In 2023, one of neoliberalism’s most flamboyant bastards took power in the second-largest country in Latin America. Javier Milei, a trained economist and newcomer to Argentine party politics, described himself as the most extreme form of libertarian, an anarcho-capitalist, who believed that states should be replaced entirely by private service providers. Clad in gold and yellow spandex, he appeared as “General Ancap” at comic-book conventions, promising to “kick Keynesians and collectivists in the ass”. After coming to power, he declared a state of economic emergency and passed an omnibus bill of hundreds of articles.
The measures were a chaotic mix: privatising state-owned companies and bypassing congressional approval to do so, deregulating credit cards and private health care, allowing employers to fire workers for participating in protests, limiting maternity leave, pardoning security forces for using violence. This was a mélange of economic shock therapy with social conservatism and authoritarianism. Someone wondering about the origin of this list could have looked no farther than Milei’s mastiffs, his pet dogs, which he refers to as his “four-legged children”. There are five of them, four cloned from the original. One was named after Murray Rothbard, the Austrian School economist and a founding theorist of neoliberalism. Rothbard published his own plan for “paleopopulism” in 1992, combining the call to “unleash the cops”, restore morality and dismantle the redistributive state. He would have approved of the name Milei gave to 2024: “The Year of the Defence of Life, Liberty and Property.”
Rothbard is far from the only neoliberal thinker to exercise an influence over the ascendant generation of populist politicians. When rising Republican star Vivek Ramaswamy met Milei at the Conservative Political Action Conference in early 2024, he said: “You’re more of a Von Mises guy, I’m a Hayek guy”, referring to Friedrich Hayek, the libertarian author of The Road to Serfdom, and his teacher and forerunner, Ludwig von Mises. To which Milei responded, “But one of the most wonderful thinkers of liberty was Murray Rothbard!”
Milei is only the most prominent example of the politicians who have arisen in the last decade who combine obsessions with three “hard” concepts: hardwired culture, hard money, and hard borders. They portray themselves as rebels, revolutionaries even. But they represent a mutation with neoliberalism, rather than its antidote. Even when they travel under new labels of “national conservative” or denounce neoliberalism as Ramaswamy does, many continue to pay homage to the intellectual forefathers of the neoliberal tradition. In 2015, during the protests against Dilma Rousseff in Brazil, signs began to appear reading “Less Marx, More Mises.” That same year, libertarian websites reported proudly that Mises was the most-searched economist on Google. By 2019, the Mises Institute in Brazil had 1.3 million monthly visitors to its website, half as many as the storied Heritage Foundation. Speaking alongside Marine Le Pen at the party congress of the French National Front in 2018, self-described populist Steve Bannon condemned the “establishment” and the “globalists”, yet built his speech around Hayek’s own metaphor of the road to serfdom and invoked the authority of the master’s name.
Eduardo Bolsonaro, son of Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil’s president from 2019 to 2023), lists attendance at Mises Institute seminars on his CV. Jair was often photographed holding books published by the São Paulo Mises Institute, whose leader reportedly helped place the Chicago-trained Paulo Guedes in the president’s cabinet. The leader of Mises Brazil helped draft amendments to the constitutions on economic freedom, a libertarian influence on a regime characterised by persecution of minorities and accelerated ecological destruction. By now, Mises has become a cult figure in Brazil. After winning a lightweight bout in the Ultimate Fighting Championship in early 2024, a bloodied, bruised, and cauliflower-eared Renato Moicano shouted into the microphone: “I love private property, and let me tell you something, if you care about your country, read Ludwig von Mises and the six lessons of the Austrian economic school!”
Since the political surprises of the Brexit vote and Trump’s victory in 2016, there has been a stubborn story that explains so-called right-wing populism as a grassroots rejection of neoliberalism, often described as market fundamentalism, or the belief that everything on the planet has a price tag, borders are obsolete, the world economy should replace nation states, and human life is reducible to a cycle of earn, spend, borrow, die. This “new” right, by contrast, claims to believe in the people, national sovereignty and the importance of culture. As mainstream parties lose support, the elites who promoted neoliberalism out of self-interest seem to be reaping the fruits of the inequality and democratic disempowerment they sowed. But this story does not capture the whole truth. By looking more closely, we can see that important factions of the emerging right were, in fact, mutant strains of neoliberalism. The parties dubbed as right-wing populist, from the United States to Britain and Austria, have rarely been avenging angels sent to smite economic globalisation. They offer few plans to rein in finance, restore a golden age of job security, or end world trade. By and large, the so-called populists’ calls to privatise, deregulate and slash taxes come straight from the playbook shared by the world’s leaders for the past 30 years.
