and neopopulism is frequently addressed as a paradox. Attempts to explain the paradox have dominated recent theoretical debates around the rise of populism in social and political thought. Such debates have often been framed within the parameters set by historian Karl Polanyi’s hugely influential double-movement theory (e. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 253

Categorization

• DEFINE: The passage sets up Polanyi’s double-movement theory as the dominant explanatory frame that the chapter will challenge.