In Hayek’s Bastards, historian Quinn Slobodian charts how the current manifestation of the far right that has risen to power in many countries, and in its most virulent form in the United States under Donald Trump, has emerged on the back of the multiple crises caused by neoliberalism and is now instrumentalising the public rage arising from these cries to seize the mantle of power.
While this bastard form of far-right politics shares much of neoliberalism’s worldview, Slobodian shows that it differs markedly in terms of its extremism on issues such as racism, antipathy towards democracy, and hostility to public programmes that support social cohesion. The central pillar of its ideology is the conviction that “the enemy, at its root, is the claim of human equality”.
In its offensive against equality, today’s far right returns to Nazi race science and social Darwinian views of nature to attack progressive goals of justice and equality as affronts to natural hierarchies determined by biology and culture. At the top of such hierarchies, of course, lie white hypermasculine males, whose superior intellect, individuality, hard work and adherence to the prosperity gospel of Judeo-Christian values, have made them creators of the world’s capitalist cultures.
The return to “natural” white male supremacist order requires first and foremost the imposition of cultural homogeneity – through mass deportations, closing borders to non-WASPs and ending birthright citizenship. It also requires legalising discriminatory laws against women and racial, religious and sexual minorities, and scaling down “unwise” social policies such as public health, education, welfare and foreign aid.
Midway through Hayek’s Bastards, Slobodian retells the evolutionary myth that academic Friedrich Hayek told to explain the emergence of neoliberalism’s highest value – individual entrepreneurialism. This occurred, Hayek claimed, when humans moved from living in small hunting and gathering clans to settling in large-scale populations. Under these new conditions, the solidarity of the clan was inappropriate and not caring about others became essential for further civilisational development. Mass human indifference, Hayek asserted, became the secret to sustaining human civilisation.
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Slobodian charts clearly how today’s far right is simply a further degeneration from neoliberalism’s celebration of economic inequality and the primacy of economics as the measure of man. We are all living in a world being plundered by Hayek’s bastards now.
Ian Hughes is author of Disordered Minds: How Dangerous Personalities are Destroying Democracy and a Senior Research Fellow at the MaREI Centre at UCC.
