What explains the global surge of authoritarian populism and the far right? Some identify the cause as blowback from globalization or even a grassroots rejection of neoliberalism. The likes of Jair Bolsonaro, Sebastian Kurz, Javier Milei, Narendra Modi, Benjamin Netanyahu, Viktor Orbán, and Donald Trump, in this reading, are defectors from a globalized neoliberal order. Yet this comes up against a stubborn fact: their “populist” governments have left most of neoliberalism’s core commitments—to financialization, austerity, regressive taxation, business deregulation, precarious labor markets, and the free mobility of capital—securely intact.
To resolve this puzzle, suggests Quinn Slobodian in his book Hayek’s Bastards, we should notice the inspiration that Trump and company have found among “mutant strains” of neoliberalism. What appears as a clash between neoliberalism and its rivals is better understood as “a family feud” or a “neoliberal civil war.” On the center-left side, we have free trade, international migration, and science. On the populist right, hard borders, unrestrained racism, and Covid-misinformation campaigns.
The misidentification of authoritarian populism as an external rival to neoliberalism owes something to the term itself, with “liberal” its root. In truth, neoliberalism’s seminal thinkers drank as much from conservative springs as from liberal ones. Take their philosopher in chief, Friedrich Hayek. Notwithstanding his ostensible repudiation of conservatism—most famously in his essay “Why I Am Not a Conservative”—the borders between conservatism and his own philosophy are porous. The title of the essay may be adamant, but its criticisms are tempered. He focuses on specific conservative mentalities: “a fear of change,” “obscurantism,” “mysticism,” and a “propensity to reject well-substantiated new knowledge,” as well as conservatives’ espousal of forms of nationalism that tend toward “collectivism.” Hayek, as Slobodian astutely observes, sees social groups in one sense through conservative eyes, as “the vessels of traditions that help determine economic success,” but he abhors them insofar as they shape social and political organization, for this opens the road to socialist serfdom. He seems, in short, to be demanding “something elusive: a small group without the group feeling that might move in the direction of sharing, a troop with no impulse toward redistribution: communal cohesion without a sense of community.”
Ultimately, neither conservative nor liberal labels suit Hayek well. He is better described as a Burkean Whig, or in his words: “an unrepentant Old Whig—with the stress on the ‘old.’” The phrase “Old Whig” was first used by Edmund Burke in 1791, in his riposte to liberal-minded Whigs who had caught the radical breeze blowing across the Channel. To those who saw reflections of England’s own 1688 revolution in 1789 France, Burke retorted that the “Glorious Revolution,” though glorious, was emphatically no revolution. It was instead merely a constitutional correction steered by the genteel hands of the aristocracy. Alongside his rejection of any ideology or movement that smacked of revolution, Burke asserted the “Old Whig” norms and values of government through the balance of powers, constitutional monarchy, respect for tradition, and Christianity as the foundation of civil society.
Echoing Burke, Hayek insists in The Constitution of Liberty that any “successful free society will always in large measure be tradition-bound,” and later, in The Fatal Conceit, he expounds on the profound connections “between religion and the values that have shaped and furthered our civilization.” For Hayek, tradition and moral norms form the bedrock of the competitive market order—and not just any old tradition but one alone, “the Christian West.” (Throughout, however, he sees morality “as having little meaning for its own sake.” To orthodox conservatives, this “functional reduction of religion” was galling.)
It is hardly surprising, then, that the figureheads of neoliberalism in its breakthrough decades, the 1970s and 1980s, were arch-conservative admirers of Hayek—leaders such as Augusto Pinochet, Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher. Their mission represented, simultaneously, a counterrevolution against the gains achieved by the social movements of the 1960s and ’70s (including labor, feminism, and antiracism), and a reshaping of financial structures to restore profitability after the systemic crises of then-prevailing models (corporatist, Keynesian, or import-substitution industrialization). To the extent that their projects represented a movement to restore the power of capitalist elites, as some have suggested, the vectors of attack were not simply social (unleashing polarization) or economic (privatizations, regressive fiscal policies, etc.). They were generals in a class war that should be understood in the broadest of terms, including pushback against the progressive social and environmental movements as well as the shackling of democratic institutions. Billionaires were always on hand to fill the war chest.
