Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right
By Quinn Slobodian
Zone Books, 272 pages, $29.95
In 2020, Quinn Slobodian published the best book on the politics of globalization: Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. In the opening pages of that marvellous work, he wrote that he had composed it partly by way of belated apology for having been absent from the “Battle of Seattle,” the anti-globalization protests that shook the American city in 1999, at which some of his friends were present. Even if he was personally absent from the protests, Slobodian served the cause well on the intellectual frontlines two decades later. From today’s vantage point, it would seem, the anti-globalists have finally won. Back in 1999, the protesters dumped imported Brazilian steel into Seattle harbor in protest at cheap imports undercutting US industry. Today, the duty on steel imported into the United States stands at 25 percent. The peak era of globalization is over, and Slobodian helped write its obituary.
The problem, however, is that the figure currently attempting to dismantle global trade is Donald Trump—not exactly the savior Slobodian and his friends hoped for back in 1999. The rise of Trump alongside the international populist right has created a problem for Slobodian, as for other left critics of globalization. Having set out to write a book for the old “Teamsters and Turtles” coalition that manned the barricades in Seattle, instead he found himself rubbing shoulders with an insurgency against neoliberalism composed of Trumpians and Brexiters.
The concern of Slobodian’s subsequent work has been to undercut the notion that national populists are truly anti-globalists. He wants to do this by showing that much of what we call the populist right is itself a mutant strain of neoliberalism. His first effort in this vein was Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World without Democracy. This 2023 book was about how the right, far from defending the nation-state against the market, had sought to chisel it away by honeycombing it with special economic zones, tax havens, free ports and secessionist city-states. Slobodian has now gone further in his new book, which tries to untangle the roots of radical right parties such as Germany’s Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD), tracing them back to a bizarre and restive intellectual subculture made up of people who sell Krugerrands, print samizdat investor newsletters, and conduct creepy investigations into the racial basis for IQ.
“For those interested in intellectual genealogy, it is a fascinating family tree.”
For those interested in intellectual genealogy, it is a fascinating family tree, with Slobodian tracing many obscure and shriveled branches of it. But there is nothing in this family tree that explains the popular and electoral appeal of today’s populist right. However right-populists may be winning, it is not by buying off voters with Krugerrands or by telling them that they are too cognitively challenged to be trusted with power (they leave that argument to the left). However many populist parties may have roots in neoliberalism, that soil is not nourishing their growth.
The neoliberal populist right that is the subject of Hayek’s Bastards , in Slobodian’s telling, is best thought of by way of analogy to the prudent portfolio investor seeking refuge from market turmoil in safe assets: bonds over stocks. Except the turmoil in question is not just a choppy stock market, but the world itself—a world drowning in debt, held hostage to the whims of voters dependent on over-generous welfare checks, nations flooded by mass migration, confronting violent racial unrest in inner cities, and supranational cabals seeking to build world government from above.
The safe assets in question are not US treasuries, but rather what Slobodian terms the three “hards”—hard money, hard borders, and hardwired human nature. Gold offers a hedge against central banks manipulating fiat money; hard borders help preserve the national stock of human capital against dilution by low-IQ migrants; human nature presents the genetic basis for market freedoms and stable social order. Slobodian notes how the renewed mania for IQ thrives in a world of “standardized outcomes, rankings, benchmarks and indicators,” how it “naturalizes and hardens existing hierarchies … with the elegance of a single number—IQ as a biologized credit score.”
“It is difficult to fit the frame to the picture before us.”
Yet reading the book in the backwash of Trump’s new tariffs, it is difficult to fit the frame to the picture before us. Slobodian identifies the writer Richard Hanania in his book as one of the exponents of the sinister new racial science of IQ. Yet in recent weeks, Hanania has been raging on X against Trump’s tariffs as further evidence of the cognitive mediocrity of the president and his backers—the pursuit of central planning, as he sees it, by people with even lower IQ than the old socialists. At another point, Slobodian digs into the early issues of libertarian former congressman Ron Paul’s Survival Report to uncover the basis of today’s new right—but sure enough, Paul has also come out as hostile to Trump’s trade agenda. In other words, rather than fulfilling the dreams of a longstanding nationalist-libertarian coalition, the current trade war seems to be straining the ostensible alliance between neoliberals and national populists.
