The Contemporary Alt-Right: From the Cesspool to the Mainstream- A Book Review
S. E. Anderson
From the Cesspool to the Mainstream
Suzanne Schneider
Suzanne Schneider is Deputy Director of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and a Visiting Fellow at Kellogg College, Oxford. She is the author of Mandatory Separation: Religion, Education, and Mass Politics in Palestine and The Apocalypse and the End of History: Modern Jihad and the Crisis of Liberalism. (October 2025).
October 23, 2025 issue of The New York Review of Books
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Reviewed:
Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right
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In his 1892 book The Grammar of Science, the pioneering British statistician and eugenicist Karl Pearson warned readers that “if society is to shape its own future,…we must be peculiarly cautious that in following our strong social instincts we do not at the same time weaken society by rendering the propagation of bad stock more and more easy.” Since “no degenerate and feeble stock will ever be converted into healthy and sound stock by the accumulated effects of education, good laws, and sanitary surroundings,” he argued, the only remedy was to winnow out corrupt genetic material via the evolutionary struggle for survival—assuming no pesky do-gooders got in the way of Mother Nature.
“Arguments about politics always rest on claims about human nature,” Quinn Slobodian reminds us in his new intellectual history of the American far right. Hayek’s Bastards focuses on a coalition of libertarians, traditionalists, and paleoconservatives who, a century after Pearson, returned to theories of immutable genetic and racial differences to make the case for market supremacy and a minimalist state, a current of thinking Slobodian calls “new fusionism.” While a previous generation of conservatives had welded religious traditionalism to free market principles—the original fusionism associated with Frank Meyer and the National Review—their ideological successors found evolutionary psychology, genetics, and biological anthropology more useful.
These new fusionists included the libertarian economist and anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard, who viewed taxation as theft and regarded the state as the apex of organized crime; the white supremacist Peter Brimelow, once an editor at National Review and more recently the founder of the radical anti-immigration website VDARE; and the German American academic Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a protégé of Rothbard who founded the Property and Freedom Society, which nurtures the bonds between libertarianism and white supremacy. Together they brought what had been fringe ideas about racial differences back into the mainstream—with effects that are all too clear today.
Slobodian skillfully shows how Rothbard, Brimelow, Hoppe, and the other intellectuals of this movement emerged from prominent neoliberal institutions like the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS), the Manhattan Institute, and the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Founded in 1947 by the Austrian philosopher Friedrich Hayek, MPS has proved the most influential of these bodies, counting among its members luminaries such as Milton Friedman, James Buchanan, and Gary Becker. Their arguments in support of privatization, deregulation, and regressive taxation formed the intellectual core of the Reagan revolution. Reagan joined MPS’s libertarian economic and philosophical outlook to social conservatism and hawkish anticommunism, heralding the advent of the neoliberal era.
Hayek’s Bastards explains why second-generation MPS members like Rothbard and the historian Paul Gottfried could not enjoy the spoils of victory—even after the Berlin Wall came crumbling down. Aghast that the welfare state remained largely intact across Western democracies, they feared that the cold war had actually been lost. Not only were governments expanding environmental protections and still doling out welfare payments, but decades of “collectivism” and state dependency had, in Slobodian’s summary, “eroded the virtues of self-reliance that would allow for the reproduction of social life.” Worst of all, governments were increasingly motivated to intervene on behalf of racial minorities and women to pursue a more egalitarian social order. It was in the face of these developments that libertarians found arguments for biological determinism, long circulated in fringe publications like Mankind Quarterly, to be particularly appealing.
“The explosive growth of genetic knowledge,” the MPS member Charles Murray stated in a 2006 lecture, “means that within a few years science will definitively demonstrate precisely how it is that women are different from men, blacks from whites, poor from rich.” Murray rose to national prominence as a coauthor of The Bell Curve (1994), the furiously controversial tract that argued that economic and social inequalities stemmed from hereditary differences in intelligence. “Biology,” declared Rothbard, “stands like a rock in the face of egalitarian fantasies.” In other words: What use is public policy intervention if inequality is baked into the genetic pie?
Appeals to nature and evolution have long been part of neoliberal rhetoric, going back to Hayek’s interpretation of evolutionary biology in his famous “savanna story.” Beginning in the 1970s, Hayek argued that because Homo sapiens had developed in small, tight-knit troops, the social atomization required for the free market was in fact deeply unnatural. “Socialists have the support of inherited instincts,” he claimed, whereas upholding the cold, impersonal logic of the marketplace was an “acquired discipline.” The sociologist Benjamin Nelson called this state of mutual alienation “universal otherhood,” wherein “all men are ‘brothers’ in being equally ‘others,’” and for Hayek it constituted the bedrock of the free market. Nature, in this telling, is not a mistress who demands obedience but the font of primal affections that must be overcome in the name of capitalist progress.
