"Desperate for a new intellectual underpinning, neoliberals and libertarians sought refuge in the work of economist Friedrich Hayek, who famously argued in his 1944 polemic The Road to Serfdom that government intervention in markets is antithetical to individual freedom. But Murray, Rothbard, Hoppe, and others fatally twisted Hayek’s message, claims Slobodian, and took it so far as to argue that only Western countries are intellectually and culturally primed for capitalism.

The politics of this cohort, which he dubs the “new fusionists,” was rooted in “three hards,” argues Slobodian: “Hardwired human nature, hard borders, and hard money.” They forged sordid alliances with biologists, evolutionary psychologists, and ethnonationalists, spouting pseudoscience about the link between race and IQ, a topic famously repopularized in the 1994 best-seller The Bell Curve, coauthored by Murray and psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein. They railed against lax immigration policies on the premise that they led to cultural decay. But perhaps most strangely, they ballyhooed the value of gold as a backstop against a looming economic cataclysm caused by incompetency in Washington. (Talk about apropos.)

In an interview with Vanity Fair, which has been edited for length and clarity, Slobodian analyzes Donald Trump’s radical agenda through this new prism of neoliberalism. He also unpacks the distressing parallels between goldbugs and crypto bros, and details why the tech set has suddenly taken up with the MAGA right. Silicon Valley’s “willingness to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Donald Trump,” he says, is indicative “of the embrace of an ideology that pretty frankly ranks human capacity along the spectrum of intelligence and IQ.”"

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/donald-trump-silicon-valley-neoliberal-roots

This is so true

Mutant Capitalism
How the dystopian visions of the nativist right are in keeping with a long tradition of neoliberal ideology.

Excerpt adapted from Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right by Quinn Slobodian

https://www.hnn.us/article/mutant-capitalism

The Techno-Utopian Seasteaders Who Want to Colonize the Ocean - Libertarians have long looked at ocean living as the next frontier. Some wealthy men are ... - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/15/magazine/seasteading-libertarian-ocean-living.html #realestateandhousing(residential) #libertarianism(uspolitics) #seasteadinginstitute #sustainableliving #bitcoin(currency) #oceansandseas #longevity

"I think that my assumption was a triumphalism and a sense of victory after the fall of the Soviet Union. But the fact that the week of the Berlin Wall falling, they were already talking about new enemies —enemies that had gone underground in certain ways or transformed in ways that were elusive — was the beginning of the rabbit hole. Because once you accept the idea that Marxism and socialism have survived and yet have changed their face, then anything can be Marxism and socialism.

I think this is how we can understand the fixation of the right wing on things like what they call “cultural Marxism” or “gender ideology” as essentially the new enemy of humanity. Because the adversary continuously changes shape, it makes them open to endless reinterpretation. There is a paranoid quality to the term. And the paranoia doesn’t really have any bounds, as I show in the book.

So I think the narrative arc comes from a feeling on the part of the libertarians, and often the racist libertarians, that they can contain their enemy in new ways by pinning it down on hierarchies of intelligence or deploying the latest findings from genetics. But by the end of the book, with a chapter on “gold bugs” and the far-right obsession with gold, there’s almost a sense of desperation or surrender to the inevitable, a failure to contain their enemies and the idea of an impending collapse and inevitable apocalypse.
(...)
What I recognize is a sort of desperation and a kind of ungoverned willingness to reach for radical remedies in a time of great peril. And as I described in the last chapter, often the rhetorical technique of the gold bug is to predict a coming apocalypse and then immediately sell you the only means there is to protect you from the worst.

I think there’s that accelerationism visible right now on the far right, certainly in the United States."

https://jacobin.com/2025/04/race-science-neoliberalism-hayek-slobodian/

"Transgression and disruption as aesthetic ideology, from Marinetti to experimental art, counterculture, neoliberalism, and Trump" is an article originally written in Dutch by me and Nienke Terpsma. It was commissioned for, and published in, the new issue (2/2005) of the art magazine Metropolis M which is covering the 60th anniversary of the Dutch Provo movement.

The text reflects on how futurism, accelerationism, and chaos aesthetics have become part of neoliberal, right-wing libertarian, and contemporary fascist politics, but how seeming antidotes like community and care can also be hijacked.

We've made a slightly expanded and revised English version of the text available here:

http://cramer.pleintekst.nl/essays/transgression_and_disruption_as_aesthetic_ideology/

"Over the past two decades, the self-avowed libertarian’s melding of genetic pronouncements with bootstrapping family-values talk has served as the bridge spanning divergent factions of the racialist right, from its IQ-obsessed, DEI-hating Silicon Valley wing to its white nationalist fringes.

Far from rejecting the dynamic of market competition, this new formation deepens it. From the United States and Britain to Hungary and Argentina, so-called populists on the right have not rejected global capitalism as such. Rather, they have rejected the 1990s model of governing global capitalism that revolved around large multilateral trade agreements—opting instead for unilateral action, as in Trump’s use of tariffs as leverage to open markets for U.S. investors and U.S. products and services. In general, the leaders of this right offer few plans to rein in finance, re-industrialize, or restore a Golden Age of job security. On the contrary, their calls to privatize, deregulate, and slash taxes come straight from the playbook shared by the world’s leaders for the past thirty years.

In other words, this new right does not really reject globalism but advances a new strain of it—one that accepts an international division of labor while tightening controls on certain kinds of migration. It assigns intelligence averages to countries in a way that collectivizes and renders innate the concept of “human capital.” It appeals to values and traditions that cannot be captured statistically, shading into a language of national essences and national character. The fix it finds in race, culture, and nation is but the most recent iteration of a pro-market philosophy based not on the idea that we are all the same but that we are in a fundamental, and perhaps permanent way, different."

