Reviews: Book: ‘Hayek’s Bastards’ by Quinn Slobodian Essay: ‘The rise of end times Fascism’ by Naomi Klein & Astra Taylor

The populist right of today (Trump, Orban, Milei etc) are not the rebels of neoliberalism. They are just carriers of a new mutation of it. They are neoliberalism’s bastard offspring, Quin Slobodian says.

He calls it the new fusionist movement.

“Many supposed disruptors of the status quo are agents less of a backlash against global capitalism than a frontlash within it.

Slobodian's Hayek's Bastards is like a novel of neoliberalism. He has a cast of characters, old and new thinkers from Murray Rothbard to Argentina's Milei, which he follows throughout the book from the early days of neoliberalism to the present day, tracing how their ideas echoed and mutated. 

This tale begins at the end of the Cold War, where Slobodian says that neoliberals, instead of rejoicing in the victory of communism, were in fact anxious. They felt communism had not left but disguised itself in the new leftism movements of environmentalism, civil rights, feminism and the influence of supranational institutions such as the EU and the UN etc. The fight was far from over.

“ Having fought back a red tide, we are now in danger of being engulfed by a green one”

One enemy was the left and their goal of egalitarianism which wanted to reduce inequality. So, what did the neoliberals do? Slobodian shows that they turned to science and biology. Creating the neoliberal market society was a task greater than economics: they needed to return to understanding human nature. 

They challenged the fundamental principle of egalitarianism by using biology to argue that we are not all equal due to differences of race and IQ. Some of us - you can guess who- had the advantageous features to survive in market society and others, the less evolved societies, did not. Therefore the left's mission to address inequality was pointless.

In 1994, Murray and co-author Richard Herrnstein published The Bell Curve, which argued there was a link between “race” and “intelligence”. A more recent example with similar ideas that Slobodian gives is Thilo Sarrazin’s book Germany Abolishes Itself published in 2015 at the height of the refugee crisis. His ideas are very close to those of the AFD and the Austrian Freedom Party today.

Alongside this, many began to argue that “cultural homogeneity is a precondition for social stability, and thus the peaceful conduct of market exchange and enjoyment of private property”. They demanded what Slobodian calls an ethno-economy. Thus, some people, of certain ethnicities, they argued, are just not meant to prosper and the perfect and balanced market society must exclude them.

 And how to protect this cultural homogeneity? Closed borders. Free movement for capital and goods but not for all people. The anti-immigration rhetoric of today's populist leaders certainly echoes this.

The third set of characters Slobodian focuses on are the ‘goldbugs’ in love with hard money. Slobodian says these catastrophe libertarians’ predicted an impending collapse and potched it as survivalism: you need to secure your hard assets and precious metals. The end of the gold standard was resented by many neoliberals and one if them called it the descent into “monetary socialism” as paper notes meant no restriction on welfare state expenditure. The fake fiat paper money was just designed by political elites to purchase votes and power. But the collapse is a question of when not if.

This apocalyptic narrative planted the seeds for a deep mistrust of public authority. 

‘Fun’ fact: in 2014, the AfD opened an online gold shop to collect revenue for party financing. Gold, they said, is ‘crisis-proof and future orientated”.

Steven Bannon, a prominent MAGA figure, shares a similar message on his podcast: the world will end, the markets will crash, be prepared. At the same time, Bannon makes a business opportunity out of this, telling his listeners to ‘Buy Birch Gold’, a metals firm he partners with.

Naomi Klein & Astra Taylor also warn of this phenomenon in their essay in the Guardian: “The governing ideology of the far right in our age of escalating disasters has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism”. She explains how the elites of today embrace a belief that the apocalypse is coming: a trend not alien to fascism which Umberto Eco named in his essay as the “Armageddon complex” which is a fantasy of defeating enemies in a final battle. The difference, Klein says, is that today fascism doesn’t have a “future horizon”. Instead, they prepare by building bunkers, planning escapes to Mars and fortressed, free economic zones where the rules of democracy, government oversight and due process do not apply. The best example of this is Prospera in the Honduras which is a semi-autonomous charter city and Special Economic Zone (ZEDE), founded by a U.S corporation that has raised $120 million in investments, including from venture-capital funds backed by well-known Silicon Valley billionaires like Peter Thiel, Sam Altman and Marc Andreessen. 

I would also argue that Trump’s push for American autarky draws from the same end times fantasy and survivalism. His threats to annex Canada, Greenland, take the Panama canal or Ukraine’s critical resources are elements of a vision to build the fortressed nation that can endure the coming shocks by securing land and stockpiling critical resources. This is accompanied by the extreme, alarmist rhetoric of immigration and ‘wokism’ as the existential threat to America. As the panic and chaos grow, so does his control.

Slobodian says the ‘new fusionists’ have 3 core ideas: ‘hardwired human nature, hard borders, and hard money’. I don't disagree that there is overlap with today's populist right on the topics of hard borders and race-inspired nationalism. But hard money? Human nature? These I find harder to link as directly. Trump’s protectionism and rejection of globalisation is more than just hard borders for people, it's hard borders for capital: a notion that traditional neoliberals would disagree with.

One can also question his attempt to link the cast of characters he introduces as the fusionists and paleo-Libertarians as the true offspring of Hayek’s ideas. Slobodian himself says that many of Hayek's students, inspired by him, actually ended up with ideas contradicting those of their founder.

It seems to me that Trump is neoliberalism’s moody, rebellious teenager. It can break the rules but it still lives under the roof of neoliberalism.