The story everyone’s heard about the Cold War is that capitalism won out. The fall of the Berlin Wall, it goes, extinguished the last embers of communism, while the flames of neoliberalism blazed on.
But that’s not the story that all neoliberals actually believed, according to Quinn Slobodian, the author of Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right, a rousing relitigation of the 1990s’ ideological scorecard. In it, the Boston University history professor reveals that some of the most fervent neoliberals, like Charles Murray, Murray Rothbard, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, worried that the red enemy had not, in fact, vanished. Rather, it shape-shifted—into feminism, environmentalism, and civil rights. To these men, Slobododian writes, “communism was a chameleon.”
‘Hayek’s Bastards’ by Quinn Slobodian
Desperate for a new intellectual underpinning, neoliberals and libertarians sought refuge in the work of economist Friedrich Hayek, who famously argued in his 1944 polemic The Road to Serfdom that government intervention in markets is antithetical to individual freedom. But Murray, Rothbard, Hoppe, and others fatally twisted Hayek’s message, claims Slobodian, and took it so far as to argue that only Western countries are intellectually and culturally primed for capitalism.
The politics of this cohort, which he dubs the “new fusionists,” was rooted in “three hards,” argues Slobodian: “Hardwired human nature, hard borders, and hard money.” They forged sordid alliances with biologists, evolutionary psychologists, and ethnonationalists, spouting pseudoscience about the link between race and IQ, a topic famously repopularized in the 1994 best-seller The Bell Curve, coauthored by Murray and psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein. They railed against lax immigration policies on the premise that they led to cultural decay. But perhaps most strangely, they ballyhooed the value of gold as a backstop against a looming economic cataclysm caused by incompetency in Washington. (Talk about apropos.)
In an interview with Vanity Fair, which has been edited for length and clarity, Slobodian analyzes Donald Trump’s radical agenda through this new prism of neoliberalism. He also unpacks the distressing parallels between goldbugs and crypto bros, and details why the tech set has suddenly taken up with the MAGA right. Silicon Valley’s “willingness to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Donald Trump,” he says, is indicative “of the embrace of an ideology that pretty frankly ranks human capacity along the spectrum of intelligence and IQ.”
Vanity Fair: Tell me what inspired you to report on “new fusionism,” as you call it, and the sudden racial or biological turn that political theorists made to fight back against a wave of progressivism after the Cold War?
Quinn Slobodian: It seemed that the real competitor to capitalism was defeated in the 1990s. So I was curious how the neoliberals understood their mission at that point. And looking into it, I was startled to see that they had this belief that they had actually not really won—that socialism was dead, but “leviathan” lived on, as they usually framed it. The social state was still quite large. You still had all kinds of entitlement programs. And to make matters worse, you also had the expansion of what they saw as a toxic wave of political correctness and affirmative action and feminist demands, as well as, perhaps most worryingly, environmental demands—all of which were presenting new challenges to capitalism and economic freedom.
So it was pretty quickly clear that a lot of the things that the right refers to as “cultural Marxism” or “gender ideology” and, more recently, “wokeness,” were labels that they were using to describe the new guises that socialism was taking. This led to some pretty wild alliances that I noticed first in something called the Property and Freedom Society, which was created by the anarchocapitalist Hans-Hermann Hoppe as a way to organize the diverse opponents of a new nefarious leftist ideology. At his gatherings, you’d get financial advisers talking to Afrikaner nationalists talking to revisionist historians of the Second World War talking to race scientists and people who end up appearing in the book—like Richard Spencer, who became the face of the alt-right in 2016 and ’17; and Peter Brimelow, who was the face of nativism already in the 1990s and increasingly in the 2010s as well. So it was at the time when everyone was trying to get their head around the alt-right in 2016 and ’17—and was shocked by the effects of the Charlottesville protests—that I started to cobble together this genealogy of people who were primarily interested in economic freedom (or libertarians) making alliances with people who had very different priorities, including racial purity, monetary stability, the removal of the historical stain of Nazism from German memory and so on.
