Hayek's bastards w/ Quinn Slobodian
58:10 Share

Hello and welcome to Politics Theory Other. My name is Alex Doherty and my guest today is Quinn Slobodian. We talked about his new book, Hayek's Bastards, The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right. Whilst politicians and thinkers of the new right are typically characterised as being fierce opponents of neoliberalism, in the book Quinn shows how the emergence of the populist right developed through a split within the neoliberal movement itself, as the

as the disciples of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises sought to confront the challenge of new social movements as the Cold War ended. We talked about the intellectual development of the new right, why their neoliberal heritage is often ignored, and how their racism and obsession with borders, though often seen as merely irrational and atavistic, contains its own form of economic rationality.

Quinn Slobodian is Professor of International History at Boston University. His books include Globalists, The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, and Crack Up Capitalism, Market Radicals, and The Dream of a World Without Democracy. His most recent book, which was the topic of our conversation, is High Ex-Bastards, The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right.

So Quinn, in the latest issue of the London Review of Books, Perry Anderson has an essay on the neoliberal era and he describes neoliberalism as a regime in the sense of, as he puts it, arrangements assuring cooperative economic relations between the major industrial states, which might or might not take the form of treaties. And he contrasts this, of course, with the Bretton Woods regime of the post-war era.

And he goes on to write in the essay that this system now generated its antibody, deplored in every reputable organ of opinion and respectable political quarter as the sickness of the age, namely populism. The widely differing set of revolts comprised under this label are united in their rejection of the international regime in place in the West since the 1980s. What they oppose is not capitalism as such, but the current socioeconomic version of it, neoliberalism.

Their common enemy is the political establishment that presides over the neoliberal order, comprising the alternating duo of centre-right and centre-left parties that have monopolised government under its rule. Now in the essay, Anderson doesn't really say very much about the intellectual lineage of the new right, but the essay's depiction of the populist right as being vigorously opposed to the neoliberal regime certainly gives the impression that he sees very little intellectual commonality between the new right and the neoliberals.

But one of the core arguments of your book is that the new right is something that actually emerges not outside of neoliberalism, but within it. And that what a figure such as Javier Mele in Argentina, for instance, represents is a dissident strand of neoliberal thought that opposes certain neoliberal orthodoxies of the 80s and the 1990s, but not others. Could you say something on this core argument of the book and where you disagree with a lot of commentary on the new right? Absolutely. No, I think that Perry Anderson essay is a perfect example

starting point. What I would take issue with in his framing is I think it collapses multiple understandings of what we mean when we say the term neoliberalism. So I think there's only one sensible way to have the conversation with the N-word, which is to begin by clarifying our terms. So

The term gets deployed in chaotic and sometimes contradictory ways, but I think that we can separate out three basic ways it is used. One would be, I think, describing a kind of era in global capitalism. So the Bretton Woods era of 1944 to the 1970s is then displaced by the neoliberal era of

And we then have to ask when and if the neoliberal era has ended. Another way of talking about neoliberalism is as a kind of policy package. So the famous Washington Consensus.

was a laundry list of measures that states might take from liberalization of trade to privatization of state-owned enterprise that might differ from nation to nation. So you could then say this country is more neoliberal than that one, even if they all exist in a kind of neoliberal age. Another way of looking at neoliberalism

is to think about it as a form of subjectivity. So people relate to themselves as a bundle of assets to be leveraged and maximized and deployed in the marketplace. And then the fourth way is to think about an intellectual movement and a fairly coherent body of ideas that developed from the 1930s when people first started using the term neoliberalism.

up to the present through these famous names and figures like Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman in conversations that continue up to the present. The danger, I think, of setting things up the way that Perry Anderson does in that essay is it tends to collapse at least two or three of these definitions together.

So I think that we can see what could be called neoliberal globalism. So this system of interlocking multilateral movements.

regulatory arrangements from investment law to the World Trade Organization that developed and fits and starts across the 20th century, but did kind of reach a sort of Pyrrhic moment of victory in the 1990s. I think we can call that neoliberal globalism and we can

at least see it in a productive relationship to some of the thoughts of people like Hayek, who had indeed over those decades promoted the idea that nation states should be subordinated somehow to a larger framework of free trade and private property encasement and protection. So that's one way of organizing global capitalism.

