For some years now the political consensus has been under attack in various countries from right wing ‘populist’ political movements. A common interpretation of these movements is that they represent a kind of backlash to neoliberalism. Aggressive opposition to institutions like the European Union, or against the free movement of people across borders are viewed as a primal reaction of frustration against a ‘globalist’ elite politics. Some form of this argument can be found in media across the political spectrum1.
Yet on closer inspection, this global movement of the radical right seemed to echo fairly conventional neoliberal beliefs on the need to reduce taxation and remove regulations standing in the way of ‘free enterprise’. Javier Milei in Argentina is something of a poster boy, being known for, among other things, appearing at comic conventions in his native country dressed in black and gold as ‘captain ancap’, and having named his dogs after libertarian economists2.
Quinn Slobodian’s Hayek’s Bastards is an attempt to trace the intellectual roots of the radical right in American libertarianism, American adherents to the ‘Austrian’ school of economic thought, and thinkers in the intellectual orbit of various free-market think tanks. His primary goal is to show that this new right is not in opposition to the intellectual movement which provided theoretical support to the wave of privatisations and deregulation by Reagan and Thatcher in the 80s, but is a dissident wing of that same movement, with some differing views on border policy3, but fundamentally just as committed to free market economics.
Tracing the Right’s Roots
The book traces the intellectual development of neoliberalism in response to the end of the cold war. Instead of revelling in their triumph, with the collapse of the eastern bloc and the dismantling of many pillars of post-war welfarism in the US and Britain, certain strands of libertarian thought were consumed by anxiety at the possibility of socialism reasserting itself through demands for greater gender and racial equality, as well as ecological concerns. One of these was led by Murray Rothbard, an American follower of the Austrian school of economics, who pushed for a strong alignment of the American libertarian movement with the burgeoning right wing nativism of Pat Buchanan in the early 90s.
The Austrian school emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with the work of Eugene Bohm-Bawerk, perhaps best known to Marxists as the most prominent exponent of the transformation problem – the apparent contradiction between Volume I of Marx’s Capital, in which commodities are priced according to labour values, and Volume III in which they are priced according to costs of production. Austrian school economists, including Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, were involved in the inter-war controversy around the socialist calculation problem, where they produced various arguments attempting to show that a planned economy would result in sub-optimal allocation of resources in the absence of market pricing.
Apart from their intellectual engagements with Marxism, the Austrian school economists are most notable for their scepticism of the types of mathematical modelling embraced by more mainstream economic thinking, as well as a theory of the business cycle and economic crisis which sees these as being mainly spurred by central banks forcing interest rates to artificially low levels. In terms of public policy advocacy, the main thrust is that government = bad, and the free market = good, a point which they often take to extremes which would embarrass even the likes of Milton Friedman.
Slobodian documents how the late work of Hayek turned towards thinking about culture and the evolution of cultural traits, in ways which began to increasingly resemble social darwinism. His attempts to move towards ‘scientific’ theories about how cultural traits are selected dominated the later part of his life, and would influence his later progeny, like Murry Rothbard, to adopt hierarchical cultural and racial supremacist views.
Murry Rothbard in the 60s had a brief flirtation with the new left, supporting Malcolm X and giving rhetorical support to black nationalist ideas. But by the 70s he had abandoned this and started to move in the opposite direction, towards a culturally conservative ‘paleo-libertarianism’. By 1992 he was supporting the candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination of Pat Buchanan, a politician with many of the same views as the contemporary radical right on immigration, women’s rights and LGBTQ+ rights. The logic here was not a wholesale abandonment of Rothbard’s previous libertarianism, but rather an evolution in his thinking.
Slobodian points to the proceedings of the Mont Pelerin Society in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union. With the collapse of state socialism, the delegates argued over which new threats would emerge to the market economy. The enemy was seen increasingly in the form of threats from movements for environmentalism, women’s rights, racial justice and LGBT rights. Even within the bounds of liberal democracy, these movements were seen as posing a dangerous threat to the free market order championed by these ideologues, because they could be accompanied by demands for greater regulation, government interference in the market, and wealth redistribution. It was from this vantage point that Rothbard supported the Buchanan movement, on the grounds that the socially conservative backlash it represented would help to further cement the demise of the New Deal welfare and regulatory state.
Rothbard’s immediate intellectual heir was Hans-Herman Hoppe, who took this melding of libertarian economics and a hierarchical and racialist view of human culture (which Slobodian dubs ‘new fusionism’) to new extremes. He wrote a book, Democracy: The God that Failed, expounding on the libertarian case for extreme authoritarian and hierarchical forms of political organisation. Hoppe would be strongly influential on Curtis Yarvin, one of the intellectual figure heads of the contemporary right.
Other characters from various directions supporting various forms of racial, ethnic or IQ based hierarchy are brought forward by Slobodian. The financial journalist Peter Brimelow, arguing against a Wall Street Journal op-ed for open borders, moves towards using theories of racial hierarchy to justify selective immigration policy. Charles Murray, author of a famous book justifying reductions in welfare in the name of reducing apparent ‘dependency’, moves towards theories of racial hierarchy on the basis of inherited IQ differences.
