Hayek's Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right

Hayek’s Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right

Source: Hayek’s Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right, Geneva Graduate Institute, 1:33:12, uploaded 2025-05-22, Watch Later position 284.

Quinn Slobodian begins with a strange speech by Charles Murray. In 2006, at a dinner marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Atlas Network, Murray imagines what the organisation will discuss at its fiftieth anniversary in 2031. The familiar language of economic liberty and free trade has disappeared. The future battle concerns science and the genetic proof of group differences. Slobodian uses that prediction to ask where the populist right came from. It may look like a revolt against neoliberalism. His account traces a frontlash, in which parts of the right extend neoliberal ideas into race, intelligence, territory, money, and force.

Murray and the return to nature

Murray’s imagined 2031 speech says that the left has spent forty years demanding equality and that genetic science will eventually deliver the demand’s death blow. He predicts proof of the ways women differ from men, Black people from white people, poor people from the rich, and Dutch people from Italians. Once science confirms fixed group differences, he asks, what moral and political ground remains for a policy that tries to remove them?

At a later Mont Pèlerin Society meeting in the Galápagos Islands, Murray develops the same idea under the title “The Rediscovery of Human Nature and Human Diversity”. He presents new genetics as a route back to an older view of the human animal. Ideas that had come to look like the discredited remains of racial and sexual hierarchy could return as scientific truths. He cites Carlton Coon’s 1962 book The Origin of Races as if it had appeared without controversy. Slobodian points out that the book had in fact provoked a strong reaction because it challenged the work of Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict on the social construction of race.

Murray also draws on the sociobiology and evolutionary psychology developed at Harvard by E. O. Wilson, Robert Trivers, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby. His account of gender difference reaches back to the savannah. Men who could judge the three-dimensional path of a spear gained a survival advantage, he says, whilst women who could remember the location and quality of gathered plants gained another. The resulting differences in spatial and object-location tests become evidence for inherited capacities.

The example matters because it places racial and sexual hierarchy inside a free-market argument. Murray wants to defeat what he calls the “equality premise”, yet he also wants to sort people more efficiently for a changing economy. A population with different visual-spatial skills and IQ scores can, in this account, be fitted more closely to an economy organised around screens, knowledge, and competition with China. The appeal to nature serves political struggle and workforce management at once.

The problem after the Cold War

Slobodian locates this turn in the 1990s. Communism has collapsed, whilst public spending and the welfare state remain. Neoliberals describe civil rights, feminism, affirmative action, environmentalism, and later gay, trans, and disability rights as political demands that create dependency and restrict free discourse. The social movements of the 1960s and 1970s have made equality part of the state’s normal obligations. A new intellectual defence of hierarchy has to answer that inheritance.

Earlier generations of neoliberals had focused on the extra-economic conditions of capitalism, or what some called the meta-market. Law, religion, and morality supplied the order in which exchange could take place. During the 1990s, Hayek’s account of cultural evolution and the popularity of neuroscience and evolutionary psychology encouraged a move towards harder scientific language. Changing demographics sharpened the question. Industrialised northern countries had ageing white populations alongside growing non-white populations. Perhaps some cultures or races were more suited to market exchange. Perhaps cultural homogeneity lowered transaction costs because people with a shared identity trusted one another and required less regulation.

Slobodian gives the German politician and author Thilo Sarrazin as an example. In Deutschland schafft sich ab, Sarrazin explains his rejection of immigration from Muslim-majority countries through claims about IQ, time horizons, instant gratification, thrift, and frugality. The argument gains its political force from the appearance of empirical respectability. Cultural exclusion can join an ethnonationalist movement whilst presenting itself as economic analysis.

This is the “folk capital” of the book’s title. A group receives a collective economic character through weak and selective social science. That lets a liberal economist and a far-right ethnonationalist share an exclusionary project for different stated reasons. One invokes cultural purity. The other describes trust, efficiency, and lower transaction costs. Their terms differ while the political result converges.