But it's not, I think, the only way to organize global trade and global capitalism. And even in that period we call neoliberalism, we had people like Ronald Reagan, who in the 1980s was using all kinds of aggressive protectionist measures that recall very much the kind of things Trump is doing now.

to put pressure on the Japanese to buy more of American products, to keep Japanese imports out of the American market. And more recently, the lineage that I play out in the book is to point out that even some of the big names of the supposed recent populist rupture with neoliberalism, whether it's the hardline leave contingent in the Brexit movement,

or many of the people involved in Trump's movement itself, or certainly Bolsonaro or Millet, are people who are not necessarily rejecting the principle of global capitalist competition. They're not rejecting the idea that economic freedom trumps other kinds of freedom. They are consistent in many ways with certain parts of the neoliberal movement's core claims about how states should be run and organized.

They're just disagreeing with a particular arrangement that we've come to know as neoliberal globalism from the 1990s and arguing for and enacting a new arrangement that could be considered a mutation of neoliberalism, could be seen as something that is post or other than neoliberalism. But in many cases, it's coming out of debates and conversations internal to neoliberalism.

neoliberal ideology rather than an outside that is rejecting and condemning neoliberalism as such. In general, I think that the framing that Anderson uses there is an unfortunate one because it buys into a particular narrative of the last 10 years whereby

We can understand populism as a popular uprising of the left-behinds of globalization who feel like they've been poorly treated by the settlement of the 90s and early 2000s. Whereas if you look at the supply side of populist movements, in other words, the intellectuals and the party actors, more often than not, we're talking about not ways to

roll back or soften the forces of global competition, but ways to accelerate it and often make harder the kind of moves and strategies used to open and retain market share. I suppose in some sense, it seems slightly strange for a British intellectual like Perry Anderson to sort of confuse the popular constituency with

for the contemporary new right with the leaders of those movements? Because the Brexit vote, for instance, seems like a more cut and dried example of what you're talking about than some others, perhaps. I mean, if we think about who is...

it was who launched the project and successfully carried the project of exiting from the EU. We're talking about very transparent right-wing neoliberals. It's the Britannia Unchained group, it's Nigel Farage, it's much of the Conservative Party. Obviously all people who show tremendous fealty to Margaret Thatcher and her counterparts elsewhere. Yeah, I mean, if I can just jump off on that, I think that this is something that I sort of performed a bit of a self-critique about years ago during Trump One.

It was a critique that I put in an article in Theory, Culture and Society of what was called the new constitutionalism literature. So Perry Anderson cites Wolfgang Streich's book Buying Time in that LRB essay. And it's a good example of this new constitutionalism idea. It's very interesting and persuasive way of looking at the 1990s as a time when

nation states either under coercion or voluntarily decided to cede part of their sovereignty up to multilateral trade agreements, be they NAFTA, the EU itself, or the WTO.

in a kind of compromise for the market openness that they hoped would come from that and the increased prosperity and economic chances that might follow. So if you're a really poor country, it's not really that great to be outside of something like a WTO because then you're just exposed to the arbitrary unilateralism of larger powers like the United States anyway, constantly.

subsidizing its own agriculture, breaking its own supposed free trade principles. So if you can at least nominally take them to court in Geneva, which you could under the WTO, then that's something. So new constitutionalism suggested that the 90s created this moment where

The interests of big capital and the most powerful countries in the world coincided with a legalization or a juridicization of economic activity such that new entities were created that sat above states and acted as arbiters and enforcers of competition and openness.

So because there was, I would say in retrospect, an overly seamless depiction of those interests in which capital C capital teamed up with the nation states and, you know, created a cockpit in Geneva to observe the global economy writ large.

When anything happened to disrupt that consensus or if people spoke out against that consensus, it could only be understood as people who were not in that interlocked set of interests. So if all of capital, all big states are all together and then suddenly people reject this, then they must be outsiders. They must not be capitalists. They must not be elites. They must not be powerful actors at all.

Whereas now if you look at specific sectors and you ask not what is capital doing, but what sectors of capital are doing what, then it starts to become much more clear. And you see that, for example, Trump's big moves in his first term on steel and aluminum were,

came directly out of the lobbying and close relationship that he and people in his cabinet had to the steel industry in the United States, which indeed was getting massively undercut by Chinese competition in the early 2000s.

And was desperate for some sort of protection. And they lobbied successfully for support for their sector. And the first big rollout of what we now see as an epochal transformation in the world trading system was to protect American steel.

