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Hayek's Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right
‘An essential read to understand the times in which we live' - Lea Ypi
A revelatory exploration of how today’s rightwing authoritarianism emerged not in opposition to neoliberalism, but from within it
After the end of the Cold War, neoliberalism, with its belief in the virtues of markets and competition, seemed to have triumphed. Communism had been defeated – and Friedrich Hayek, the spiritual father of neoliberal economics, had just about lived to see it. But in the decades that followed, Hayek’s disciples knew that they had a problem. The rise of social movements, from civil rights and feminism to environmentalism, were now proving roadblocks in the road to freedom, nurturing a culture of government dependency, public spending, political correctness and special pleading. Neoliberals needed an antidote.
In this illuminating new book, historian Quinn Slobodian reveals how, from the 1990s onwards, neoliberal thinkers turned to nature, in an attempt to roll back social changes and to return to a hierarchy of gender, race and cultural difference. He explores how these thinkers drew on the language of science, from cognitive psychology to genetics, in order to embed the idea of ‘competition’ ever deeper into social life, and to advocate cultural homogeneity as essential for markets to truly work. Reading and misreading the writings of their sages, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, they forged the alliances with racial psychologists, neoconfederates, ethnonationalists that would become known as the alt-right.
Hayek’s Bastards shows that many contemporary iterations of the Far Right, from Javier Milei to Donald Trump, emerged not in opposition to neoliberalism, but within it. As repellent as their politics may be, these supposed disruptors are not defectors from the neoliberal order, but its latest cheerleaders.
A revelatory exploration of how today’s rightwing authoritarianism emerged not in opposition to neoliberalism, but from within it
After the end of the Cold War, neoliberalism, with its belief in the virtues of markets and competition, seemed to have triumphed. Communism had been defeated – and Friedrich Hayek, the spiritual father of neoliberal economics, had just about lived to see it. But in the decades that followed, Hayek’s disciples knew that they had a problem. The rise of social movements, from civil rights and feminism to environmentalism, were now proving roadblocks in the road to freedom, nurturing a culture of government dependency, public spending, political correctness and special pleading. Neoliberals needed an antidote.
In this illuminating new book, historian Quinn Slobodian reveals how, from the 1990s onwards, neoliberal thinkers turned to nature, in an attempt to roll back social changes and to return to a hierarchy of gender, race and cultural difference. He explores how these thinkers drew on the language of science, from cognitive psychology to genetics, in order to embed the idea of ‘competition’ ever deeper into social life, and to advocate cultural homogeneity as essential for markets to truly work. Reading and misreading the writings of their sages, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, they forged the alliances with racial psychologists, neoconfederates, ethnonationalists that would become known as the alt-right.
Hayek’s Bastards shows that many contemporary iterations of the Far Right, from Javier Milei to Donald Trump, emerged not in opposition to neoliberalism, but within it. As repellent as their politics may be, these supposed disruptors are not defectors from the neoliberal order, but its latest cheerleaders.
273 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 15, 2025
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June 7, 2025
Full disclosure: Quinn Slobodian is my Marxist intellectual crush 😻 One of them. So I did enjoy his latest book "Hayek's Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right" (Zone Books, April 2025). I also loved his 2024 book "Crack-Up Capitalism" (hence crush!).
What a political theory rabbit hole this guy has gotten himself into - an important one though to make sense of today's resurgence of the Far Right, showing that key strains of the Far Right emerged within the neoliberal intellectual movement not against it. "What has been reported as an ideological backlash against neoliberal globalization in recent years is often more of a frontlash."
The book traces the intellectual mutation of free-market ideology into a today's hybrid of libertarian economics and far-right racial thinking. The book follows a group of post-Cold War thinkers—whom Slobodian calls “Hayek’s bastards”—who broke from Friedrich Hayek’s more nuanced views on social evolution and cultural learning. Instead, they embraced a worldview that justifies inequality as natural and immutable, often invoking race, genetics, or pseudo-scientific IQ theories. These actors—ranging from Silicon Valley libertarians to Austrian-school economists and gold standard evangelists—advocate for market orders divorced from democracy, promoting gated forms of capitalism that privilege hierarchy over inclusion.
Slobodian argues that this ideology is not an aberration but a logical, if extreme, outgrowth of neoliberal though. Rather than viewing right-wing populism as a revolt against neoliberalism, Hayek’s Bastards frames it as a perverse culmination: a vision where the market rules, democracy retreats, and only the “fit” deserve sovereignty. By unearthing the intellectual scaffolding behind contemporary illiberalism, Slobodian shows how market fundamentalism can coexist—and even thrive—with racial exclusion and authoritarian politics.
A few key points/ take-aways:
#1 Moments of global economic crisis allow for the breakthrough of eccentric and (for some) exhilaratingly novel forms of politics, but they do not appear from nowhere: they have their own intellectual lineages and material preconditions. We cannot understand the peculiar hybrids of extreme market ideology, Far Right authoritarianism, and social conservatism without familiarizing ourselves with the often-tangled genealogies traced in this book. Well-funded networks of think tanks, conferences, gatherings, and workshops, as well as investment forums, comments sections, and Reddit groups, offer nurseries for new adaptive ideological strains. Mises Institutes are a case in point.
#2 "The book is a warning not to be taken in by false prophets, fooled by appearances or lazy media framing. Many supposed disruptors of the status quo are agents less of a backlash against global capitalism than a frontlash within it.
#3 This book argues that the appeal to nature was a central part of the neoliberal solution to a problem they faced in the decades after the Cold War. This was an era in which communism was dead but, as they put it, Leviathan lived on. Public spending continued to expand even as capitalism became the only surviving economic system. Behind this was a political problem. The social movements of the 1960s and 1970s had injected the poison of civil rights, feminism, affirmative
Neoliberals needed an antidote.
Confounded by persistent demands for the redress of inequality at the expense of efficiency, stability, and order, neoliberals turned to nature in matters of race, intelligence, territory, and money as a way to erect a bulwark against the encroaching demands of progressives and hopefully roll back social changes to return to a hierarchy of gender, race, and cultural difference they imagined to be rooted in genetics as well as tradition.
# 4 QS calls the new strain of the neoliberal movement that crystallized in the 1990s the “new fusionism.” While the original fusionism of the 1950s and 1960s and the New Right melded libertarianism and religious traditionalism in the style of William F. Buckley and the National Review, the new fusionism defended neoliberal policies through arguments borrowed from cognitive, behavioral, and evolutionary psychology and in some cases genetics, genomics, and biological anthropology.
#5 As early as 1987 the conservative historian Paul Gottfried, who coined the term “alternative right” with Richard Spencer, identified that new fusionism on the Right. Whereas older conservatives may have used a language of religion to back up claims about human differences, Gottfried noted that they had begun to use disciplines like sociobiology, the discipline created by ecologist E.O. Wilson to, in Wilson’s words, “biologicize” questions of human ethics. New fusionism uses the language of science to justify the extension of competitive dynamics ever deeper into social life.
# 6 Good reflections also on the intellectual roots of Germany's fa right party "Alternative für Deutschland" , stressing that despite the journalistic treatments of the AfD which tend to focus on its anti-immigration policy, its Islamophobia, and its nativist pronatalism, the original “alternative” they presented was not an alternative to nonwhite migration or “Islamification” but an alternative to the euro as a German currency. German paleos broke into mainstream politics in the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis, an example of the paleo alliance in action with a vision of both monetary and moral order at its core. The AfD was founded in 2013 by economics professors in protest against what they saw as Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mishandling of the Eurozone crisis.
What a political theory rabbit hole this guy has gotten himself into - an important one though to make sense of today's resurgence of the Far Right, showing that key strains of the Far Right emerged within the neoliberal intellectual movement not against it. "What has been reported as an ideological backlash against neoliberal globalization in recent years is often more of a frontlash."
The book traces the intellectual mutation of free-market ideology into a today's hybrid of libertarian economics and far-right racial thinking. The book follows a group of post-Cold War thinkers—whom Slobodian calls “Hayek’s bastards”—who broke from Friedrich Hayek’s more nuanced views on social evolution and cultural learning. Instead, they embraced a worldview that justifies inequality as natural and immutable, often invoking race, genetics, or pseudo-scientific IQ theories. These actors—ranging from Silicon Valley libertarians to Austrian-school economists and gold standard evangelists—advocate for market orders divorced from democracy, promoting gated forms of capitalism that privilege hierarchy over inclusion.
