This episode focuses on Slobodian’s latest book, Hayek’s Bastards, which reveals how some neoliberals forged an alliance with segments of the far right to roll back the progressive achievements of the post WWII era, eroding the very foundations of democracy. Why did the end of the Cold War trigger new fears among them and how did this eventually lead to an illiberal, soft authoritarian turn? What is the epochal significance of framing anti-progressive and anti-egalitarian political ideologies and agendas in the language of socio-biology and economics. How can ideas about the deregulated free market be reconciled with hard border control and ethno-racial arguments against immigration? Tune in to hear Quinn Slobodian explain what the neoliberal justifications of inequality and hierarchy mean for the future of our democracies.
Our guest: Quinn Slobodian
Democracy in Question? is brought to you by:
• Central European University: CEU
• The Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy in Geneva: AHCD
• The Podcast Company: scopeaudio
Follow us on social media!
• Central European University: @weareceu.bsky.social
• Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy in Geneva: @ahcdemocracy.bsky.social
Subscribe to the show. If you enjoyed what you listened to, you can support us by leaving a review and sharing our podcast in your networks!
Shalini: [00:00:00] Welcome to a new episode of Democracy in Question, the podcast series that explores the challenges democracies are facing around the world. I'm Shalini Randeria at Central European University Vienna, and at the Albert Hirshman Central Democracy Graduate Institute, Geneva. This is the third episode of season 11 of Democracy in question.
I'm really pleased to welcome back Quinn Slobodian, professor of International history at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. He is one of the most exciting historians of economic ideas today, and is the author of several award-winning books, many of which have been translated into multiple languages.
In 2025, he's been awarded the very prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. In the last episode, we spoke about his book's, Globalists: The End of Empire and The Birth of Neoliberalism, published in 2018 and focused [00:01:00] on Crackup capitalism: Market Radicalism and the Dream of a World without Democracy, published in 2023.
In today's episode, we'll discuss his latest book titled Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right, which was published this year. He's published widely in academic journals as well as in the New Statesman, the Guardian, New York Times, Boston Review, Dissent, and The Nation. This is the second part of a conversation I began with Quinn Slobodian in the previous episode that focused mainly on his book, Crackup Capitalism.
Today's episode picks up on some important questions that that book raised. It puts into historical perspective Quinn's argument about the fragmentation of sovereignty. This is especially salient considering the Trump administration's centralization of power in alliance with some tech [00:02:00] tycoons who have advocated secession.
And the privatization of state functions. But first, I'll ask Quinn to explain how some neoliberals ended up forging an alliance with ultraconservative extreme right forces. What fears did the end of the Cold War trigger among them, and how did this lead to an illiberal soft authoritarian turn that feeds on latent tendencies, which go back to its founding fathers like Hayek?
We'll discuss the significance of grounding anti progressive and anti egalitarian political ideologies and agendas, which are very popular today in the language of sociobiology. How can ideas about the deregulated free market be reconciled with hard border control and with ethno racial arguments against immigration?
And what does the naturalization of inequality and hierarchy, “Hayek’s [00:03:00] bastards,” as Quinn calls the unholy alliance between some neoliberals and the far right portend for our common future. I look forward greatly to hearing his answers to these questions in today's episode of Democracy in Question. Quinn, welcome back to the podcast and it's wonderful to have you again as my guest.
Thanks so much for joining me today.
Slobodian: I'm happy to be here.
Shalini: In the previous episode, we discussed your book, Crackup Capitalism that provides a corrective to the conventional understanding of neoliberal globalization as a process of supernational economic integration. You've argued that such a view misses out on the opposite dynamic of fragmentation, which was actively promoted by actors for whom democracy is not only incompatible with, but also detrimental to, capitalism.
Your new book, Hayek’s Bastards on which we are going to focus today, is about the post-89 moment, which was mistakenly celebrated by many optimistically as the end of history. You point out that for many neoliberals, the end of the Cold War was not an epic victory. In fact, they feared that socialism had merely mutated into [00:01:00] statism to curb markets in the name of social justice, affirmative action, environmentalism, feminism, etc. And to counter these ideas and to roll back decades of societal progress on these questions some of these thinkers turned to genetics and to sociobiology.
Quinn Slobodian: Yeah, this was one of those occasions where I saw the value of being a historian because rather than going in with [00:02:00] an architectural kind of theory that I wanted to buttress and validate, I went to the sources and allowed them to guide me. And there I was, to be honest, quite surprised at the records of the gatherings of neoliberal intellectuals from the immediate wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall, of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. I guess I assumed that I would find triumphalism and even gloating. And I found something that was quite different and that became the puzzle of the book to help explain why they seemed to feel like they hadn't won the Cold War in a certain way. That the battle was not over, and that the enemy had actually just changed its shape and its color. And as you [00:03:00] intimated had gone from being the old fashioned red communist threat to one that was now green, environmentalism, and pink in the form of gay rights and feminism and anti-racist and had now become a kind of a shape-shifting opponent for the defenders of the free market.