So, you know, if you look at that from one angle, you say this is a response to the creed of the Midwest and the steel towns that have gone under, maybe. And that was definitely an effective campaign tactic. Because everything is couched in terms of jobs, of course. And I mean, it seems it seems as if one is forgetting the standard advice. If you hear right wing politicians talking about jobs, they're typically talking about profits. Talking about profits. Yeah. So then you look more closely and that's

what it ended up being. And Brexit is another perfect case in point. I think to this day, one of the best analyses I've seen of Brexit is by the French sociologists Marlène Banquet and Théo Bourgeron.

where they say, why was it that certain sectors of finance were for leave and other sectors of finance were for remain? Well, it's simple. Some have short time horizons for profit and others have longer time horizons. Some put more emphasis on stability and order. Others were willing to accept high risks for the possibility of high reward. And so insurance was over there and asset managers were over there and hedge fund managers and other sort of chancers were on the other side of the

So I think there's a way that by now, almost a decade after that moment, 2016 of Trump and Brexit, we need to get away from an analysis that is just based on this vertical analysis of top and bottom, above and below the elites and the rabble and the elites wanted neoliberalism and the rabble are the ones who have a confused sense of justice and injured people.

on their side. No, it's a fight within capitalism. It's a fight between sectors of capital. Some of them feel like they've been hard done by and some have been by the globalization settlement and they're seeking a new settlement. That's what it is. And presumably for you, this isn't just an academic exercise. This isn't just about intellectual history. Presumably you feel that

not capturing the current moment in the right way. It has real strategic consequences for how the left seeks to combat the new right. Yeah, well, I think that, once again, it's worth looking at the way that, and of course, I mean, just as an aside, let it be said that I have an enormous amount of respect for Perry Anderson. This is not really a beef with him personally, but more like a framing.

Which is that if you frame it as he did, that the right has a critique of capitalism and a critique of the free movement of finance and a critique of the free movement of people and migration as being disruptive, then the left doesn't really have – this is how he frames it – the left doesn't really have a leg to stand on because –

They don't permit themselves a critique of the disruptive effects of immigration, and they only target the economic questions. I mean, there is a kind of a low key anti-woke approach.

to both his recent work and Wolfgang Streich's work more obviously. A little less low-key in Streich's case. Very much less low-key, right. But I mean, you can hear bits of that. And I think that if you've set up the whole narrative of the last decade the way that I described it, then it makes sense that you have created a kind of checkmate where if the left doesn't now come out against...

immigration, they have lost the entire mandate of heaven that they might otherwise enjoy. But if you see, as I think is patently obvious on closer inspection, that the right is employing their own kind of economistic vision to

that is in its own way designed primarily for the siphoning of value towards a small elite stratum. And you utterly demystify the claim of popular enrichment as somehow the endgame of what pass for populist right-wing parties these days.

then I think, you know, you could have hopefully some kind of a pedagogical effect where you can at least not make people feel as they had in Germany or they were being pushed to feel in recent years, that either you take the Zara-Wagenknecht line and accept anti-immigration and nativism as your new position or else,

you're doomed for the dustbin of history. Amazing fact of the last German election that many people would have noticed is that after she left the party with that right-wing socialist, if such a thing is possible, line, then the left ended up doing much better. The left did twice as well as people expected, had their best election result in years, and not on the basis of

compromising towards a narrative by which

Everything about globalization is bad, and therefore we need to reject, go down the list, you know, finance, trade, immigrants, international law and everything else, too. I think that's a really essential, you know, we need to sort of be able to look back at the 1990s, not as one big conspiracy that was imposed on us in ways that needs to be shredded now, but something that contained, as people saw in a clear eyed way at the time, the

alternative versions of globalization, which actually needed to be salvaged and nurtured. All right. Well, let's maybe turn to the intellectual roots of the new right. So in the first chapter of the book, you describe how in the 1960s, Friedrich Hayek, perhaps the most well-known neoliberal intellectual, began to

began to dabble with the inclusion of evolutionary theory into his understanding of social order. And you refer to what you call the Savannah story that Hayek told, which describes the supposed social organization of early humans with people living in small tribal groups organized along solidaristic principles and with low levels of individuation.

Can you expand a bit on that story and how he then describes humanity's departure from that situation and what the implications of that story were for the neoliberal new right and what you describe as the new fusionism?

The idea that he operates with is that we were hardwired by our extended stay on theoretical, you know, idiomatic Savannah. And so in certain ways, our behavior has been encoded in such a way that we think about outsiders as threats and we only recognize people in our extended kin group as people we can trust.

And that led to a more or less flat line of development across a great period of human history, which needed to be transcended. So the real story of

Humanity for Hayek is when we stopped being happy with our simple lives in small groups and began to organize, tax one another, establish agriculture. So we needed to start to see each other not as kin, but as anonymous counterparts with whom we could transact with.

