After wrapping up a four-part series on free trade and the left , I thought I was done with neoliberalism. I had come to the conclusion that neoliberals were simply not serious people: instead of placing value in literally any human concern, they value only a network of trade, and as such, cannot say anything of value. They should be ignored in public debate; we can find economists elsewhere.

I based this conclusion partly on Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists (2020), which describes Friedrich Hayek’s fascination with cybernetics in the latter part of his life. But Hayek himself died before the birth of the WTO, NAFTA, all the institutions “we” fought in Seattle; we fought his ghost, living on past its time.

Well, like I say, I thought I was done, but then a copy of Slobodian’s Hayek’s Bastards (2025) arrived in the post. The book contests the narrative that the right-wing “populism” that we have seen in the last couple decades is an exogenous reaction to elite technocratic management under high neoliberalism, and that actually it proceeds from a faction of the neoliberal project. It’s easy to infer a connection when we look at, say, Javier Milei ‘s background and cohort, but Slobodian delicately unpicks the weft to expose the tensile fibers linking the core neoliberal institutions to the alt-right. Tonight’s note is a book review of sorts.

after hayek

Let’s back up a bit. Slobodian’s argument in Globalists was that neoliberalism is not really about laissez-faire as such: it is a project to design institutions of international law to encase the world economy, to protect it from state power (democratic or otherwise) in any given country. It is paradoxical, because such an encasement requires state power, but it is what it is.

Hayek’s Bastards is also about encasement, but instead of protection from the state, the economy was to be protected from debasement by the unworthy. (Also there is a chapter on goldbugs, but that’s not what I want to talk about.)

The book identifies two major crises that push a faction of neoliberals to ally themselves with a culturally reactionary political program. The first is the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, together with decolonization. To put it crudely, whereas before, neoliberal economists could see themselves as acting in everyone’s best interest, having more black people in the polity made some of these white economists feel like their project was being perverted.

Faced with this “crisis”, at first the reactionary neoliberals reached out to race: the infant post-colonial nations were unfit to participate in the market because their peoples lacked the cultural advancement of the West. Already Globalists traced a line through Wilhelm Röpke ‘s full-throated defense of apartheid, but the subjects of Hayek’s Bastards ( Lew Rockwell , Charles Murray , Murray Rothbard , et al) were more subtle: instead of directly stating that black people were unfit to govern, Murray et al argued that intelligence was the most important quality in a country’s elite. It just so happened that they also argued, clothed in the language of evolutionary psychology and genetics, that black people are less intelligent than white people, and so it is natural that they not occupy these elite roles, that they be marginalized.

Before proceeding, three parentheses:

1. Some words have a taste. Miscegenation tastes like the juice at the bottom of a garbage bag left out in the sun: to racists, because of the visceral horror they feel at the touch of the other, and to the rest of us, because of the revulsion the very idea provokes.

2. I harbor an enmity to Silvia Plath because of The Bell Curve . She bears no responsibility; her book was The Bell Jar . I know this in my head but my heart will not listen.

3. I do not remember the context, but I remember a professor in university telling me that the notion of “race” is a social construction without biological basis; it was an offhand remark that was new to me then, and one that I still believe now. Let’s make sure the kids now hear the good word now too; stories don’t tell themselves.

The second crisis of neoliberalism was the fall of the Berlin Wall: some wondered if the negative program of deregulation and removal of state intervention was missing a positive putty with which to re-encase the market. It’s easy to stand up on a stage with a chainsaw, but without a constructive program, neoliberal wins in one administration are fragile in the next.

The reactionary faction of neoliberalism’s turn to “family values” responds to this objective need, and dovetails with the reaction to the civil rights movement: to protect the market from the unworthy, neo-reactionaries worked to re-orient the discourse, and then state policy, away from “equality” and the idea that idea that We Should Improve Society, Somewhat . Moldbug’s neofeudalism is an excessive rhetorical joust, but one that has successfully moved the window of acceptable opinions. The “populism” of the AfD or the recent Alex Karp drivel is not a reaction, then, to neoliberalism, but a reaction by a faction of neoliberals to the void left after communism. (And when you get down to it, what is the difference between Moldbug nihilistically rehashing Murray’s “black people are low-IQ” and Larry Summers’ “countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted” ?)

thots

Slobodian shows remarkable stomach: his object of study is revolting. He has truly done the work.

For all that, Hayek’s Bastards left me with a feeling of indigestion: why bother with the racism? Hayek himself had a thesis of sorts, woven through his long career, that there is none of us that is smarter than the market, and that in many (most?) cases, the state should curb its hubris, step back, and let the spice flow. Prices are a signal, axons firing in an ineffable network of value, sort of thing. This is a good thesis! I’m not saying it’s right, but it’s interesting, and I’m happy to engage with it and its partisans.

So why do Hayek’s bastards reach to racism? My first thought is that they are simply not worthy: Charles Murray et al are intellectually lazy and moreover base. My lip curls to think about them in any serious way. I can’t help but recall the DARVO tactic of abusers; neo-reactionaries blame “diversity” for “debasing the West”, but it is their ignorant appeals to “race science” that is without basis.

Then I wonder: to what extent is this all an overworked intellectual retro-justification for something they wanted all along? When Mises rejoiced in the violent defeat of the 1927 strike , he was certainly not against state power per se; but was he for the market, or was he just against a notion of equality?

I can only conclude that things are confusing. “Mathematical” neoliberals exist , and don’t need to lean on racism to support their arguments. There are also the alt-right/neo-reactionaries, who grew out from neoliberalism, not in opposition to it: no seasteader is a partisan of autarky. They go to the same conferences. It is a baffling situation.

While it is all more the more reason to ignore them both, intellectually, Slobodian’s book shows that politically we on the left have our work set out for us both in deconstructing the new racism of the alt-right, and in advocating for a positive program of equality to take its place.