By John Foster
Although the term “irony” turns up all too frequently these days, it is practically impossible to discuss contemporary politics without it.
This is particularly true for the libertarian political tradition. From a doctrine meant to privilege human freedom, however misguidedly, libertarianism has mutated into a doctrine devoted to restriction as much as liberty.
This has occurred in conjunction with its cultural and institutional synergy with neoliberalism, a process that Canadian historian Quinn Slobodian examines in his recent works.
In Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (2020), Slobodian presented an intellectual history of neoliberalism, focusing on the Geneva School, which included Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Wilhelm Röpke.
Contrary to the common belief that neoliberals wish to minimise state power, Slobodian argued that these thinkers sought to protect global capitalism by establishing supranational institutions to shield markets from the redistributive pressures of nation-states, especially in the context of decolonisation and the rise of mass democracy. They envisioned a global order where economic rules were insulated from popular demands, creating institutions like the World Trade Organization.
In Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy (2023), Slobodian turned his attention to the libertarian project of creating “zones of exception”, such as tax havens, special economic zones, and charter cities, that operate beyond the reach of democratic governance. These enclaves are designed to attract capital by minimising regulation and taxation, effectively "punching holes" in the authority of nation-states.
This trend represents a deliberate strategy to insulate capitalism from democratic oversight, insulating market forces from public accountability. Slobodian traces the intellectual lineage of this movement from figures like Milton Friedman to contemporary tech libertarians such as Peter Thiel, highlighting their shared vision of a world where economic activity will operate free from political constraints.
Slobodian’s latest book, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right, shines a light on intellectual traditions that have metastasised from the territory of a radical fringe into the mainstream of the American Republican Party and the European populist right.
The leading figures in this narrative, such as Murray Rothbard, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Lew Rockwell, and Samuel Francis, hail from a network of think tanks and foundations funded by billionaires of the extreme right that have acted as incubators for their reconfiguration of libertarianism. Together, they have produced a radical doctrine that conflates liberty with property ownership rights.
Slobodian focuses on a development he calls the “new fusionism”. Whereas fusionism was a mid-twentieth-century synthesis of “libertarianism and religious traditionalism in the style of William F. Buckley and the National Review”, the new mode of fusionism combines this political mindset with concepts borrowed from a range of scientific disciplines, such as psychology, genetics, and anthropology.
New fusionism alloys neoliberalism’s defence of market structures with narratives of biological superiority based on race and sometimes gender. In particular, its proponents evince a fascination with IQ, often arguing that those with higher scores should have more or less exclusive political power and sometimes also advocating that those with lower ones should be sterilised.
Underlying the various doctrines of new fusionism is an essentialist obsession with what Slobodian terms “three hards”—hardwired human nature, hard borders, and hard money—which together constitute the foundation for the carceral ethnocapitalist states that the populist right wants to build.
For the new fusionists and paleolibertarians, human nature is immutable. From their perspective, everyone from mainstream neoliberals to the radical left makes the mistake of prioritising nurture over nature. They argue instead for what Slobodian calls “neurocastes”.
The new fusionist right links this ranking of intellect with an account of race. It’s not just that some individuals are smarter, but that some groups are. Sustaining this belief requires a shift from the primacy of the market to what is sometimes termed the “metamarket”, turning away from the traditional libertarian obsession with individualism in favour of a spectrum of other values.
The desire to liberate one’s environs from those with generally lower intellect—and those dissimilar to oneself—is the metavalue undergirding the second hard: borders. The defence of white intellect and civilisation requires that while goods and capital be allowed to circulate freely, people cannot.
Slobodian illustrates the hysterical power of this narrative of racial endangerment by describing the reception on the paleolibertarian right of Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints, in which European civilisation is swamped by an influx of intellectually and genetically inferior non-whites.
The third pillar of hardness is hard money. Slobodian’s account of the obsession with gold as a fundamental marker of value for the paleo right is especially compelling. Whereas the hyping of paranoia about crypto-socialism and racial dilution can be traced back to more recent moments—the collapse of communism and the publication of Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve, respectively—the fixation on gold is of much longer provenance.
European states abandoned the gold standard during the First World War to meet their astronomical fiscal and financial demands. After efforts to reconstruct the system in the interwar period were scuttled during the Great Depression, gold was once again made central in the Bretton Woods system.
For those who believed that moving away from gold was a secret attempt by governments and other elites to ruin the finances—and perhaps the precious bodily fluids—of decent, value-respecting folk, Richard Nixon’s final suspension of convertibility in 1971 was the cruelest cut.
Ever since, the role of gold as a guarantor of “true” value has been an idée fixe of the radical right. As Slobodian notes, the original “alternative” offered by Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland was gold as an alternative to intrinsically suspect paper currency. The connection between that platform and xenophobia was forged in the course of later developments.
Hayek’s Bastards is an important book. It helps make sense of the far right’s attempt to destabilise existing institutions.
While Donald Trump’s politics lack any consistency—outside of white victimhood and self-dealing, anyway—he is surrounded by a corona of formerly marginal cranks whose ideas he is happily putting into practice. Some of these conflict with the ideology of paleolibertarianism, as Slobodian describes it.
On the other hand, the project of destroying the institutions of the US state currently being undertaken by Elon Musk and others in Trump’s orbit under the auspices of DOGE jibe well with the paleolibertarian goal of vaporising the regulatory state. Even President Trump’s tariff policy, which might be seen as running counter to neoliberalism’s free trade commitments, can be understood as one stage in a long game in which the destruction of trade-distorting institutions would be the eventual desired outcome.
As with Slobodian’s previous books, Hayek’s Bastards shows remarkable thoroughness in terms of research and in pursuing the connections among the thicket of figures populating the netherworld of the new fusionist right. Slobodian has provided his readers with nothing less than a counter-history of the nexus of politics, economics, and ideology in our world. The results are breathtaking but also terrifying.
Please support The Battleground. Subscribe to our free newsletter and make a donation to ensure our continued growth and independence.
Photograph courtesy of Morgan Schmorgan. Published under a Creative Commons license.