David Ost, "intellectuals first proclaimed an inseparable connection of labor and democracy, thus establishing the claim they would spend most of the rest of the decade trying to dismantle". Later in the 1980s and in the 1990s workers will be defined by intellectuals as irrational, misguided and even dangerous, because of their "illegitimate" opposition to the "necessary", "correct" and "rational" economic policies, pursued especially by the new post-1989 liberal establishment and couched by it in the absolute language of science, not in relative terms of a political debate. Ost concludes that the liberals "got it wrong" and made "their fatal error": they drove the critics of their reform toward an ideological and intolerant Right. The abandonment, rejection and exclusion would thus push many workers, labor activists and others into right-wing populism and religious nationalism (the marginalized in 1989 but later resurgent illiberal camp), while the liberal elite would pay with a steady erosion of its authority. The liberals' approach revealed "a fundamental misunderstanding of what democracy is and how best to consolidate it". In the end the liberals, misguided in their belief that "liberal democracy could be grounded solely in private property", ignored in the post-1989 discourse not only the material but also the symbolic and emotional levels. They adopted a hostile attitude toward their labor base and had thus "squandered their moral and political authority", making it possible for the politically illiberal populist Right to fill the resulting societal vacuum. The illiberal Right had been able to flourish by proffering only fictitious enemies and symbolic appeasement. q.David Ost described the situation as follows: "As democratic reform became a real possibility, intellectuals sought to legitimate their emerging class interests. Political liberalism they shared with labor, but not economic liberalism, which is what they emphasized now. In doing so, they spoke the language that the party was now speaking, which eventually made them attractive partners for the party elite." r.The All-Poland Alliance of Trade Unions (OPZZ) was established by the government in 1984, following the martial law ban on all trade union activity. It was shunned by underground Solidarity activists, who pressured past Solidarity members and its present sympathizers not to get involved with this initiative. s.Neoliberalism and shock therapy were presented to the Polish public as a rational (scientific, based on mathematical economics) and merit-based, nonpolitical and objective system. The supposedly natural (biological) character of the systemic changes was stressed.