And the long story that he tells is from the savannah to what he calls the Great Society. And the Great Society is something that is global. And it involves us being in constant exchange with people who we will never see and we will never know the name of.

and who we might not even like if we ever spoke to. So the great victory and success of liberalism and capitalism was to create an anonymous mass of people who transacted as customers, clients, provisioners, service takers, and service providers. So for him, the moment at which we tried to

reestablish Savannah-like relations by either decommodifying our interactions or building our sense of solidarity on some shared trait, like, you know, we are related or we have the same skin color or we live in the same nation, then we were actually starting to undermine and erode the great society, right? This wonderful accomplishment of anonymous ass life.

So that was his approach, which was in itself kind of antagonistic towards the idea of borders and certainly had in it, at least potentially, a cosmopolitan aspiration or a universalist way of thinking about what humanity should be.

The normal story of the New Right would be that people were appalled by the effects of Americanization and commodification and materialism on life, especially in Europe after the Second World War. And as a backlash against that, they sought to create readouts and retreats and spaces in which more qualitative rather than quantitative relationships could be restored.

whether that was small communes in the countryside or the nation itself, somehow a sense of fullness that was not based on market relations would need to be rebuilt. And that is actually an accurate description of much of the thinking of the European far right and includes parts of what became the AFD as well. The twist, though, and the twist that I follow in the book is that Hayek's

didn't remain a globalist in that strong sense or a universalist in the sense of imagining humanity as one large undifferentiated mass that only differed according to its ability to tap into the world's resources and make use of them in clever ways and exchange them with one another. Rather, partially because of his interest in evolutionary biology,

He started to see in the 1960s and then developed with ever more focus until his death in the 90s, a vision of populations as, you know, subgroups within the world population. So,

In evolutionary biology and genetics, they use the term population, meaning very extended group of kin that has developed over long periods of time within which there are some shared inherited characteristics, but then inevitable mutations and adaptive selection of adaptive traits that then change the nature of the population over time.

So Hayek starts to see the world actually as being composed of populations. And he sees the world's populations as having differing levels of capacity to operate effectively inside of a market society. So some populations had developed certain qualities of thrift, austerity, discipline,

acquisitiveness, inquisitiveness that made them better able to make use of the world's resources and in turn made them able to conquer, subjugate and introduce market relations to other parts of the world that were less well-equipped.

And that the history of the modern world wasn't just one of the slow, gradual emergence of one big ball of humans, but it was about subgroups in interaction with each other with less adaptive populations being slowly smothered by more adaptive ones and the ability to transmit those traits to sort of

make one population be as thrifty or as entrepreneurial as another one was somewhat limited. So he didn't believe that the ability to be a good market actor was written in the genes. He was very deliberate to point that out. He thought it was not a matter of genetic evolution, but cultural evolution. But cultural evolution itself took time.

So, in other words, there was this really subtle and hard to get your head around, but hard to miss also if you start reading his work from the 70s and 80s and 90s. You know, introduction through the back door of all these old fashioned ideas, really, of tradition, culture, civilization, nation, and really even race.

Because who are these populations in other terms? Well, they are those things, their cultures, their traditions, their races, their empires. And this ended up being very interesting to especially American conservatives, but also German conservatives, because they saw now that you could have a baseline neoliberal understanding, which is

thinking about the world primarily in terms of economic freedoms and competition. But that could also be grafted onto an understanding of humans as divided into subgroups that might have shared traits that we would otherwise call racial traits or cultural traits.

So, I mean, in a way, they were just taking the long road back to Herbert Spencer and social Darwinism. And the resonances are very strong because by the 1980s, if you see the things that Hayek is presenting at the Heritage Foundation and the way he's being received there, it's really just a return to a language of survival of the fittest.

So there was a culturalization and then for some people who I describe in the book, a racialization of neoliberal theory through a creative and sometimes distorted appropriation of Hayek's own ideas of cultural evolution.

Would you say that at least for the earlier work with Hayek and people who were more true to his thought, that their position allows them to, in spite of the, as you say, a sort of social Darwinist turn, it allows them still to repudiate, say, Nazi race science because the culturalist argument does not totally exclude certain populations. There's not a sort of a genetic basis for inequality. Yeah.

Well, so here's one thing that I think it's good to bear in mind, that is that the interesting thing about studying neoliberal theory through these thinkers and through the debates that they have from decade to decade is

is they are not debates or discussions happening in isolation or abstraction. So these are really, even though they might sound like it sometimes, not ivory tower debates. Most of the time, they're actually movement-based debates. So more often than not, the things that happen in the theory, as it were, the doctrine, are happening as a way to patch up, knit together, make more tactically effective decisions

certain political moves within certain political moments. So I say that because the question of Nazism and racism is really a perfect example of this. And I wrote an article about this years ago called Perfect Capitalism, Imperfect Humans. And someone like Mises would say, hypothetically,

That race science is been poorly done. It doesn't have that much meaning. But at the same time, he will concede the point that there are, as he puts it, something along the lines of few white populations that would not be horrified by the large presence of a black or brown population in their midst.

