Book review: Hayek's Bastards

Does the new populist right really have 'neoliberal' roots?

Hayek’s Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right by Quinn Slobodian, Penguin Random House

The premise of Quinn Slobodian’s new book is that authoritarian right-wing populism is a mutated version of classical liberal economics, the seeds of which were sown by members of the Mont Pelerin Society many decades ago. While national populism is widely regarded as a backlash against neoliberalism, Slobodian sees it as a new strain of it which he calls the ‘new fusionism’. Essentially a form of racist, oligarchical capitalism, it does not intend to ‘smite economic globalization’ (a course of action that Slobodian might endorse) but to ‘privatize, deregulate, and slash taxes’.

The first two chapters find Slobodian searching for hints of racial prejudice in the work of Hayek and Mises. For the former, the best he can manage is a reference to ‘the Christian West’ in a 1984 speech. For the latter, who may well have been Austria’s least racist man in the 1940s, it is an even greater challenge. Slobodian revives two articles he wrote about the lifelong supporter of open borders in 2019 that have been heavily criticised by Phillip W. Magness and Amelia Janaskie for ‘inverting Mises’s meaning in a light that erroneously casts him as sympathetic to racism or colonialism’. One does not need to be an expert on Mises to see that Slobodian is guilty of selective quotation. One only needs to read the whole paragraph from which the quote is taken. For example, Mises is quoted as writing in 1944: ‘There are few white men who would not shudder at the picture of many millions of black or yellow people living in their own countries’. Slobodian puts this in a context that implies that Mises shared this revulsion and cites it as evidence that Mises had ‘partially legitimized closed borders for nonwhite migrants as a near-permanent feature of the world order’. But the very next sentence of Mises’ text reads: ‘The elaboration of a system making for harmonious coexistence and peaceful economic and political cooperation among the various races is a task to be accomplished by coming generations.’ It should be obvious that Mises was not endorsing the prejudices of the majority, but merely acknowledging the existence of such prejudices and hoping that they could be overcome.

Relying on the reader assuming that there is no smoke without fire, Slobodian then introduces the central argument of his book which is that ‘the followers of Mises took his rather parenthetical opening to the possibilities of race theory and drove a metaphorical truck through it’. We are then introduced to a cast of characters, many of whom are eccentric if not repulsive, who Slobodian sees at the godfathers of America’s modern ‘Far Right’ (always capitalised): paleo-libertarians, paleo-conservatives, race scientists, IQ researchers, nativists, goldbugs and white supremacists who are united in their scepticism about the benefits of mass immigration if nothing else. I confess that I had never heard of most of them before reading this book. After working in the world of free market think tanks for fifteen years, this may be a failing on my part, but it might equally be because they are not significant figures in the ‘neoliberal’ movement.

To advance his argument, Slobodian has to focus on some mostly obscure characters of variable influence and ignore the many libertarian writers and economists who have been highly critical of the nativist right. Any fair-minded reader of Mises can see that the Austrian’s position on immigration had nothing in common with that of paleo-libertarians such as Hans-Hermann Hoppe, let alone white nationalists such as Peter Brimelow or ‘race scientists’ such as Richard Lynn, all three of whom are given prominence in this book that is vastly disproportionate to their influence. There is simply no through-line from Mises or Hayek to the alt-right. By referring to right-wing populists of the present day as Hayek’s illegitimate offspring (‘bastards’) Slobodian allows himself a certain amount of wriggle room, but if a student believes the exact opposite of the teacher, can he really be portrayed as a follower?

The fatal flaw in this book is that Slobodian has clearly started with his conclusion and worked backwards. An author who was interested in writing about the roots of the current wave of right-wing populism would start with the right-wing populists and study their words and deeds. One might begin, for example, with someone like J. D. Vance, the US vice-president whose outlook epitomises American populism and who has written a book (Hillbilly Elegy) about his political journey. Vance’s politics do not fit Slobodian’s premise and he is never mentioned in the book. Nigel Farage, Viktor Orbán, Geert Wilders and Giorgia Meloni are also conspicuous by their absence. Marine Le Pen and Steve Bannon get two passing mentions each and there are surprisingly few references even to Donald Trump. This is a book about right-wing populism and yet the most prominent right-wing populists barely feature.

This, perhaps, is because the big spending economic nationalism of Le Pen and the protectionist mercantilism of Trump is antithetical to everything Hayek and his followers represent. ‘New fusionism’ is supposed to be about free trade without mass immigration. It is supposed to be a continuation of neoliberalism, not a reaction to it. And yet everything in the words and deeds of the national populists indicates a genuine hostility to globalisation and a lurch towards protectionism that would have Hayek spinning in his grave. Slobodian asserts that the three obsessions of the ‘new fusionists’ are ‘hardwired human nature, hard borders, and hard money’, but are these really the defining characteristics of the ‘populist right’? I would suggest that they have four defining characteristics, all of which are essentially reactionary. They violently reject globalisation, military interventionism, mass immigration and ‘wokery’. Slobodian focuses on only one of these (‘hard borders’) but it is their revolt against neoliberalism and neoconservatism that is the real departure from centre-right ideology and, since free trade and foreign wars are unpopular unless they produce obvious benefits, it is this that has helped them achieve electoral success. They have been unwittingly abetted by the left’s lurch towards extreme identity politics and de facto open borders immigration, both of which are also unpopular, but in rejecting globalisation and neocon foreign policy, they have become more similar to the left than Slobodian would like to admit. In that sense, the populist right are the bastard children of Naomi Klein, whose work Slobodian’s most resembles. The anti-globalisation narrative that was popularised in Klein’s No Logo (1999) has now been adopted by social conservatives, albeit for different reasons. When Donald Trump called the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) ‘the worst trade deal in history’ he was echoing earlier opposition from the likes of Bernie Sanders, Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein, all of whom were also at the forefront of the resistance to the neoconservatives and the second Iraq War which, in a peculiar misrepresentation that has echoes in Hayek’s Bastards, Klein partially blamed on Milton Friedman.

I am not arguing that anti-capitalists and right-wing populists are peas in a pod. There is a world of difference between opposing free trade because you think it will make your trading partner worse off and opposing free trade because you think it will make you worse off. Opposing foreign wars because they result in the deaths of innocent people is very different to opposing them because they cost too much money and don’t result in decisive victories. But in the final analysis, both the No Logo left and the populist right are opposed to globalisation and neoliberalism, and whatever reasons they have for wanting to rip up trade agreements and subsidise their domestic industries, the outcome could not be further away from what Mises, Hayek and several generations of free market economists and libertarians have argued for.

Hayek’s Bastards concludes not with Donald Trump - who has inconveniently launched a trade war since the book went to press - but with Argentina’s president Javier Milei. Milei fits Slobodian’s hypothesis insofar as he is a card-carrying, Mises-quoting anarcho-capitalist, but he has not been credibly accused of racism and he is not anti-immigration. As far as I can tell, he does not believe in ‘hardwired human nature’. Slobodian implies that he is ‘Far Right’ because he is opposed to abortion, but this is hardly unusual in Catholic Argentina. He leaves us with the mental image of Milei posing for a selfie with the managing director of the IMF, with the implication that this undermines his anti-establishment credentials, and informs the reader that Hayek’s Bastards is ‘a warning not to be taken in by false prophets’. And there the book ends, in a ball of confusion.