Slobodian argues that this ideology is not an aberration but a logical, if extreme, outgrowth of neoliberal though. Rather than viewing right-wing populism as a revolt against neoliberalism, Hayek’s Bastards frames it as a perverse culmination: a vision where the market rules, democracy retreats, and only the “fit” deserve sovereignty. By unearthing the intellectual scaffolding behind contemporary illiberalism, Slobodian shows how market fundamentalism can coexist—and even thrive—with racial exclusion and authoritarian politics.
A few key points/ take-aways:
#1 Moments of global economic crisis allow for the breakthrough of eccentric and (for some) exhilaratingly novel forms of politics, but they do not appear from nowhere: they have their own intellectual lineages and material preconditions. We cannot understand the peculiar hybrids of extreme market ideology, Far Right authoritarianism, and social conservatism without familiarizing ourselves with the often-tangled genealogies traced in this book. Well-funded networks of think tanks, conferences, gatherings, and workshops, as well as investment forums, comments sections, and Reddit groups, offer nurseries for new adaptive ideological strains. Mises Institutes are a case in point.
#2 "The book is a warning not to be taken in by false prophets, fooled by appearances or lazy media framing. Many supposed disruptors of the status quo are agents less of a backlash against global capitalism than a frontlash within it.
#3 This book argues that the appeal to nature was a central part of the neoliberal solution to a problem they faced in the decades after the Cold War. This was an era in which communism was dead but, as they put it, Leviathan lived on. Public spending continued to expand even as capitalism became the only surviving economic system. Behind this was a political problem. The social movements of the 1960s and 1970s had injected the poison of civil rights, feminism, affirmative
Neoliberals needed an antidote.
Confounded by persistent demands for the redress of inequality at the expense of efficiency, stability, and order, neoliberals turned to nature in matters of race, intelligence, territory, and money as a way to erect a bulwark against the encroaching demands of progressives and hopefully roll back social changes to return to a hierarchy of gender, race, and cultural difference they imagined to be rooted in genetics as well as tradition.
# 4 QS calls the new strain of the neoliberal movement that crystallized in the 1990s the “new fusionism.” While the original fusionism of the 1950s and 1960s and the New Right melded libertarianism and religious traditionalism in the style of William F. Buckley and the National Review, the new fusionism defended neoliberal policies through arguments borrowed from cognitive, behavioral, and evolutionary psychology and in some cases genetics, genomics, and biological anthropology.
#5 As early as 1987 the conservative historian Paul Gottfried, who coined the term “alternative right” with Richard Spencer, identified that new fusionism on the Right. Whereas older conservatives may have used a language of religion to back up claims about human differences, Gottfried noted that they had begun to use disciplines like sociobiology, the discipline created by ecologist E.O. Wilson to, in Wilson’s words, “biologicize” questions of human ethics. New fusionism uses the language of science to justify the extension of competitive dynamics ever deeper into social life.
# 6 Good reflections also on the intellectual roots of Germany's fa right party "Alternative für Deutschland" , stressing that despite the journalistic treatments of the AfD which tend to focus on its anti-immigration policy, its Islamophobia, and its nativist pronatalism, the original “alternative” they presented was not an alternative to nonwhite migration or “Islamification” but an alternative to the euro as a German currency. German paleos broke into mainstream politics in the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis, an example of the paleo alliance in action with a vision of both monetary and moral order at its core. The AfD was founded in 2013 by economics professors in protest against what they saw as Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mishandling of the Eurozone crisis.
August 20, 2025
took me longer than it should have to figure out that neoliberalism was not pristine, but was rather a highly racialised, gendered and agitational political programme. it again took me more than one Slobodian book before I started to figure this out - first one I found very dry, second more episodic, I'd be recommending this as the best ones to start for people who might still be trying to think through this stuff - but it really has helped a lot of things click.
I blame i) books which used the word austerity and neoliberalism more often than capitalism or imperialism ii) adam curtis' popularisation of the term neo-conservative iii) left intellectuals giving very ingenuous accounts of Hayek et al.'s thought while skimming over the foaming-at-the-mouth race stuff
I blame i) books which used the word austerity and neoliberalism more often than capitalism or imperialism ii) adam curtis' popularisation of the term neo-conservative iii) left intellectuals giving very ingenuous accounts of Hayek et al.'s thought while skimming over the foaming-at-the-mouth race stuff
April 28, 2025
What of Hayek's Legitimate Children?
A few decades ago, the American historian Richard Weikart published From Darwin to Hitler, a book that tried to draw a line between Darwinism and the horrors of Nazism and the Holocaust.
While few of his factual assertions could be disputed, the overall direction of the book — namely, assigning Darwinists a large share of responsibility — felt like a remarkable stretch, and mostly ended up giving ammunition to people who wanted to discredit Darwinism for ideological reasons.
Slobodian’s Hayek’s Bastards reminds me of that book. His reconstruction is not to be dismissed lightly, of course. It’s hard to deny that some parts of the neoliberal tradition went beyond flirting with ideas about closed borders, racial difference, social exclusion (if not worse) — and sometimes openly embraced them.
But once you acknowledge that, you’re left with two options:
You can try to rescue Hayek, Mises, and the Austrian School by showing the valuable parts of their work (like their insights into knowledge dispersion) and argue that their ideas also gave birth to at least another, more virtuous intellectual lineage. Or you can be content with Slobodian’s version of the story as the one that matters.
I certainly cannot blame Slobodian for what he chose not to write. But I observe that his decision to follow the second path — rather than the first — is but a matter of agenda, not historiography. To mention the most controversial policies of Milei, or the fact that Bolsonaro posed for photographs while holding Mises’ Human Action, or to hint at libertarian support for Trump, does not do full justice to the title, leaving the reader with the impression that such a legacy of Hayek is not only real, but perhaps even the most legitimate one.
A major problem I had with the book is that it contains such a massive amount of information that it becomes difficult to tell when its reconstruction holds solidly, and when its conclusions feel like stretches, based on the mere juxtaposition of quotations. For example, I was particularly struck to see economist Bryan Caplan allusively thrown into the cauldron of the "bad guys," without any mention of his overt and consistent advocacy of open borders. And if it is so with Caplan — someone I happen to know, and who surely belongs among Hayek’s "legitimate children" — how can I be sure about the authors I am less familiar with?
A few decades ago, the American historian Richard Weikart published From Darwin to Hitler, a book that tried to draw a line between Darwinism and the horrors of Nazism and the Holocaust.
While few of his factual assertions could be disputed, the overall direction of the book — namely, assigning Darwinists a large share of responsibility — felt like a remarkable stretch, and mostly ended up giving ammunition to people who wanted to discredit Darwinism for ideological reasons.
Slobodian’s Hayek’s Bastards reminds me of that book. His reconstruction is not to be dismissed lightly, of course. It’s hard to deny that some parts of the neoliberal tradition went beyond flirting with ideas about closed borders, racial difference, social exclusion (if not worse) — and sometimes openly embraced them.
But once you acknowledge that, you’re left with two options:
You can try to rescue Hayek, Mises, and the Austrian School by showing the valuable parts of their work (like their insights into knowledge dispersion) and argue that their ideas also gave birth to at least another, more virtuous intellectual lineage. Or you can be content with Slobodian’s version of the story as the one that matters.
I certainly cannot blame Slobodian for what he chose not to write. But I observe that his decision to follow the second path — rather than the first — is but a matter of agenda, not historiography. To mention the most controversial policies of Milei, or the fact that Bolsonaro posed for photographs while holding Mises’ Human Action, or to hint at libertarian support for Trump, does not do full justice to the title, leaving the reader with the impression that such a legacy of Hayek is not only real, but perhaps even the most legitimate one.
A major problem I had with the book is that it contains such a massive amount of information that it becomes difficult to tell when its reconstruction holds solidly, and when its conclusions feel like stretches, based on the mere juxtaposition of quotations. For example, I was particularly struck to see economist Bryan Caplan allusively thrown into the cauldron of the "bad guys," without any mention of his overt and consistent advocacy of open borders. And if it is so with Caplan — someone I happen to know, and who surely belongs among Hayek’s "legitimate children" — how can I be sure about the authors I am less familiar with?
