If any of us were asked what we believed to be the outcome of the Cold War, we would probably respond without fear of being wrong that it ended with a clear victory for capitalism. Or we might say, for neoliberalism: a sort of modified return to classical liberalism as a reaction to Keynesianism, which had been intellectually developed between the 1930s and the beginning of the post-World War II era with the economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek as its main exponents. This set of ideas, which proclaimed the unrestricted defense of private property and market freedom, combined with an individualist philosophy, became state policy in response to the capitalist crisis of the mid-1970s. After the defeat of the revolutionary upsurge that had begun in the late 1960s and the political rise of Reagan and Thatcher in the early 1980s, neoliberal ideas were embodied in an aggressive program of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat to, as David Harvey argues, restore its “class power.”
The period following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union was marked by a seemingly boundless capitalist-neoliberal triumphalism. The 1990s were the decade of the “American hyperpower,” an exceptional unipolar moment of US leadership, which commanded the “liberal world order” led from Washington for its own benefit, while guaranteeing the conditions for capitalist expansion on a global scale. It was also the decade in which globalization and the neoliberal consensus — deregulation, privatization, precarity, and public and private debt — were imposed, sustained by conservative and social democratic parties that alternated in government but pursued the same economic program. Francis Fukuyama would become famous for announcing the “end of history,” a formula that, beyond the Hegelian philosophical pretensions of its author, became popularized as the definitive triumph of capitalism and liberal democracy. The TINA (There Is No Alternative ) formula coined by Thatcher was a metaphor for the times.
This climate of profound ideological reaction had also permeated Marxist intellectuals. In a 2000 editorial in New Left Review, Perry Anderson contrasted the situation of the 1990s with the 1960s, describing a scenario of “generalized capitalist triumph.” While he maintained that “a decade does not make an epoch,” with the social liberal turn of the old reformism and the “third way,” he nonetheless considered neoliberalism to be “ the most successful ideology in world history.” This long cycle of neoliberal hegemony, which marked an entire period of bourgeois restoration, finally showed its exhaustion with the capitalist crisis of 2008, which opened a new stage of reactivation of the tendencies characteristic of the imperialist era, namely wars, crises, and revolution-counterrevolution confrontations.
The shift in direction is evident. The “rules-based liberal world order” is decaying; the “free market” coexists with protectionist policies and tariff barriers reaching levels of the 1930s. American leadership is in decline and faces competition from China and other emerging powers. However, there is an open debate about whether neoliberalism has run its course — beyond continuing as an economic automatism combined with protectionist measures — or whether it has been redefined.
Let’s look at some examples. At one extreme of these debates is Wolfgang Streeck. The author of Buying Time believes that neoliberalism has been so successful in carrying its tendencies to the end, eliminating the limits that preserved it that it is causing a slow death of the capitalist system itself through, we might say, an overdose of itself. This death, not at the hands of its gravedigger (the working class) but due to its own contradictions, is a process of long decline, in which we are seeing a kind of “double movement” in the sense of Karl Polanyi in the emergence of political phenomena that question neoliberal dogmas. From an apparently opposite position, Gary Grestle, in his book Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era, argues that the “neoliberal order” has already come to an end. Although his analysis focuses on the United States, the effects of this seismic shift, which according to the author is expressed in the rise of right-wing “populism” with Trump and left-wing “populism” with Sanders, are historic and international. In an intermediate position, Perry Anderson asks if we are not maybe facing a “regime change” in the West, not in the sense of the expression acquired during the Iraq War (U.S. intervention to overthrow enemy regimes) but in its traditional meaning of “the gradual establishment of a new international order in times of peace.” His conclusion is that this has not yet happened because neoliberalism is opposed by populism, which has failed to articulate an alternative.
