What is behind the contemporary Far Right’s recent ascent?
This deceptively simple question animates historian Quinn Slobodian’s latest book, completing a trilogy in his intellectual history of neoliberalism. The first book, Globalists, examined how global neoliberal institutions were designed to create an international order that would protect free trade and private property from democracy. In Crack-Up Capitalism, Slobodian turned to right-wing neoliberal efforts to carve the world into profitable zones for capital accumulation without democratic governance or social responsibility.
In Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right (Zone Books, 2025), Slobodian scrutinizes the writings of neoliberal thinkers like Friedrich A. Hayek and those who now wield his ideas to reassess the economic story many tell about the Right’s global resurgence. He finds that today’s Far Right isn’t a backlash to neoliberal capitalism—it’s a “frontlash” that evolved out of it, bringing together right-wing libertarians and neoliberals with paleoconservatives and populists. At the end of the Cold War, this titular cast merged free-market ideology with notions of biologically wired human difference and hierarchy to oppose social movements demanding rights and justice. Their new ideology deepens neoliberal capitalism’s economic logic through a far-right politics invested in three “hards”: nature, borders, and money.
PRA spoke with Slobodian about neoliberalism’s ideological entrepreneurs and how their turn to nature and “race science” justifies competition to produce far-right notions of value, whether in immigration, gold collecting, tariffs, or military contracting. This wide-ranging discussion presents insights for understanding key differences within this alliance and the MAGA coalition, the broader influence of White nationalist and anti-immigrant ideas, and technofascism’s rise. The interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.
Over the past several years, you’ve developed a body of work analyzing free-market libertarian and far-right political projects. How does Hayek’s Bastards build upon that work?
I was first motivated to plunge into this line of historical research by seeing diverse uses of neoliberalism as a category in academia and social movement activism. “Neoliberalism” seems to explain everything, and the term frustrates many because of its nebulousness. Is “neoliberalism” a synonym for capitalism? Is it a set of specific policy proposals that international financial institutions dictated? Is it synonymous with globalization or Americanization? Everyone had their own answer. I was intrigued by research trying to pin it down by looking at the small group of people who took that category as their own.
Self-claimed neoliberals first used the term in the 1930s. They were concerned about fascism on the Right and communism on the Left and sought to defend free-market liberalism and political systems that privileged economic freedom above other freedoms. By looking at these intellectuals over the decades, I found an interesting story about the antisocialist Right’s evolution. This also yielded a more specific definition of neoliberalism as a debate about how capitalism should be protected from democracy.
As I finished writing Globalists, great disruptions—Brexit and Donald Trump’s 2016 election—seemed to mark a provisional endpoint for the book’s arc of neoliberalism. The problem seemed to change from too much law constraining nation-states to nation-states exercising too much power in exclusionary and violent ways, understood as populism, nationalism, the resurgent Right, etc. I found this narration by the media and many scholars to be misleading. When you look closely at the personnel circulating these ideas, the backlash against neoliberal capitalism isn’t a backlash. The people leading the move to leave the European Union for the disruptive political entrepreneurs inside of the Alternative for Germany party, or the People’s Party, or Forza Italia under Berlusconi—these people are directly tied to the neoliberal intellectual movement.
In Crack-up Capitalism and my new book, Hayek’s Bastards, I found that these disruptive exits from existing institutional arrangements like the EU and subnational solutions of smaller city-states were often being led by a new alliance between neoliberals and people invested in ethnic security and national belonging by blood. So, my overarching argument is that the Right’s resurgence, at least from the supply side, isn’t a refusal or rejection of neoliberalism—it’s a mutation within it and a new solution to the persistent problem of the relationship between capital and demos [the people].
You make an important argument about the return of “race science” among right-wing libertarians who became influential figures in this new strain of the neoliberal movement. What is this “new fusionism,” as you call it, and what are its implications for understanding the Far Right’s resurgence?
The flat way of understanding neoliberal thought is that it entails a belief that all humans are the same and unmarked by culture, race, or nation, making them interchangeable commodities in a global marketplace of human interaction. When the Far Right criticizes neoliberalism, that’s how they describe it, too—that neoliberalism deracinates and uproots people from their bloodlines and the places that have given them meaning for millennia, treating them as units of exchange and an assembly line. But this is where it’s helpful to look at the writings of neoliberals, especially influential ones like Hayek, because they do something else.
Hayek doesn’t see people as unmarked, exchangeable entities, but as members of populations who share a set of capacities and virtues not necessarily shared by others. So even an arch neoliberal like Hayek views the human community as divided into cultural groups, some of which are better equipped to thrive in the market than others.