How do you view Trump through this prism of neoliberalism? He’s obviously a nativist and a xenophobe, but he’s not a free marketeer. So how do you see that strange combination?
Yeah, I think that in the first Trump administration there were, as there always is around him, a motley crew of people with clashing ideologies all trying to capture his ear and realize their own particular wishlist. And one of the most effective activists in that project was Arthur Laffer and his collaborator Stephen Moore, who were both these denizens of neoliberal think tanks. Arthur Laffer was best known for the Laffer curve, which justified Ronald Reagan’s first-term tax cuts and the idea of supply-side economics. Stephen Moore had been quite vocal in his ideas that capitalism is more important than democracy. And they were perfect creatures of the kind of milieu I described in the book in that they were not very discriminating about who they could work with as long as they could drive through what became Trump’s only real legislative accomplishment, which was the 2017 tax cuts.
But at the same time, you had other people in his coalition like Robert Lighthizer, who was pushing through a trade policy that doesn’t have much to do with neoliberal principles. I would say in Trump 2.0, that contradiction has become even more heightened in that there are people who are thinking about geoeconomics in terms of state sovereignty and direct annexation, which is the exact sort of sovereigntism and statism that neoliberals originally mobilized against in the 1930s. On the other hand, I think that what I lay out in the book is helpful to understand [what] people from Silicon Valley are up to in their willingness to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Donald Trump because of the embrace of an ideology that pretty frankly ranks human capacity along the spectrum of intelligence and IQ.
So I think that the idea of hardwired human nature working alongside market competition and commodified human relationships captures the Silicon Valley attitude quite well. But even there, I would say in its radicalization, it’s drifting quite far from the neoliberal canon. For example, the embrace of monopoly and the desire to destroy all competitors and produce walled gardens of markets and capture domains that one company can oversee—these are not traditionally neoliberal attitudes towards the market. Traditionally, neoliberals have wanted to have multiple actors within a market and saw that as producing greater efficiency. So I think the kind of techno-monarchism, which has been noted in the Silicon Valley right, is a further turn of the screw away from some of those original principles.
I feel like IQ is not explicitly talked about in the way that it was with Rothbard and Murray. Do you feel like that obsession has manifested through a different proxy? How is Silicon Valley really pushing a “biologized credit score,” as you call it?
It’s definitely part of just the vernacular of what passes for intellectual life on the chatboards and Twitter spheres of Silicon Valley. It’s still very common to hear invocations of IQ. Like, people from the DOGE team were posting about IQ related to racial group and so on.
Because Silicon Valley in its right-wing form isn’t particularly interested in collective public outcomes, I think the use of IQ as a measure of policy effectiveness is a little bit irrelevant. But I do think we can see that idea of ranked humans come across more in the immigration debate. For example, the H-1B [visa] showdown between Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy on one hand and Steve Bannon on the other late last year. I think it was an interesting moment where the terms of the immigration debate within the MAGA movement were defined, on the one hand, as being about ethnic belonging as some form of essential right as an American citizen. And then on this side of Musk and Ramaswamy, it was about utility and instrumental value for the economy. The idea being that you should be able to enter the country if you’re able to contribute to the economy, leading, I would say, pretty smoothly to Donald Trump’s discussion of a gold-card system, where, as he put it, an Indian, Chinese or Japanese kid could graduate from Yale, Harvard, or Wharton, and pay a million dollars to stay in the country. That’s a pretty explicit racialization of a meritocracy vision and a monetization of it.
So I found that a very telling moment where the idea of racially ranked economic actors was lined up with a price tag on it and then substituted as a hard-line immigration strategy. It’s actually not. It’s actually what they call a “designer” immigration strategy that uses dog whistles about racial difference to somehow signal its reactionary overtones. And it’s that weird combination I think we see manifesting a lot.
One of the other key topics in your book is the perceived value of gold in the economy and how the neoliberals thought it could be used as a backstop against the potential market apocalypse induced by Washington incompetency. I couldn’t help but think that that’s kind of how crypto is sometimes talked about in Silicon Valley. Do you feel like there’s a parallel there?
