Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right

"Since the 2010s, a lot of people have said that neoliberals were politically important from the 1980s onwards, but that more recently neoliberalism has been politically repudiated. They can point to all kinds of things—like the return of protectionist tariffs—to demonstrate this. Maybe neoliberalism doesn’t matter anymore—that’s become a very common position on the left. Slobodian challenges that—hence the designation ‘Hayek’s bastards.’ This book is very good in pointing out that many of the figures who have developed this more recent ‘populist’ right-wing strain of thought turn out to have been members of the neoliberal thought collective in good standing. That’s true of Germany as much as America. For instance, the people who started the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) were all part of either Mont Pelerin or the Friedrich Hayek Society. How is it that this stuff, which seems to contradict whatever people thought neoliberalism consisted of at the end of the 20th century, still has close genetic intellectual ties to it? It isn’t just because they’re right-wing in some vague political sense. It’s that, in some ways, the new populism grew out of the reactions to what had already happened amongst the subsequent generations of the neoliberal thought collective. Slobodian’s very good on this. You would think that, after the Soviet Union fell, the Mont Pelerin folks would be dancing in the streets. But they weren’t. Slobodian documents how they immediately started worrying about what kinds of political units and states we were going to end up with in the wake of the Soviet collapse. There’s probably a distinction between Slobodian and me here, in that he is willing to say that Trump himself really is almost a total break with the neoliberals. I am not so sure. The extent to which it’s a break or some sort of continuity depends on what you think is central to modern populism. For instance, the overt Trumpian hostility to expertise and the contempt for democratic safeguards is pretty Hayekian, as I see it. Slobodian does take the position in this book that there are at least three significant reversals of what might be considered Hayek’s core propositions in this generation of Mont Pelerin figures. The way he argues it is through examination of what he calls the three ‘hards.’ The first is the tendency to appeal to ‘hard’ science in order to justify a resurgent racism and to underline the impossibility of maintaining any modicum of economic equality. The second is to promote and reinforce their politics of ‘hard’ borders, which means exclusionary migration policies and an unapologetic muscular nationalism. Slobodian contrasts this with a tendency towards having more open borders in earlier neoliberalism. Then, third, there’s ‘hard’ currency, this idea that somehow you can escape fiat currency in favor of gold or newer cryptocurrencies. This last divergence may have been less pronounced, since one can observe some longing for a natural money in Hayek as well. So Slobodian sees these tendencies as the three central tenets of the more modern right, and he speculates about the degree to which these modern positions are reactions to contradictions in Hayek’s thought. A central figure in the ‘populist turn’ amongst the neoliberals was Murray Rothbard. Rothbard was very central in the neoliberal thought collective. He helped found the Cato Institute. He was a member of the Mont Pelerin Society. But then he started breaking away by saying that Hayek was mistakenly worried that working people would all be attracted to socialism for all sorts of bad political reasons. Rothbard’s position in the 1990s was that, if you look around, working people aren’t pro-socialist anymore. The real enemy is the professional intelligentsia. Intellectuals were the enemy for Hayek too, but the Rothbard change in political strategy grew much closer to fascism. Rothbard asked how we can use the relatively disgruntled, ignorant working populace against the intellectuals and take over the state in that way. He turned out to be important for many of the people who built the AfD, and Slobodian knows German politics fairly well. He also points out that the current president of Argentina, Javier Milei, was a member of these clubs at an early stage, became a follower of Rothbard, and developed this populism in Latin America. It’s interesting that you can trace many of these main populist lines from the neoliberal thought collective. The issue is how that happens. Slobodian makes the case that Hayek’s bastards are still the ones who dominate much of right-wing politics, which means that Hayek still has this profound influence much further down the line. Remember, Hayek himself didn’t believe that you could trust people to be rational, so this populist irrationality that’s being developed on the right is really part of the Hayekian legacy. One minor complaint about Slobodian is that he doesn’t really explore Hayek’s own internal contradictions to any great extent. He’s not as interested in unpacking the way in which Hayek’s own internal contradictions give rise to this new populism."