Similarly, Hayek, in a series of op-eds in the Times of London, supported Margaret Thatcher's call to end immigration in the late 1970s for the same reason. He said, you know, as unfortunately, human nature is such that we reject those who appear different than us.

And there's a long period of assimilation that is necessary. And he says that he had seen that himself in his native Vienna when Jews from the more eastern provinces or fleeing pogroms from the Russian Empire had made their way into Vienna and had been treated as outsiders and were not able to assimilate. So you can see that there's a first there's a sort of a tactical rejection of the teachings of the Savannah story.

But then also an appeal back to it when it's helpful to say, you know, we are humans. We we are still, quote unquote, tribal beings somehow at our core. And we need to constantly be aware of that and militate against that. But then also, as in the case of Thatcher, you can say, well, I guess this part of her theory is acceptable, right?

Because, after all, you know, we have to make concessions for a political conjuncture, and we can also build larger coalitions by allowing for things that might be more popular at a given time. So the question of race science was, for one thing, a kind of contingent one, I think, that could be treated differently at different moments, depending on

what seemed to be the primary enemy of the parties or the politicians that they were aligned with. And then also they were open to a better version of these things if better science were discovered. So Mises says, you know, the Gobineau craniology and the Nazi race science is nonsense, but we do need to

remain open to the idea that there might be a better race science out there that could guide us in the future. And this is a kind of a parenthetical reference that most people who follow Musis interpret away, but those who want to cling to it, in other words, the racist libertarian faction, really hold up this idea

parenthetical side that Mises makes and claim that as Hans Hermann Hoppe has claimed and Murray Rothbard has claimed, this is evidence that Mises saw the biological reality of race. And the problem is not people were thinking about scientific race, but just they hadn't gotten the science right yet.

On Hopper and Rothbard, so these are intellectuals who are much more overt and unapologetic about their racism and there's much less ambiguity than there is in the case of Hayek or even Mises.

For that reason, it can seem perhaps difficult to imagine that figures like them and others receive the support of some very well-known neoliberal institutions with strong links to more conventional neoliberal policy. I mean, you talk about the role of the business press, think tanks such as the Institute of Economic Affairs and, of course, the Mont Pelerin Society in providing support to some quite virulently racist thinkers.

Can you talk a bit about that and also your sense of the degree to which there was disquiet within those institutions at propagating the views of outright white supremacists? Yeah, I mean, Murray Rothbard and Hans Hermann Hoppe are good examples of these intellectuals who are not just intellectuals. They're also think tank entrepreneurs. They're policy entrepreneurs, right?

And they're performing a really important convening function by gathering people from different points of the political compass and giving them a sense of common purpose. Their embrace of race science is itself pretty symptomatic of that and interesting to track. I mean, Rothbard famously in the 1960s was extremely supportive of Black power and Black separatism. So he was...

a supporter of Malcolm X over MLK. He believed that there should be Black nationalism in the United States and even a breakaway African-American polity somewhere in the American South. This was part of his attempt to draw people away from the New Left, in part, into the libertarian movement. But it was also reflective of his idea that

The Savannah story that Hayek saw as something that could and only should be transcended could also serve an important social glue function in the event that you succeeded and conventional states had been dismantled.

So even if you wouldn't want people to primarily orient their lives around just finding people of the same skin color and then banding together, you would want a world of totally privatized and commodified exchange in Rothbard's projection. Nevertheless, you would need something there to replace the trust-building function that conventional state institutions filled. And in his mind, racial identity would serve that.

as some of them would put openly, would decrease transaction costs within this sort of future anarcho-capitalist polity. He was also really interested in IQ from an early moment. And he and others were interested in how biology and science could be used as a refutation to the egalitarian push of the post-1960s moment.

So the idea that biology, as he put it at some point, was like a rock that stood in the way of egalitarianism was something that he really embraced. And one of the moments that I describe in the book is Charles Koch paying for something called the Second Symposium on Human Differentiation that happened in Gestad, the resort town in Switzerland, in the early 1970s.

And that was the whole tenor of the discussion. It was one libertarian and neoliberal and conservative after another saying the new left is denying human difference. They're claiming we're interchangeable. They're claiming we can all live in this

this renewed caveman type primitive style existence, we need to remind them that humans are different and there's ways that we can rank them ordinarily. There's ways that we can group them meaningfully. And we can't in the end all act alike or actually equal.

