How free market ideas mutated into the far right

Quinn Slobodian on how libertarian thought has evolved into the ideological backbone of nationalists and authoritarians around the world.

Peter Thiel and Elon Musk launching PayPal in 1999. The self-professed libertarians are now major Trump backers.

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Now, onto the main event.

Quinn Slobodian is no stranger to big, bold arguments. The Canadian historian’s last book, Crack-Up Capitalism, offered a powerful rethinking of globalisation—not as a uniform march toward integration, but as a patchwork of elite-designed zones where capitalism could operate without democratic constraint.

I found Crack-Up Capitalism vital for understanding the fractured nature of the global economy —and why that fracture often works in favour of the wealthy and powerful, as we are seeing in Donald Trump’s second term in the White House.

But there is also something particularly curious about the Trump administration: supposed free marketers have fallen in behind Trump’s massive tariffs and a blizzard of executive orders that have stripped away so many democratic freedoms.

Self-declared techno libertarians like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are now at the vanguard of an uber nationalist political project to ‘Make America Great Again’.

So what’s going on? Why are would-be libertarians in hock with the far right? And is this really a new departure?

In trying to understand all this, I’ve found myself turning again to Slobodian. His new book Hayek’s Bastards traces the surprising legacy of free-market doyen (and onetime London School of Economics professor) Friedrich Hayek, whose neoliberal ideas have been reinterpreted, repackaged, and radicalised by everyone from Trumpist think tanks to Argentinian president Javier Milei.

Hayek’s Bastards delves into the networks, and the institutions that have helped free-market ideology morph into something far stranger and, at times, more dangerous. Along the way, Slobobian shines a light on familiar players—including the Tufton Street think tanks that birthed Brexit and Liz Truss’s disastrous premiership.

I recently spoke to Slobodian about how libertarianism and authoritarianism have become bedfellows in the US and beyond - and why understanding Hayek and his ideological descendants is crucial to grasping the present moment.

I hope you enjoy the conversation!

Peter Geoghegan: Hayek's Bastards is certainly a provocative title. What do you mean by it? Why do you think Hayek is so important for understanding the current moment we are in?

Quinn Slobodian: The title is an homage to a book called Voltaire’s Bastards by the Canadian intellectual John Ralston Saul, which was very important to me when I was a teenager. His argument was that the idea of reason and rationality had, in many ways, produced perverse effects in the modern world. By adopting that phrase for my book, I wanted to signal that the basic idea of free markets—as some might simplistically associate with Hayek—has evolved into increasingly esoteric forms over time, often with destructive consequences.

Ultimately, the book is an intellectual genealogy of a few key thinkers. But my gambit is that only by carefully tracing the evolution of ideas can we follow the twists, turns, and responses that make apparent opposites into products of the same tree.

Peter: Populists are often described as being in opposition to global elites but you argue that much of what we see on the right, and the far right, are 'mutant strains of neoliberalism' - could you explain what you mean by this?

Quinn: After 2016 and the twin shocks of Trump and Brexit, a lot of people described these and other manifestations of the far right as a backlash against neoliberal globalisation. I thought this was strange because few of these movements—from Viktor Orbán to Jair Bolsonaro— seemed to be invested in softening the pressures of competition or withdrawing from global engagement. Rather, as I lay out in the book, many of the core thinkers of the far right, and even movements described as nationalist were coming straight from the ranks of neoliberal thinkers associated with free market and conservative think tanks and the extended universe of the Mont Pelerin Society.

If you take neoliberalism as a constantly shifting philosophy designed to protect capitalism from democracy under different conditions, then the form of that protection transforms over time too. People who put great stock in multilateral trade agreements in the 1980s became very suspicious by the 1990s that things like the European Union were pushing out socialism and environmentalism that might contaminate healthy capitalism. The turn to alliances with populists and nativists was a response to the challenges of the often robust new social movements of feminism, civil rights, and ecology. To follow the mutant strains of neoliberalism is also to track the changes in the global political landscape to which they were responding.

Quinn Slobodian, photograph by Bénédicte Roscot

Peter: How important are the ideas of Hayek and his followers for understanding Donald Trump and his administration?

Quinn: I think one is best off distinguishing between Trump 1 and Trump 2. The president himself does not have a clearly defined economic doctrine, but is often influenced by circles of advisors and cabinet members who direct him toward their preferred policy goals.

In the first Trump administration, there was a combination of trade policy—intended to use tariffs as bludgeons to gain better access to foreign markets—and his most comprehensive legislative achievement: the 2017 tax cuts, which he hopes to make permanent this year. Those tax cuts, in particular, were designed by direct denizens of the neoliberal think tank world, namely Stephen Moore and Arthur Laffer. The latter was one of the inspirations behind Ronald Reagan's tax cuts during his first term.

It is easy, in that sense, to see some of the core thinkers in Trump's circle as being Hayek’s bastards, in my phrasing.

The second administration has radicalised considerably on the fronts of economic policy and the concentration of executive power—along with arbitrary and unpredictable tariff policies, the threat to override national sovereignty by annexation. These moves are quite distant from any patrimony of the neoliberal movement, however many steps removed from the core thinkers. In that sense, I would say the framework I lay out in the book is more of a prehistory of how we got here, rather than a perfect diagnosis of our present moment, which continues to surprise with its levels of extreme uncertainty.