But it wasn’t until the 1990s that, at all levels, the dominant institutions and political parties turned neoliberal. Having arisen among tycoon-funded think tanks before “gripping the elites” in Chile and a few Anglophone nations, neoliberalism now entered the embrace of ruling classes worldwide. The prevailing wind during this decade of American unipolarity was toward liberalization. Under liberal-minded leaders, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair among them, feminism, antiracism (in the form of “diversity”), and environmentalism were neutered and co-opted by the neoliberal regime.
As neoliberalism strode forth, with its adherents in power almost everywhere, it was increasingly called out and resisted. The question was, which direction would the most effective opposition come from? In certain places, notably Latin America, populist leftism gained ground, but elsewhere, right-wing populism was a major outlet. Neoliberal policies themselves contributed to the popularity of the opposition. Social polarization and community disintegration fed pools of insecurity and misery, resentment and anger, and, in some quarters, a taste for apocalypse. Those experiences nourished constituencies receptive to right-wing populism, including Slobodian’s “mutant” neoliberals (and the “disaster nationalists” discussed by Richard Seymour in his recent book).
But Slobodian contends that this right-wing populism is less a backlash against neoliberal capitalism “than a frontlash within it.” Hayek’s bastards are not random mutations of neoliberalism or simply responses to the developments of the 1990s. They are, as I would rephrase the point, existing mutations that began to come to prominence at this juncture, during the global reign of Clinton-Blair-style liberalizing neoliberalism, which—despite promises of stability and abundance—presided over a transition to an increasingly disordered and disintegrated world, a drawn-out degeneration that brought on a legitimacy crisis. This backdrop explains why, beginning in the 1990s and accelerating in the era of “polycrisis” that opened in 2008, illiberal strains of neoliberalism have proliferated, including, above all, what Slobodian terms the “new fusionism.”
The new fusionism is an adaptation of the postwar conservative fusionism—developed in the American context by William F. Buckley—that melded laissez-faire individualism with a religious traditionalism that provided moral justification for social hierarchy. In contrast, the new fusionist defense of neoliberal policies is less reliant on religious ethics than on arguments confected from science and pseudoscience: evolutionary psychology, sociobiology, and genetics. It seeks to ground neoliberalism in “nature,” on three fronts in particular: hard borders, hard money, and hardwired human nature.
The first, closed borders, is “necessary to save globalization,” according to the neoliberal ideologues Erich Weede and Thilo Sarrazin. The movement of people would be controlled; that of goods, ideas, and bullion would not. Hard money refers to gold, extolled by some neoliberals as a “filament of morality.” A resurrected gold standard, some neoliberals contend, would provide solutions to society’s “moral, economic, and political decay.” By hardwired human nature, Slobodian means the pseudosciences of race and eugenics, notably the thesis that certain groups (Black people, Muslims, etc.) have lower IQs. “Racial homogeneity,” for the new fusionists, is a precondition for social stability: it would lower transaction costs and enable national markets to function properly. IQ, for its part, renders “human worth objective and calculable.” Neoliberalism, Slobodian writes, encourages “zero-sum competition over a shredded safety net of rankings, benchmarking, indices, productivity monitoring, and precarity,” which together have produced “a new sense of all against all.”
In these ways, the new fusionists seek to “biologicize” questions of human ethics, deploying scientific language to justify hierarchy and the extension of competition ever deeper into social life. Their agenda is patently an offshoot of Hayekian neoliberalism in that it offers a doctrine not so much of the market system as what is sometimes called the “metamarket,” the attempt “to ground neoliberalism in something beyond the social.” And yet, they stray into territories that Hayek himself dismissed as “scientism.” Hence their “bastard” character.