And this was interesting because if you look at globalization and globalism in the 1990s as itself a pretty enormous institution-building project, as an attempt to build a legal architecture on top of national states, then it's a constructivist project. It's the kind of thing that Neoliberals are supposed to be on guard against, right? And the story I had told in Globalists was about their willingness, [00:04:00]nevertheless to try to build international economic law from the 1920s onward so that the market would be encased and protected.
But there was something about the 90s project that put that constructivist institutional building undertaking in center stage that you could tell made them nervous. And it made them nervous because they felt like there was a good chance that that would become a kind of Trojan horse for leftism and progressivism in the wake of the Cold War. So that was their fear that this scaffolding for global property rights, for global free trade that had been painstakingly built up through things like GATT, through international investment law had now become a kind of a new grand project that the Left would seize and make their own. So, European integration will no longer be about just negative integration of the [00:05:00] capital freedoms, but would become a way of defending things like equal rights and harmonization across the block. So, the political problem that they were up against, I think was the fear that rather than having been finally put to rest, the Leftists with the progressivist threat would now actually perversely be scaled up to a new level in the wake of the Cold War. Were they seeing phantoms? Were they paranoid? Partially yes, but there were also things they could point to as evidence points for their fears. And the one that they most commonly point to is the fact that state spending as a proportion of GDP actually didn't go down after the end of the Cold War, right? [00:06:00] So this is the famous Paul Pierson argument about dismantling the welfare state. Did Reagan and Thatcher actually do it? In a way, no, because the NHS is still there, entitlements programs are still there. So that was something that even a kind of less paranoid, neoliberal or conservative could point to. And suggest that actually the battle was ongoing.
Shalini: After all, by the mid 1990s, the World Trade Organization WTO had been established according to their blueprint. Even China joined early two thousands. The WTO was hardly a champion of any progressive [00:09:00] ideas on environmentalism, on feminism, equal rights, social justice. On the contrary, it kept all questions of human rights and human mobility completely out of the purview of its framework. And instead, the WTO provided only a very efficient legal framework for the movement of capital and goods. So that was in effect, the kind of supranational order, which the neoliberals should have been more than content with, namely the constitution of a new global economic and trade order based on open borders, but only for the movement of goods, capital's, services, and finance. One that was not interested in opening borders for the movement of human beings. What the US then started to do, in my view, was to soon afterwards dismantle that order. Slowly and surely, not because it was all [00:10:00] about affirmative action or social justice, but because the United States government found itself losing cases in this multilateral organization, so it preferred to go bilateral.
Quinn Slobodian: That's I think maybe speeding up the story a little bit too much. I mean, WTO was set up in 1995, China joins 2001. So those cases you're talking about, which indeed started happening, India, China bringing cases, [00:08:00] winning half the time, 2000s into the 2010s. So yes, Trump, then it's a new story. And even by the late Obama era there's already discontent brewing. But we're talking about a 30 year time period. I think if you look at what I'm interested in, which is how does that pivot happen so quickly? I'm talking about 89. So, where does the discontent begin? You know, factually speaking, I'm totally on your side. I mean, realistically the WTO was like gutting the idea of a more expanded understanding of human rights and narrowing it down to the freedom of goods and services and finance even.
But the interesting thing is: where does the discontent begin? Well, it begins in Europe. It begins with a concern about European integration. Again, something that [00:09:00] any number of social scientists would look at and say like, are you insane? That the EU in the 1990s and 2000s was anything but the High Church of Neoliberalism. Some people would argue that it was, and I think they have a lot of evidence to make that claim.
Why did these sort of rogue neoliberals, who would eventually end up joining forces with the right, have a different idea already in 89? Well, they were worried about Jacques Delors. They were worried about a language of social Europe. They were worried that the French socialists - always the kind of enemy of the German ordo-liberals - would somehow seize the steering wheel in Brussels and Frankfurt and turn the EU into something that they didn't want it to be. Then once you get into the era of the Eurozone crisis, this produces the kind of spark that really sets the tinder on fire. And that's when some of these people, the very people who I'm talking [00:10:00] about, who were expressing some concern through the nineties, end up helping found things like the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party quite directly. So discontent turns into outright rebellion, but not until after the global financial crisis. Until then they think this is still a terrain of struggle. So, just to get the frame right for what the book is setting out to do, is to say, alright, in 2016 with Trump and Brexit Alternative for Germany, we were told this was a kind of storming of the fortress of neoliberalism from the outside. The barbarians at the gates. Mostly the left-behinds of globalization who are angry. And they come with their pitchforks. My argument is: No, there is a prehistory to this, an intellectual prehistory. And you can actually see a lot of the discontent with the settlement of the two thousands brewing from within the core of neoliberal intellectuals themselves.
And some of the very people, take Vaclav Klaus, who was one of the first presidents of post socialist Czech Republic, hugely feted figure in the traditional libertarian and neoliberal world, received the Peter Bauer Prize and the Milton Friedman Prize and spoke at the Cato Institute, was a fellow there, etc. Have a look at him now. He's one of the most fire breathing nativists, climate denying nationalist populists, all terms that he would claim proudly for himself. How did this happen? How did Mr. Globalization suddenly become Mr Right wing populism? There, it [00:12:00] needs to be explained, and I think it can be explained.