The supposed victory over communism therefore produces anxiety. At a Mont Pèlerin meeting in 1991, the Wall Street Journal reports that members regard environmentalism as the next threat to liberty. Communism has changed colour from red to green. Milton Friedman makes a related complaint in a 1992 interview with Peter Brimelow. The end of the Cold War has produced no summit about reducing government. George H. W. Bush has expanded government through the Clean Air Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and civil-rights legislation.

The enemy keeps changing its name. Victoria Curzon Price, a Geneva Graduate Institute graduate and one of the Mont Pèlerin Society’s few female presidents, says that the opponents of the 1940s were easier to identify. Antonio Martino, an Italian economist who later co-founds Forza Italia with Silvio Berlusconi, says at the first post-Wall Mont Pèlerin meeting that socialism is dead whilst statism survives. Environmentalism, state spending, and European integration become the threats. European institutions that once promised a “Ferrari model” of competition appear instead as a socialist Trojan horse. The right’s later language about wokeism, DEI, and CRT belongs to this older effort to recast social demands as a new form of collectivism.

The imagined pain of neoliberal success

The 1990s raise a second problem. What happens if the neoliberal project actually wins? Murray asks how a liberal state should respond to the human suffering that remains after public institutions have been cut back. He reaches for Herbert Spencer’s image of welfare recipients as opium eaters who must endure a painful withdrawal before they can return to self-help. The passage he quotes carries a brutal eugenic logic. It describes a population made “unadapted” to social life by bad institutions and says that its removal will cause pain because a past evil has to be paid for.

Murray admits that this is a hypothesis awaiting evidence. Even so, the image reveals the political problem Slobodian finds at the centre of the book. The social state has created expectations across several generations. Neoliberal success would mean withdrawing those expectations and deciding who can survive the new arrangement. Questions about the size of the community, its membership, its forms of authority, and its tolerated suffering become practical questions rather than abstract theory.

Slobodian connects that thought to current arguments about the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, Social Security, and Medicaid. The invocation of IQ becomes a language for ranking people. Donald Trump uses it to disparage enemies, whilst figures in Silicon Valley use it to praise allies. The same measure can turn identity into an economic value and make exclusion appear like selection.

From Hayek’s great society to guarded populations

Marie-Laure Salles, who introduces and moderates the event, asks whether the word “bastards” suggests too much discontinuity. The hierarchy in the new right may have been present from the beginning, through social Darwinism, classical economic liberalism, and Calvinism. Slobodian answers with a qualified continuity.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Hayek, Lionel Robbins, and Ludwig von Mises imagine civilisation as a process of expansion. Small tribal groups develop into the great society, where anonymous people exchange goods through a global division of labour. Hayek calls the spontaneous order of that world catallaxy. Friedman’s famous pencil illustrates the same scale: one ordinary object depends on talents, resources, and labour spread across the world and coordinated by prices.

The puzzle is that people from this globalist tradition later support Brexit, oppose the World Trade Organization, and seek national withdrawal from the European Union. Slobodian follows Hayek’s own writing from the 1960s and 1970s to locate the change. Hayek’s idea of cultural evolution gives populations internal traits that become more or less adaptive for capitalism. Those traits help explain how some societies open markets, conquer others, and accumulate advantages. By the 1980s, Hayek describes Western Christian society as having inherited virtues that other populations lack.

Decolonisation and mass immigration then create separate defensive moments. As newly independent countries enter the world economy, they propose national and social arrangements outside neoliberal rules. Social states and systems of entitlement also make it possible for people from elsewhere to enter Western societies. The result, in Slobodian’s account, is a movement from a universal market order towards a guarded population whose ability to take part in the market is treated as culturally inherited.

Röpke’s 1964 essay, “South Africa: An Attempt at a Positive Appraisal”, shows an earlier and more extreme position. He praises the Boers’ strength, efficiency, and superiority, then describes the post-war commitment to equality as a progressive ideological surrender. Slobodian had already discussed the essay in Globalists. He treats Röpke as an indicator of the reactionary direction that the wider community eventually takes, rather than as a simple representative of every neoliberal in the 1960s. Röpke leaves the Mont Pèlerin Society after writing the essay.

