"It's fantastic. We think of the far-right as racist and identitarian, and this book really narrows down that that did not come out of nowhere. As Slobodian notes, modern scholarship on the far-right barely mentions capitalism, and he really adds to the body of work by slotting the economic aspect in.

Must read for understanding and combating hate everywhere."

"I should have reviewed this some time ago. I enjoyed it. History of ideas, but within living memory if, like me, you're well past middle age. Friedrich Hayek is the fellow that inspired Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, a mania for giving tax cuts to the rich, and the fire-sale of state assets which we know today as neo-liberalism. It turns out that his disciples were rum lot, some of them very interested in eugenics; also, it turns out that capitalism works best if it's managed by clever people, and certain races are cleverer than others (we've all been kept in the dark about this - socialists and their ilk are dragging us all down to their level). Slobodian traces many twists and turns among conferences, think-tanks, billionaires' foundations, private communications, and academic journals - there is quite a cast of academically distinguished people involved with this - to tell a compelling story of what informs much of today's bonkers right-wing extremism. It's very impressive research, and the book is a real page-turner, but at the end, with all the acronyms, unfamiliar names (foundations, think-tanks, etc., but also personal names), the takeaway is rather insubstantial - an impression of dark forces at work, but not much tangible to hold on to. I don't hold Slobodian responsible for this. It's the nature of his subject matter. Maybe in time, when others have taken up and expanded on the same material, it will become more familiar and seem less abstruse. I hope so."

"I’ve been a fan of Slobodian’s work for a while, and he delivers another essential work here. This continues in the vein of his earlier monographs Globalists and Crack-Up Capitalism in historicizing the relationship between capitalism, liberalism, and the global right. I think Slobodian’s project is especially poignant for me, as I distinctly remember when it seemed that there was much more daylight between free market/libertarian ideology and white supremacy, war, and authoritarianism than there actually was. I was never sympathetic, but I thought maybe the ideology could stand on its own more than it has.

What Slobodian shows here is how, in the “End of History� era after the collapse of the Soviet Union, many free market zealots couldn’t rest easily on their laurels. Between the very real preexisting far-right commitments of many of the original neoliberals, the crises that the end of the Cold War left unresolved, and a need for a hook for further political action, a subsection of capitalist ideologues made a “new fusionism.� If post WWII American conservatism rested on a coalition of the religious, anti-government free-market proponents, and anticommunists (this was in their own telling- notice it doesn’t say “racists�), the new right-wing fusion would be between free market neoliberals and “paleos,� that is, racists, ethnonationalists, etc. Arguably, the most symbolic figure of the “new synthesis� is Murray Rothbard, the “anarcho-capitalist� ideologue. I say “arguably� because, at the end of the day, the neoliberal-paleocon synthesis, as I think Slobodian shows, advances more by the action of those who took some, but not all, of its premises, and agreed to fudge the rest to work towards the common goal of defeating anything progressive: Pat Buchanan, Charles Murray, Peter Brimelow, the hundreds of journalists and academics who smuggled their rank bigotries and sophistries into mainstream conversations, eventually the influencers and meme-lords of today, up to and including the actual current president of Argentina and, in a less direct way, the president of the United States.

Slobodian finely threads the needle between the original neoliberals around the Mont Pelerin Society and the new synthesis. They truly are Friedrich von Hayek’s bastards- not his legitimate heirs, but sharing plenty of his DNA. It’s true that Hayek turned towards “cultural explanations� for inequality towards the end of his life, and agreed that efforts to protect/advance the cultures that supposedly allowed for liberal capitalism were necessary to undertake. True to form though, he refused to quantify these cultural differences or assign them firmly to any given demographics. You could more or less tell what they meant- it was pretty consistently white people they were “defending� from “forced integration� and/or “aggression,� from the Jim Crow US South to apartheid South Africa. This, more than any other issue, is what kickstarted political libertarianism in the US. That said, Hayek, Friedman, and political epigones like Goldwater and Reagan all claimed that the free market was for everyone, foreswore bigotry as irrational, etc. That they had to deflect to “freedom of association� to fight civil rights is the hypocrisy-tax they paid to the virtue they understood broad human freedom to be. But from Rothbard on down, other libertarians who rubbed elbows at Mont Pelerin conferences were more than happy to spell the implications out, aloud, along predictable lines.

The new fusion didn’t just provide an alliance between cultural conservatism and neoliberalism, one that could outlast the disastrous neoconservative coalition when it shat the bed in the Middle East and everywhere else. It also reestablished the right in an intellectual foundation of supposedly hard realities. For all the emphasis the likes of Milton Friedman put on the “free flow� of money, goods, ideas, and sometimes people, their ideological neighbors in the new fusion preferred more solid metaphors. IQ, supposedly, is “hard-wired,� in the genes. These genes in turn supposedly run along hard lines of descent bound to racial, ethnic, and national groups. They then reinscribe these supposedly immutable differences (based on made up and arbitrary racial and national groups) to insist on the need for need hard borders, in order to keep undesirables, those not programmed by the aforementioned genes to succeed in capitalism, out. Hard money, too, in the form of gold or, eventually, the hard logic of the blockchain, would separate the strong, thoughtful, and provident from the weak suckers who think that society, in the form of government and its papers, could, would, or should care about them (they’d be the ones who could fight off the low-IQ foreign hordes, too, in their own imagining). Slobodian combs through a wonderful array of sources, from the performatively (pseudo)-intellectual world of post-war eugenics, to goldbug survivalist fora which dovetailed with the once-lively world of investment advice newsletters to a few different flavors of science fiction to show us how this new fusion formed and spread. Among other things, Hayek’s Bastards shines as an example of a growing historical literature of just how fucking weird the nineties and aughts really were.

That all of this is based in junk science ala Charles Murray, junk economics, fetishism of various kinds (commodity, race, gender, violence, take your pick), doesn’t really deter anyone invested in this new fusionism or its constituent parts. These supposedly hard facts that ground them in reality are more like feelings, and the right is going to oblige all of us to care about them. Slobodian was also co-author of the paper that introduced the concept of “diagonalism� to explain the appeal of authoritarian movements � MAGA, AfD in Germany, anti-vax and transphobia everywhere � hooked in crunchy, notionally-libertarian or apolitical types in a sort of united front of “alternative facts� believers against the oppressive regime of� well, reality, and its harsh vibes. Diagonalism and the new fusionism are, at the very least, sitting at the same lunch table, if not cousins (or weird scifi clones).

The neoliberal project, from its beginnings in interwar Vienna, has always been about encasing the market as an institution from democratic pressure. More than the chaos that free marketeers supposedly thrive off of, the most important neoliberal thinkers emphasized institutions (constitutions, nations, banking authorities, courts, etc) that could act as bulwarks against the supposedly corrosive action of the masses. I would say it wasn’t just fringe kooks taking the neoliberal oriflamme from the “respectable� hands of the Hayeks of the world. Post-Cold War (and post 9/11, post-GWOT, post-2008, post-Tea Party, on and on), it was those kooks who helped give the right, as a broader project of the defense of privilege, and neoliberalism with it, new life. And Slobodian produces an uncanny effect in his writing (at least for this child of the end of history period) by displaying just how porous the line between kook and respectable always was, not just intellectually but institutionally and even socially- the connections have always been there. And he does this without the kind of reductionism you so often see in “the discourse� - “of course, they were always nazis from the word go,� etc etc, which might be handy in a social media dustup but less so for a thoroughgoing understanding of what’s going on.

All this, in a slim (under 200 pages), readable, and often highly entertaining book. Go read it!"