Shalini: Let me return, Quinn, to how these libertarians and right-wing thinkers built on Hayek’s speculations about [00:14:00] evolution and difference, as if these were ontological facts. And already in the 1960s, they came up with genetic and socio-biological arguments, which have once again become very salient in many political discourses on the right. Today, what comes as a surprise to me as a social anthropologist, is this turn, this recent turn once again to socio-biology, which had been completely debunked in my discipline decades ago. How does one explain this particular reading, or should I rather say, misreading of Hayek's speculations?
Slobodian Quinn: Yeah, they're really kind of from the desk sort of philosophizing more than anything else. Well, the first book that I wrote, Globalists, was really about the problem of democracy and how neoliberals have been concerned across the 20th century and into the 21st about how the principle of universal suffrage could disrupt a world that was made safe for capitalism.
I think the best way to answer your question is to say there was a parallel problem, not unconnected, which is the problem of human equality. So if there are basic claims being made that are ontological claims of the most essential type about the equality of humans at the level of their capacity, at the level of the rights that they should be able to hold in front of governments, and even beyond that, then a [00:14:00] lot of the proposals that Neoliberals are making are greeted with a lot of friction because the market produces inequality. And the secret of neoliberal philosophy is to say that the inequalities it produces are both A) worth the outcome; and B) rewards for higher talent and better effort. In the 1960s, why does it come up first then? Because it's a time of great demands by social movements for human equality, whether it's the anti-racist, civil rights, women's movements in the global North, and then the combined movements of a similar type that become the anti-colonial movements and the revolutionary movements in the global South.
There were people all over the world saying, we are equal and we should organize our societies to reflect that fact. And that was the first time that, you see a lot of these neoliberals and their affiliated conservatives [00:15:00] seeking what they saw as a hard science refutation of that demand or that claim. And where they found it was in the traditional way. It was found across the 19th century anyway in bad race science. And I include in the book some discussion of this first and second Symposium on Human Differentiation as they were called, funded by Charles Koch, hosted by the Institute for Humane Studies, which now has a multimillion dollar budget. It's attached to George Mason University. And they got together a bunch of people who just one after another said, here's why the young radicals in the streets, the anti-colonial movements, the civil rights movements are all wrong, and will always be wrong, because humans are different and it's built into their biology.
And it any attempt to try to make humans the same in outcomes and [00:16:00] in life will disrupt fatally the mechanisms that produce innovation, that produce efficiency, that produce growth. So, in fact, the main thing we need to be fighting against is the claim of human equality. And what weapons do we have? What's in the arsenal? It had this one big bludgeon that they reached to again and again, which is the science to show that on average people of these genetic communities are less capable, less intelligent, less worthy of reward in the marketplace. And therefore, we need to organize society around that fact of basic human inequality.
And that same form of argument recurs from the 60s to the 70s around a language of IQ. It returns again, as I describe in the book in the 1990s in the form of the Bell Curve written by [00:17:00] Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, and it recurs again in the recent discussion, of course, of the resurgence of interest in ideas of, human difference and human hierarchies. And once again, actually, literally IQ being a fixation for the convergence of national conservatives and Silicon Valley right wingers. So all of that gets woven into Hayek own speculations, sometimes faithfully, more often unfaithfully.
And the title of the book was too irresistible for me to not take up, but some true believer Hayekians have been really irked by it because they feel like I'm pinning too much on Hayek, even if it's in the form of claims that this is illegitimate. But I find Hayek a bewitching figure as many people do. Very interesting to think about, and with [00:18:00] his speculations about human nature, to put them very briefly, were that to understand where a market-based society should go, we need to understand where it's come from. And to understand where it's come from, we need to know why certain parts of the world have been more successful than others in developing the toolbox of moral virtues and habits as a society that have made them more capable of expanding across the earth and dominating other populations. He argued already in the 1960s, not think about human nature as something that is really evenly distributed across the world, or shared by all homo sapiens, but that is subdivided into population groups that have more and less capacity for thrift, hard work, work [00:19:00] ethic in short. And taking that on board, we need to see the limits of things like international development, the limits of multiracial societies of mass immigration. If you assume, as he eventually did, that some cultures have an inheritance that others don't, then why try to export the tools of advanced capitalism from one place to the other? It'll never work. Why bring in groups of people who come from a less developed society? You're only gonna dilute your own talent pool. And those arguments which began, I would say as kind of a reflection on a theory of history, have now been pretty clearly weaponized as the the basis of what we think of now as ethnonationalist, exclusionary politics.
Shalini: So during the course of the 30 years that you are interested in as the [00:20:00] intellectual prehistory of the present, what we are seeing is what you call the New Fusion of neoliberals and the new Right. And that's something the book tries to analyze. They both have, as you very rightly pointed out, a great worry about global economic inequality, of any kind of solidarity beyond the nation state. And they're both equally worried about any egalitarianism both between, but also within societies. So could you say something about this New Fusionism and what kind of discursive strategies do they use apart from these arguments on inherent inequality?