The different strands then produce different descendants. Some Hayekians at George Mason University read Paul Ricœur, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Michel Foucault through Hayek’s claim that prices communicate between unknowable selves. They become interested in interpretation and the subjectivity of value. Others reject that hermeneutic approach and insist that biological evidence gives a solid basis for ranking racial groups. Hayek’s children are therefore legitimate and illegitimate in different senses. The intellectual family shares premises, yet its members draw very different conclusions from them.

A new fusionism

The American right has long joined Christian tradition to economic freedom. That older fusionism appears in National Review, Ronald Reagan’s speeches, and George W. Bush’s combination of religious language with consumer capitalism. Slobodian calls the alliance described in Hayek’s Bastards a new fusionism. It joins capitalism to evolutionary stories about human nature rather than grounding it mainly in morality or religion.

The new language says that private property comes from territorial behaviour on the savannah. Neuroscience explains psychological life through chemistry. The Human Genome Project, completed at the end of the 1990s, encourages a rhetoric of genes for every trait. Bell curves and charts then become a common visual language on the right. The purpose is to make the defence of certain freedoms appear scientific and to mark egalitarian demands as errors about nature.

Religion remains powerful. Catholic institutions continue to fuse free-market principles with social conservatism, whilst evangelical belief joins hyper-individualism in Brazil and the prosperity gospel in the United States. Slobodian’s narrower question concerns the shift inside neoliberal intellectual circles. Science supplies a new foundation for the market project and can sit beside religion when both support the same political front.

The alliance does not need doctrinal agreement. When the Vatican describes “gender ideology” as a culture of death, Catholic conservatives supply a moral language. Scientifically minded allies add claims about biological sex and cognitive difference. The Property and Freedom Society makes the arrangement visible. Its meetings bring together a Swiss tax adviser, an Afrikaner nationalist from Namibia, a German revisionist, a Northern Irish race scientist, Richard Spencer, and the founder of American Renaissance. Their shared enemy is egalitarianism. A common target holds the coalition together more effectively than a single theory.

Race, immigration, and force

An audience member asks why race remains so attractive to educated people as an explanation for complex questions of resource distribution. Slobodian points to the history of slavery and colonial injustice in the United States. Natural hierarchy supplies a way to explain that history away. IQ can also rank East Asian populations as superior, creating a second pressure on white nationalism. Vivek Ramaswamy’s praise of Asian work and family values, the conflict with Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer, and Trump’s proposal for a five-million-dollar path to citizenship for graduates from India, Japan, or China are small signs of that tension inside the MAGA coalition.

The language has reached institutions. Slobodian mentions the removal of a book criticising The Bell Curve from the US Naval Academy’s library whilst Murray’s book remains. He also describes criticism of a Smithsonian exhibition for denying the biological reality of race. These examples are offered as evidence that scientific language has moved from online subcultures into policy and public institutions. The talk does not provide the underlying catalogues or administrative records, so they remain claims made in the event.

The same logic shapes immigration. Slobodian describes two neoliberal proposals from the 1990s: replace birthright citizenship and family reunification with a points-based system, and rank prospective immigrants by their presumed human capital. Murray’s rough rule of thumb assigns lower average IQ to people from Haiti or Latin America even whilst conceding that exceptional individuals exist in every population. Slobodian connects this ranking to the treatment of white Afrikaners as the one group receiving asylum in the United States at the time of the event.

Force had been harder to see in earlier neoliberal writing. Hayek treats law as the condition that creates and orders markets, using the image of referees and umpires. He says less about the force that preserves law or creates it. Murray Rothbard makes that force explicit in the 1990s. He wants to break the blockage that keeps Leviathan alive after the Cold War by unleashing popular anger, imprisoning vagrants, and restoring Victorian stigma and punishment. Pain becomes an instrument for changing people.

The spectacle of deportation belongs to this politics. Military planes are inefficient as a means of removal, yet they make the violence visible. The display has political value because the infliction of pain is part of the policy’s message. Slobodian calls this a vulgarised neoliberal rhetoric whose coercive premises have become public rather than hidden inside a theory of law.