December 16, 2025
An outstanding dive into the ideological currents that pushed market extremism and its attendant hierarchical essentialism into the mainstream of world politics. A breezy 175 pages, Slobodian traces the intellectual genealogy of the modern far right from Mises and Hayek to Rothbard and Murray to Stephen Miller and the Silicon Valley Techbro Mafia. One of the best books I've read all year, very helpful for understanding the idealogues of the class enemy.
May 3, 2025
Along with John Ganz’s When the Clock Broke, the best analysis of the paleo-libertarian strain that is taking over the Right. A convincing argument that this movement is a mutation and evolution of neoliberalism rather than a backlash against it.
January 19, 2026
Highly readable (as always) and very interesting on the wankers who spent the 90s dreaming the epoch we now live in, and on the right's interesting and, for them, politically useful unwillingness to admit when they've won, but also rather caffeinated.
July 23, 2025
Whether in the form of the Trump MAGA, Farage’s ReformUK, the German AfD, the French Rassemblement national or the Italian Fratelli d'Italia, the far right is united in its claim to be leading the fight against the liberal elite’s plans for globalisation. Against cosmopolitan diversity they represent a popular revolt standing for national patriotism, cultural homogeneity, and the traditional family.
The usual version of the history of right wing political activism tells us that it tracks back to the intellectuals gathered around Mount Pelerin who were intent on following the teachings of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. In this free market utopia, the factors of production – capital, labour, and goods - flow unimpeded across the globe. Its genius would perform magic in spontaneously optimisating of output to the benefit of all, maintaining its equilibrium without the interference of politics and the state.
But despite the significant wins for this ideology achieved by Pinochet’s overthrow of Chilean democracy in 1973, the partnership between Thatcher and Reagan in the 1980s, and the Washington Consensus that rolled on from the 1980s into the 90s and the collapse of Russian-style state socialism, the free market utopia never really arrived. In its place we got stagnant wage growth, declining public services and rising inequality.
In Hayek’s Bastards Quinn Slobodian looks at the evolution in right wing thought which has been attempting an escape route for an ideology which promised so much freedom but only opened the gates to much more misery. The name for this progression is paleolibertarianism.
As Slobodian explains, both Mises and Hayek had anticipated the weakness in reasoning that saw the liberation of the homo economicus who supposedly lay at the heart of human existence as the surest way to secure universal freedom. Human nature was making a prior claim on the way people related to each other, and that had been conditioned across tens of thousands of years to place a high value on cooperation and collective life. The neoliberal doctrine had to pull back from gratification of human needs by way of the market to complete its appeal, and that meant reaching beyond simple economics to build roots in the social and the political.
The result was a new fusionism in right wing thinking promoted by such luminaries as Lew Rockwell, Charles Murray, Gerrard Radnitzky, Murray Rothbard, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Peter Brimelow and others. Making use of a network of think tanks and academic networks they worked to close the gap between capitalist libertarians and the more traditional conservative right, which anchored its programme in the values of Kinder, Küche, Kirche – children, church and kitchen. If Mises and Hayek had once, mistakenly, signalled an interest in open borders and radical cosmopolitan outlooks, all this was to be reviled and replaced with a return to the patriarchal social order, with fealty to nation kith and kin at its centre.
The advocates of the fusion of neoliberal libertarianism with old-style conservativism claims a scientific basis for its claims about human society. Social order is seen as arising from the ascendancy of the most able to the top spot, which cues IQ measurement as the guide as to who is best fitted. Charles Murray’s infamous claims about racial difference as set out in the Bell Curve have a revered place in paleolibertarian writings. Apartheid and Jim Crow segregation are praised as a rational means to regulate relations between ethnic groups, and firmly applied immigration control a routine feature at national borders. To cap it all, the paleos make gold-based money a part of their credo, though for Nayib Bukele, the paleolibertarian president of El Salvador, there is a ‘new gold’ option available courtesy of the blockchain based cryptocurrencies.
Is all this really a counterblast to the ‘globalists’ so reviled by the populist right? Not really. An elite – looking a lot like the tech bros of Silicon Valley - will remain at the top of the global order, capital will rule the roost and roam footloose across the world, the disadvantaged will be left to scrabble for the crumbs, and the universal principle of property rights over human rights will ensure that those of use without our own Lear jets will live and die wherever we are born. Sounds just like old-style neoliberalism
The usual version of the history of right wing political activism tells us that it tracks back to the intellectuals gathered around Mount Pelerin who were intent on following the teachings of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. In this free market utopia, the factors of production – capital, labour, and goods - flow unimpeded across the globe. Its genius would perform magic in spontaneously optimisating of output to the benefit of all, maintaining its equilibrium without the interference of politics and the state.
But despite the significant wins for this ideology achieved by Pinochet’s overthrow of Chilean democracy in 1973, the partnership between Thatcher and Reagan in the 1980s, and the Washington Consensus that rolled on from the 1980s into the 90s and the collapse of Russian-style state socialism, the free market utopia never really arrived. In its place we got stagnant wage growth, declining public services and rising inequality.
In Hayek’s Bastards Quinn Slobodian looks at the evolution in right wing thought which has been attempting an escape route for an ideology which promised so much freedom but only opened the gates to much more misery. The name for this progression is paleolibertarianism.
As Slobodian explains, both Mises and Hayek had anticipated the weakness in reasoning that saw the liberation of the homo economicus who supposedly lay at the heart of human existence as the surest way to secure universal freedom. Human nature was making a prior claim on the way people related to each other, and that had been conditioned across tens of thousands of years to place a high value on cooperation and collective life. The neoliberal doctrine had to pull back from gratification of human needs by way of the market to complete its appeal, and that meant reaching beyond simple economics to build roots in the social and the political.
The result was a new fusionism in right wing thinking promoted by such luminaries as Lew Rockwell, Charles Murray, Gerrard Radnitzky, Murray Rothbard, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Peter Brimelow and others. Making use of a network of think tanks and academic networks they worked to close the gap between capitalist libertarians and the more traditional conservative right, which anchored its programme in the values of Kinder, Küche, Kirche – children, church and kitchen. If Mises and Hayek had once, mistakenly, signalled an interest in open borders and radical cosmopolitan outlooks, all this was to be reviled and replaced with a return to the patriarchal social order, with fealty to nation kith and kin at its centre.
The advocates of the fusion of neoliberal libertarianism with old-style conservativism claims a scientific basis for its claims about human society. Social order is seen as arising from the ascendancy of the most able to the top spot, which cues IQ measurement as the guide as to who is best fitted. Charles Murray’s infamous claims about racial difference as set out in the Bell Curve have a revered place in paleolibertarian writings. Apartheid and Jim Crow segregation are praised as a rational means to regulate relations between ethnic groups, and firmly applied immigration control a routine feature at national borders. To cap it all, the paleos make gold-based money a part of their credo, though for Nayib Bukele, the paleolibertarian president of El Salvador, there is a ‘new gold’ option available courtesy of the blockchain based cryptocurrencies.
Is all this really a counterblast to the ‘globalists’ so reviled by the populist right? Not really. An elite – looking a lot like the tech bros of Silicon Valley - will remain at the top of the global order, capital will rule the roost and roam footloose across the world, the disadvantaged will be left to scrabble for the crumbs, and the universal principle of property rights over human rights will ensure that those of use without our own Lear jets will live and die wherever we are born. Sounds just like old-style neoliberalism
December 11, 2025
The land of libertarianism is one I know well, and many of its neighborhoods and personalities are quite dear to me. I have an especially soft spot in my heart for Friedrich Hayek, though I will admit that in a certain mood I find von Mises quite stirring. But libertarianism has its darker corners as well, places where the appeal of property rights is not so much their protection of individual autonomy or incentivizing effects, but their utility as a tool to keep out the "wrong" sort of folk.
Slobodian is someone who has spent a good deal of time in these darker corners, and this book is his travelogue. The story he tells is a horrifying one, an important one, and one that sheds a good deal light on how we got to a place where a good portion of the libertarian movement is cheering on while masked, armed agents of the state kidnap workers whose only crime was to cross a political border without authorization from the state, and where rolling back wokeness has come to be regarded as a task so important it overrides almost any other moral or political consideration.