Quinn Slobodian: Maybe it's first good to say what I mean by that term. It's a play on the category of “Fusion”, which historians of the American Right have used for some time to talk about how religious conservatives [00:21:00] and free market liberals started seeing themselves as being part of the same project. So William F. Buckley National Review, all the way up to, I would say Mike Pence, but certainly through both of the Bushes and Ronald Reagan, you had this combination of a language of born again virtue and Christian ethics with family values, obviously with a language of the need to preserve private property and free trade as somehow equally sanctified. So, that was Fusion and that was a good half century of the American, right? What I'm calling New Fusionism, is something that you see start to develop in the shadow of the traditional fusion, which in the 1990s was also associated with what we call neo-conservatism. So this idea that [00:22:00]after the Cold War, the moral obligation of America to guard and liberate the world was not over. In fact, now perhaps it had even been scaled up because there was no competitor. So the language that George W. Bush used about a crusade to defeat terrorism and global Islam, etc., was sort of the other side of the coin of fusion.
Fusion and neoconservatism went well together. At the same time though, there were these kind of dissonant members of the Right, including the people I write about in the book, who were both dissatisfied with this new global mission that the US had taken on for itself, and they were trying to root their ideas of human difference in something other than a language of religion. When it came to foreign policy, they were isolationists. They believed that America should just take care of itself. That the language of “America first” was very much on the lips of these people who called themselves [00:23:00]paleoconservatives against the neoconservatives, who believed that the good thing about the Cold War being over is they didn't have to put soldiers on the ground across the world anymore and could focus on reinforcing the homeland.
And what the homeland was comprised of then was thought through some new languages of science rather than religion. So the idea that we are more likely to cooperate with people that have the same ethnicity as ourselves is something that comes out of sort of arcane discussions within sociobiology, as you mentioned a minute ago, and becomes the basis for arguments against immigration in places like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, who rather than talking about [00:24:00]what it says in the Bible, are saying, what Robert Trivers or E. O. Wilson said about baboon troops in the 1970s and 1980s.
So this is a novelty in neoliberal and conservative discourse, which hadn't really been that reliant on the language of social sciences or the hard sciences in the earlier post-war years. But picked up on a kind of a shift in the Zeitgeist and the intellectual mood too, which was more interested in pop- science explanations of the world. There was a popular interest in things like the Human Genome Project, which was being completed across the 1990s. The idea that there was a science of human difference that was hardwired into our brains and our DNA was something that was quite out of vogue for decades, right? The high point of [00:25:00] Boasian cultural anthropology, the idea that race was just a social construction that was used to justify status quo hierarchies was really under attack in the 1990s, and not only by right wingers.
There were a lot of people who found the new discoveries of population genetics as important ways to address vulnerabilities in marginalized communities. People like Alondra Nelson have written about the way that Black scientists in particular and medical researchers found it helpful to be able to use things like DNA to address health issues.
Charles Murray is certainly the most recurrent right wing figure in the book and his reliance on what he understands to be his race science continues. So [00:26:00] nowadays he's writing about the science of race and sex difference and making pretty outrageous claims that in the near future they will be able to do a kind of a genetic audit of each person and be able to tell right off the bat from that score how well you'll be able to perform at your job, whether you should be let into the university or not. So this is a extraordinary kind of scientization of the language of free market philosophy. Which, as I'm at pains of pointing out in the book, is really against the original Hayekian spirit. Hayek was, like Karl Popper, his collaborator, a pretty consistent critic of overly credulous claims about what science could tell us about the world and believed that there needed to be very rigorous resistance against what Hayek called scientism.
Shalini: So let me turn to another aspect of the ideological mix that we are talking about. I think you're absolutely right to point out this is type of evolutionary psychology etc is on the rise. And that's what they're focusing on rather than finding religious arguments for making a case about what they think is putatively the genetic basis for inequality of intelligence. And [00:28:00] obviously as you very rightly point out, if one believes that there is a genetic basis for unequal intelligence, then, of course, any kind of equality of outcomes through education or redistribution are just totally futile efforts. So, I can see that piece of the puzzle. But the other piece, which is interesting, is immigration. You point out in the book - and this came as a surprise to me as well- that already 25 years ago, Rothbard, who is one of the figures whose thinking you're analyzing, railed against immigration by what he called “hordes of foreigners”, who are all going to be unwilling and unable to assimilate.
And this anti-immigration rhetoric in the US and the anti-elitist populism have mutually strengthened each other, both in the US and then in Europe. So, could you [00:29:00] explain how they managed to channel this resentment that they had against foreigners, on the one hand, those who are sort of outside the social body as they conceived of it, but also upwards against elites, who they somehow saw as stealthily ushering in social democracy, which wasn't really the case in the US.
Quinn Slobodian: No, no. Far from it, right? Yeah, I mean the, the story of immigration and neoliberal thought is actually quite fascinating because
Shalini: it's counterintuitive in a sense.
