Blood-and-Soil Neoliberalism

Blood-and-Soil Neoliberalism

An interview with Quinn Slobodian, the author of Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right.

In his last three books, Quinn Slobodian has enriched our understanding of the history of neoliberalism. Globalists (2018) told the story of the neoliberals who sought to build a global order to protect capitalism—a story that challenged the widespread notion that neoliberalism is another word for antistatism. Crack-Up Capitalism (2023) showed how that same impulse to encase capitalism led market radicals to support the fracturing of sovereignty into micro-territories where capital and competitive forces could reign. And in his latest book, Hayek’s Bastards (2025), Slobodian argues that the contemporary far right is better understood as an offshoot of the neoliberal project than a backlash against it. The radical right has successfully married market competition with ideas imported from neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, genetics, and other natural sciences—a “new fusionism,” with echoes of the old Social Darwinism. I spoke with Slobodian about his book, the politics of the Trump era, and the future of neoliberalism.

Nick Serpe: Hayek’s Bastards is, in some ways, a pre-history of the alt-right, or the contemporary far right. What’s distinctive about the alt-right—and what do most accounts get wrong about its origins?

Quinn Slobodian: I would define the alt-right, or the far right, as an attempt to undo the efforts of egalitarian liberal humanism over the last 200 years—and to reinstate an order based on hierarchy, grounded in natural differences in human beings. That order can refer primarily to science, or to religion, or to more folk understandings of traditional essences.

What is the main thing that has been missed? Since 2016 or so, the far right has been narrated as a backlash against neoliberalism and an attempt to shield people from the competitive pressures of an excessively heartless, competitive order. Some people on the left see it as a version of what Karl Polanyi called the “double movement”: once people have been dis-embedded from their social context and forced to treat each other as objects, there will be a reaction in which people try to protect themselves and re-embed themselves in a new way. Polanyi was always very clear that that could come from the right as well as the left. In fact, in the context in which he was writing, in the 1940s, it was almost more likely to come from the right.

There was a tendency to simply copy and paste that interpretation onto the rise of MAGA, Brexit, and various far-right movements in Europe and beyond. I wanted to show how some of the most influential thinkers inside this new far-right formation were actually operating quite differently. They weren’t seeking to reverse or counteract capitalist competition, but were actually accelerating zero-sum market-style conflict. That seemed to be a perspective that was missing, and I felt it was necessary to bring it in so we would have the right opponent in mind.

Serpe: When did this formation start to come together? What kind of problems were they addressing that neoliberals before them hadn’t addressed?

Slobodian: As with my last book, Crack-Up Capitalism, much of this is a post–Cold War story. It’s a kind of revisionist history of the 1990s. The effective denouement of the world-historical confrontation between the Soviet Union and its allies and the United States and its allies left people wondering whether or not there was actually a new world that had been created, or if the enemy had simply changed its coloring or its outward appearance. Much of what I describe as the contemporary far right crystallized in that moment, in which people found new enemies beyond communism to combat. Those came in the form of the environmental movement, the feminist movement, the anti-racist movement, demands for rights for queer people. The idea of social constructionism and the belief that identity could be reinvented like a consumer product became very fearsome for the people on the far right.

That belief that the enemy had gone from red to green and pink became the unifying pole of opposition for people who might otherwise not work with each other, including neo-Confederates, Christian traditionalists, and anarchocapitalists like Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell. They may not have shared much in common, but they did share the belief that while socialism had died, the leviathan was living on and needed to be combated in new ways.

Serpe: You call this the “new fusionism.” What’s the substance of this project? Does it supplant the old fusionism of the right, or is it building on top of it?

Slobodian: There’s a very famous way of describing the conservative movement in the United States as one of fusionism between people primarily interested in economic freedom and market liberalism, on the one hand, and people primarily interested in Christian values and traditional order on the other. Historians have described an alliance between these two wings of the American right starting in the 1950s, which we can later see achieving power in certain ways in the Reagan administration and the second Bush administration.

The new fusionism I describe in the book starts to come together in the 1990s. The people who were arguing about the danger of the state and persistent socialism, and the need to defend capitalism and economic freedom, started to appeal, rather than to categories from religion, to categories from science—in particular evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, and even race science. This was a domain of great excitement and intellectual ferment in the 1990s, especially as books like The Bell Curve mainstreamed ideas of racial differences and intelligence, and scientific breakthroughs like the human genome project made it seem like our bodies contained a particular kind of truth that could not be denied by all the humanities professors in the world. Appeals to science became an effective way to fight this fight within the realm of ideas—in the academy, in the pages of magazines, and on talk shows. They somehow had more solidity than the longstanding appeal to Christian doctrine.

As with all forms of success on the American right, and the American left too, it’s less the supplanting of one thing by another thing completely, and more an addition to a broad rushing river of influences. There are a lot of people on the far right for whom religious belief remains a primary motivating factor. And some of the people I write about in the book were quite adept at folding together seemingly strange bedfellows, like evangelical Christianity and a belief in the need to return to the gold standard. There was an acrobatic way that the threads of science and free-market ideology were joined, sometimes also braiding together with Christian doctrine.