Those who turn to race science are radicalizing this aspect of Hayek’s thought—that humans are different and arranged on a hierarchy. Neoliberalism doesn’t work by treating everyone as the same, but by treating them as different, and they have different capacities and contributions to produce value inside a modified market. So, when people like Charles Murray, Peter Brimelow, and Murray Rothbard begin to associate market value with racial difference and IQ, they’re applying neoliberal logic to race science. And they’re combining the two to produce a far-right politics that hasn’t rejected the principles of competition and monetized social relations—it extends that logic by claiming these principles are hardwired into people’s brains and DNA. The book shows how what’s seen as reversing 1990s capitalist globalism actually deepens the ideas operating underneath it. That’s important politically because it undermines the Far Right setting itself up as legitimate critics of homogenizing global capitalism, especially in Europe.
The old fusionism of the 1950s and 60s combined Christian conservatism with ideas of economic liberalism. New fusionism is a far-right form of free-market thinking that deploys arguments from cognitive psychology, genetics, genomics, evolutionary biology, and sociobiology. First, it grounds human difference in nature, and introduces and legitimizes forms of economic competition through those naturalized differences. Then, it proposes policies of exclusion, separation, and punishment along that hierarchy of racial difference.
You mentioned the association of IQ and race, which you describe in the book as “neurocastes.” What’s behind the turn to biologized notions of human difference, and specifically IQ, then and now?
This bridges the Silicon Valley Right and the traditionalist MAGA Right and it’s now central to how the U.S. Right is operating. Musk and Trump both believe that IQ is a meaningful way of ranking human beings.
During Silicon Valley’s first tech boom, IQ became a way to express being in charge, because we are a cognitive elite—as Charles Murray would describe them—who deserve what we’ve got. Because meritocracy rewards people for having better-endowed minds than others. Although it had been around for a century, the idea of an intelligence quotient and IQ testing gained salience in the 1990s hype about the knowledge economy. Tech was seen as the source of solutions for all social problems, the savior of the U.S. economy, and by extension, the global economy. IQ became a perfect indicator for this era.
Charles Murray and others also use IQ to justify ethnic exclusion in immigration regimes. Because they believe in group differences in IQ, they argue that it’s not racism to reject immigrants from Latin American or Muslim-majority countries, it’s simply cognitive science. It would be foolish to bring in immigrants from “low IQ” countries, because it disarms an economy instead of enriching it. Parallels can be seen in Germany’s far-right discourse and the book, Germany Abolishes Itself, which makes similar arguments.
With that in mind, let’s talk about why you titled your book, Hayek’s Bastards. You write of Hayek’s skepticism of using science in statecraft. What are the implications of his followers’ turn to science for U.S. politics today?
Hayek was concerned about making politics based on a misplaced concreteness about what science tells us about how to organize society. His reference point was scientific socialism. For Hayek, socialist planning (to optimize the distribution of a nation’s resources without a price system) ignored the extent of human creativity and knowledge, which couldn’t be fully captured on a table or even in any computer. He was skeptical about the excess of claims of concrete knowledge and deployment of evidence for policy reasons.
What you get with the race scientists is a rejection of that willingness to not fully know, to operate with the assumption of decentralized human creativity. They want to create tables of racial groups for the purposes of immigration policy, employment, etc. They’re committing what I call scientism.
We often think that the Far Right is operating in a world of myth and fables, and we need to pop their bubbles with our facts. But their expansion has been powered partly by appealing to facts on their own grounds. The Far Right has created what they see as a more robust corpus of evidence than the Left has its disposal. They’ve been aided in this by advances in genetic science. The notion that race is a social construct prevailed for nearly 50 years, from American anthropology to the UNESCO Statement on Race to the human genome. The scientific discussion has since shifted the idea of race in ways that humanists have not effectively countered. When Charles Murray first started writing about race and IQ in The Bell Curve, he was working with data based on racial self-identification in the census. Now he’s talking about epigenetics and genomics. Critics of the Right should be better versed in this science of human difference to make more grounded critiques [of how it’s being used].
We saw this emerge in the COVID and vaccine debates. William Callison and I coined the term “diagonalism” to describe how groups of people [who mobilized against governmental efforts to contain the pandemic] were crossing the political spectrum in novel ways. A lot of this was about doing their own research and countering science with their own versions of it. So, we should think about this not only in terms of hate and resentment politics, but as a new debate happening on the terrain of public science, which the Far Right has opened up with its own set of scientific references, its own canon, its own ideas.
The Far Right’s use of science is selective, flattens genuine debate, and does things that are sketchy and in bad faith. But they’re engaging with popular ideas to create a new politics and find an edge in a competitive market of investors.