Perhaps it is unfair to read Slobodian through the prism of Trump’s latest trade war, given that the book was written before it got underway. Yet even discounting the tariffs, Slobodian’s method—tracing newsletters, attendees at meetings of the Mont Pelerin Society, and obscure websites to show that through his economic advisor Larry Kudlow, Trump is connected to alt-right leader Richard Spencer (remember him?)—falls flat. After all, Spencer himself voted for the Democratic candidate Joe Biden in 2020, and like Hanania, he has since become a vociferous critic of the MAGA right to which he once belonged.
Slobodian employs a number of neologisms to drive home his point that today’s nationalist populism is an extension of yesterday’s neoliberalism: “ethno-economy” (to correspond to the more familiar ethno-state and ethno-nationalism); “Volk capital”; “auripatriotism” (the political feeling for currency backed by precious metal). But he fails to demonstrate that the victories of the populist right owe much to the intellectual cunning of the cranks whose careers are explored in Hayek’s Bastards. For instance, Trump’s frequent boasting about his IQ, presented in the book as evidence of populist leaders’ support for a racialist revival, seems a slender basis on which to accuse him of being the figurehead for a sinister eugenic politics of an elite new “neurocaste.” In fact, Trump has largely succeeded by drawing on ordinary citizens’ intuitions and wielding them against the obliviousness of those Hanania likes to call “elite human capital.”
Herein lies the problem with Slobodian’s contention that there is a “new fusionism” at the root of the populist right, in which arguments for market freedom are melded not with religious conservatism, as during the Cold War, but with evolutionary psychology, genomics, and biological anthropology. The old fusionism was not merely an intellectual meld but a potent electoral alliance between a neoconservative intelligentsia and a vast evangelical voting bloc. However deep neoliberals may reach into human evolution to formulate their arguments for racial supremacy today, it is difficult to see that such arguments have any corresponding electoral depth. On the contrary, Trump returned to power in 2024 by incorporating large numbers of Latino voters into the MAGA coalition—the same demographic that has been historically despised by “new fusionists” concerned with preserving the white racial basis of US human capital.
There are similar issues with Slobodian’s dismissal of Eurosceptical populism as merely another variety of updated neoliberalism. At one point, for instance, he criticizes “the conflation of European integration with neoliberalism,” countering that “many actual existing neoliberals were violently opposed to European integration—and especially the euro.” Yet Slobodian’s own earlier work makes clear this isn’t the whole story.
Reading his description, in Globalists, of the origins of neoliberalism in inter-war Vienna, it was impossible not to see it through the prism of the Eurozone of the early 21st century. Rankling at the upstart newly-independent nations of Central and Eastern Europe pursuing national development among the ruins of the Habsburg empire, the first generation of neoliberals pined for the cosmopolitan order of the old imperial free-trade zone that had sprawled across the Danube river basin prior to the Great War. Smart enough to see that the world of the old empires was gone, the neoliberals dreamt instead of a new global order, one in which the parvenu nations would be encased in supranational structures that would curb their efforts to thwart or mould the global market through the exercise of sovereign power. This line of thinking was a crucial source of inspiration for the architects of European integration, even if some of neoliberalism’s progeny soured on the eventual results.
Slobodian concludes the new book by discussing Argentine President Javier Milei’s rapturous reception at the World Economic Forum at Davos in 2024. In doing so, he apparently wants to make clear that the reason to oppose the WEF is not because it is a “globalist” organization, but because its attendees embraced the charismatic Latin American libertarian and his extreme capitalist agenda. It would seem, in other words, that while Brussels is cleared of the charge of neoliberalism because some of Hayek’s ideological offspring detested the European Union, Davos remains a legitimate target because a gonzo Hayekian recently found a congenial audience there.
Perhaps by removing any taint of association with the populist right, Slobodian has at last discharged his debt to the left anti-globalizers. Those of us who have enjoyed his books can only hope this will free him up to expand his interests into other realms. “Well-funded networks of think tanks, conferences, gatherings, and workshops, as well as investment forums, comments sections, and Reddit groups, offer nurseries for adaptive ideological strains,” he tells us in Hayek’s Bastards. Who could doubt such a claim after the recent dissolution of USAID exposed the vast reach of its progressive empire? There is a book there to be written.