Peter: It is striking that at the end of the Cold War, Hayek's followers didn't say 'we've won', they turned their attention to new enemies: environmentalists; the European Union; anti-racism. How did neoliberalism go from Thatcher and Reagan to someone like Jeff Deist, president of the Ludwig von Mies Institute, talking about “blood and soil and God and nation"?

Quinn: Neoliberals, including Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, never really thought about the world as one homogeneous mass. In fact, Hayek in particular became enamored with ideas from population genetics, evolutionary biology, and sociobiology in the 1970s. He began to think about the world as subdivided into different populations that shared common market attributes and traits—traits that were sometimes considered superior and sometimes inferior to those of other populations.

He resisted the idea of genetically defined groups, but saw cultural evolution as the motor of change and the index of hierarchy. Some of the main thinkers in the alliance between neoliberal thinkers and the far right simply made that idea of a "population" more concrete, folding bad race science and bad psychology into the framework.

Charles Murray, the emeritus holder of the F.A. Hayek Chair in Cultural Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, is a perfect example of this. He writes books about the so-called science of human difference in race and gender while also seeing this as perfectly continuous with his libertarian principles.

The Silicon Valley right has brought their own naturalised idea of human difference to this as well, especially with their fixation on IQ. The hard-right that combines a belief in capitalist principles with hardwired ideas of human difference is a sizable force now—and in some cases, such as in the U.S. Libertarian Party, has become the leading faction.

This does not mean there is no longer dissent from what I call the "cultural Austrian" wing in the book, and I do not seek to tar the entire movement of neoliberals and free market thinkers with the same brush. Rather, my goal is to draw out the differences and offer concrete lines that help us keep distinct schools of thought apart.

Peter: Hayek's Bastards is filled with names of well-funded ‘think tanks’ and ‘research institutes’ with anodyne names - including our own Institute of Economic Affairs. How important has this money been? Where has it come from?

Quinn: One of the consequences of the evacuation of journalism—both local and national—due to the rise of the Internet and the loss of advertising revenue has included an increasing reliance by critical outlets on philanthropic funding and private donors. This has led to the sometimes farcical spectacle of journalists and intellectuals on both the right and left pointing fingers at each other like the Spider-Man meme, even as both take money from different sources. One may be partially funded by the Open Society Foundation, the other by the Charles Koch Foundation or Peter Thiel. Sometimes they’re funded by all three.

The emergence of a progressive philanthropic network allows us to test the theory that the right's success has always stemmed from having deeper pockets of donors. I think the jury is still out on that. One arguably encouraging feature of politics over the last ten years is the realisation that donations and funding don’t necessarily translate into success at the ballot box or the emergence of an organic grassroots movement.

We already saw this in 2016, when Trump won the election despite having significantly less funding than Hillary Clinton—and again in 2024. There’s something bracing about that. Of course, issues of campaign finance remain, and Elon Musk is spectacularly illustrating this by handing out novelty-sized $1 million checks to support people voting and organizing the way he wants them to. But I think we on the left should have more faith in our ability to generate momentum, even on a shoestring budget.

The waves of protest over the past few years, the huge turnout for candidates like Bernie Sanders, and the ground game he helped build show how political movements can emerge from almost nothing and become major forces at the ballot box. These dynamics have often been associated with the right—but I don’t believe they have to be.

In some ways, we need to embrace the idea of lean political organising and in-kind labor. The money will almost always be stacked against the left—and we need to learn to live with that.

Peter: You write that we should "think about the far right in terms of an investment strategy in a world of unequally distributed assets." What do you mean by this? And how can those who oppose authoritarianism and racism challenge this?

Quinn: My intention here—somewhat provocatively—was to borrow from approaches suggested by thinkers like Michel Feher, who ask how we can use analogies and dynamics from the world of finance and capitalism itself to make sense of the political decisions people make within capitalist societies.

The blending of personal enrichment and political support has become so pronounced that political figures now mint their own personalities as speculative cryptocurrency assets. In that context, it’s not a huge leap to imagine that people are starting to understand their own political identification and mobilisation in terms similar to how they think about investing their savings in a particular stock.

While writing, I was struck by the idea of a "flight to safety"—a financial term used to describe investors seeking stability during uncertain times—and how it might help us understand some of the appeal of far-right capitalism. Take gold, for instance: people often invest in it during crises because it tends to retain value and appreciate slowly over time. Some of the “catastrophe libertarians” I describe in my book seem to follow a similar logic: hoping to accelerate a crisis while simultaneously holding the tools to protect themselves from it.

The divide between politics on one side and the economy on the other is rarely sustainable. The rise of immediate, personalised forms of engagement—whether through cash transfers, tailored tariffs, or offshore investment strategies—suggests that politics has increasingly been folded into a broader landscape of speculative investment and fiduciary management.

Thinkers like Feher have proposed that we might even be able to turn these oversized financial relationships against the powerful—through campaigns for ethical investment, divestment, or shareholder activism. The right-wing backlash against DEI and ESG initiatives shows that they’re genuinely threatened by efforts to inject ethical considerations into the domains of the workplace and financial markets.

While many of those efforts were superficial or symbolic, they could, over time, lead to more structural transformation. Allowing investment as a concept to drift between the psychoanalytic, the economic, and the political might ultimately strengthen—rather than weaken—our strategies in the years ahead.

Quinn Slobodian’s new book Hayek’s Bastards is out now.