In cataloguing and documenting the shadows that lurk in these horrors, Slobodian's book is persuasive and compelling. Slobodian doesn't limit himself to the obvious targets - the Lew Rockwells, the Hans-Hermann Hoppes. He brings in figures like Charles Murray and Peter Brimelow as well, documenting their connection to (and the support they received from) the libertarian movement.
It is when Slobodian tries to speak about what lies outside of the shadows that he becomes significantly less reliable as a guide. Slobodian's book is an extended effort to draw connections a wide variety of different figures - Trump, Brimelow, Rothbard, Hayek - all, to Slobodian’s eye, are part of the same web of libertarian/neoliberal influence. Occasionally he does acknowledge that there are some holes in this web. The title of the book, "Hayek's Bastards," is meant to suggest that much of what we see in Rothbard et al. is a bastardization of the classical liberalism of Hayek (and Mises). But, despite these concessions, Slobodian can't help suggesting that the seeds of Trumpism were there in Mises (and his flirtation with race science) and Hayek (and his 'savannah story') from the beginning. For reasons that Phil Magness has pointed out in his Reason Magazine review of this book, I think there are good grounds for skepticism regarding these claims, and fair criticism to be made of Slobodian for playing fast and loose with his quotations.
By focusing so much on the shadows, the book gives a distorted picture of the lay of the land as a whole. I guess it's true that the virulently anti-immigrant writer Peter Brimelow spent some time in libertarian land. For my part, I never saw him there during my roughly thirty years of residence. I saw Hoppe around a few times, but most of the people I spoke with saw him for what he is: a mean little buffoon whose arrogance far outstripped his arguments. I admit, most of my time in the land was spent in a fairly particular set of neighborhoods - mostly college towns, a few centers of public policy. So perhaps my own view of the land suffers from distortions of its own. But still. My story is at least a part of the story of libertarianism, and it is nowhere to be found in Slobodian's book.
There's a line to be drawn from libertarianism to the alt-right. But it is a complicated, messy, indirect one. And it is far from the only, or even the dominant line one might take from that starting point. Slobodian shows us some of the folks who have travelled down that path. But he does not tell us about the ways in which the post liberal right has explicitly sought to distance itself from the liberalism of Hayek and Mises, viewing it as an enemy force rather than as a source of inspiration. He does not explore the division between "freshwater" and "saltwater" Austrians, or the way in which actual libertarian politicians like Javier Milei write Hoppe off as an "economic idiot."
That doesn't make Slobodian's book worthless. Not at all. But it does make it radically incomplete. Read it. But take it with a grain of salt. Or a tumbler.
Slobodian is someone who has spent a good deal of time in these darker corners, and this book is his travelogue. The story he tells is a horrifying one, an important one, and one that sheds a good deal light on how we got to a place where a good portion of the libertarian movement is cheering on while masked, armed agents of the state kidnap workers whose only crime was to cross a political border without authorization from the state, and where rolling back wokeness has come to be regarded as a task so important it overrides almost any other moral or political consideration.
In cataloguing and documenting the shadows that lurk in these horrors, Slobodian's book is persuasive and compelling. Slobodian doesn't limit himself to the obvious targets - the Lew Rockwells, the Hans-Hermann Hoppes. He brings in figures like Charles Murray and Peter Brimelow as well, documenting their connection to (and the support they received from) the libertarian movement.
It is when Slobodian tries to speak about what lies outside of the shadows that he becomes significantly less reliable as a guide. Slobodian's book is an extended effort to draw connections a wide variety of different figures - Trump, Brimelow, Rothbard, Hayek - all, to Slobodian’s eye, are part of the same web of libertarian/neoliberal influence. Occasionally he does acknowledge that there are some holes in this web. The title of the book, "Hayek's Bastards," is meant to suggest that much of what we see in Rothbard et al. is a bastardization of the classical liberalism of Hayek (and Mises). But, despite these concessions, Slobodian can't help suggesting that the seeds of Trumpism were there in Mises (and his flirtation with race science) and Hayek (and his 'savannah story') from the beginning. For reasons that Phil Magness has pointed out in his Reason Magazine review of this book, I think there are good grounds for skepticism regarding these claims, and fair criticism to be made of Slobodian for playing fast and loose with his quotations.
By focusing so much on the shadows, the book gives a distorted picture of the lay of the land as a whole. I guess it's true that the virulently anti-immigrant writer Peter Brimelow spent some time in libertarian land. For my part, I never saw him there during my roughly thirty years of residence. I saw Hoppe around a few times, but most of the people I spoke with saw him for what he is: a mean little buffoon whose arrogance far outstripped his arguments. I admit, most of my time in the land was spent in a fairly particular set of neighborhoods - mostly college towns, a few centers of public policy. So perhaps my own view of the land suffers from distortions of its own. But still. My story is at least a part of the story of libertarianism, and it is nowhere to be found in Slobodian's book.
There's a line to be drawn from libertarianism to the alt-right. But it is a complicated, messy, indirect one. And it is far from the only, or even the dominant line one might take from that starting point. Slobodian shows us some of the folks who have travelled down that path. But he does not tell us about the ways in which the post liberal right has explicitly sought to distance itself from the liberalism of Hayek and Mises, viewing it as an enemy force rather than as a source of inspiration. He does not explore the division between "freshwater" and "saltwater" Austrians, or the way in which actual libertarian politicians like Javier Milei write Hoppe off as an "economic idiot."
That doesn't make Slobodian's book worthless. Not at all. But it does make it radically incomplete. Read it. But take it with a grain of salt. Or a tumbler.
May 5, 2026
“This book is a warning not to be taken in by false prophets, fooled by appearances or lazy media framing. Many supposed disruptors of the status quo are agents less of a backlash against global capitalism than a frontlash within it. Our genealogies of their ideas are X-rays that leave little doubt.”
So ends this exhaustive (and exhausting) examination by Canadian historian Quinn Slobodian of the multiple (and multiplying) ideological strains that make up the relentless surge of right-wing authoritarianism and deformed libertarianism now evident around the world - from Trump in the US to Modi in India to Milei in Argentina.
A common assessment of the right-wing backlash of the years since the global financial crisis is that it represents a popular revolt against neoliberalism - the dominant ideology of the 1980s to early 2000s. But Slobodian’s thesis is that the rise of today’s alt-right, new right, new fusionist, paleo-libertarian and all the other byzantine flavours of reactionary politics in the 2020s are an extension of neo-liberalism, not an opposition to it.
As many other recent books on political economy have charted, neoliberalism was first championed after WWII by a group of public intellectuals who believed fascism had been a knee-jerk response to the growth of socialism. These thinkers, led by Austrian philosopher Friedrich Hayek and meeting under the name of the Mt Pelerin Society, argued for ‘free markets’ and the rights of the individual against an ever encroaching totalitarian state.
However, In the 30 years after 1945, a period when capital in western democracies made a highly successful accommodation with labour in the face of opposition from Soviet Communism, the neo-liberals were largely ignored as a fringe group fighting old wars. What altered this landscape was the sudden breakdown of the Keynesian consensus on economics in the stagflation of the early 1970s. A new operating system was called for and in came Reagan in the US and Thatcher in the UK. The latter famously confronted doubtful Cabinet colleagues by pulling a copy of Hayek’s 1944 classic ‘The Road to Serfdom’ out of her handbag and declaring: “THIS is what we believe.”
A decade or so after the imposition of this economic revolution - marked by inflation-crushing interest rates, privatisation, market liberalisation and the defeat of trade union solidarity - neo-liberalism looked to have ‘won’. The Soviet empire had collapsed, communism had been defeated and intellectuals were lining up to declare victory for the ‘Washington Consensus’ of western liberal democracy and free market economics.
But Slobodian shows that many in the neoliberal camp, high on their own supply, were still not happy. While the ‘reds’ had been defeated, these second-generation Hayekians perceived new threats in the rise of green politics, environmentalism, civil rights, social programs, feminist theory and racial diversity programs. An economic revolution was not enough. The entire post-war program of liberal social policy also had to be unwound. Biology now replaced economic theory as their touchstone.
