the regained freedom. The trauma of the great transformation has been exploited by right-wing populists. David Ost wrote the following (2016), referring to the "post-communist" Democratic Left Alliance, its ascent to power and its decline in 1993–1997 and 2001–2005: "Twice before PiS first came to power, parties aligned with the liberal left secured strong labor support. But by insisting on marketization, privatization and participation (as a peripheral player) in the global capitalist economy, and disparaging demands for more security, they soon squandered that support and ended up driving regular workers into the arms of PiS." Then in 2007–2015, "market liberals of Civic Platform ... pursued a pragmatic politics of adapting to the European Union ... while suicidally pursuing a hard agenda against workers." Economic insecurity having fueled the rise of the Right as elsewhere in Europe, "Kaczyński won in 2015 by focusing on economic issues" and because of PiS' "promise of economic security". m. Drastic cuts were implemented in progressive taxation and public spending, including on welfare. Income and wealth were massively redistributed toward a small number of people at the top at the price of impoverishment of a large number at the bottom. The unemployment had reached an all-time high of 20% by the end of 2003, just before the European Union membership came to the rescue. As a result of high unemployment, it took at least a decade for the average real pay to reach the level from before 1989 and joining the Union triggered the greatest peacetime wave of permanent economic migration out of the country. The reforms undertaken by the Polish elites were of an overwhelmingly economic character. Their socially detrimental consequences included the lasting political polarization over the practically limited range of choices: economic liberalism lacking any communal concerns on the one hand, and the conservative, patriarchal and parochial backwaters of Polish nationalism on the other. n.Polish intellectuals and leaders of the 1980s were affected by the shifted economic and political thinking in the West, now dominated by the neoliberal and neoconservative policies of Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. o.Sixty percent of the Polish workforce were manual laborers (skilled and unskilled) or farmworkers. They had become passive objects in the systemic transition processes, but provided the votes needed by the Solidarity intelligentsia elite in order to achieve its domination and implement the changes that the leaders intended. p.In 1980, according to