Serpe: In some cases this seems less about incompatible ideas being forced together out of political necessity, and more about affinities—how these ideas reinforce each other.

Slobodian: I think it’s best to understand these as ideas in motion. They are not primarily of interest for their doctrinal purity or their abstract flawlessness. They’re ideas that are found to be useful at different moments of political mobilization as points of consensus between groups that are often quite different from one another. This is evident in the John Randolph Club, which is a startup political organization in the 1990s, similar to the Mont Pelerin Society but much smaller. The club was trying to figure out what two groups of people that might not appear to share many ideas could find in common for the sake of political strategy.

One of the interesting things that they arrived at was the idea of the contractual community. Whether you’re an anarchocapitalist who doesn’t believe in God and believes in the right to choose your sexual partner freely, or you’re a traditionalist Christian who believes in the need to preserve heterosexual marriage, you can agree on the idea that states should not dictate one or the other form of sexual behavior from above, and that these things should be decided by freely contracting communities, separate from one another—what in Crack-Up Capitalism I call soft secession, or micro-ordering. This idea emerges from a strategic political discussion, rather than someone going to a mountaintop to figure out what the purest version of a free society is. That’s what I find perversely inspiring about some of this stuff. Even if you’re a critic, as I am, it is bracing to see people who understand that ideas have impact. They are not simply pristine objects to be kept behind glass in a museum or in a classroom, but should be brought into contact with everyday people and projects of social transformation.

Serpe: One such useful idea is IQ. IQ thinking and studies play an important role in the contemporary far right. One recent story crystallized for me how the right is thinking about intelligence: Trump blamed a series of aviation accidents on air traffic controllers being hired under DEI policies, and reportedly suggested replacing them with “MIT geniuses” to fix the problem. You argue that while the ideas in books like The Bell Curve have been empirically refuted many times over, it’s also important to understand them through the lens of political economy. How does that help us understand why IQ became so important?

Slobodian: That gets to another intervention I’m trying to make. The far right of the 1990s is often analyzed strictly in terms of culture and politics. I’m trying to bring in the question of capitalism and ask what kind of political economy they were operating with implicitly and what they had in mind prescriptively. IQ is a perfect eugenic idiom for the information age, because it’s not primarily about human economic actors as laborers in the manual or physical sense. It’s about their cognitive capacity to solve complex problems, to rotate objects in their mind in ways that would make them more adept white-collar workers, software engineers, and intellectual laborers of various kinds. In the 1990s, the cutting edge of American competitiveness was in high tech and research, and we needed to select for people who excelled in those specific ways.

That was the prevailing discourse in that period, and arguably it still is. The language of meritocracy was so dominant, especially on the liberal left, in the 1990s through the Obama years, and it ended up validating this fetishism around IQ, because it suggests that there are diamonds in the rough who can be discovered and should be rewarded for their individual brilliance. The IQ racists agree with that but go one step further to say that if we can objectively quantify someone’s cognitive ability, then there must be, statistically, some kind of distribution across a curve, and that can be drawn up with some accuracy according to peoples’ demographic points of origin.

The far right is born out of these mainstream discussions and then twists them in a way that becomes politically repellent. But they are not operating out of a totally different conceptual universe. Think about the bumper stickers and lawn signs you saw during the first Trump administration that said “Trust the science” or “I believe in scientists.” The new fusionists would agree. They just had a different idea of what the science was. Critics of the far right make it too easy for themselves if they banish that ideology into a realm of irrationality and mysticism that can be easily punctured and dismantled. Often, they are operating in the same spirit of rigorous inquiry that we are, just through a different epistemological framework and setup.

Serpe: When many of these ideas first emerge, they’re widely considered fringe. But then they make entryways into the mainstream, the way The Bell Curve did. Do you see some kind of takeoff point where the new fusionism started to achieve more hegemony, on the right and beyond?

Slobodian: If you distill the far right down to just the word “hate” or “resentment,” then all you need to do is dispel peoples’ false consciousness—the “What’s the matter with Kansas?” model of people voting against their economic interests. If you follow some of these thinkers, however, you realize that a lot of this discourse was bubbling in the background all along. An example I use in the book is Peter Brimelow. He was the founder of VDare.com, which was one of the most important nativist, anti-immigrant websites. He’s sometimes described as a kind of godfather of the alt-right, with ties to Larry Kudlow and Roger Ailes. And he was publishing op-eds in the Financial Post and Forbes starting in the 1980s playing with ideas of racial science and difference, posing provocative ideas about the need to select immigrants on racial grounds. These same debates were happening around people like Pat Buchanan and William F. Buckley into the 1990s.