I call the new strain of the neoliberal movement that crystallised in the 1990s the “new fusionism”. While the original fusionism of the 1950s and 60s and the new right melded libertarianism and religious traditionalism in the style of William F Buckley Jr and the National Review, the new fusionism defended neoliberal policies through arguments borrowed from cognitive, behavioural and evolutionary psychology, and in some cases genetics, genomics, and biological anthropology. As early as 1987, the conservative historian Paul Gottfried, who coined the term “alternative right” with the American neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, identified that new fusionism on the right. Whereas older conservatives may have used a language of religion to back up claims about human differences, Gottfried noted that they had begun to use disciplines like sociobiology, established by ecologist EO Wilson to, in Wilson’s words, “biologicize” questions of human ethics. New fusionism uses the language of science to justify the extension of competitive dynamics ever deeper into social life.
Moments of global economic crisis allow for the breakthrough of eccentric and (for some) exhilaratingly novel forms of politics, but they do not appear from nowhere: they have their own intellectual lineages and material preconditions. We cannot understand the peculiar hybrids of extreme market ideology, far-right authoritarianism and social conservatism without familiarising ourselves with their often-tangled genealogies. Well-funded networks of think tanks, conferences, gatherings and workshops, as well as investment forums, comments sections and Reddit groups, offer nurseries for new adaptive ideological strains. Mises institutes are a case in point. They have proliferated globally this century, popping up in Romania in 2001, Poland in 2003, and more. Funding for the original institute in Alabama rose after 2008, with IRS filings showing an annual revenue of between $3m and $6m. By 2013, there were 24 Mises institutes with active websites worldwide, arranging local meetings and making the writings of Mises and Rothbard (among others) available in many languages.
The era of quantitative easing that followed from 2008 until 2022 was a historically unique time. New laws of physics in the world economy seem to be emerging. No matter how far down central banks in the industrial countries pushed their interest rates, nothing resembling inflation seemed to arise. Old preconceptions seemed destined for the dustbin of history. New ideas on the left about modern monetary theory proposed that the laws had always been misunderstood. Maybe governments could indeed print as much money as they liked. It seemed especially true for the United States, which remained the issuer of the world’s global reserve currency.
If there was a restlessness about what new order might transform the conditions of everyday life after 2008, these ideas spread like an algae bloom in the months of 2020. In an extraordinarily poorly timed decision, the head of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, long a lightning rod for justifiable discontent over globalisation, chose July 2020 to roll out a new book about what he called “the Great Reset”. While the book did little to build a new consensus among the world’s elites, it did offer a new target of suspicion for many people on the far right and more conspiratorially minded left. One of the earliest and most effective propagandists for the idea that the Covid-19 pandemic was part of a planned seizure of power from above was a denizen of one of the hard-right neoliberal think tanks most active in climate denial, the Heartland Institute. Justin Haskins wrote a series of articles denouncing the Great Reset and went on the talk show circuit, propagating the idea that lockdowns, vaccinations, and monetary policy to bail out ailing workers and businesses was part and parcel of a socialist coup from above. The very organisation that appealed to bad science to deny the realities of climate change was now using appeals to bad science to oppose the utility of attempts to contain the pandemic.
The Hoover Institution, a neoliberal think tank not known for its previous expertise in epidemiology, became a clearing house for bad facts on the virus. Most notable was long-time Mont Pelerin Society member and legal scholar Richard Epstein’s prediction that the global Covid cases would peak at one million and the total deaths in the United States at fewer than 50,000. As of this writing, he was off by approximately 699 million on the first figure, and on the second by more than 1.5 million. Other institutions provide a linear link from the earliest days of the new fusionism to its most contemporary iterations. The Bradley Foundation had funded Charles Murray while he wrote The Bell Curve, the infamous and infamously flawed study of hereditary intelligence, race and IQ that Murray produced alongside Richard Herrnstein. And in 2024, two of the recipients of the foundation’s $250,000 prize were: Samuel Gregg, holder of the Friedrich A Hayek chair in economics and economic history at the American Institute of Economic Research in Great Barrington, Massachusetts; and Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of health policy at Stanford University, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, which opposed masking and lockdowns during the pandemic. (Bhattacharya left Stanford in March of this year to become Trump’s director of National Institutes of Health.)
