Your Planet, Our Choice
Elon Musk's claim that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy” has caused shock and revulsion. But a new book, Hayek's Bastards, suggests that this central pillar of the Trump regime has been long in the making.
Welcome to the return of The Climate Laundry, now on a new, open-source platform: Ghost.org
If only every switch was as easy to make. As the lineup of billionaires at the Trump inauguration showed, the American corporations and oligarchs that own the digital economy have thrown in their lot with a proudly racist, authoritarian regime that is waging a campaign to bulldoze diplomatic alliances, wind back civil rights and take a wrecking ball to US government capacity. The world looks on in impotent horror as Trump 2.0 eliminates protections for women, minorities and the environment, while gutting funding for anything that looks like science. Jaws drop as the administration’s chief enforcer, the world’s richest man, informs the terminally credulous Joe Rogan that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”
How, people reasonably ask, did it come to this?
At the superficial level, as Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has eloquently explained, we’re witnessing a putsch by a billionaire class that now views democracy merely as an impediment to its further accrual of wealth and power. Collectively, the ultra-wealthy have looked at democratic institutions and concluded "one of us has gotta go, and it's not gonna be me."
But how exactly did Silicon Valley billionaires, the online far-right, Christian Nationalists, oil tycoons and libertarians all end up reading from the same page? According to Quinn Slobodian, a professor of international history at Boston University, the answer lies within the mainstream ideology that has, since the 1970s, been reshaping Western governments and the global economy: the school of neoliberalism.
Slobodian’s new book, Hayek’s Bastards, joins a growing body of literature on the rise of the “new right” that includes such titles as Katherine Stewart’s Money, Lies and God and Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains. But Slobodian’s thesis is novel: he suggests that what is unfolding in Washington is the culmination of a strategic shift by neoliberal planners to achieve more populist support for their particular cause—namely, the defence of capitalism against three evils: those of environmentalism, statism, and European integration. To achieve this, they formulated a doctrine of three “hards”, which Slobodian identifies as hardwired human nature (the idea that people are genetically predisposed to be as they are), hard borders (preventing immigration), and hard money (gold and, latterly, cryptocurrency).
As writers such as George Monbiot and Mehrsa Baradaran have shown, 1980s neoliberal champions such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher knelt at the altar of this dogmatic creed on the basis of plausible-sounding promises by the neoliberal sages of the Mont Pelerin Society, who claimed their economic prescriptions offered a foolproof, get-rich-quick scheme for any country bold enough to adopt it. Since that time, neoliberalism and its beneficiaries have become ever more powerful, gutting public investment, handing power to corporations and feeding the rise of the far-right via a deft campaign of media manipulation. Neoliberalism has swallowed economics: as Monbiot has put it, from Starmer in the UK to Merz in Germany to Macron in France, “we’re all neoliberals now.”