Hayek’s ‘bastards’, to quote the title of Slobodian’s book, were committed to removing these new ‘roadblocks to Freedom’, as they saw it - in reality, this was a reassertion of the right of rich white men and paleo fossil fuel advocates to make as much money as possible at the expense of everyone else and to not such much eliminate the state, but to capture it for their own ends. (‘Drill, baby, drill’.)
So from the 1990s, we have seen wave after wave of ugly reactionaries casting themselves as apostles of freedom, while claiming a scientific basis for white male supremacy, authoritarianism, and the unwinding of rights to abortion, equality of education and state-funded healthcare. Of course, there wasn’t much about this retrograde agenda that was either ‘liberal’ or ‘neo’. In fact, it was just old, rich, white, reactionary men trying to claw back the power their caste lost in the liberal social advances of the 60s. Still, their crude dummy-spit, dressed up as something intellectually respectable, served the same ends as post-Cold War neoliberalism in increasing inequality, destroying safety nets and unwinding social democracy.
In his book, Slobodian shows that much of what these deformed offspring of Hayek proclaim reflects not a thought-out ideology but a superficial grab for attention using shock tactics in an economy overloaded with information. The resentment of ordinary people at the excesses of neoliberalism is real and understandable, but Hayek’s bastards are redirecting the popular anger toward the very victims of market fundamentalism. And in doing so, they serve the real powerbases - the billionaires of Silicon Valley, the fossil fuel-funded ‘think tanks’ of Washington and London, the media owners seeking to monetise outrage, and the outright fascists seeking a cloak of respectability for their vile ideas.
The currency for these opportunists - like Argentina’s bouffant-haired, chainsaw-wielding president Milei - is resentment at powerful women, a celebration of violent machismo and a desire for attention. They thrive and profit on prophecies of doom and they persuade ordinary people that the uncertainty they feel is due to those trying to channel the resources of the state to end the suffering of the least fortunate. (But of course, the reactionaries who use state money and power to pursue the schoolboy obsessions of their wealthy funders get a free pass.)
“Moments of global economic crisis allow for the breakthrough of eccentric and (for some) exhilaratingly novel forms of politics, but they do not appear from nowhere: they have their own intellectual lineages and material preconditions,” Slobodian writes.
“These are attention plays in an economy where attention is a scarce resource. Their strategy is to hit the same notes with a sledgehammer, the ones their consumers expected to hear: The crisis is around the corner. The crash is coming. The status quo is doomed. All assumptions must be undone. Taboos must shatter, the unspoken said aloud. Your liberty is at risk. Act now and act quickly. The centralisers are coming. The socialists are coming. The refugees are coming. The gold requisitioners are coming. The authorities are coming. The state is coming (even if we are the state). The alarmism is entrepreneurial. The klaxon is a pitch.”
The grim, destructive nature of these appalling people and their crackpot, half-baked ideas is depressing. Even more so is their success in not just influencing power, but, particularly in the case of the people behind Trump II, capturing the state itself and attempting to destroy what is left of post-WWII democratic and social institutions.
This is a very long way of saying that I fully agree with Slobodian’s analysis. My criticism of the book, however, is the level of detail he goes into in the middle chapters about the many, many strands of this disease in western ‘thought’. It becomes pretty clear early on in his account that the majority of Hayek’s ideological offspring are flakes. Most of them are closet (or overt) racists or weak resentful men who have a problem with smart, capable women. Some are just opportunistic grifters and attention-seekers whose business model is manufacturing outrage. In other words, there is not a lot of substance to their ‘ideas’. They are essentially trawling for clicks among (mainly) poorly educated white men upset at diversity programs, inclusion, the social safety net and the energy transition, while applying to their diatribes a patina of intellectual respectability.
I kept thinking while reading his analysis: “Yes, we get it. These people are idiots and weirdos. But WHY is this happening and why are these clearly crackpot chancers chewing up so much bandwidth?” We knew there was a ready market for a backlash to the injustices and obscene inequality wrought by neoliberalism, but why has it been these inbred bastard offspring of the movement’s own intellectual godfather who have best exploited that need??
In other words, I could have done with less of the forensic study of the evolution of the far right’s many rancid tributaries and more of an examination of the vacuum on the left that has paved the way for the ascension of this miserable, opportunistic bunch of reprobates.
But maybe that’s another book - ‘Keynes’ Kids’?
So ends this exhaustive (and exhausting) examination by Canadian historian Quinn Slobodian of the multiple (and multiplying) ideological strains that make up the relentless surge of right-wing authoritarianism and deformed libertarianism now evident around the world - from Trump in the US to Modi in India to Milei in Argentina.
A common assessment of the right-wing backlash of the years since the global financial crisis is that it represents a popular revolt against neoliberalism - the dominant ideology of the 1980s to early 2000s. But Slobodian’s thesis is that the rise of today’s alt-right, new right, new fusionist, paleo-libertarian and all the other byzantine flavours of reactionary politics in the 2020s are an extension of neo-liberalism, not an opposition to it.
As many other recent books on political economy have charted, neoliberalism was first championed after WWII by a group of public intellectuals who believed fascism had been a knee-jerk response to the growth of socialism. These thinkers, led by Austrian philosopher Friedrich Hayek and meeting under the name of the Mt Pelerin Society, argued for ‘free markets’ and the rights of the individual against an ever encroaching totalitarian state.
However, In the 30 years after 1945, a period when capital in western democracies made a highly successful accommodation with labour in the face of opposition from Soviet Communism, the neo-liberals were largely ignored as a fringe group fighting old wars. What altered this landscape was the sudden breakdown of the Keynesian consensus on economics in the stagflation of the early 1970s. A new operating system was called for and in came Reagan in the US and Thatcher in the UK. The latter famously confronted doubtful Cabinet colleagues by pulling a copy of Hayek’s 1944 classic ‘The Road to Serfdom’ out of her handbag and declaring: “THIS is what we believe.”
A decade or so after the imposition of this economic revolution - marked by inflation-crushing interest rates, privatisation, market liberalisation and the defeat of trade union solidarity - neo-liberalism looked to have ‘won’. The Soviet empire had collapsed, communism had been defeated and intellectuals were lining up to declare victory for the ‘Washington Consensus’ of western liberal democracy and free market economics.
But Slobodian shows that many in the neoliberal camp, high on their own supply, were still not happy. While the ‘reds’ had been defeated, these second-generation Hayekians perceived new threats in the rise of green politics, environmentalism, civil rights, social programs, feminist theory and racial diversity programs. An economic revolution was not enough. The entire post-war program of liberal social policy also had to be unwound. Biology now replaced economic theory as their touchstone.
Hayek’s ‘bastards’, to quote the title of Slobodian’s book, were committed to removing these new ‘roadblocks to Freedom’, as they saw it - in reality, this was a reassertion of the right of rich white men and paleo fossil fuel advocates to make as much money as possible at the expense of everyone else and to not such much eliminate the state, but to capture it for their own ends. (‘Drill, baby, drill’.)
So from the 1990s, we have seen wave after wave of ugly reactionaries casting themselves as apostles of freedom, while claiming a scientific basis for white male supremacy, authoritarianism, and the unwinding of rights to abortion, equality of education and state-funded healthcare. Of course, there wasn’t much about this retrograde agenda that was either ‘liberal’ or ‘neo’. In fact, it was just old, rich, white, reactionary men trying to claw back the power their caste lost in the liberal social advances of the 60s. Still, their crude dummy-spit, dressed up as something intellectually respectable, served the same ends as post-Cold War neoliberalism in increasing inequality, destroying safety nets and unwinding social democracy.
In his book, Slobodian shows that much of what these deformed offspring of Hayek proclaim reflects not a thought-out ideology but a superficial grab for attention using shock tactics in an economy overloaded with information. The resentment of ordinary people at the excesses of neoliberalism is real and understandable, but Hayek’s bastards are redirecting the popular anger toward the very victims of market fundamentalism. And in doing so, they serve the real powerbases - the billionaires of Silicon Valley, the fossil fuel-funded ‘think tanks’ of Washington and London, the media owners seeking to monetise outrage, and the outright fascists seeking a cloak of respectability for their vile ideas.