Quinn Slobodian: It needs to be historicized, right? Because on paper you should think of labor as a mobile unit of production that should go to where it is most needed and where it can be deployed most efficiently. But since the 1930s even the purists had already began to make some pretty serious sort of carve outs for the question of immigration as basically a concession to flawed human nature. I title an article I wrote about this “Perfect capitalism, imperfect humans”. The argument being that someone like (Ludwig von) Mises, who was Friedrich Hayek’s mentor from Austria said, his ideal was something like the old Hapsburg Empire, where you had a big free trade area and you had free movement of labor, and people seemed to be satisfied with the level of national representation that they had. They could have schooling in their own languages, they could operate within their own languages to a certain extent, and yet they could also go where their labor was needed. [00:31:00] So one of the things that I wrote about at that time, is that the original kind of Austrian neoliberal vision was to just scale up the Habsburg Empire to the scale of the world, and similarly have nominal national representation with an underlying economic unity and the enforcement of free trade and capital rights. But Mises himself already in the 1940s was saying, listen, people aren't gonna accept this. You can't expect white people in the United States to accept an influx of Asians or people from South America. They'll be revolted, repulsed. Hayek repeated effectively the same reframed in the UK in the late 1970s after Margaret Thatcher came out as such a [00:32:00] fire breathing nativist, anti-immigrant spokeswoman. And he said, I can understand this because when I was in Vienna in the 1920s, we had arrivals of Jews from the East and they were unacculturated. It took them a long time to fit in and it was very difficult to see them as our equals as part of the community. Human nature is imperfect and slow. And of course, the Thatcher duality between hard borders and free markets was already there at the beginning. And that was the really the essential quality of Thatcherite neoliberalism in many ways.
So it's hardly a novelty to combine a certain vision of ethnic national purity with a vision of deregulation and further privatization and the opening up of markets. But [00:33:00] that being said one of the things that I did not know about that I was shocked to come across when I was researching for this book, was the fact that in the late 1980s, the Wall Street Journal was in the habit of every 4th of July declaring that there should be a new amendment to the Constitution that said, there shall be open borders. And they meant what they said. And, and they were criticizing the militarization of the southern border. They were criticizing the use of high tech surveillance. They said, let people come in. We need the workers, we need the labor. Basically they were genuflecting before the self-ordering qualities of the market in a way that was quite extraordinary and actually not typical of the neoliberal intellectuals that I write about in the book.
So even [00:34:00] Hayek would not have really agreed with that position. And what I point out in the book is that there was an opening created for a position that could combine anti-immigration with liberal values, economically neoliberal values that was capitalized on by Peter Brimelow, a kind of gray eminence inside of the world of far right and MAGA politics. He was a speech writer for Rupert Murdoch for a while. And my argument is that if we look at the gestation of what we now think of as far right politics, it's not just blood and soil and a demand for the ethno-state, it's also being couched in a [00:35:00] language of economic rationality.
And it's saying things like we actually don't want their human capital, their human capital is inferior and we need to think about the needs of the American economy. And we could use one intelligent native person is worth more than 10 low IQ imports. So let's boost the knowledge economy by increasing investment in human capital at home. It produces an economistic language of far right exclusion that I call more a language of ethno- economy than ethno-state. So that is I think important because when we talk about 2016 and onwards, often we talk about this as a kind of political or cultural backlash against economic rationality, right? People are voting against their own interests. They are acting in ways that are fundamentally ungrounded in economic theory.[00:36:00]
And yet there were people making the case within economic terms. And it also shows why is immigration important? Because it shows the flip side of what I think we could think of as “neoliberal eugenics”. It's almost a contradiction in terms because neoliberals supposedly don't like a lot of state intervention, and eugenics always requires a lot of state intervention. But there's a way around that if you do it through a selective immigration policy that you rank according to racial capacity, then you're doing eugenics at the border, so to speak, by protecting the internal population. And if you offload the care of the family and children to private actors as, for example, Robert Kennedy Jr., is doing now by eliminating federal oversight of things like vaccination, then that's, I think a form of neoliberal [00:37:00] eugenics in its own form. Because you're saying those who have the means and the wherewithal to reproduce are going to survive because of the dissolution of federal oversight for child and maternal health, and those who don't have the means will die premature deaths. So it's eugenics by another means.
Shalini: This is a very interesting argument and alarming because what you're pointing out is that the New Fusion, as you call it, is not only about erecting hard borders around a putatively racially pure and culturally homogenous ethno-state. But it's also about safeguarding the allegedly “natural workings” of what you call an ethno-economy within these borders. And that it is of apiece then with a kind of genetics and eugenic thinking, which could include some kind of eugenic [00:38:00] calculus for immigration, which would obviate the need for cultural claims about non assimilability, etc. because you have a clearly economic reason to include some and exclude others. However, the progressive argument for immigration is also an economic one, that immigrants actually contribute to the GDP and that they are actually not a drain on the, the nation state, but are both demographically necessary because of falling birth rates, but also economically necessary because of labor shortages. But the economic argument has already been turned around on the right into a eugenic one. What kind of argument do you think would make sense to counter, this [00:39:00] narrative?