So far from that being a position that led to you being ostracized or something or marginalized within the neoliberal movement in the 1960s and 70s, I would say it was closer to the consensus view.

Where you put the emphasis mattered, of course, whether you put the emphasis on sex difference and saw the attempt of women to seize equal rights as disruptive of efficiency and output, or you saw the problem in affirmative action would be another question, or if you saw the difference in matters of brain power as in with those focused on IQ. But there's really remarkable archival moments, I think, in the book where, for example, a

There are a couple of people from the Institute for Humane Studies, which was originally set up in Menlo Park, right close to Stanford, and then later moved to become effectively part of George Mason University with a huge endowment from the Charles Koch Foundation. It's a conversation that I came across in the archives there between someone working for the Institute for Humane Studies, who were talking about William Shockley, who at that time was

a notorious eugenicist and racist. He was one of the inventors of the semiconductor, so was very famous and wealthy in early Silicon Valley, but was notorious for his ideas of race-based differences in IQ and his proposition that he pay people who had low IQ to sterilize themselves. In this internal correspondence, the person from the Institute for Humane Studies says that

Well, you know, based on what I know of the African-American population, I think they would take a lot less than that to be sterilized. So we should actually offer less. So in other words, they were outflanking one of the most notorious racists in the United States from the right. I mean, to them, Shockley was actually not racist enough. So if you bear in mind that The Bell Curve, written by Charles Murray and Richard Hernstein, that came out in 1995, was a bestseller and remains in print.

and drew a huge amount of television and press coverage and was premised on the idea that there are large and persistent and incurable gaps in especially black and white intelligence. If that was ready for the salon, if you could

chat about that stuff on mainstream news, then it's hard to see what actually the lines of taboo were. You know, the more you go back and look at the discussions of race, you realize that the idea of the revival of race science is a bit of a misnomer. It's kind of been there the whole time. Presumably part of the reason we don't tend to think of that form of racism in connection with neoliberalism is because

of the trajectory of places like the United States and Britain through the 1980s and 90s, that despite the fact that these were run by figures who were indeed neoliberal, those societies became more multicultural and successfully multicultural. Yeah, but it was because that was happening that then this rose as a more powerful movement.

counterforce and reaction. I mean, a wonderful biographical trajectory there is John O'Sullivan, one of Thatcher's speechwriters. He then became an editor of the National Review in the United States.

And then about 10 or 15 years ago, he moved to Hungary and became the head of something called the Danube Institute, reviving all of the very ideas that in some narratives would be the opposite of neoliberalism, quote unquote, the idea of national populism, the importance of hard borders, the importance of dropping out of multilateral trade agreements, restoring national sovereignty. It's the same person. He actually hasn't changed his mind yet.

He's been saying the same thing from the 1960s to the 2020s. What has changed is the conjuncture, the moment of global economic change, and the container within which they see it best suited to fulfill their goals. So I think that's why I think a framework that really fetishizes, let's say, multilateral trade agreements versus,

bilateral trade agreements or reciprocal tariffs of the kind that Trump has been proposing, we shouldn't be making our judgments about what neoliberalism is based on those passing forms. We should actually look at what is the intention of the actors who are promoting those things and what is the moment in which they are promoting them. And what is often, I think, the most important question, who do they see as the primary enemy at a given time? Because

Much that seems very confusing about the far-right's politics these days becomes much more clear if you realize that with the end of the Cold War and the demise, formally speaking, of the state socialist threat in 1991 with the dissolution of the Soviet Union,

there was a real moment of confrontation with the question of whether victory was real or simply apparent. And if it was only apparent or illusory, then there must be another fight to be fought and the enemy must still be out there. It had just changed its coloring and had changed its outward appearance. And indeed, immediately after the Berlin Wall falls,

The neoliberal intellectuals and the conservatives are getting together and saying, like, who's the new enemy? We know that this fight has not been won. We know that the statism still exists. We know that Leviathan still exists. We know that the state still spends a large amount of GDP, you know, from year to year. Who's behind this? Apparently, it wasn't just the Reds. It wasn't just the communists.

And they discover new enemies. They discover environmentalists. They discover feminists. They discover gay rights activists. They discover anti-racists. And that remains up to now, you know, the new enemy, right? The Vatican did this in the mid-1990s, discovering gender ideology as the new origin of the culture of death that was being rolled out by the United Nations and the World Health Organization by mainstreaming

reproductive rights and women's equality. And that remained then and became a very effective way to build a universalist sense of threat against which they could build a common front of Catholics from arch-traditionalists to people who had become more liberal. So I think that if you had dropped down

into discussion in the Vatican in 1955 and said, you know, do you know that gender ideology is going to be the thing you're most worried about in 40 years? They wouldn't have known what you were talking about.