The currency for these opportunists - like Argentina’s bouffant-haired, chainsaw-wielding president Milei - is resentment at powerful women, a celebration of violent machismo and a desire for attention. They thrive and profit on prophecies of doom and they persuade ordinary people that the uncertainty they feel is due to those trying to channel the resources of the state to end the suffering of the least fortunate. (But of course, the reactionaries who use state money and power to pursue the schoolboy obsessions of their wealthy funders get a free pass.)
“Moments of global economic crisis allow for the breakthrough of eccentric and (for some) exhilaratingly novel forms of politics, but they do not appear from nowhere: they have their own intellectual lineages and material preconditions,” Slobodian writes.
“These are attention plays in an economy where attention is a scarce resource. Their strategy is to hit the same notes with a sledgehammer, the ones their consumers expected to hear: The crisis is around the corner. The crash is coming. The status quo is doomed. All assumptions must be undone. Taboos must shatter, the unspoken said aloud. Your liberty is at risk. Act now and act quickly. The centralisers are coming. The socialists are coming. The refugees are coming. The gold requisitioners are coming. The authorities are coming. The state is coming (even if we are the state). The alarmism is entrepreneurial. The klaxon is a pitch.”
The grim, destructive nature of these appalling people and their crackpot, half-baked ideas is depressing. Even more so is their success in not just influencing power, but, particularly in the case of the people behind Trump II, capturing the state itself and attempting to destroy what is left of post-WWII democratic and social institutions.
This is a very long way of saying that I fully agree with Slobodian’s analysis. My criticism of the book, however, is the level of detail he goes into in the middle chapters about the many, many strands of this disease in western ‘thought’. It becomes pretty clear early on in his account that the majority of Hayek’s ideological offspring are flakes. Most of them are closet (or overt) racists or weak resentful men who have a problem with smart, capable women. Some are just opportunistic grifters and attention-seekers whose business model is manufacturing outrage. In other words, there is not a lot of substance to their ‘ideas’. They are essentially trawling for clicks among (mainly) poorly educated white men upset at diversity programs, inclusion, the social safety net and the energy transition, while applying to their diatribes a patina of intellectual respectability.
I kept thinking while reading his analysis: “Yes, we get it. These people are idiots and weirdos. But WHY is this happening and why are these clearly crackpot chancers chewing up so much bandwidth?” We knew there was a ready market for a backlash to the injustices and obscene inequality wrought by neoliberalism, but why has it been these inbred bastard offspring of the movement’s own intellectual godfather who have best exploited that need??
In other words, I could have done with less of the forensic study of the evolution of the far right’s many rancid tributaries and more of an examination of the vacuum on the left that has paved the way for the ascension of this miserable, opportunistic bunch of reprobates.
But maybe that’s another book - ‘Keynes’ Kids’?
April 30, 2025
Brilliant genealogy of the libertarian far right. Tad short, but offering I think many new ways of thinking about local dialects of libertarianism in the far right elsewhere.
April 5, 2026
“Hayek’s bastards” are a melange of far rightists claiming ancestry from the Austrian school of economics. But where figures like Hayek and Von Mises retained some nuance in their crackpot theories, their bastard offshoots increasingly look like poorly disguised Nazis. Slobodian shows how today’s alt right are in many ways just vulgar neoliberals. For decades, free market demagoguery and xenophobia have gone hand in hand. These trolls believe in the three hards: hard borders, hard currency, and hardwired human nature. Their vision of freedom is an apocalyptic embrace of closed borders, rampant privatization, and eugenic meritocracy. They view the world in get rich quick schemes and invest in gold to profit from predicted economic collapse. And the worst part is that their grasp on power has only tightened; they are well funded, and they frame themselves as an alternative to the “globalist order” they helped create.
September 21, 2025
One of those books that re-affirms the opposing views it intends to denigrate.
Nonetheless, it was a good book on the history of the modern far right, starting from the libertarian roots all the way to current day figures like Curtis Yarvin.
But the supposed links between hard money and race realism, hereditary genetics etc. are not really explored, only shown as shared ideas between this sect of the right. Why is one attracted towards ideas of hard borders if one is also attracted towards ideas of hard money? Or why do the opposite set of beliefs tend to accommodate each other? Maybe one should read some Moldbug to figure that out.
Nonetheless, it was a good book on the history of the modern far right, starting from the libertarian roots all the way to current day figures like Curtis Yarvin.
But the supposed links between hard money and race realism, hereditary genetics etc. are not really explored, only shown as shared ideas between this sect of the right. Why is one attracted towards ideas of hard borders if one is also attracted towards ideas of hard money? Or why do the opposite set of beliefs tend to accommodate each other? Maybe one should read some Moldbug to figure that out.
August 2, 2025
This book does very important work of showing how old-fashioned race science and eugenics are a driving force for seemingly dry economic ideas. Really eloquently portrays how destructive this pernicious far-right ideology is, and how bananas these shitheads are. If only they didn't have so much power now....
January 4, 2026
First book* of the year! Clearly written with an interesting thesis. I probably would have benefited more from physically reading it as opposed to going the audiobook route. Still excellent
*audio book
*audio book
Did Not Finish
August 13, 2026Am Anfang viel Überschneidung zu Globalisten, dann irgendwann keine Lust mehr gehabt.
Did Not Finish
May 3, 2026Incomprehensible nonsense please explain your key terms.
August 22, 2026
American politics feel like a dystopian mystery story. How did we make such a hard turn? How did conservatives turn from free markets and low taxes so quickly and uniformly into unflinching advocates of nationalism, tariffs, and centralized power?
It turns out all of this was brewing in think tanks and conservative/right wing organizations like the Mont Pelerin Society, the John Randolph Club, the Hayek Society, the Mises Institute, the Hoover Institution, the American Enterprise Institute, and more.
We did see some of this as early as the Pat Buchanan presidential campaign in 1992 and in books like The Bell Curve (1994) and Alien Nation (1996). But those seemed, at least to me, like fringe rather than mainstream elements of the conservative movement. As it turns out, though, there is a strong continuity and an ideological rationale tying those elements to the mainstream political Right of today.
The ground was prepared by Friedrich Hayek’s concession that free markets were not sufficient in and of themselves to generate a free and prosperous capitalist society. There are preconditions. Hayek himself developed his position in his later work, well after he’d written The Road to Serfdom (1944), expanding on cultural factors and, in some contrast to the libertarian creed, policy and regulatory power. Economic freedom and prosperity wouldn’t just happen by themselves if we freed economic activity from attempts to control it. Cultural, legal, and policy conditions had to be met and maintained.
But it was others who expanded and radicalized these preconditions into the three attributes that Quinn Slobodian identifies as “hardwired culture,” “hard money,” and “hard borders.” And it was over decades that those conditions developed into the policies and measures that we see today.
James Brimelow (author of Alien Nation) used the term “metamarket” to describe the institutional and cultural prerequisites for the success of free markets. One essential prerequisite would be broad and strongly enforced private property laws. He also included immigration restrictions, which themselves could promote an appropriate moral foundation, ethnic and cultural homogeneity, skills, and intelligence.
Human capabilities are key, according to the argument, for a thriving economy (and a free society). And it is not just numbers, i.e., the size of the labor force, that best represents human capability. It is the quality, especially as productive labor shifts from relatively unskilled tasks to ones requiring intelligence. Such an argument then supports policies and measures for selective immigration, based on intelligence or what are taken by its proponents to be proxies for intelligence — wealth and ethnicity.
Immigration restrictions, as well as more general demographic controls, would provide a key to a host of perceived benefits. Ethnic and cultural homogeneity would reduce frictions in economic transactions, as standards of fairness and language would be shared by all. An appropriate moral foundation would undergird that cultural homogeneity, minimize property crimes, ease the problems of criminal enforcements, and generally provide shared standards of right and wrong.
Limiting immigration to desirable candidates would promote needed skills and high intelligence. Raising the intelligence and capabilities level of the entire population would, in theory, raise the level of outcomes for all. To achieve such goals, immigration control and controls over reproduction itself would not be out of bounds.
The outcomes of efforts to promote cultural homogeneity, moral agreement, and intelligence are not hard to find in current hard Right thinking. Cultural homogeneity and moral agreement can be achieved through religious uniformity. Some participants in think tanks and other networks have claimed for Christianity a necessary role due to what they claimed to be its unique superiority over all other religions.
