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.
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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.”
Stalking Horseplay
The neoliberals themselves have, until recently, managed to maintain an image of something approaching aloof erudition. They’ve stayed out of the limelight, and if they’ve been portrayed at all in the cultural consciousness, it has perhaps been as a troupe of rather scholarly economists, poring over trade figures while smoking pipes. Not for these éminences grises the red hats of the MAGA movement, or the Hitlerian salutes of Musk: these are thoughtful, serious characters, taken very seriously by the very serious technocrats of the Global North.
Slobodian admonishes that we’ve been fooled. He shows that, from the early 1990s, the neoliberals of the Mont Pelerin Society made common cause with fringe conservative groups to adopt what he terms a “new fusionism”. Extending and misinterpreting the teachings of Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek and his teacher Ludwig von Mises, new fusionism garnered power by combining forms of economic and social populism that would previously have been regarded as incompatible. So while the media have presented Trump, Germany’s AfD or the UK’s Nigel Farage as personifying a reaction against neoliberal globalization, in reality they are nothing of the sort. Egalitarianism, equality and solidarity are as anathema to neoliberals as they are to the new right. Both believe in the primacy of capitalism and markets, and the view that people can and should be judged by their economic output. “Perhaps most strikingly,” Slobodian says, “both draw from the same pantheon of heroes.”
“The reported clash of opposites,” he concludes, “is a family feud.”
The title of the book is a tribute to John Ralston Saul’s influential 1992 work Voltaire’s Bastards, a treatise on the “dictatorship of reason”, in which Saul shows how ostensibly rational institutions and structures, unmoored from any consideration of outcomes or moral values, have led to irrationality and tyranny. The neoliberals and their allies, Slobodian shows, have done something similar, turning a set of notions about how economies work into a full-spectrum “doctrine of everything” that, while based almost wholly on assumption and myth, possesses an internal logic all of its own.
This metastasisation was, Slobodian shows, a defence mechanism against a new perceived threat to the neoliberal project. When the Berlin Wall fell, rather than bask in the victory of slaying the foul dragon of big-C Communism, Mont Pelerin Society former president Milton Friedman fretted aloud that social concerns about the environment, as well as compassion for disabled people and minorities, had become the “growth areas for postcommunist statism.” Or, as Fred Smith of the Competitive Enterprise Institute warned the Society: “Having fought back a red tide, we are now in danger of being engulfed by a green one.”
And so, throughout the 1990s, the neoliberals turned their guns on environmentalism, state spending and European integration, which they believed were manifestations of communism by another name. But, they warned, this fight would be trickier: people have an annoying tendency to care, not just about each other and those less fortunate, but about the world around them, and the things and creatures in it. Not only that, those people had reality on their side: the global scientific community was rapidly coming to the consensus that rampant growth, fuelled by mined hydrocarbons, was essentially incompatible with life on Earth.
The neoliberals realised that, to succeed, they would have to make an enemy of empathy itself.
To achieve this, men like German philosopher Gerard Radnitzky and Chicago economist Gary Becker recognised that their movement would have to get creative. They turned to social messaging to make their narrative of individualism and self-sufficiency seem more palatable to the masses, and to inculcate in publics that state interventions, welfare programmes, environmental regulations and climate action were the evil hallmarks of communism.
Of Pulpits And Calipers
One of these social mechanisms was religion and its institutions. While neoliberalism is usually thought of as an irreligious creed, Hayek through the 20th century increasingly aligned himself with the religious right, in the 1980s telling the Heritage Foundation (the people who created Trump’s Project 2025), that “we must return to a world in which not only reason, but reason and morals, as equal partners, must govern our lives, where the truth of morals is simply one moral tradition, that of the Christian West, which has created morals in modern civilization.” Slobodian writes: “An alliance with conservatives over religion and tradition made sense, even strategically, as an insurance policy against the atomizing and disrupting effects of untampered market competition.” Needless to say, this was a vision of Christianity without the burden of compassion.
But in the 1990s, the neoliberals began more openly embracing nativism and eugenics, obsessions more usually associated with other, less apologetic conservative movements. The Mont Pelerin Society got in on the act by enthusiastically endorsing the work of far-right demagogue Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve. As noted by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Murray, despite having no training in neuroscience, genetics or any other relevant discipline, believes that “disadvantaged groups are disadvantaged because, on average, they cannot compete with white men, who are intellectually, psychologically and morally superior.”