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/free-markets-and-fixed-natures/

"The output of new fusionism was and continues to be virulently, nauseatingly racist. One prominent figure in the movement gleefully recalled watching a peer tell “a black intellectual that his race’s problems might be caused by an hereditary IQ deficiency.” Another, Richard J. Herrnstein, a co-author of the notorious “The Bell Curve,” wrote in a letter to a friend: “It continually amazes me that even biologists deny having eugenic sentiments, as if they were shameful.”

The end goal of such a noxious politics was to enshrine racial and gendered inequalities as inevitable, to outsource the difficult work of democratic dispute to pseudoscientists, and to appeal to the ostensible authority of biology to quash dissent. (Never mind that virtually all credible biologists rejected its assertions.) It was a political movement that aspired to eliminate politics altogether, replacing disagreement in the public sphere with the fatalism of genetics.

“Hayek’s Bastards” can be dense — a risk for any serious work of intellectual history — but it can also be entertaining. Slobodian’s wry commentary offers welcome respite from both the difficulty and the moral odiousness of his subject: He describes a neoliberal economist’s choice to live in an artists loft as “off-brand” and decries the “punitive neo-Victorian tone” of new fusionist books with titles like “The Loss of Virtue.”"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/04/04/hayeks-bastards-quinn-slobodian-review/

"If you are a libertarian and you believe in the power of markets ... how can you be so stupid as to not also be a socialist?

If you believe that competitive markets are the way that we're creative, then you should be doing everything in your power to maximise the number of skilled, confident, unafraid, joyful market participants. In which case poverty is a crime against libertarianism."

#DavidBrin, 2023

https://www.teamhuman.fm/episodes/256-david-brin

(1/2)

Freedom Cities

https://www.metafilter.com/207995/Freedom-Cities

The Trump Administration: Government by Billionaires, for Billionaires
https://cepr.net/publications/the-trump-administration-government-by-billionaires-for-billionaires/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wikiCenter_for_Economic_and_Policy_Research

#billionaires #capitalism #inequality #plutocracy #meritocracy #oligarchy
#Trump #fascism #authoritarianism #Musk #DOGE #libertarianism #privatization #Christofascism

[#TwoWords : Elon Musk] Palantir suggests 'common operating system' for UK govt data
https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/25/palantir_covid_inquiry_comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43470010

#billionaires #oligarchy #libertarianism #meritocracy #plutocracy #capitalism #protofascism
#surveillance #Palantir #privacy
#TwoWords

Chris Hedges: Trump’s War on Education
https://consortiumnews.com/2025/03/14/chris-hedges-trumps-war-on-education/
The U.S. president’s cuts to education under the guise of fighting anti-Semitism are an effort to enforce totalitarianism in the minds of future generations. Questions are not to be asked, myths are to be enforced. By Chris Hedges ScheerPost The…
#Politics #Analysis #CivilRights #History #HumanRights #Racism #RightWing #TrumpAdministration #AntiSemitism #BookBans #ChrisHedges #Dei #DonaldTrump #Education #EllenSchrecker #HannahArendt #HowardZinn #JasonStanley #Libertarianism #Propaganda #Totalitarianism

New for Spring 2025!

"The majority of people in Argentina (53%) are now living in poverty. Their purchasing power and standard of living have been crushed by Milei’s brutal austerity.

Nearly three-quarters (72%) of Argentines said in June 2024, after half a year of Milei’s rule, that they were worse off economically.

While Argentina’s real economy is in crisis, the stock market has boomed, enriching local oligarchs and rich foreign investors.

Milei’s government has also promoted a notorious carry trade scheme known as the “bicicleta financiera” (financial bicycle) that has guaranteed massive returns for the few Argentines wealthy enough to invest.

Aside from finance, the few other sectors of the economy that are growing under Milei are agriculture and mining — extractive industries that rely on exports and benefit from a falling currency and weak domestic demand.

In short, Argentina is being turned into an impoverished, deindustrialized resource colony for foreign corporations and oligarchs."

https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2025/02/28/javier-milei-argentina-economy-resource-colony/

So, VCs and "enterpreneurs" are parasiting the public infrastructure payed by U.S. taxpayers to create their fantasy islands throughout the U.S. I guess it's cheaper than paying for that infrastructure in their own desert islands...

"Several groups representing “startup nations”—tech hubs exempt from the taxes and regulations that apply to the countries where they are located—are drafting Congressional legislation to create “freedom cities” in the US that would be similarly free from certain federal laws, WIRED has learned.

According to interviews and presentations viewed by WIRED, the goal of these cities would be to have places where anti-aging clinical trials, nuclear reactor startups, and building construction can proceed without having to get prior approval from agencies like the Food and Drug Administration, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Environmental Protection Agency.

Trey Goff, the chief of staff of the startup nation known as Próspera, tells WIRED that he and other Próspera representatives working under an advocacy group called the Freedom Cities Coalition have been meeting with the Trump administration about the idea in recent weeks. He claims the administration has been very receptive. In 2023, Trump floated the idea of creating 10 freedom cities. Now, Goff says that Próspera’s vision is to create “not just 10, but as many as the market can handle.” They hope to have drafted legislation ready by the end of the year."

https://www.wired.com/story/startup-nations-donald-trump-legislation/

"There is no such thing as a good government. There never was. There can't be."
— Emma Goldman