It is in this context that we could place Quinn Slobodian’s intellectual history of neoliberalism, particularly his latest book, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right. There he traces the genealogy of the Alt Right from the founding of the Mont Pèlerin Society to the paleolibertarian conservative alliance. Slobodian argues that today’s Far Right is neither an anti-neoliberal “backlash” nor a political translation of the great resentment of the losers of globalization, to use E. Fassin’s apt concept. On the contrary, even if it is cloaked in “anti-system” demagoguery (and resorts to protectionist policies as Donald Trump does), it is still a “frontlash,” that is a radicalized reactionary drive — economic, political, and state — to overturn the balance of forces in favor of the dominant classes and carry the “ultracapitalist” tendencies of neoliberalism to their conclusion. The brutal adjustment government and the “cultural battle” of Javier Milei, to whom he dedicates the epilogue, undoubtedly fit into this thesis.
This core idea, which, according to Slobodian explains a significant part of the cultural, political and economic “battles” of the far-right variants in government today — from Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” to Milei’s chainsaw — is already outlined in the two books that precede Hayek’s Bastards, which in chronological order are: Globalists: The End of Empires and the Birth of Neoliberalism (2018); and Fragmentation Capitalism: Market Radicalism and the Dream of a World Without Democracy (2023).
The common thread running through this spontaneous trilogy, because it wasn’t conceived as such, is the aim of denaturing some of the common understandings that have served as founding myths of contemporary neoliberalism. In particular, the supposed contradiction between the “free market” and the state; and the relationship between the freedom of capital and liberal democracy, which has been mistakenly considered its companion in the journey since the disappearance of the Soviet Union and the Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe.
In Globalists Slobodian reviews the origins and deployment of neoliberal thought in the period from the end of the First World War (particularly the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) to the 1990s. Against the false notion that neoliberalism is synonymous with “anti-statism,” Slobodian shows the necessary relationship between the “free” deployment of capital, the nation state, and the construction of a global order based on international institutions (e.g., the World Trade Organization), which act as its protective shields not only against revolts or revolutions but even against the limited demands of liberal democracy.
If Globalists can be read as an explanation of the state imposition of neoliberalism as a condition for the free circulation of capital, The Capitalism of Fragmentation shows the inverse tendency of radicalized capitalist sectors to directly escape this state encapsulation by creating “special zones” or “micro-territories,” where no semblance of society exists and pure capitalist competition reigns. These “zones” range from traditional tax havens to the delirium of private “micro-states” imagined by techno-libertarians like Peter Thiel, who in 2009 proposed the establishment of “start-up nations” offshore, outside of any state jurisdiction and therefore free of taxes, regulations, and any form of government. Ultimately, Thiel concluded that it is easier to appropriate existing bourgeois states and parties than to embark on new reactionary utopias. In 2016, he abandoned his ultimate program of ultra-capitalist offshore communities and jumped on the Trumpist bandwagon, never to return. JD Vance, the current U.S. vice president and eventual successor to Trump, is his safest bet.
In Hayek’s Bastards… Slobodian focuses his analysis on the 1990s, following the trail no longer of the elite of the neoliberal intelligentsia (Hayek, Mises, Friedman) but of its “bastard children” of the paleolibertarian Right, a galaxy of neo-reactionaries in which various eccentric and obscure figures orbit, who for many years remained on the margins, such as Murray Rothbard, Peter Brimelow and Charles Murray and their admirers like Trump or Milei.
As the title suggests, taken literally from John Ralston Saul (Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West ), Slobodian believes that the self-proclaimed heirs of the “Austrian school” have taken this heritage beyond what could be admitted within the limits of a faithful continuity with the spirit of their masters. This excessive reactionary turn is expressed in openly racist positions, with a supposedly scientific (biological) basis, which, according to the author, do not necessarily derive from the theories of Hayek and Mises, although they are not absolutely antagonistic either.
However, one might wonder to what extent the paleo-libertarian Right represents a departure from the original ideas of the Mont Pèlerin associates.
Slobodian maintains that it is not a question of “saving the honor” of the Austrian school, and there are only a few steps after all, from Hayek’s late assertion (cited by Slobodian on p. 43) about the superiority of the “moral heritage” of the “Christian West,” to the ethno-cultural justification of the success of Western societies (and the biologically determined failure of others) upheld by its paleolibertarian bastards.