There has always been a not-totally-underground part of the far right that is willing to entertain ideas that now seem startling in retrospect. There was a kind of respectability politics within the Republican Party itself, which made some of these ideas seem more fringe, in the sense that they weren’t usually given a platform inside Congress or the White House. For all of George W. Bush’s extreme actions, he nevertheless was not “just asking questions” about racial differences while in office. So the 2016 moment is still a striking one, because a lot of these discussions suddenly erupted into public view.

But The Bell Curve, an attempt to reboot race science, was a bestseller. Binky Urban, one of the biggest agents in New York City, represented Charles Murray. Brimelow’s Alien Nation was published in 1995, and his agent was Andrew Wylie—still one of the most powerful literary agents. That book basically wrote the script for what’s happening now in immigration policy in the United States. This stuff was out there. It was on talk radio. It was on websites. It was occasionally making its way into op-eds and columns. Now, Trump has issued an executive order about the Smithsonian Institution that criticizes an art exhibition for denying the fact that race is based on biological difference. The race-realist argument is now part of the right-wing cultural reformation, and it was small cause célèbres around bestsellers like Bell Curve and Alien Nation that helped to break taboos and bring certain discourses back into circulation among elites, journalists, and academics.

Serpe: In a piece you wrote for the New York Review of Books in February, you identify three tendencies of the people in and around the Trump administration. There’s the world of private equity and distressed debt, the long new right that formed in opposition to the New Deal, and finally the online accelerationist right. I was curious about where these divisions map onto the story that you’re telling in the book. Have Hayek’s bastards achieved complete hegemony on the right? Are all of these factions breathing the same ideological air?

Slobodian: The version of neoliberalism I described in Globalists was very legalistic. It was about the design of regulatory frameworks that would lock in free trade, property rights, and the possibility for disruption by new market entrants, and create markets where they don’t exist. It was a version of neoliberalism that saw the state as a very useful tool for the encasement and protection of markets. It did not have that many conjectures about the kind of people that would operate inside of those frameworks. Human nature wasn’t the primary object of inquiry or interest for those Hayekians, who, from the 1930s to the 1990s, were invested in conceiving of a framework for globalization.

What’s distinctive about this newer generation is how focused they are on human nature. They are less interested in systems-level redesign than in bringing agency and power back to much smaller groups. My argument in the New York Review piece was that, as with the paleoconservatives in the early 1990s, these figures today can agree that the existence of a large, relatively well-funded state is problematic as such—and that more of the conditions of peoples’ lives should be in the hands of private actors beyond oversight. We are either customers of service providers or a self-reliant and self-contracting covenant of likeminded communities. That pivot of interest from the system or the top-level framework to the individual and the question of who is a valuable human—who should be allowed in the community—is something that is shared across the most powerful insurgent parts of the right at the moment.

The new fusionism that I describe has arguably triumphed, in the sense that both the techno-libertarian wing and the traditionalist right wing agree that there is an identifiable hierarchy of humans that might be measured in one way or the other, and that the point of designing new laws and new systems is to figure out who should be in and who should be out. That system of inclusion and exclusion is a new variation of neoliberal rationality, but I hesitate to see this as simply more of the same neoliberalism. This shift from “protect the system” to “rank human nature” is something that sends shockwaves through assumptions about how states should be organized, or dismantled.

Serpe: What’s the status of the neoliberals who have not made this turn—either because they hold to more economistic thinking or because they have more progressive beliefs?

Slobodian: The good-faith wing of the neoliberal movement, which prizes economic freedom above other freedoms, but hopes not to sacrifice all other freedoms to get it, has adapted as well. You might remember the “ne0liberal” movement from a few years ago—young libertarians trying to reboot the neoliberal movement. The best good-faith Hayekians are people who take his evolutionary metaphor to mean that we can’t determine in advance what will emerge from a market society; the best we can do is to place minimal constraints on individuals so that they can find their way to their own desires, which will somehow add to the collective pool of pleasures and human imaginative capacities.

What are they doing now? They’re pushing the abundance agenda. (That is definitely not to suggest that “abundance” is therefore contaminated.) If you believe in the creative capacity of the market, and its ability to host a discovery procedure through the process of individual exploration, innovation, and competition, then you need to search for allies who are willing to create open systems that provide access to a diverse set of potential agents and inventive participants in the market that you’re hoping to build. With neoliberal globalism on the back foot, it makes sense that good-faith neoliberals have switched it up and started to see how they could work productively within a more nationalist framework. One of the confusions for me about the abundance debate is that it is not being carried out in reference to the Biden economic agenda. Because that is what they’re describing: an effort to re-engineer the state to enable investment toward socially desirable ends, without stripping agency from private-market actors—and in fact derisking their activity.

If you believe, as Hayek believed, that the quality of a system can be measured in the number of humans that it can produce—that the calculus of cost is the calculus of lives—then you should be more open to emulating successful competitors. The neoliberals who are enchanted with the China model are probably more faithful to the spirit of the master than those neoliberals who have begun to invest so much attention in blood and soil.

Quinn Slobodian is professor of international history at Boston University. His latest book is Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ and the Capitalism of the Far Right.

Nick Serpe is senior editor of Dissent.