This leads to political actors in far-right movements and media ecosystems working to monetize support and build customer bases through the selling of supplements, gold bars, subscriptions, and more. People like Ben Shapiro, Alex Jones, and Glenn Beck who are not only selling ideas—they’re selling concrete commodities too.
That brings us to the last of new fusionism’s three “hards”: hard money. Your final chapter is on “goldbugs” who seek to profit from an apocalypse. What is their worldview and how do you see it operating in far-right politics today?
The goldbugs are a community of gold-coin collectors, sellers, traders—whether it’s Austrian and German precious metals consultants who are also major proponents of the notion of a “Muslim invasion,” or, closer to home, Ron Paul, long-time Texas senator and millenarian believer in the breakdown of the American economy, who registered and ran a gold coin operation with his friend for decades.
Looking at Far Right ideas about gold shows how their millenarian logic of a coming collapse has a monetary dimension. With the printing of paper money following the end of the gold standard, they link the wave of liquidity to a wave of immigration bringing humans they see as invaders, leading to a rupture or crash that will result in the extermination of the White race or an economic meltdown. What do you do when that apocalypse is coming? You prepare for it: you armor yourself, hide away with provisions, and buy gold because people will revert to what they have “always” used as a means of exchange and it’s the only thing that will have value.
Far-right ideas of value are made literal in this fixation on metal, which becomes metaphorically connected to other kinds of naturalized value. Being obsessed with gold as the only natural form of value overlaps with the idea of racial difference being naturally encoded and unquestionable. Both appeal to the “reality” of natural difference and hierarchy.
There’s also what you call the “flight to the freedom of the networked vault.” How does this view of the nation as platform and part of a networked global economy figure into the MAGA coalition’s antidemocratic politics?
In Crack-Up Capitalism, I told a story about how, in the early 2000s, Silicon Valley tech founders like Peter Thiel, Balaji Srinivasan, and Patri Friedman believed they had to exit the U.S. to create [Ayn] Randian utopias on the high seas. Some years later, in 2016, Thiel is on stage at the RNC, speaking in support of Trump.
It’s easier to take over an existing state than to start a new one. The likes of Marc Andreessen, Alexander Karp, and others have followed that logic since. Their participation in the MAGA coalition is to become the new state. Karp’s The Technological Republic is a blueprint: Replace inefficient legacy service providers in weapons systems with ones that require far fewer humans and deliver results. In other words: Become the new Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. Governance becomes automated while you use governance data to feed your AI model, producing a positive feedback loop of ever-better results with ever-fewer people. That’s what Musk’s DOGE is about.
The point of view of Russ Vought, Stephen Miller, and the authors of Project 2025 is more like what I describe in the book. They want to break Civil Rights egalitarianism’s claims and restore the[ir] order of White male supremacy through contractual communities at a smaller scale. This paleoconservative faction of the MAGA coalition wants to dismantle federal capacity to push things back to the state and local levels, with all the consequences for widening inequality that entails.
MAGA is many projects, not just one, and gives multiple constituencies different things all at once in a chaotic, unorganized way. So, we get neoconservative, muscular expressions of U.S. military might one day, and the next, arbitrary high tariffs that could be about reshoring industry and delinking from the globe or reconquering global trade.
Technoacceleration is part of that coalition. Their centralizing push for big power is for material gain. Karp and Thiel are pushing all their chips onto the U.S. military budget as the mainstream of revenue going forward. So, they don’t quite want the end of the United States anytime soon. Even with someone like Curtis Yarvin: In 2009, he’s talking about smashing up states; by 2025, he’s interested in a new techno-dictator who can govern centrally.
Finally, what can readers take from your analysis of the history of neoliberal ideas and into a political strategy for fighting far-right authoritarianism?
Through the current assault, we’re learning what parts of the U.S. state and economy matter to people most. That could provide insights for mobilizing. Intrusions into Social Security or Medicaid prompt an immediate grassroots reaction. People care greatly about what version of the U.S. welfare state exists, even if it’s minimal by comparative standards, because it’s still extraordinarily important to people’s life plans and understandings of the social contract. It’s good to know that people do value the social state—and politics could expand on care economy discussions already being incorporated during the previous administration.
In my view, there’s a good argument to be made for a consistent post-neoliberal or anti-neoliberal politics that’s also opposed to the Far Right: one that advocates for good paying jobs, expanding the social safety net and the capacity to organize in unions in areas hit hard by globalization, to make products that are designed for a just energy transition and long-term competitiveness.
There’s a dialectic quality to the change of administrations that produces an economic and political opportunity. Maybe Trump 2.0’s even greater chaos will create an opening for a better countermovement in its wake.