The past decade has seen right-wing populism surge across the globe. Donald Trump leads a Republican Party refashioned in his image; in Britain, Reform UK is seriously challenging the traditional British political parties; and in Europe, right-wing groups are the ruling or the largest parties in Hungary, Italy, Sweden and elsewhere. Here, NZ First’s steady agenda of populist rhetoric has been rewarded in the polls.
Many right-wing populist parties are now seeking to unwind the neoliberal consensus installed by conservative and centrist governments in the last quarter of the 20th century.
It is the intellectual genealogy between modern neoliberalism and the far right that Canadian historian Quinn Slobodian discusses in Hayek’s Bastards. His previous two books, Globalists, covering the birth and goals of neoliberalism, and Crack-Up Capitalism, about how capitalist extremists have sought to escape the fetters of democracy, examined themes within the same family of thought.
At the head of the family tree is Friedrich Hayek, the Austrian-born British economist and philosopher who laid out the economic and political underpinnings of libertarian and neoliberal thought in the post-war era through his own writings and the Mont Pelerin Society, which he founded in 1947.
Hayek’s neoliberalism, the blueprint for Thatcherism, Reaganism and Rogernomics, championed individual liberty, free markets, property rights and limited government. The “bastards” are the successors who adulterated his original vision – in Slobodian’s words, the “mutant strands” of neoliberalism that combined with other forms of reactionary politics in the 1980s and 90s.
Critiques of neoliberalism are hardly in short supply, but Slobodian, born in 1978, is its most compelling historian, set apart by the breadth of his research and deft synthesising of the ways in which neoliberalism has shaped contemporary politics, culture and social worlds.
Fundamentally, he writes, “to understand neoliberalism as an apocalyptic hyper-marketisation of everything is both vague and misleading”. Instead of a capitalist world without states, neoliberals thought “the state needs to be rethought to restrict democracy without eliminating it and how national and supra-national institutions can be used to protect competition and exchange. When we see neoliberalism as a project of retooling the state to save capitalism, its supposed opposition to the populism of the right begins to dissolve.” Both neoliberals and the new right scorn egalitarianism, global economic equality and solidarity beyond the nation, he writes.
Slobodian opens his book at the 25th anniversary of neoliberal think-tank hub the Atlas Economic Research Foundation (now the Atlas Network) in 2006. The keynote is delivered by Mont Pelerin member Charles Murray, author of the 1994 book The Bell Curve, a controversial bestseller whose findings have been widely criticised, particularly for its interpretations about racial differences in intelligence.
Murray says, “For the last 40 years, the battle cry of the left has been ‘equality’ … [but] the explosive growth of genetic knowledge means that within a few years, science will definitely demonstrate precisely how it is that women are different from men, blacks from whites, poor from rich, or, for that matter, the ways in which the Dutch are different from Italians.” The confirmation of ineradicable group differences would leave a void “in the moral universe of the left”, Murray predicted. “If social policy cannot be built on the premise that group differences must be eliminated, what can it be built upon?”
The recurring themes of racial and intellectual hierarchy were picked up by later variants of populism and argued through economic reasoning. Whereas older conservatives may have used a language of religion to back up claims about human differences, Slobodian notes, they had begun to use scientific disciplines to “biologicise” questions of human ethics.
Much of the argument seems to come down to a kind of “evolutionary libertarianism” that there is an inherited human nature against a general socialist belief that inheritance is more negligible as compared with the influence of the social environment.
Neoliberals have since their inception in the 1930s sought a “sense of order” against the push of progressive policies, state spending and what they view as social and economic engineering. Hayek believed the masses tended socialist, a belief challenged by his political and philosophical descendants.
There has been a splintering into various strains of libertarianism and the populist far right over some decades. The border between right-wing populism and the far right is porous. Both rely on appeals to the “people” and the restoration of a nation’s perceived former glory. But the former embraces nationalism and “traditional” values and argues against large-scale immigration on the grounds of national identity, social cohesion and economic and security risks. The far right often more explicitly advocates nativism (ie, promoting the interests of the native born over those of immigrants), ultraconservatism and rejection of liberal democratic norms.
Slobodian tracks an almost dizzying cast of players, including Murray Rothbard, a hard-right reactionary who coined the term “anarcho-capitalism” and later rebranded his beliefs as “paleolibertarianism”, fusing free-market economics with strict racial hierarchies and social conservatism.
Slobodian’s at times convoluted discussion of not only the figureheads but also the development and transmission of their ideas is a thrilling ride, if occasionally he stays in the weeds a little too long. But he balances more discursive passages with engrossing, entertaining and sometimes alarming commentary.
The chapter on the gruesome origins of the Alternative for Germany or AfD party (it involves gold trading, the death-camp gas Zyklon B and a farcical loophole in party fundraising laws) is particularly absorbing, and the gold investment passages prefigure today’s crypto enthusiasts on the right.
Slobodian is scholarly but he is also a storyteller; his stylish prose is crafted with a sharp pen and an ear tuned toward a compelling narrative. So, why this book now? Hayek’s Bastards argues that tracing the origins of these intellectual currents and taking them and their adherents seriously is necessary not only to grasp our present condition but also to emphasise that often, jarring new ideas are not produced in a vacuum; they have clan and kin, often surprising, as Slobodian reveals, and will go on to propagate. Identifying their relations allows us to have a clearer view of the provenance of political propositions that otherwise seem to appear in the “marketplace of ideas” as if by natural order.
As it stands, the broad church of the populist right and other right-wing groups is resurgent and still fracturing; US blogger and software developer Curtis Yarvin, for example, graces magazine covers armed with ideas that are counter to egalitarian values fundamental to democracy, just like those before him. But these figures take as read the world, and indeed the state, that has provided for them while arguing for its weakening if not its cratering. The book, then, is a warning of sorts. Slobodian cautions that this “latest crop of anarcho-capitalists and the paleolibertarian right have lived through a period of global order, and are seeking an unwinding and dismantling with only a half-baked bricolage of ideas of what will be there in its place”.