But 40 years later, it is the most important thing for them. And it's not because the Vatican has changed. It's because the world has changed and they have new enemies they need to fight against. So that dialogic or dialectical way of understanding what neoliberalism is, is for me essential. It's not something that exists in a void or a vacuum. It's something that is constantly being developed today.

through attempts to maneuver through a new landscape of opposition and threats and opportunities. And thus, it mutates as it goes. It changes shape as it progresses.

Another figure who you write about in the book is the journalist and white supremacist Peter Brimelow, who in the 1980s worked for the financial press, including the Financial Post, Forbes, Fortune. And you discuss how Brimelow is today largely discussed in terms of his racism, but that there's relatively little focus on his career in business journalism and his attachment to neoliberal thought. And you write in the book that seeing Brimelow more clearly helps us see the far right more clearly too.

you expand on that a little bit and particularly the way discussion of the new right often focuses on their racism and sexism while ignoring their economic and material concerns? Yeah, I think this is another consequence of focusing too much on what scholars of populism call the demand side or what draws people to new political formations and not enough on the supply side or what kind of scripts and narratives are being offered by the ideologues and the thinkers.

If you just look at the demand side, I think you end up just defaulting to these big baggy words like hate or resentment. But if you look at the supply side, you can see how that hate or resentment is being directed or how it's being given a form or a shape.

And there, not surprisingly, there is a question of economic motivation, of capitalism as a structuring system within which these new scripts and narratives are being written.

For some reason, those seem to rarely come into mainstream or even scholarly understandings of where the far right comes from. If capitalism comes in, it's usually the thing against which the far right is rebelling or something that has caused a certain psychic or material damage in populations, which leads them to become more attracted to ideologies of the far right. But

But the idea that there might be something within far-right ideology itself that has a capitalist rationality is, I think, not a way of approaching the matter that is very common, perhaps partially because of the overdetermination of the Nazis and Italian fascism, which, again, falsely have been described as something that has nothing to do with capitalism.

Peter Brimelow, for me, offers a helpful way to get into this, give it some meat or definition, because he's someone who starts out very much as just an average financial journalist. One of his first books is called Wall Street Gurus. It's about investment newsletters, which were and in some ways still are a very big deal, subscription services that give you advice on which stocks to pick.

It's an important background for me because I understand in the book people's attraction to the far right, sometimes as a kind of investment strategy. So a common term in financial circles is the flight to safety or the flight to security. So when there's a downturn,

Or volatility in the market, people will flee to safety. And what that used to mean is American treasury bonds, because they tend to be pretty stable in returns over the years, even if they're not the most profitable thing to hold. Or it means buying gold, which becomes really relevant because they have a whole chapter about how the right wing promotes the idea of a flight to the natural shiny metal of gold under moments of insecurity and

But it's also, I think, in certain ways about a flight to the safety of the privileges that whiteness affords and something that provides a sense of security and an advantage, even a material advantage in times of crisis or precarity. But in the case of Brimelow, he is just a guy talking about the stock market, talking about things like that in his columns, right?

But then he starts to get really interested in the late 1980s in the question of immigration. And there's a question of whether or not the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Union and the breakup of Yugoslavia weren't signs that there was a right moment to rethink sovereignty and rethink national belonging in a new way. And that in some ways, the 1990s was a revenge of

Wilsonianism, because so many of these large multinational states or these specific large multinational states had broken up into their constituent nationally defined units. So it seemed that there was something resurgent about the idea of organizing polities around a common identity or ethnic background kinship.

So people were already talking about that and thinking about that. So the debate about immigration was in the air and material terms, there were more numbers of people entering the United States at that time than there had been in decades previous, partially because the economy was doing relatively well. And there was a big pull factor for people to come into the economy where work, where laborers were needed. Brimelow,

starts talking about immigration not so much as a matter of the need to save the purity of the American bloodline, but in economic terms. So the argument becomes that immigrants, especially ones from non-white, non-Western backgrounds, tended to be not as adept market actors, so they would end up being parasitic on the welfare state.

and they would actually end up having a net negative economic effect rather than net positive.

And that seems now like a position embraced by both American political parties and not controversial at all to say that there should be actually a bit more of a tighter selection for incoming immigrants based on economic principles. This tallies with the point system in Australia. Right, exactly. And Canada. But at the time, this is another one of those things that

In the course of research, I was actually borderline shocked to discover that in the late 1980s, every July 4th in the Wall Street Journal, they published the same editorial and the editorial said there shall be open borders. That's what they meant. Yeah.