Libertarian arguments began to draw ever more frequently from the arsenal of the hard sciences to ground their claims. One of the most fertile sites for the new fusionism has been Silicon Valley, where thinkers increasingly promote the idea that “traits like intelligence and work ethic… have a strong genetic basis”. The author of that line is the American writer Richard Hanania. Hailed by his publisher, HarperCollins, as “one of the most talked-about writers in the nation”, Hanania was exposed in 2023 as the pseudonymous author of openly racist articles for the website AlternativeRight.com, founded by the neo-Nazi and white supremacist Richard Spencer. His articles included calls to forcibly sterilise everyone with an IQ under 90 and claimed that Hispanics “don’t have the requisite IQ to be a productive part of a first world nation”. For Hanania, whose podcast guests have included high-profile intellectuals such as Steven Pinker and Tyler Cowen (whose Mercatus Center at George Mason University gave him a $50,000 contribution), high IQ in individuals and nations leads to success, libertarianism and appreciation of markets. Hanania frets about “dysgenic fertility” as measured in the decline of IQ rates in the American population and suggests that “the real source of class difference is traits like IQ and intellectual curiosity”.
Hanania is the intellectual heir of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, but it is important to remember that The Bell Curve did not originally mean “cognitive elite” as a compliment. In later books, Murray would even more pointedly criticise the cognitive elite for their literal and figurative aloofness from the rest of the population. However, the early 2000s saw what one journalist called “the revenge of the nerds” as the West Coast tech sector, far from the traditional centres of American power, began to emerge as the engine of the digital economy.
In the process, the critical term “cognitive elite” became a self-congratulatory one. The apparent world historical inversion, whereby the smart kids were also the rich and most powerful ones, was celebrated on iconic blogs and listservs such as Slate Star Codex and LessWrong (where users self-reported implausibly high IQ scores), as well as Econlib and Marginal Revolution. The latter were both run by libertarian George Mason University economics professors Bryan Caplan and Tyler Cowen, respectively. (One of their colleagues in the economics department wrote a book on IQ called Hive Mind and defended gender differences in cognitive reasoning.) Contributors and commenters on these sites revelled in arcane detail, the visual language of statistics and graphs, and the impression of academic rigour.
A high-profile member of this tech-adjacent strain of new fusionism was Curtis Yarvin, who blogged under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug. As a teenager, Yarvin had been part of the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth established at Johns Hopkins University to identify high-IQ youngsters. Still attached to the idea of the cognitive elite as an adult, he condemned democracy for spoiling coexistence between “high-IQ” and “low-IQ” individuals and proposed a “psychometric qualification” for voting in South Africa, disenfranchising everyone below an IQ of 120. To followers of neo-reactionary ideology, the internet and its affiliated communities were offering an alternative public sphere where a new elite could arise by virtue of their brains, their genes, or frequently both.
In the run-up to Donald Trump’s election as US president in 2016, the intelligence question emerged again in the ecosystem of what was now being called the alt-right. Charles Murray’s work on the supposed “forbidden knowledge” of intelligence research served for another round of controversies, claims and counterclaims as the “intellectual dark web” earned hyperventilating profiles in the New York Times. This time around, the discourse was less about criticising the detachment of the creative elite or praising new leaders of economic innovation. Instead, it had taken a graver turn toward the potential need to escape from the drag of surplus members of society or possibly even exclude them from equal status. The IQ-centric version of new fusionism was aided by considerable financial support from a few wealthy men including Harlan Crow, heir to a real estate fortune, whose holding company had $19.6b under management in 2020. Charles Murray, a regular guest at Crow’s house along with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, has dedicated his most recent two books on race science to him.