Slobodian shows how followers of Hayek like Rothbard and Murray turned their master’s logic on its head, taking up his mantle while lapsing “into the very intellectual errors that Hayek himself diagnosed.” These bastard children regarded nature as the cosmic originator of innate hierarchies rather than a force to be mastered. Only a punitive program of reform, they felt, could return humans to the bosom of natural selection, deprivation, and, implicitly, death, as the market would provision health and security exclusively to the most deserving. Slobodian describes how they turned to sociobiology and evolutionary psychology to make their case for the “three hards: hardwired human nature, hard borders, and hard money.” Detailing how these arguments hung together theoretically—composing a moral order shaped by “natural” hierarchies, limits, and restraints—is among the book’s most profound and original aspects.
A crucial piece of this order was what Slobodian calls the “ethno-economy,” the set of arguments that new fusionists developed to link the health of society’s markets to its degree of ethnic homogeneity. As Brimelow wrote in his 1995 book Alien Nation, the free market was embedded in a “societal framework” and could function only “if the institutions in that framework are appropriate.” Those institutions included not just property rights and the rule of law but also “some degree of ethnic and cultural coherence”: social homogeneity, he wrote in a 1989 Financial Post column, “reduces frictions” in the marketplace by introducing a layer of presumed trust between buyers and sellers. Moreover, “some cultures can handle the marketplace’s atomism and impersonality better.” Turning against Hayek’s celebration of global markets and labor force mobility—Slobodian reminds us that the most prominent supporters of “open borders” in the 1980s wrote for the Wall Street Journal editorial page—the champions of Volk capitalism “continued to demand free movement for capital and goods; they simply drew a hard line against certain kinds of people.” This closed-border libertarianism could simultaneously support outsourced production and restricted immigration, facilitating the global movement of capital while preserving Western countries’ (presumably singular and implicitly white) national character.
Hayek’s Bastards links such arguments to the specters of decolonization abroad and desegregation at home. Of particular importance was the second Symposium on Human Differentiation, convened in Gstaad in 1974 by Charles Koch’s Institute for Humane Studies. Speakers like the economist Nathaniel Weyl underscored the perilousness of a moment in which “the wretched masses of the Orient and the Tropics are taught that neither race nor class should serve as barriers to their advancement.” If there was a racial basis to intelligence, then hard borders between the Global South and North were a matter of civilizational survival for the North. Such arguments also served as a bulwark against any lingering sense of imperial responsibility: as one of Margaret Thatcher’s favored Oxford economists, Peter Bauer, argued in the 1970s, wealthy countries had no moral obligation to help poor ones and should not expect them to become successful members of the global economy. “What holds back many poor countries,” Bauer claimed, “is the people who live there.” Followers of Murray, Hoppe, and Brimelow would call such ideas “race realism” and lean on them to discredit attempts to improve the lives of minority communities in the United States.
The final piece of the neoliberal flight to nature was gold—not simply as an economic principle but as a moral imperative. Slobodian’s treatment of the “goldbugs” makes for particularly engaging reading on account of his willingness to examine “the profane space of the newsletter, the advice manual, and eventually, the website, the feed, and the chatroom.” As he notes, many neoliberals decried Richard Nixon’s 1971 decision to abandon the gold standard because “they felt it freed states from salutary constraints.” Currencies untethered from precious metals—which are inherently limited in supply—paved the way for free-spending governments to indulge in redistributive policies. This much, at least, was consistent with the writings of Hayek’s teacher, Ludwig von Mises, who valued gold for “its ability to act as a brake on the tendency of democratic states to spend beyond their means.” As the investment adviser Harry Browne wrote in his 1970 book How You Can Profit from the Coming Devaluation, “Governments don’t like gold because it tells them when they do wrong things. Without the gold, they might be able to stretch their misdeeds a little further.”
Mises, however, did not assign gold metaphysical or mystical qualities or link its private accumulation to fantasies of self-sovereignty, as goldbugs like Browne did. They envisioned a political and societal collapse that individuals could only navigate using gold, and at the same time sought to profit from the coming ruination. (“The history of libertarianism in the United States cannot be separated from the business of selling collectible coins,” Slobodian notes.) Hoarding gold served as a gateway to the survivalist or “prepper” movement that emerged in the 1990s under the influence of publications like the Ron Paul Survival Report (originally the Ron Paul Investment Newsletter), which predicted that the demise of the welfare state would incite social, and particularly racial, chaos. “Make your home a fortress,” an investment consultant named James B. Powell advised in a 1993 article for Paul’s newsletter. “Be ready both physically and psychologically for a total breakdown with possibly very little warning.” Siege mentality has gone mainstream, and in this age of luxury apocalypse bunkers, it is useful to trace its origins back to the proper cesspool.