Absolutely. If anything, the crypto idea is even more far-fetched, right? I mean the goldbug idea—which is, it must be said, a very minority view among neoliberal intellectuals and economists—very few of them actually believe in the need to return to a gold-backed monetary system, partially because it makes most of the economic activity that we value impossible. You basically choke out any possibility of credit if you say that you have to have a 100% gold-backed currency system. You can’t have an expanding monetary base. So you might get rid of inflation, but you instead have hyper-deflationary tendencies. And that’s the same with crypto. Of course, the fantasy or the myth is that you could somehow move to a totally crypto-based money system, but both crypto and gold only work in relationship to a fiat system as hedges and speculative assets at different moments of the business cycle. The interesting thing symptomatically to me—especially nowadays of the goldbug imaginary—is that their devotion to capitalist principles is so extreme that they would embrace a solution that would destroy capitalism itself.
And that tells me something about the quasi Red Guard–type tendencies that we’re seeing in the first months of the MAGA administration, where the devotion to ideology overrides economic rationality. In the case of the goldbugs, the idea was that in the ruins of an economy destroyed by what they call “monetary socialism,” you would be able to barter and truck and exchange with small chunks of gold that had been in your possession through the whole duration of the collapse. But it strikes me as a very strange and negative utopia where life has been reduced to exchanging metal. And yet for a lot of people, there was this twin vindication of being proven right if that happens, and then also being able to purchase the lives and properties of others for nothing.
There’s a really interesting twist here, which is that at times these hard-money people especially can become sort of trenchant critics of late capitalism. I think they’re accurately seeing some of the absurdities of a hyper-financialized economy. And yet, as with a chaotic trade policy of these last weeks, the [critics] diagnose accurately the problem, which is the social and economic disruptions of hyperglobalization. But then they compose a solution that will only make it worse.
Let’s talk about the tariff situation because I think that’s probably what our readers are worrying about.
But he just gave a 90-day delay, so maybe no one’s going to be talking. [Laughs]
Exactly. Well, I read your latest column in the Financial Times, and you talk about how his tariffs are a powerful form of “direct economics.” Do you want to unpack what you mean?
Sure. I think that much of the three hards—hardwired human nature, hard borders, and hard money—is an attempt to recover an immediacy that people feel has been lost.
So there are three different ways of responding to what feels like excessive abstraction and dematerialization of people’s everyday lives, their senses of themselves, their senses of the place that they live. They attempt what the financial press categorizes as a “flight to safety” or a “flight to security” under terms of uncertainty. So that could mean taking refuge in literally gold or, symbolically, the privileges of whiteness or national citizenship and the security that is assumed to go along with that. I think that Steve Bannon’s idea of citizenship value is kind of brilliant—that we need to move from a world of shareholder value to citizenship value. I think that’s a perfect expression of the demand for immediacy and recompensation for feeling of loss that people in many cases are experiencing.
So to give people a sense of immediacy, they resort to a series of techniques, which you could call gimmicks, tricks, or clever tactics to satisfy people’s political earnings. And in that piece, I describe a couple of them. The exercise of executive power over trade policy itself. The ability of the president, as with the many executive orders, to simply turn the ship of the national economy—and by extension the ship of the world economy—at the stroke of a pen is a remarkably empowering feeling for people who see the president as an extension of themselves in some way. The practice of cash transfers—as in the stimulus checks that people received in the course of the pandemic—with the president’s name on them, colloquially known as Trump Bucks, was another example of that. Obviously, purchasing a memecoin like TrumpCoin or $MELANIA is another way that you’ve managed to do an end run around this dense thicket of elites, whether they’re Wall Street advisers or bankers or university professors and economists who all pretend to know how everything works, and yet you suspect that they don’t. When someone offers you these methods of direct economics, then you feel satisfied and satiated. Power seems to have come back down to earth and taken a human form.
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