Needless to say, such claims have no basis in science. But the point of developing this view of “hardwired human nature” was—and remains—that the neoliberals required a scientific justification for increasing inequality. The resurgence of interest in IQ racism, Slobodian says, “can be explained by the desire to have a reliable benchmark of value comparable to stock valuation.” To properly defend capital and free markets, the neoliberals reasoned, society should not look after its most vulnerable. Charles Murray himself, in a letter circulated to the Mont Pelerin Society in 1996, quoted the violently racist 19th century philosopher Herbert Spencer, stating: “the transition from state beneficence to a healthy condition of self-help and private beneficence must be like the transition from an opium-eating life to a normal life—painful but remedial.” As Slobodian notes, Murray didn’t include the rest of the paragraph, in which Spencer proceeds to his conclusion that “we cannot repress and gradually diminish this body of relatively worthless people without inflicting much pain. Evil has been done and the penalty must be paid.”
Anyone even marginally curious about contemporary archeology, genetics or social development could not possibly take Murray’s shtick seriously. But, as so many reactionary and far-right movements throughout history have found, mythmaking performs a useful political role, providing a social adhesive that binds otherwise disparate groups in an emotive, if superficial, common cause. And so, armed with this anti-scientific slop, the neoliberals concluded there was no reason to interrogate questions of why their overwhelmingly white, male ranks viewed non-white, non-male people as inferior: they had found a sufficiently sciencey-sounding explanation to prove it.
The Flat Circle
One of the many phenomena touched upon but less explored by Hayek’s Bastards is the cyclical nature of such powerful, harmful, but fundamentally nonsensical ideas. A theme tangentially revealed is that the neoliberals, unlike the paleoconservatives, or the libertarians, or umpteen other movements, have been masters at biding their time; waiting for the opportune moment. The John Birch Society of Fred Koch, father of Charles and David, attempted to push racist claptrap and small-government dogma, but it did so in the 1950s and 60s when the US and the rest of the world was rebuilding and had had quite enough injustice. It wasn’t until the 1970s, with the arrival of cosmetically less grotesque concerns, such as ALEC, the Heritage Foundation, and Charles Koch’s earlier think tanks, that libertarian and neoliberal economic prescriptions really began capturing governments—but for the most part the operatives kept eugenics off the table.
By the mid-1980s, however, the neoliberals were in full command of the world’s most powerful economies. With the benefit of hindsight, that incarnation of the project resembles a Trojan horse for what was to come.
One of Slobodian’s key achievements here, at least in the view of this author, is in showing that the entire weight of the extraordinarily successful neoliberal project rests on a foundation of pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo. The neoliberals’ assumptions about human nature are unscientific and fantastical; their prescriptions for human emancipation are inherently brutal and doctrinaire. Their worldview, from their view of people and of society, to their understanding of economics and of biology, is nowhere supported by independent scholarship or empirical reality. But that, as Slobodian shows, has been no handicap: the neoliberals have synthesized all the tenets of effective propaganda to tell emotionally convincing lies in support of their atavistic program of civilisational destruction.
Does Slobodian offer any answers with regard to how we might fight back against the new right and the neoliberal braintrust? Not so much. He is, after all, a historian, not a political theorist. But his account is nevertheless instructive; the realisations it engenders have their own power. They are a reminder that those of us with an interest in a compassionate, less cruel, more liveable world must reckon with a brutal truth. In parallel with the rise of neoliberalism and the new right, both liberals and progressives have found themselves on the back foot, specifically because they have failed to develop a vision of the world they want to inhabit. Without a positive narrative, it is not enough to make appeals to the empirical truth, even if those appeals are emotionally convincing. What’s needed, right now, is a cohesive movement that upholds and aggressively develops the case for justice and human empathy, no matter how abundantly, self-evidently crucial those qualities might seem.
At its denouement, Slobodian says Hayek’s Bastards is “a warning not to be taken in by false prophets, fooled by appearances or lazy media framing.” For many, that warning has come too late.
So what in the name of this beautiful blue, green, finite Earth do we do next?
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