Quinn Slobodian: Well, on the point of sort of laundering a far right agenda through a language of social science, there's a very clear example of this being done and working, which I mentioned in the book, which is in Germany with Thilo Sarrazin’sbook Deutschland Schafft sich ab (or Germany does itself in), which was an alarm bell about immigration as well as demographic decline in the ethnic German population. And the argument against further immigration was based on bad science from psychology and from a lot of the people I talk about in the book, including this particular thinker named Richard Lynn. And Sarrazin's argument is because people from Muslim majority countries have lower IQ, that means they also have worse impulse control, and more likelihood to become welfare dependents, and time preference that does not map well onto enterprise and a bunch of garbage frankly. But it was an [00:40:00] argument for ethnonationalism that was made through IQ science and without appealing to anything mystical. It was just social science. That was I think very important in shifting the Overtonwindow in Germany for more middle class people saying, okay, now this is not just blood and soil Nazi stuff. This is actually up to date social science, and maybe we need to take it seriously.
Shalini: It was a very, very popular book and there was a huge debate about whether he should be thrown out of the social democratic party of which he was member. So this wasn't the conservative right? But let me follow up with another idea [00:41:00]which you have also analyzed in the book, the category of IQ racism. And you referred earlier to Charles Murray, the controversial work on the Bell Curve, and the emergence of what you call “neuro-castes”, which promises in a way the safety of racial homogeneity. So could you explain what you mean by this the term “neuro caste” and what would this then mean for the uneven history of the capitalist world if we were to use this kind of an optic? Because it would basically say we just have to live with all the inequality because it's just objectively given.
Quinn Slobodian: That's certainly the end point, and that's intended as such. What I mean by that category of “neuro-castes” is [00:42:00] the same thing that Michael Young talks about when he coined the term “meritocracy”, which is that if you have a society where intelligence is measured through IQ, is the primary determiner of social standing and wealth, and if you believe that IQ is substantially heritable in ways that can't really be changed that much through early childhood intervention or education, then what you'll get over time is a group of people that are defined by their hereditary in-group status. That correlates with a higher level of intelligence and a higher level of wealth and power. And that's what [00:43:00] the Bell Curve is about. What Charles Murray is arguing is that over time you're getting this great divide in American life, where people of high IQ are gravitating towards centers of higher education and high earning. They're all in Georgetowns and the Wall Streets and the Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Palo Altos, and it's leaving a hollowed core of the country, of people who are by no fault of their own low IQ, unable to achieve much and will likely remain as such. So it's a very weird book because it's actually very anti-poor, right? It's basically saying these poor people are low IQ and inequality is given. So what's the answer? Basically, stop trying to change it. So remove what exists of interventionism because it's throwing [00:44:00] good money away. America, as they say in the book, needs to start living with inequality again.
And that that is a message that needs to be scaled up globally. So what kind of a version of the capitalist world results from this? It's one that completely abandons the mid-century vision of modernization theory or an idea of a future of global evenness, where there's convergence through capital transfer, technology transfer, educational support. In one of my favorite quotes, a senator from Kansas in the 1950s said: We will bring Shanghai up and up until it is just like Kansas City. And this was the dream of the the mid-century American Rostowian state. Of course Shanghai has now long superseded [00:45:00]Kansas City. And that's maybe kind of the point, that America now no longer feels that it needs to take the world by the hand, in part because it's been outpaced, right? It is now far behind China in manufacturing capacity. It is about to be taken over in absolute economic power altogether, and it's in defensive mode. And so what I'm describing in the book, is the emergence of a kind of a neoliberalism within the west, within the US in a world in which they see themselves as losers.They now see themselves as needing to barricade themselves against a rising China. And so no global mandate, no global agenda. That was a mistake. Globalism had its moment and now it's gone. And this is about saying, how can you refigure [00:46:00] neoliberal market defensive thinking for a deglobalization world?
And I think that the interesting thing about watching Trump I and Trump II is you can see quite literally the way that kind of activists from within the neoliberal world at the Cato (Institute), Heritage (Institute), types tried to make gains inside of MAGA for their own agenda and have had, I would say, limited and now shrinking success. They basically have got tax cuts and deregulation, but the larger Trump agenda is by now, I think, not easily described as the neoliberal one in any way. And I think the kind of stampeding over the rights of private enterprise that's happening now, I think shows that the gamble that they were trying to pull off in joining [00:47:00]arms with ethno-nationalist forces is now probably turning against them.
Shalini: But what is puzzling, Quinn, watching from afar, is, it's a political hybrid of xenophobia, anti-poor sentiment, protectionism and free market values, which are just strange bedfellows. How is an ideology based on this strange mixture so effective in gaining popular support for a highly elitist project that has favored the rich by privatizing, cutting taxes, taking away the little bits of the welfare state, which would've provided some [00:48:00] healthcare and access to education. This is the real puzzle.