As President’s trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” underscores, Slobodian’s subjects have now experienced a lopsided form of success. With billions of dollars in additional funding earmarked for detention centers, ICE agents, and the military, and corresponding cuts to food stamps, Medicare, and housing support, all financed by a deficit-boosting tax cut for the wealthiest Americans, we have arrived not at the minimalist state of libertarian dreams but at a fully militarized one instead. State violence, rather than market discipline alone, will enforce the “natural” hierarchies that new fusionists find so captivating.
Hayek’s Bastards makes a welcome contribution to the genre of far-right explainers, all too many of which, as Slobodian rightfully notes, neglect to even mention the word capitalism in accounting for the rise of this political force. While many thinkers understand the right’s renewed vitality as a cultural backlash to globalization, civil rights, and feminist movements, Slobodian argues that it is more accurate to call it a “frontlash”—a theory he spends little time elaborating, but which suggests that the driving force behind the far right’s ascent has been intellectuals and their funders rather than workers incensed by shuttered factories and stagnant wages.
There is much to recommend this position, given the well-endowed institutions that support the conservative world and attempt to furnish the MAGA-verse with an ideological root system, but the emphasis on elites obscures a more complex dynamic. Intellectuals toil away at the margins in every age, yet their ideas gain traction only at points of crisis and transition. Hayek and the other members of the MPS spent decades refining their theories at mountain retreats, but it took the crisis of the 1970s—brought on by the Vietnam and Yom Kippur Wars and the subsequent oil embargo and stagflation—to offer a political opening. Similarly, reactionary ideas about innate biological and cultural difference may have been reformulated during the “end of history,” but they became politically effective after the September 11 attacks, costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the 2008 financial crisis unraveled the postwar international order. There is a reason donald trump could do what Pat Buchanan could not, and it can’t be explained by frontlash (or, indeed, intellectual history) alone.
Making the case for continuity between the MAGA era and its “respectable” predecessor, Slobodian argues that “many contemporary iterations of the Far Right emerged within neoliberalism, not in opposition to it.” Yet it is neither surprising nor counterintuitive that neoliberalism was the petri dish in which the most racist, misogynist, and paranoid strains of today’s far right developed, for the simple reason that neoliberalism was the dominant ideology of the last generation on both the left and the right. “When we see neoliberalism as a project of retooling the state to save capitalism,” Slobodian writes, “then its supposed opposition to the populism of the Right begins to dissolve.” But that project is hardly unique to neoliberalism; after all, Marx already saw the state as “a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie,” and Hannah Arendt memorably described imperialism as a process of redeploying public resources to meet the expansionary needs of capital. Neoliberalism did not inaugurate the project of state capture any more than it did that of race science, and strategic continuity does not absolve us from taking stock of the broader ideological rupture between neoliberalism and the current array of conservative and far-right forces.
Slobodian’s most convincing claim is that new fusionists like Murray, Rothbard, and Hoppe served as the missing link between twentieth-century libertarianism and the alt-right, a term that gained traction during the 2016 presidential campaign to describe the “heterogeneous collection of white nationalists, neo-Nazis, male supremacists, neo-reactionaries, paleoconservatives, online trolls, and anarcho-capitalists existing to the Right of the mainstream conservative movement.” In fact, it was the former MPS member Paul Gottfried who, alongside the neo-Nazi political agitator Richard Spencer, coined the term “alternative Right” in 2008. The family resemblance is certainly strong if you consider a figure like Spencer—who continues to uphold the closed borders–free markets position even as it grows more marginal within the MAGA coalition—or Argentinian president Javier Milei, who has described himself, just as Rothbard had, as an anarcho-capitalist. The influence of Hoppe and Rothbard on the neo-monarchist writer Curtis Yarvin (whose ideas about democratic collapse have been publicly embraced by J.D. Vance) is especially clear. “In this house, we believe in science—race science,” Yarvin wrote in a blog post last December.
Today the new fusionist coalition comes closest to mapping onto the Silicon Valley wing of the far right, with its vortex of reactionary founders, neo-eugenicists, and entrepreneurs hawking private cities that offer governance as a service. Próspera is one such private city, or as its promotional materials put it, “startup zone with regulation and tax autonomy.” Located on the Honduran island of Roatán, Próspera targets entrepreneurs looking for the “freedom to design and build” unencumbered by democratic oversight, luring founders with the promise of low taxation, crypto summits, and the “highest-density of interesting people in the world,” gesturing at the new fusionist fixation with the supposedly ultra-intelligent groups that Slobodian terms “neurocastes.”