Recommendations to end birthright citizenship and to restrict immigration to European demographics are not new. Nor is the idea of requiring significant payments in return for immigration privileges. These things have been brewing in the conservative world for decades.
Claims such as those made in The Bell Curve provide an apparent rationale for race as a proxy for intelligence. Never mind that the traditional conservative reverence for individualism would seem to argue against lumping all members of a race together under one evaluation of intelligence (and never mind also methodological and political biases in the studies themselves that claim white and Asian superiority). And never mind the biased convenience of race itself as a category under which to organize and evaluate individuals.
Ending the gold standard made fiat currencies and the Federal Reserve System a target of the new Right because the ability of governments to issue and spend money without the constraints of the gold standard was seen as the enablement of the welfare state. The welfare state itself was an obstacle to the natural emergence of efficiency and wealth through competition and the survival of the fittest. The welfare state supported the population of underachievers. Those with low capabilities dragged down the prosperity otherwise achievable by persons of high capability and work ethic.
Targeting fiat currencies led to two complementary movements, conspiracy theories about world governments or secret powerful entities and a coming apocalypse. Money enabled power, and fiat currencies set loose those who would use that unleashed power to corral otherwise free societies under their thumbs. But at the same time, fiat currencies, lacking the security of gold-backed currencies, would inevitably collapse, taking with them the governments and institutions financed by them. Either way, fear sets the tone.
Fear mongering provides an especially effective rhetorical weapon. Much of the discussions we’ve been talking about, concerning economic efficiencies, the need for immigration control, etc. were carried out in right-wing think tanks or within the confines of the right-wing community. Fear mongering about conspiracies and apocalypses helped to engage the public, via the investment newsletters of the 1990s (e.g., Ron Paul’s Survival Report), right-wing talk radio, cable television and, later, the Internet. Not coincidentally, the fear mongering also enabled entrpreneurial schemes like the sales of gold coins. The German AfD party, for example, funded itself after its first year of operation via sales of gold on its own website.
Pushing forward the policies and ideology of this new hard Right required departures from traditional conservatism. One necessary step was detaching free movement of labor from free trade. The argument for free movement of labor (including immigration across borders) had long been that labor, in a free market, would move to the places where it was needed, promoting an efficient distribution of labor among the free market’s other efficiencies. But advocates of free trade who also had become advocates of ethno-economics argued that in fact free trade minimized the need for immigration, since free trade would promote a global distribution of production. Labor could stay put, produce goods, and be sustained in place by free trade.
It might be too obvious to note the contrast between the kind of controlled society that the hard Right proposes with the libertarian ideology proclaimed by the same faction and its early thinkers. Hayek himself had, at least in The Road to Serfdom, singled out central planning as the great mistake that leads to oppressive state power. What else is the crafting of an ethnically homogeneous society with strict immigration controls but central planning? Libertarian ideals of the free movement of persons and goods under minimal government oversight seem left well behind.
How did we get to today’s hard Right? It was a long road, paved by a confluence of raw greed, nationalism, and racism with intellectual rationalization, facilitated by money (Charles Koch’s funding of hard Right ideology goes back to the early 1970s) and new media channels. When we survey the positions of the hard Right today, and its policies and enforcement tactics, we see the decades-in-the-making results of the claims and arguments of the think tanks and other institutions.
One important thing to note is the minor role of Donald Trump in the story Slobodian tells. This is not “Trumpism”. This is the hard Right, which carried Trump to power, leveraging his ability to attract support and work the mechanisms of power. Trump himself is not mentioned until the final few pages of Slobodian’s story, with figures like James Brimelow and Murray Rothbard carrying the heavy loads.
Quinn Slobodian studies and teaches international history at Boston University. This is the second of his works that I’ve read. The first, Globalists, told the story of the post-colonial economic world, the neo-liberal movement for free trade and a laissez-faire world economy that propelled us into the Reagan era. As with that book, Slobodian does his homework here, throwing himself into the nitty gritty of think tanks, conferences, political media, and the actors within them. The book contains extensive and valuable sections of footnotes and references. He deserves to be read and needs to be read if we are to understand the world we’ve got in front of us now.
It turns out all of this was brewing in think tanks and conservative/right wing organizations like the Mont Pelerin Society, the John Randolph Club, the Hayek Society, the Mises Institute, the Hoover Institution, the American Enterprise Institute, and more.
We did see some of this as early as the Pat Buchanan presidential campaign in 1992 and in books like The Bell Curve (1994) and Alien Nation (1996). But those seemed, at least to me, like fringe rather than mainstream elements of the conservative movement. As it turns out, though, there is a strong continuity and an ideological rationale tying those elements to the mainstream political Right of today.
The ground was prepared by Friedrich Hayek’s concession that free markets were not sufficient in and of themselves to generate a free and prosperous capitalist society. There are preconditions. Hayek himself developed his position in his later work, well after he’d written The Road to Serfdom (1944), expanding on cultural factors and, in some contrast to the libertarian creed, policy and regulatory power. Economic freedom and prosperity wouldn’t just happen by themselves if we freed economic activity from attempts to control it. Cultural, legal, and policy conditions had to be met and maintained.
But it was others who expanded and radicalized these preconditions into the three attributes that Quinn Slobodian identifies as “hardwired culture,” “hard money,” and “hard borders.” And it was over decades that those conditions developed into the policies and measures that we see today.
James Brimelow (author of Alien Nation) used the term “metamarket” to describe the institutional and cultural prerequisites for the success of free markets. One essential prerequisite would be broad and strongly enforced private property laws. He also included immigration restrictions, which themselves could promote an appropriate moral foundation, ethnic and cultural homogeneity, skills, and intelligence.
Human capabilities are key, according to the argument, for a thriving economy (and a free society). And it is not just numbers, i.e., the size of the labor force, that best represents human capability. It is the quality, especially as productive labor shifts from relatively unskilled tasks to ones requiring intelligence. Such an argument then supports policies and measures for selective immigration, based on intelligence or what are taken by its proponents to be proxies for intelligence — wealth and ethnicity.
Immigration restrictions, as well as more general demographic controls, would provide a key to a host of perceived benefits. Ethnic and cultural homogeneity would reduce frictions in economic transactions, as standards of fairness and language would be shared by all. An appropriate moral foundation would undergird that cultural homogeneity, minimize property crimes, ease the problems of criminal enforcements, and generally provide shared standards of right and wrong.
Limiting immigration to desirable candidates would promote needed skills and high intelligence. Raising the intelligence and capabilities level of the entire population would, in theory, raise the level of outcomes for all. To achieve such goals, immigration control and controls over reproduction itself would not be out of bounds.
The outcomes of efforts to promote cultural homogeneity, moral agreement, and intelligence are not hard to find in current hard Right thinking. Cultural homogeneity and moral agreement can be achieved through religious uniformity. Some participants in think tanks and other networks have claimed for Christianity a necessary role due to what they claimed to be its unique superiority over all other religions.
Recommendations to end birthright citizenship and to restrict immigration to European demographics are not new. Nor is the idea of requiring significant payments in return for immigration privileges. These things have been brewing in the conservative world for decades.
Claims such as those made in The Bell Curve provide an apparent rationale for race as a proxy for intelligence. Never mind that the traditional conservative reverence for individualism would seem to argue against lumping all members of a race together under one evaluation of intelligence (and never mind also methodological and political biases in the studies themselves that claim white and Asian superiority). And never mind the biased convenience of race itself as a category under which to organize and evaluate individuals.
Ending the gold standard made fiat currencies and the Federal Reserve System a target of the new Right because the ability of governments to issue and spend money without the constraints of the gold standard was seen as the enablement of the welfare state. The welfare state itself was an obstacle to the natural emergence of efficiency and wealth through competition and the survival of the fittest. The welfare state supported the population of underachievers. Those with low capabilities dragged down the prosperity otherwise achievable by persons of high capability and work ethic.
Targeting fiat currencies led to two complementary movements, conspiracy theories about world governments or secret powerful entities and a coming apocalypse. Money enabled power, and fiat currencies set loose those who would use that unleashed power to corral otherwise free societies under their thumbs. But at the same time, fiat currencies, lacking the security of gold-backed currencies, would inevitably collapse, taking with them the governments and institutions financed by them. Either way, fear sets the tone.