They meant that the southern border, the U.S.-Mexican border, should be opened, should be demilitarized. And why? Because this was a certain high point of faith in the self-ordering qualities of the market and the ability of private forces to produce the best outcomes for everybody. And so for Brimelow to be in that world of The Wall Street Journal and of fact, adjacent to it, Forbes and Fortune, and say instead,

No, actually, that's not just like a security problem, quote unquote, or a social issue, but that actually doesn't make economic sense, was like a dissident position for the financial press in the late 1980s, early 1990s. And again, we would think that would be a defense of an ethno state or something, you know, that membership should be based along ethnic lines, right?

But it was, as I describe it in the book, more of a defense of an ethno-economy because his argument against immigration is not primarily about blood and soil and connection to a community of fate or some shared characteristics, even less than Hayek's in a way, but more about just saying this doesn't make sense economically and we need to move more towards a Japanese-Australian relationship.

Canadian model of highly economistic selection. And that was a shift happening on the American right at the time, which I described. So people like Fukuyama and Ben Wattenberg, other conservatives, much softer conservatives, were phrasing it not as a need to, you know, select for people with a particular ethnic background, which Brimelow was saying,

But we need to do what they call designer immigration. And designer immigration meant, you know, get highly skilled workers. I mean, it's the H-1B debate all over again that we've been having now. So for me, the intervention there was to say, if we want to understand the shift in American politics towards a policy of hard borders and ever harder borders, and now, of course, a policy of

mass deportation. We need to not primarily see that as a cultural backlash or a defense of some mystical idea of making America great again, necessarily. But you can also follow it even in the policy economic debates of people like Brimelow, who became seen as the most wild-eyed acolytes of alt-right movement circa 2016.

Going back to your point about the blind spot that there seems to be around seeing a figure like Brimelow in terms of his economic thinking.

Do you think that's something that characterizes just liberal analysis of the new right? And of course, we know it's very common for liberals to see racism as being basically exogenous to capitalism and as a sort of atavistic impulse. But would you see it as something that also characterizes a lot of left analysis too? It's a good question. I mean, I do think that we have by now started to develop a good alternative analysis of the far right, which

which is not primarily one that, you know, assumes they have bad feelings in their hearts or are undereducated or crazy. I think the work of your, you know, your close collaborator, Richard Seymour, and people like Wendy Brown and Melinda Cooper and Alberto Toscano and many others, the Salvage Collective, Andreas Malm, have proposed now, I think, good ideas

interpretations of the far right that combine an attention to material interests, you know, global conjuncture, and then the kind of libidinal attachments that might get interwoven and attached onto those things.

So I think we're doing okay, I think. I think that there's a sense of disorientation now in the second Trump administration about what it is we're looking at. And there, I would say...

The analysis I offer in this book is, you know, could be updated more with, let's say, some of the things I've been writing in the last few months. So I think the arrival of Silicon Valley as almost a vanguard formation inside of MAGA is much more aggressive than I think almost anyone anticipated, right? I mean, as recently as December, nobody thought that

Musk was going to effectively move into the White House and begin, you know, taking meetings with Modi like on site and, you know, trying to put the entire social security system onto Java in the next week and a half or whatever he now has laid out. I mean, there's a level of takeover with this incredible hubris associated with the prosthetic capacities of technology and AI in particular that

That I think is even one step beyond whatever I'm describing in that book. I think the I think whatever the alt right was in 2016, 17 in that sort of uneasy and the AFD, as I describe it in the book, is similar, which is an uneasy coalition and alliance between fiscal conservatives, people dissatisfied with multilateral trade settlement and

And then hardcore ethno-nationalists and race realists to say, we're fed up with all of the mainstream legacy parties. We need to create new ones. In the case of MAGA, we need to basically take over the GOP. In the case of the AFD, we need to storm this from the margins.

I mean, that insurgent moment, I think, can be explained pretty effectively by this linking of certain material interests and a new neo-fusionist combination of naturalism and often abstract traditionalism. But the overlay of that with what Alexander Karp calls the technological republic as the horizon for action is

is something that I think we're still all trying to get our heads around. So those of us who have been paying attention to the idea of sectors and the idea that there are winners and losers, even amongst the powerful in globalization, and there's resentment at the top as well as at the bottom, are probably better suited to understand the most recent, you know, head-spinning, surprising turn of events that we're watching now. You've been listening to Politics Theory Other.

If you've been enjoying PTO and finding it useful, please do consider rating or reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts. It really does help to bring in new listeners. The show's music and graphic design is produced by Planet B Productions. Thanks for listening. I'll be back next week.