But the alt-right has largely been eclipsed in recent years by the new (new) right, the so-called postliberals who embrace similarly odious racial views but explicitly reject libertarian political and economic ideas. As the American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Continetti admitted recently, there are “a growing number of people, and especially young people, who think the realities of the twenty-first century force us to discard some of the lessons, or some of the doctrines, that Hayek and Friedman advocated.” As history Slobodian’s account is persuasive, even indispensable; as a genealogy of the present crisis, there is room for debate.
Indeed, whether we look at Yarvin’s neo-monarchist vision, which calls for the absolute dictatorship of a CEO-king, or Yoram Hazony’s National Conservative one, which embraces economic protectionism and industrial policy, the marginalization of libertarian ideas within the American right is striking. Writing for the libertarian outlet Reason, Brian Doherty sounded the alarm bell after Peter Thiel’s remarks at the 2019 National Conservatism Conference:
In his hourlong presentation, Thiel expressed no particular libertarian inclinations. Instead, he talked about how public policy decisions should be based on how they would better not individual lives but a collective “America” while crushing her enemies.
In this Thiel was merely adopting the language of his friend Hazony, who rejects market principles as the basis of political community and argues for the superiority of collective freedom over individual liberty. Hazony may share the new fusionist emphasis on cultural homogeneity, but he derives his conclusions from entirely different sources. It is not Hayek or Mises but Carl Schmitt and Meir Kahane who have been whispering in his ear.
As for Thiel’s fellow “broligarchs,” I’ve argued that observers have been far too credulous of their libertarian self-narratives.
Their actual behavior suggests fealty to a patronage market, not a free one, as they attempt to translate their proximity to President trump into lucrative defense and surveillance contracts. These entrepreneurial parasites need a state they can feed on. Yarvin has scorned DOGE as too libertarian and rejected trump’s tariffs as insufficiently mercantilist; he wants a maximal state, not a minimal one. Spencer’s uniquely noxious brand of libertarianism and biological racism caters to a dwindling crowd alienated not by the latter, but by the former.
In tracing how right-wing libertarians helped reintroduce race science into mainstream political discourse, Hayek’s Bastards offers a natural complement to John Ganz’s When the Clock Broke, which charts how the alliance of libertarians and paleoconservatives that coalesced around Pat Buchanan hitched anarcho-capitalist sensibilities to the wagon of white racial resentment. Understanding this formula is all the more vital after the second trump victory, but it also suggests continuities between MAGA and previous forms of conservativism that are more tactical than ideological. The rapidity with which many in the contemporary far right have shed their libertarian principles—a trend Slobodian does not address—indicates that the economic philosophies of Rothbard and Hoppe were more disposable than their racial project, which began well before neoliberalism and will outlive it.
This turnabout reveals the real driver of concern: not the size or nature of the state but the sort of people it serves. Look, for instance, at the far right’s insidious co-optation of the language of civil rights, and now the tools of the state itself. In recent years Murray and Brimelow have presented race science as respect for “human diversity” and opposition to white supremacy as “viewpoint discrimination.” America First Legal, a conservative legal action group founded by White House adviser Stephen Miller, has taken to filing antiwhite discrimination lawsuits. As I write, VDARE is in the process of being shuttered because it cannot secure website hosting or banking services, and its founder is agitating for federal legislation “to allow freedom of speech to return to America”—presumably using civil rights legislation and the authority of the Department of Justice to do so. The libertarian label is wearing thin.
For this reason, I found myself thinking that Hayek’s Bastards captures the chaotic mood of the first trump administration better than it does the present one. As many have observed, this iteration of the trump White House reflects a significantly more ideologically developed and institutionally robust movement—one that has gained political momentum by arguing that markets should serve the nation rather than the other way around. It is not just the free movement of people that today’s far right finds troubling, but also the free movement of goods and capital.
We need to take this break with neoliberalism seriously in order to grapple with fundamental questions: Why have different factions of the right jettisoned libertarian principles that for decades were at the center of conservative economic orthodoxy, while retaining and even deepening their attachment to “natural” hierarchies? How does the right’s turn toward scientific arguments relate to the moral panic over fertility rates, which is fueling arguments for pronatalist family policies targeted at “real” Americans? To what extent are tariffs and the current crackdown on immigration—rationalized by appeals to wage pressure but largely opposed by Hayek’s acolytes in Silicon Valley—consistent with a politics of Volk capital? Hayek’s Bastards may not answer these questions, but it does provide a useful perch from which to pose them. ///
s. e. anderson
author of The Black Holocaust for Beginners
www.blackeducator.org
"If WORK was good for you, the rich would leave none for the poor." (Haiti)
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