To my mind, Slobodian is at his sharpest when interrogating a second area in which the bastards diverge from their former guru: their rethinking of the neoliberal movement’s relationship to the masses. Hayek and his early associates’ approach had been patrician. They assumed that “the masses naturally tended toward redistribution and socialism and careful state design was necessary to constrain them.” Their principal audience was the upper crust. It was elites “who would design, adjudicate, and enforce the binding rules that prevented democratic legislation from derailing the laws that protected private property and free competition.” But Hayek’s bastards, the paleolibertarians and the New Right, sought to reverse the dynamic, unleashing the mob and using the masses “to disempower the elites.”
The new strategy, which “turned Hayekian neoliberalism on its head,” was pioneered by the anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard in the early 1990s. It was based on a simple insight, Slobodian writes: various leftist specters had disappeared and “the masses no longer leaned socialist.” To the paleolibertarians and the far right, “the only true-believer socialists” that remained were to be found among state-dependent elites like politicians, civil servants, lobbyists, technocrats, and Ivy League academics, as well as media and old-money financial elites. Rothbard singled out, in his words, an “unholy triad” of environmentalism, “left Puritanism,” and “victimology.” This last term should be read as projection, given the centrality of victimology to Rothbard’s own worldview. In his demonology, elite neoliberals (inevitably, he spotlights Hillary Clinton) have constructed “a phony set of ‘rights’ for ‘victim groups’” such as Black, disabled, and queer people and women and children—groups who are being granted “ever-increasing power to exploit, dominate, and loot an ever-dwindling group of: middle-aged, white, English-speaking, Christian, and especially heterosexual male parents.” Similarly, Rothbard’s protégé Hans-Hermann Hoppe laments that affirmative action and feminism have turned “white married Christian couples with children” into “the most severely victimized people,” while “single black Muslim mothers on welfare” have become “the most protected.”
The fantasy that oppressed minorities (not to mention minors) act as the power tools of rapacious liberal elites led, for Rothbard and Hoppe, to a strategy of “Outreach to the Rednecks.” The white male masses could act as a battering ram to break up democratic institutions and forge new contractual communities where at last order could reign, based on gold, racial homogeneity, family values, and Christianity. The program was summarized in a 1992 essay by Rothbard titled “Right-Wing Populism.” Name-checking Joe McCarthy and fascist leader David Duke, he hails their ability “to short-circuit the power elite…and reach out and whip up the masses directly.” The new politics, if it is to engage the resentful masses, must be “exciting, dynamic, tough, and confrontational.” Another model was Pat Buchanan. He had proved capable of connecting to and reshaping the grievances of “white Euromales,” on questions of guns, taxes, immigration, environmentalism, foreign aid, and the alleged attack on Christianity.
How odd, one might have thought before reading this book, to see Pat Buchanan, a paleoconservative, bracketed together with neoliberals. But, meticulously and eruditely, Hayek’s Bastards shows how impulsive such a response would be. Mapping the intricate and varied landscape of neoliberal thought, including its lurid margins, has been a red thread through Slobodian’s previous books, and in this one the cartography continues.
We may wonder, however: If the neoliberal project’s boundaries are so capaciously drawn, where do they end? Neoliberalism, the inheritor of the marriage between liberal economics and political conservatism that began with Burke, now defines the political mainstream. Since its breakthrough in the 1970s and ’80s, its adherents have built coalitions from the center-left to the conservative right and beyond, pushing onward the neoliberal cause—which is, in essence, to design and enforce market-conforming political mechanisms. To the degree that it succeeds in its vocation, it necessarily sparks popular reactions that look to other ideological currents, including fascist, conservative, and socialist ones. Slobodian helpfully, and often brilliantly, traces the neoliberal threads at work within some of these developments. The risk, however, is understating the degree to which authoritarian populism is undermining the established neoliberal order in favor of something even worse.
Hayek’s Bastards
Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right
Quinn Slobodian
Zone Books
$29.95 | 272 pp.