In addition to their unrestricted defense of the “freedom” of capital, the “bastards” continue the anti-democratic and conservative tradition of the founders of neoliberalism, which, as Slobodian points out, involves using the state to guarantee it and create a “constitutional protection” that immunizes capitalist markets against any interventionist policy aimed at keeping social inequalities within manageable limits.
Furthermore, the authoritarian turn of Trump or Milei — which can be read as an attempt to forcefully resolve the organic crisis of bourgeois hegemony — is in continuity with Hayek and his disciples’ support for the Pinochet dictatorship, and more generally, with the elimination of any minimally democratic (even formal) or “redistributionist” obstacle that threatens the supposed “spontaneous order” of the free market. For the reactionaries of yesterday and today, there is no contradiction between economic “freedom” and the worst political oppression; this includes the racist and anti-immigrant policies of those who continue Hayek’s work.
If a conceptual key to Hayek’s Bastards is the neoliberal core of the “illiberal symptom” of our time, the temporal key to understanding the “paleo” evolution of the Far Right lies in the 1990s.
The starting point of the historical revision of the post-Cold War period undertaken by this new intellectual generation of neoliberals is that the victory of the capitalist “West” over the planned economy, albeit in its most bureaucratic and degraded form, was, to say the least, Pyrrhic. Slobodian assumes that this sector, which, as we shall see, will form the ideological core of the Far Right, experienced the 1990s as a defeat because, despite the liquidation of nationalized property and shock therapies in the former USSR (and by extension in Eastern European countries and the semi-colonial world), public spending continued to expand in the West. To paraphrase Slobodian’s condensed formula, communism was dead, but the Leviathan was still alive and well.
This meant that the institutions of the “enlarged state” (welfare state) that had been created in Western countries in the post-World War II era to counter the appeal of socialism with promises of a certain egalitarianism, sparked by impressive social struggles such as the civil rights movement in the United States, were still in place when the socialist bogeyman had already left the historical scene. Not even the counterrevolution of Reagan and Thatcher had dared to liquidate this heresy — generically called “social justice” — which, for the supporters of absolute freedom from capital, was nothing more than an aberration, a sin. Hence, far-right leaders like Milei claim to see “socialists” everywhere, even at the Davos summit.
According to the Mont Pèlerin partners, the enemy hadn’t disappeared; it had simply mutated to perpetuate itself under other guises. In the 1990s, center-left sectors gave the neoliberal offensive a “progressive” veneer, with rhetoric that aimed to reduce or mitigate identity inequalities and, in some cases, “market failures,” without questioning the neoliberal foundations in the least. Faced with this reality, which included everything from variants of the so-called “third way” to currents of liberal feminism, these “paleo” neoliberals concluded that the fight for “freedom” had begun a new round, no longer against “communism” but against its substitutes: feminism, environmentalism, and the various forms of affirmative action. The evolution of this far-right “cultural battle” led to the current obsession with combating “wokeism,” “cultural Marxism,” and “gender ideology,” all of which are fanciful names for attacking rights and the achievements of oppressed people.
The identification of this new enemy, according to Slobodian, is of strategic importance because it unites the traditional right — traditionalists, Christian evangelicals, nativists — with freak sectors located at the extreme right of the spectrum, including anarcho-capitalist libertarians such as Murray Rothbard.
This original alliance between supporters of “economic freedom” and conservatives who postulate natural forms of (social) hierarchy such as race, gender, and intelligence, with unmistakable connotations of social Darwinism, is referred to by Slobodian and other right-wing theorists, such as John Ganz, as “neofusionism.” In this way, it indicates a relationship of continuity and rupture with respect to the “fusionism” between, on the one hand, the “free market” and, on the other, the Christian Right, which was the basis of the American Republican Party from the 1950s until the Reagan and Bush administrations.
Slobodian points out an inversion of Hayek’s thinking that is crucial to the “populist” turn of the paleolibertarian Right. In his reflections on human nature, Hayek considered that because of the tribal past (life on the savannah), solidarity and loyalty were inscribed in the (pre)history of humanity, and therefore capitalism went against those ancestral sentiments because it is indifferent to loyalties and familiarity. Just as it went against natural tendencies, neoliberalism demanded an “acquired discipline” to educate the “masses,” although it did not rule out the eventual need to make concessions, such as some social support networks. Paleolibertarians turn this Hayekian argument on its head. The “socialist” tendency lies in the “elite” and the state bureaucracy, and what it is about is mobilizing the individualistic impulse and the natural tendency toward private property.
