Chapter 5 analyzes how neoliberal trade dislocation, austerity, and widening inequality became politically translated into xenophobic populism and ethnonationalist backlash. Rather than treating right-wing nationalism as spontaneous expressions of economic pain, the chapter shows how elites and movements reframed trade shocks into cultural narratives of national decline, status loss, and racialized grievance, redefining “protection” away from social justice and toward exclusionary boundaries of belonging. Linking Polanyi’s double movement to the cultural politics of nationalism, the chapter examines how immigration, sovereignty, and trade became fused in reactionary imaginaries across cases such as Brexit and the broader European far right. The chapter argues that this reactionary protectionism functions as a distorted countermovement: it responds to real market harms while channeling anger toward scapegoats and authoritarian solutions, thereby deepening democratic erosion rather than re-embedding markets in egalitarian institutions.