Michael Young’s 1958 dystopian satire The Rise of the Meritocracy, which coined the term, portrayed a meritocracy structured around IQ working too well, with hellish results. The complaint of many of today’s new fusionists is that it is not working well enough. Even after the Supreme Court ruling against affirmative action, a long-time goal of conservatives like Murray, they fear that admissions officers at top universities and hiring committees at top firms still assemble cohorts based on criteria rather than true ability. Lionel Shriver’s novel Mania captured the anxiety of the libertarian-far right nexus in her depiction of an America where the high-IQ “brain-vain” are regarded as “cerebral supremacists” and campaigns of “Mental Parity” lower expectations for everyone and stigmatise achievement and excellence. The opposition to so-called diversity, equity and inclusion efforts is especially virulent. In his blurb to Hanania’s 2023 book The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics, Peter Thiel uses violent rhetoric, writing “DEI will never d-i-e from words alone – Hanania shows we need the sticks and stones of government violence to exorcise the diversity demon.”
Declaring membership of the cognitive aristocracy could be harmless if it stayed in the comments section. But IQ fetishism has pernicious effects. It draws racial lines placing Caucasians, East Asians, and Ashkenazi Jews on one side of the line with other Asians, Hispanics and people of African descent on the other. The IQ fetishists like to think they are living in a near future where they, the pure creative information workers imagined in the 1990s, have been elevated through their high intelligence and innate ability.
Perhaps the darkest direction that new fusionist thinking could go was previewed by Yarvin in 2008. Speculating about the transformation of San Francisco into a private entity called “Friscorp” in a text titled “Patchwork: A Political System for the 21st Century”, he wondered what could be done with the unproductive residents of the city that remained. After considering then dismissing the idea of pulping surplus “hominids” into biodiesel for city buses, he suggests that “the best humane alternative to genocide” was “not to liquidate the wards… but to virtualize them”. He envisioned the incarceration of the knowledge economy’s underclass in “permanent solitary confinement, waxed like a bee larva into a cell which is sealed except for emergencies”. Against fears this would seed an insurrection, like that imagined by Michael Young a half-century earlier, he played the card of technology. The captive’s cell would not be bare. It would include “an immersive virtual-reality interface which allows him to experience a rich, fulfilling life in a completely imaginary world”.
Hayek’s final book, The Fatal Conceit, famously proposes the circular argument that the proof of an ideology’s adaptive capacity is the number of human lives it helps sustain. The new panic over fertility and birth rates promises a coming chaotic round of intellectual debates about how and if libertarian values can be adapted to continue to win the demographic race. Some of the leading figures have taken the drastic choice of restricting the bodily autonomy of women to make choices about their own reproduction. Among them are Ron Paul and the new Argentine president Javier Milei, who opposes the abortion that was legalised in the majority-Catholic country of Argentina only in 2020, after a successful decades-long mobilisation. His argument blends a half-gesture to genetics with a stronger one to natural law. “It is true that the mother has the right over her body but not over the body of the child, which is a totally different body, it has a different DNA… There is neither freedom nor property if you are not born.”
Milei cuts a bizarre figure in his AC/DC coiffure and meme-ready mugging for the camera, but in assessing the latest crop of Hayek’s offspring, it is worth remembering the rapturous reception he received at that most mainstream of venues, the World Economic Forum in Davos. In his 2024 appearance, Milei denounced the “radical feminist agenda”, the “bloody abortion agenda”, and the “neo-Marxists [who] have managed to co-opt the common sense of the Western world”. He listed all the varieties of collectivism he opposed, including communists, fascists, social democrats, nationalists, national socialists, Nazis, Christian democrats, neo-Keynesians, progressives, populists, nationalists and globalists. He reserved his praise for the wealthy gathered in the room. “You are the true protagonists of this story,” he said, “you are heroes.”
Like Jair Bolsonaro, Sebastian Kurz and Donald Trump, who had spoken from the same stage before him, Milei spoke less as a defector from the global capitalist order than its latest photogenic cheerleader. He posed for selfies with the managing director of the IMF after the show, just as he would pose later with Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, and take the stage at the Hoover Institution, introduced by its director, Condoleezza Rice. Many supposed disruptors of the status quo are agents less of a backlash against global capitalism than a frontlash within it. Our genealogies of their ideas are x-rays that leave little doubt.
Extracted from HAYEK’S BASTARDS: THE NEOLIBRAL ROOTS OF THE POPULIST RIGHT by QUINN SLOBODIAN, published by Allen Lane on 15th April 2025 at £25.00 Copyright © Quinn Slobodian 2025
[See also: The prophet of the new right]
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