Pat Buchanan’s 1995 Republican primary campaign was a turning point for this alliance between “populists” and radical libertarians. Indeed, one of the ideologues of that campaign was M. Rothbard, who, in an infamous essay defending the pro-Nazi candidate David Duke, proposed a strategy of using “right-wing populism” to strengthen the “paleo-libertarian” movement, mobilizing primarily conservative, white men from the working class (the “European white male revolution,” he called it) behind the goals of “minimal government,” drastic tax cuts for the wealthy and social benefits, the elimination of affirmative action policies, police empowerment, and the vindication of family values. From these ideological shifts, Slobodian identifies three “hard cores” that characterize both the thinking and political strategy of the Far Right: biological determinism (inherited inequalities), “hard borders” (anti-immigrant policies), and gold (“hard currency” versus fiat money).
The intellectual process that Slobodian traces in neoliberal circles of the 1980s and 1990s to justify inequality is the return to pseudoscientific theories with a clear racial bias, both in the fields of biology, evolutionary and cognitive psychology, and sociobiology. The turning point of this biological determinism based on “racial science” recycled with neuroscience and genetic theories was the 1994 publication of The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life by Charles Murry and Richard Herrnstein. Running to more than 800 pages, the objective of this infamous book was to provide pseudoscientific cover for clearly ideological claims, based on the differences between human groups in intelligence quotient (IQ) measured by intelligence tests of the early 20th century. These “natural” differences extended to “racial groups,” so, given their biological determinism, it made no sense to take measures to relativize them. Needless to say, Murray’s book sparked widespread criticism and controversy within the scientific community. In 1994, the same year The Bell Curve was published, paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould categorically refuted the supposed theory of a biologically determined IQ and included this criticism in new editions of his book The Mismeasure of Man. Furthermore, the conception of intelligence that served as the basis for psychometric tests had already been discredited decades earlier by Jean Piaget, who discovered in the systematic errors committed in these tests the key to his constructivist epistemological theory of intelligence based on systematic abstractions from the subject’s own action patterns.
This openly racist theory, which Slobodian summarizes in the concept of “neurocaste,” has spread geographically. This is the basis for policies of selective rejection of immigration from certain impoverished regions of the planet, based on the belief that prosperous societies — that is, white and Western ones — run risks by incorporating people with biologically fewer “capitalist” capabilities, who are therefore candidates for dependence on state assistance, increasing public spending. The so-called “great replacement theory” is a variant within this same xenophobic logic that reproduces the common beliefs of white supremacy.
In recent years, books and academic papers have proliferated on the nature of the (new) Far Right or Radical Right — examining whether it should be considered as an antagonistic tendency against bourgeois democracy (“21st-century fascism”) or a Caesarian variant within existing constitutional regimes. From Trump to Orban and Milei, these right-wing movements emerged with force in the face of the collapse of what Tariq Ali called the “extreme center,” and in a context of asymmetric polarization in which, while left-wing political phenomena are also emerging, it is the Right that has become most radicalized.
The importance of this debate goes far beyond the academic sphere and has acquired a major political-strategic significance. Broadly speaking, there are two strategic positions or hypotheses on the left in response to the rise of the Far Right. One is that of the anti-fascist popular front and its various forms of “cordons sanitaires,” that is, alliances with the very bourgeois forces that brought us here. The other is that of those of us who uphold the need for a working-class and socialist alternative to defeat this new offensive by capital.
This isn’t strictly Quinn Slobodian’s topic or angle of analysis. But by shedding light on the ideological genealogy of the Alt Right, it undoubtedly provides tools for combating it on the ideological terrain, which is another front in the struggle for liberation from capitalist exploitation and oppression.
Originally published in Spanish in Ideas de Izquierda on August 3
Adapted by James Dennis Hoff