Fear mongering provides an especially effective rhetorical weapon. Much of the discussions we’ve been talking about, concerning economic efficiencies, the need for immigration control, etc. were carried out in right-wing think tanks or within the confines of the right-wing community. Fear mongering about conspiracies and apocalypses helped to engage the public, via the investment newsletters of the 1990s (e.g., Ron Paul’s Survival Report), right-wing talk radio, cable television and, later, the Internet. Not coincidentally, the fear mongering also enabled entrpreneurial schemes like the sales of gold coins. The German AfD party, for example, funded itself after its first year of operation via sales of gold on its own website.
Pushing forward the policies and ideology of this new hard Right required departures from traditional conservatism. One necessary step was detaching free movement of labor from free trade. The argument for free movement of labor (including immigration across borders) had long been that labor, in a free market, would move to the places where it was needed, promoting an efficient distribution of labor among the free market’s other efficiencies. But advocates of free trade who also had become advocates of ethno-economics argued that in fact free trade minimized the need for immigration, since free trade would promote a global distribution of production. Labor could stay put, produce goods, and be sustained in place by free trade.
It might be too obvious to note the contrast between the kind of controlled society that the hard Right proposes with the libertarian ideology proclaimed by the same faction and its early thinkers. Hayek himself had, at least in The Road to Serfdom, singled out central planning as the great mistake that leads to oppressive state power. What else is the crafting of an ethnically homogeneous society with strict immigration controls but central planning? Libertarian ideals of the free movement of persons and goods under minimal government oversight seem left well behind.
How did we get to today’s hard Right? It was a long road, paved by a confluence of raw greed, nationalism, and racism with intellectual rationalization, facilitated by money (Charles Koch’s funding of hard Right ideology goes back to the early 1970s) and new media channels. When we survey the positions of the hard Right today, and its policies and enforcement tactics, we see the decades-in-the-making results of the claims and arguments of the think tanks and other institutions.
One important thing to note is the minor role of Donald Trump in the story Slobodian tells. This is not “Trumpism”. This is the hard Right, which carried Trump to power, leveraging his ability to attract support and work the mechanisms of power. Trump himself is not mentioned until the final few pages of Slobodian’s story, with figures like James Brimelow and Murray Rothbard carrying the heavy loads.
Quinn Slobodian studies and teaches international history at Boston University. This is the second of his works that I’ve read. The first, Globalists, told the story of the post-colonial economic world, the neo-liberal movement for free trade and a laissez-faire world economy that propelled us into the Reagan era. As with that book, Slobodian does his homework here, throwing himself into the nitty gritty of think tanks, conferences, political media, and the actors within them. The book contains extensive and valuable sections of footnotes and references. He deserves to be read and needs to be read if we are to understand the world we’ve got in front of us now.
May 24, 2025
It's fantastic. We think of the far-right as racist and identitarian, and this book really narrows down that that did not come out of nowhere. As Slobodian notes, modern scholarship on the far-right barely mentions capitalism, and he really adds to the body of work by slotting the economic aspect in.
Must read for understanding and combating hate everywhere.
Must read for understanding and combating hate everywhere.
November 8, 2025
Needed to be much longer. A very important text though in connecting the history of libertarians to the far-right.
March 17, 2026
Interesting book, but it felt at times as if I was reading a sequel to a book I hadn‘t yet read. It was quite difficult for me to get a grasp of all the different people, names and publications.
March 16, 2026
I was really amazed by the research that was put into this book, it was very apparent that the author had spent a lot of time dedicated to connecting dots and getting as many facts as accurate as possible. This was one of those rare books where I could have highlighted every sentence because I feel like the writing was so concise and precise and every sentence had meaning and there was very little extra fluff or filler. I really enjoyed learning about a section of history that I didn't know much about and learning about how that has impacted our current political climate. That being said I do wish that the author had spent more time debunking a lot of these harmful narratives, I'm assuming that the author didn't do this because if you're reading this book the assumption is that you already know a lot of why IQ racism and gender roles etc are harmful ideologies not based in reality. however, it did make it feel like there was something missing then to contextualize why we should be reading this book and learning about these things because an explanation even a brief one for why these beliefs driving this ideology is harmful would be beneficial. The book focuses exclusively on the ideology itself and not its impacts which I think leaves much to be desired but it's still an incredible piece of information so I still really enjoyed it.
July 31, 2025
"Many supposed disruptors of the status quo are agents less of a backlash against global capitalism than a 'frontlash' within it. Our genealogies of their ideas are X-rays that leave little doubt."
A deeply considered and thorough work that charts the interplay between neoliberalism and contemporary 'far right' ideology, and concludes, successfully, that our current reactionary turn is not a backlash to neoliberal capitalism - but an intensification of its logics and its project. The detail is overwhelming, and it charts a global network of thinkers and thoughts, recurring and mutating in diverse national, economic and political contexts.
The only gap in Slobodian's work, in my view, is a brief explorations of the ubiquitous funders and purveyors of dark money - they're ever-present in this book through the vast astro-turfed network of bullshit think tanks, societies and foundations which characterise the Right, but their agency and influence is not directly explored.
A deeply considered and thorough work that charts the interplay between neoliberalism and contemporary 'far right' ideology, and concludes, successfully, that our current reactionary turn is not a backlash to neoliberal capitalism - but an intensification of its logics and its project. The detail is overwhelming, and it charts a global network of thinkers and thoughts, recurring and mutating in diverse national, economic and political contexts.
The only gap in Slobodian's work, in my view, is a brief explorations of the ubiquitous funders and purveyors of dark money - they're ever-present in this book through the vast astro-turfed network of bullshit think tanks, societies and foundations which characterise the Right, but their agency and influence is not directly explored.
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June 15, 2025Es muy interesante como muchos de los elementos aquí presentes, constituyentes de la ideología reaccionaria actual, ya fueron analizados por Lukács, allá por los 50s, en el infáme Asalto a la Razón. El viraje a las ciencias "duras", a la biología y la genética, el no tan oculto tanteo con el darwinismo social, y la adecuación de un legado "anarquista" (anti-estatal, anti-fronteras) que se contradice con el marco de políticas de estado sostenidas por tales autores (desde el control de fronteras, de la "pileta" genética de los estado nación, la herencia de la raza y el coeficiente intelectual, etc); todas ellas, constituyen el nuevo conjunto de estrategias políticas, hoy en día ya de masas, de la reacción más pútrida y rampante del capital, cada vez más cercana a su hermana de los años 30s del siglo pasado.
August 9, 2025
A lot more formal than I expected, written with intricate argumentation with references to economic and political writers/scholars and their publications, but nonetheless engaging in exposing the banality of widespread pseudoscientific prejudice within these circles, as well their apparent immortality over the last century, and resurgence in our time.
One would have to be better read in theory to really appreciate this but it fills a few gaps in understanding the very faint background to today’s combative and contradictory far right
One would have to be better read in theory to really appreciate this but it fills a few gaps in understanding the very faint background to today’s combative and contradictory far right
January 27, 2026
Wow, just wow. It's unlivable how much hate the alt right has for "other people"!
This is a revealing text which finds the Neoliberal roots of alt right, referencing to the same individuals in Hayek's circles and organisations.
If you want to know more about these ghouls in power from the white house to silicon valley, this is a very informative text.
This is a revealing text which finds the Neoliberal roots of alt right, referencing to the same individuals in Hayek's circles and organisations.
If you want to know more about these ghouls in power from the white house to silicon valley, this is a very informative text.
June 27, 2026
Very densely presented and thoroughly researched (and referenced) analysis of how the world - and foremost America - arrived at its current love affair with strongmen leaders and democracy-bashers, and how their intertwined narratives have informed alt-right thinking and actions. Scary and insightful. Sadly, the author offers no antidote.
August 13, 2026
Gold and IQ are the loudest dog whistles and the earliest obsessions of the modern far-right movement. If it wasn’t for the fact that these guys actively harm and kill people, they would be fascinating case studies of how generations of privilege make you a loser.
October 4, 2025
Go read!
July 30, 2026
If you want to understand the world view of Javier Milei, Alice Weidel, Peter Theil or Curtis Yarvin, start here.
May 1, 2025
im besten Sinne gegenwärtige Ideengeschichte, die tief im Dreck wühlt, manchmal aber doch zu anekdotisch bleibt
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