Supply, demand, and the right’s coalition

Slobodian’s project begins with dissatisfaction with the standard account of the populist right after 2016. That account explains Trump, Brexit, and the Alternative for Germany through the demand side: wage stagnation, regional inequality, the loss of union jobs, and people left behind by globalisation. Slobodian accepts that these conditions can create an audience for right-wing politics. His method follows the supply side. It asks where the ideas come from, who offers them, and what policies they produce once the campaign ends.

The answer complicates the image of a revolt from below. Thatcherite hyper-capitalists lead Brexit. Libertarian think tanks advise Trump on tax cuts. The AfD offers little material help to the voters it claims to represent. The ideology can speak to resentment whilst advancing a programme designed by people who benefit from capital’s power.

Slobodian describes three changes between Trump’s first and second administrations as COVID, crypto, and cage fighting. The pandemic deepened trust in government for some people and destroyed it for others. Crypto moves from a financial technology into a means of political affiliation. The Trump memecoin and the promise of a Mar-a-Lago meeting for the ten largest holders make wealth a route to access.

Cage fighting supplies an image and a business model. The UFC operates throughout the year without ordinary protections such as health care, retirement benefits, or unions, while one owner controls the league. World Wrestling Entertainment adds a more theatrical version of the same mixture of sexuality, humiliation, power, and political spectacle. Linda McMahon, the former WWE chief executive, leads the Department of Education and the America First Policy Institute. Dana White, the UFC chief executive, joins Meta’s board. Slobodian says that these links may help explain new political associations, whilst also stressing that their effects remain speculative.

Individual liberty and the rebuilt community

An audience member asks how a doctrine of individual achievement joins the populist right’s language of family, nation, and community. Slobodian answers through the neoliberal concern with the conditions that make individual freedom possible. An individual cannot exercise freedom in a vacuum. The market needs a form of social reproduction, law, trust, and order after the twentieth-century state has been reduced.

The proposed replacement often takes the form of a contractual community. It may rely on unpaid reproductive labour performed by women in a traditional household. It may seek racial, cultural, or religious homogeneity to reduce disputes. It may choose the nation as a more manageable unit than the world economy or the European Union. Individual liberty therefore produces a demanding programme for rebuilding collective life from the smallest scale. The rules grow more complicated because every part of the social contract has to be written again.

Slobodian’s answer to the question about the United States and foreign force follows the same line. Neoliberals and neoconservatives separate in the 1960s. The latter focus on national security, military guarantees, and the Cold War. Hayek’s writing gives far less attention to the Cold War than to economic freedom, global market order, and institutions such as GATT and the WTO.

He therefore finds the current Trump administration’s tariffs, unilateral trade policy, and plans for territorial expansion difficult to place inside neoliberal history. Annexing Greenland, Canada, or the Panama Canal belongs more closely to nineteenth-century imperial competition than to the twentieth-century problem of reconciling independent states with interdependent economic affairs. Geneva’s institutional question is how to govern that interdependence. Territorial annexation evades the question rather than answering it, and Slobodian says he cannot find much intellectual scaffolding for the move in the neoliberal meeting records.

Limits of the account

The talk reconstructs an intellectual supply network from books, meetings, speeches, and public statements. Slobodian says that this method does not explain why individual voters join a movement, how young people encounter its ideas online, or how grassroots organising works in detail. He also says that the book should have given more attention to masculinity and the reaction among young men to women’s educational gains, the language of male toxicity, Andrew Tate, and the manosphere.

The captions are automatic and mishear several names, titles, and figures. This note has corrected obvious names from the event’s context, while keeping claims about Murray, Sarrazin, current US policy, and institutional examples attached to Slobodian’s account. The description supplies the publisher’s page for Hayek’s Bastards and identifies Slobodian as a Boston University professor. It supplies no bibliography for the talk’s many historical and contemporary claims, and the event itself has no chapter markers. Reported figures, quotations, and claims about the current administration therefore need independent checking before they are used as evidence beyond this note.