Slobodian also contains various interesting bits of information on the intellectual influence of American libertarianism on the contemporary German right and the AfD in particular. He points out that in an early incarnation, the AfD was attuned to various forms of goldbug thinking, including using sales of gold to finance the party before the rules were changed in Germany. It is interesting to note in this connection that Nigel Farage has been shilling for gold and silver as recently as 2020 according to the Financial Times.
Ideological Reproduction of the Radical Right
Slobodian’s book has great merit in analysing the intellectual developments and mutations of the radical right. It shows convincingly that a strata of elite intellectuals with great importance for the modern radical right developed their thinking, not as a ‘backlash’ against neoliberalism but a ‘frontlash’ against the threat of new political forces dismantling the achievements of the neoliberal movement. This helps to bring back into focus the ways in which this new right is continuous with the historic right, in ways which can become obscured solely by focusing on the political ‘base’ of radical right parties.
I think however, we have to note that this is specifically an account of the intellectual production of a small elite. Now it can be argued that in some cases this elite has had an outsized political influence. Javier Milei is the obvious example, as both president of Argentina and an outspoken fan of Rothbard and Hayek. Slobodian also quotes Steve Bannon, again quoting Hayek, to show the direct influence of Austro-libertarianism on a key figure of the Trump movement. But the connections of this intellectual elite with the broader political movement they are associated with isn’t always so clear cut.
Consider Curtis Yarvin, the right wing blogger who has had a spike in interest from the mainstream press as an intellectual of the modern radical right. Yarvin is an outspoken opponent of democracy, and strongly intellectually influenced by Rothbard, as well as Rothbard’s disciple Hans-Herman Hoppe. But Yarvin also seems to bounce back and forth on whether he actually supports Trump or not, at points even calling for his followers to vote for Biden, since he is unsure whether Trump’s movement is ‘radical’ enough for him4.
In an interview on the Politics Theory Other podcast, Slobodian discusses a contrast between ‘demand side’ and ‘supply side’ theories of the radical right. Many thinkers apparently study the radical right in terms of the make-up of its supporters, but by ignoring the ‘supply side’ of the ideologists who come up with ideas in the first place. This is an important clarification but still an incomplete picture of ideological reproduction as a whole.
Radical right intellectual reproduction is not confined solely to the sphere of think tanks and speeches to the Mont Pelerin Society. It also incorporates the intellectual production of political leaders who might not necessarily adhere as closely to the strictures of intellectual discipline. While Douglas Carswell, the conservative defector to UKIP in 2015, advocated for central banking reforms inspired by Mises, his specific zeal didn’t seem to rub off on Farage5. This is not to say that there is no ideological connection there either though. Farage is a known admirer of Enoch Powell, and aside from his infamy for the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, Powell was also a known admirer of Hayek and member of the Mont Pelerin Society.
There is the everyday intellectual reproduction of the ‘base’ of these movements, through tabloid and social media that spreads the racist enmities which mobilise the hard core of radical right activists and voters. Slobodian chastises other theorists of the radical right for their silence on capitalism. I think this is commendable, but capitalism is not just a set of ideas, but a dynamic system of political economy and social class structure. A full accounting of the modern radical right and its intellectual production needs to account for all the elements of the movement and their position within that class structure. Slobodian gets us part of the way there, but questions remain open for a full left accounting of these movements.
- A simple one off example – this article in the Washington Post refers to “angry nationalism… a rejection of two decades of rampant liberalism… that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union.” Ishaan Tharoor, “Trump’s return and the final ‘rupture’ of liberalism”, Washington Post, January 20, 2025, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/01/20/trump-return-rejection-liberalism-davos-globalization-nationalism/ ↩︎
- Slobodian also discusses Milei in more depth in an article for the New Statesman. Quinn Slobodian, “Monster of the Mainstream”, New Statesman, November 20, 2023, https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2023/11/javier-milei-argentina-president-monster-mainstream ↩︎
- Although in some cases not even that differing from original neoliberalism. Slobodian notes that Thatcher had been supported by Hayek in calling for an end to immigration. Quinn Slobodian, Hayek’s Bastards (Zone Books, 2025), 78. ↩︎
- “Last year, [Yarvin] encouraged his readers to vote for Joe Biden before he dropped out of the race. Yarvin’s worry at the time was that, by only bringing about a partial revolution, Trump could end up delaying the total revolution needed to usher in Yarvin’s preferred regime.” Jemima Kelly, “Sunday at the garden party for Curtis Yarvin and the new, new right”, Financial Times, August 8, 2025, https://www.ft.com/content/0e244103-80e8-4acc-9262-d6a45bbbaf14 ↩︎
- In fact the BBC reported that their relationship was less than amicable – https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-3939367 ↩︎