Quinn Slobodian: I think it's explainable though. To go back to the talk about neuro caste, if you make a claim that let's say whiteness and East Asianness in particular come with automatically higher intelligence compared to the brown world, let's say, then you've already made quite a powerful political promise to a large part of the population. You're basically promising what has been called the wages of whiteness. It is something that you will be getting back soon. There's a promise of future returns on your status in this privileged group. And the way that the MAGA movement currently [00:49:00] promises to deliver on that, they are doing things that if you are a believer, you could see as promising as well. I mean, if you see deportation and you think in your mind mechanically that means my wages as a construction worker will go up, then that looks like action. If you are credulous and you think that tariffs and state intervention in the economy of a reckless and haphazard kind is going to lead to new well-paid factory jobs, then that looks like more than you were being offered by the other party.
Shalini: And what happens when all of that just doesn't happen?
Quinn Slobodian: Well, it didn't happen in the first Trump administration.
Shalini: This, this is why for me, the puzzle is the continued belief in something which is always a deferred promise that you'll make it [00:50:00] in time. But none of them have ever made it.
Quinn Slobodian: Well, but in the narratology of the last decade in the United States, that would be just because your efforts to take back what was yours were so threatening to the establishment that they had to mobilize everything they could to try to stop you, which is what they would call the stealing of the 2020 election, the mobilization of paid protestors and radicals in the streets in an attempt to block the genuine effort to take back America. So this is now the second effort to finally defeat the enemies within and get to the promised land on the other side.
Shalini: I have two last questions. One is to do with zones, and I want to come back to Crack-up Capitalism on this. And the other is a more global question on law because of my own interest in the internationalization of law. [00:51:00] You end Crack-up Capitalism by pointing out that one of the really big paradoxes, which are at the core of this project, is that, and I quote you, “zones are everywhere, but they don't seem to be creating islands of liberation from the state. Rather, states are using them as tools to advance their own purposes.” So the likes of Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, they know the real game is capturing the existing state. They don't have to go to the trouble of creating a new one. Could you say something about the structural transformation of the American state under Trump 2.0? In a recent article you provocatively likened it to Saudi Arabia.
Quinn Slobodian: Well I think that was an effort to try to understand Trump's own ideal typical political economy in his brain. I think that [00:52:00] Trump in particular and his family are enamored with a petro Saudi style regime. But I think he is as always a kind of juggernaut, or a locomotive, to which many people try to attach their own personal projects whether that's getting enormous investments in AI data centers, or bringing back manufacturing to the American South. But I think as far as the political geography question, how this [00:53:00] cashes out looked at through the lens of something like a zone, I think the United States is interesting because it is a very large country and it's very internally diverse. There's quite a bit of capacity to create different laws and taxation regimes at the state level below the national level. And America has always operated by what they call jurisdictional competition or arbitrage that companies perform by putting their domicile in one state and then their headquarters in another. Delaware is the classic example, South Dakota. These are places where many, if not all, or most of the blue chip companies in this country are domiciled even though they have nothing more than a nameplate there to show their presence. And then that has created a kind of [00:54:00] internally uneven landscape of laws and also wealth in the US. And someone like Musk is actually participating heavily in accelerating that internal diversification by taking out his company's registration in Delaware and moving it to Texas where the new government or the governor is trying to make it as capital- hospitable as possible.
The social laws, especially around reproductive rights, but also around education policy are producing a kind of a sorting out of the American population internally that I think is going to look more and more different over time. I mean, already the state of Massachusetts where I live is refusing to follow the vaccine policy being developed at the federal level. They're saying we're doing our own. So these are signs of decentralization [00:55:00] inside the state that I think are happening at the same time as centralizations of power on things like tariff policy. So it's as with the 90s with globalization, when there were both forms of supranational integration happening and forms of fragmentation happening. Down at the grassroots level, I think the same thing is happening in the US now. I wouldn't mistake everything happening now as a one way process of centralization.
Shalini: That's exactly what I wanted to end our conversation on because it ties with the first part of our conversation. We were talking about smaller scale segregation and fragmentation when we were thinking about gated communities as sites, where you could experiment with decentralized and privatizing legal arrangements. And many of the thinkers you've been discussing seem to have an agenda of, both decentering and pluralizing [00:56:00] law and order. So it's in a sense for many of them an open call to what some legal scholars would call legal polycentrism. The utopian world which they imagine seems to be a world in which different communities or firms carry their own private law around with them. And they can freely opt in and out of sort of overlapping quasi-private spaces of sovereignty. So could you describe what kind of an international legal order is an ideal world for them, which would encourage in a way, totally individualistic abdication from any responsibility for the common good.
Slobodian Quinn: I think that kind of ideal world that I was describing [00:57:00] in Crack up Capitalism as a kind of extreme form of libertarianism, banal things like privatized security forces as one part of that, but then at a higher level, things like arbitration courts, which are forms of law that are provided by private service providers and basically operate on the principle of confidence and trust. So companies will agree to arbitration with x arbitration court. And if it doesn't do its job well then people will stop signing up for their services with it. And it's not something that is decided by a statute or constitutional law, but it's something that happens through the decisions of private actors. So they imagine a version where more of that logic colonizes investment, the commerce and [00:58:00] you can run around elected governments and simply conduct yourself in the form of this private international law rather than public international law.
Now, there was a moment when I thought maybe that was what united, let's say Silicon Valley, with parts of the libertarian right in the United States. I think there was maybe a moment where the direction of travel for something like MAGA could have gone in that direction. But now I think especially in the second term, not only is there this idea of using protectionist policy and trade policy in a way to reorder the world, but also in ways that I hadn't taken seriously enough.
I think the attempt to root out what they see as the roots of leftist hegemony [00:59:00] in the American social body is being taken much more seriously than I would've expected. In other words, I don't think that the real activists inside of the government believe that you can just kind of live and let live. And as Libertarians, in fact, often would say like, Hey, let San Francisco have their full employment policy and let Massachusetts do their own thing. And like people will go to the part of the country that works better for them. But if you have this more apocalyptic vision of common sense having been poisoned by the output of places like Harvard University and The Nation Magazine and the New York Times, then you do need to root it out at the source, even if that is not very libertarian and could be economically counterproductive.
And that's the stage where now I think even conservatives are getting restless, right? The [01:00:00] Attorney General Pam Bondi talking about hate speech is something. The Wall Street Journal editorial page, which has stood arm in arm with the Trump administration on most policies is now pushing back. Tucker Carlson has pushed back against this because they see that: one, it's not true to the spirit of the American political settlement, and two, that by introducing precedents like that you actually set yourself up for retaliation if and when a democratic party is returned to power. So I think that a lot of what I wrote about in Crack-up Capitalism is more of historical interest at the moment than a diagnostic of what we are going to see coming in the near future.
Shalini: Thank you very much Quin. This is, to be very honest, a very alarming conversation to say the least. So thanks for this really wide ranging and very insightful conversation on a genealogy of the present; and of trying to make sense of the present moment in terms of some rather odd combinations of ideas which seem to be extremely powerful at the moment.
Slobodian Quinn: It was my pleasure.
Shalini: My conversation with Quinn Slobodian today focused on his latest book, Hayek’s Bastards. It charts the way in which some neoliberals have joined the paleoconservative right in what Quinn calls the New Fusion. He pointed out that many neoliberal intellectuals continue to worry about the potential hijacking by progressives of international institutions serving the global expansion of capitalist markets, even after the left suffered a historic defeat at the end of the Cold War. These neoliberals eagerly joined forces with the extreme right in the US and in Europe, as they saw the persistence of progressive state funded welfare policies in the EU as a formidable threat. Therefore, far right politics should not be seen as an external, culturally driven reaction to neoliberalism, [00:58:00] but rather as a historically rooted one in the neoliberal movement itself. Unlike the new conservatives of the Reagan-Bush era, the paleoconservatives did not embed their political economic ideology in the language of religion, Christianity. Instead, they invoked scientistis and economic arguments. While Hayek was critical of pseudo-scientific explanations, these followers of his accepted socio-biological claims about inherent genetic differences. As early as 1960s, these claims were used by them against egalitarian, progressive efforts by social movements. In the view of these neoliberals, whom Quinn calls Hayek’s bastards, it's wrong to demand equality as there are ineradicable foundations to hierarchical biological [00:59:00] differences. These seriously mistaken claims are the basis then of ethno-racially framed demographic imaginaries. They've become a powerful argument and an instrument to oppose immigration, and they've merged pro-market fundamentalism with deregulation, privatization, and a strong call for tight border control. This alliance aims to preserve so-called ethno-national purity. It has succeeded in part due to its recourse to a language of economic rationality bolstered by pseudo-scientific socio-biological claims. It's produced a language of what Quinn terms ethno-economy, but this has also legitimized a discourse of selective neoliberal eugenics, as Quinn put it. In practice, such neoliberal eugenics works at the border itself, keeping those deemed inferior in terms of the economic [01:00:00] potential and human capital out of the country. It works domestically within a society, through the biopolitics of rolling back the protective safety net that supports the more vulnerable and thus economically less useful parts of the population. One consequence of this is that even sound economic arguments in favor of immigration are now rendered helpless. The grim message is that inequality is just objectively given and instead of trying to alleviate it, we should simply accept it and learn to live with it. Earlier narratives of modernization, development and convergence are thereby consigned to the dustbin of history. Instead, a self sorting, segregated spatial order now threatens to fragment our societies—a theme that we also discussed in detail in the previous episode. We argued that the [01:01:00] retreat from internationalism and an open border policy enjoys broad popular support in the United States precisely because of its promise to restore racially coded and geographically protected economic privilege, even to those who vote against their own objective interests.
This was the third episode of Season 11 of Democracy in Question. Thank you for listening, and join me again next month for a conversation about how recent demographic dynamics relate to the exercise of reproductive agency by men and women. I'll discuss these with two experts from the UN Family Planning Agency, UNFPA, Alanna Armitage, and Rebecca Zerzan.
Please go back and listen to any episode you might have missed, including the previous one that also focused on attempts to dismantle democracy in the name of capitalism. [01:02:00] And of course, let your friends know about this podcast. If you've enjoyed it, you can stay in touch with the work of the Central European university@www.ceu.edu and the Albert Hirschman Central Democracy at www dot graduate Institute CH democracy.