I think the book was intended as a corrective to this narrative that became very common after 2016 with Donald Trump and Brexit, in which the far right was understood as a response to and a critique of the excesses of neoliberal globalization.

The assumption was that these actors in the far right were seeking some kind of social protection or shielding of populations from dynamics of competition. But my book shows that many of the prominent leaders of the far right were in fact radicalized capitalists who were seeking to accelerate those same dynamics of competition and rivalry in a new way.

The context I look at is the end of the Cold War. With the death of state communism, there was concern that the enemy had changed its shape and changed its face because neoliberals and conservatives still felt like there was a large state, there were social justice demands, and progressives had not died with the Soviet Union.

So from the 1990s onward, people on the Right, in both the neoliberal camp and the more cultural conservative camp, began focusing on new enemies — including feminists, anti-racists, and environmentalists. So much of the strangeness of the present moment, where the right wing is obsessed with cultural Marxism and wokeness, I think stems from this transformation after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

It’s an indication of the fact that some of the primary intellectuals I profile in the book were members of the organized neoliberal intellectual movement. They were part of a relatively small group of people that met regularly in the Mont Pelerin Society to debate the different ways capitalism should be defended against its challengers, including democracy.

Friedrich Hayek himself had an evolving understanding of human nature and the nature of markets. Many of the people I write about in the book simply took his ideas to the next step. Cultural evolution turned into biological evolution. Market traits inside of populations turned into ideas of hardwired intelligence, deficiency, and race science.

So they’re “bastards” in the sense that they are the offspring intellectually of Hayek, but I think they are misreading him and taking his work in directions that he himself would not have taken it.

I see it very much in continuity with the previous two books and even almost as a chronological bookend to them.

Globalists takes into account the period between the end of World War I — specifically the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire — and the 1990s. At the time, this group of neoliberal intellectuals believed strongly that you could create institutions that sat above the state and encased markets through law and state design, all of which culminated in the World Trade Organization, for example — in other words, the idea of locking in certain rights for capital that overrode national sovereignty.

Crack-Up Capitalism was about people who are dissatisfied with that model of scaling up and instead looked at opportunities to scale down and exit existing state arrangements. So the romance of Hong Kong and the microstate as the new fix for the obstacles of class politics and social movements, which picked up in the late 1970s but then really accelerated into the 1990s and 2000s, with techno-libertarian dreams of charter cities and private states.

Hayek Bastards picks up where Crack-Up Capitalism left off. The latter opens with this image of Peter Thiel in 2009 speculating about the need to escape politics altogether and create thousands of new states and polities. But the book ends with Thiel in 2016 taking the stage at the Republican National Convention and fusing this political project with Trump’s. The conclusion there seems to be that it is much easier to take over an existing state than start a new one.

I would say that the intellectual project is to try to understand one part of that ideology that has come to power in the United States, and how people who prioritize economic freedom above all else would find helpful allies in people who believe in natural forms of hierarchy such as race, gender, and intelligence. So yes, the trilogy brings us up to the present moment.

The method has been slightly unusual in that I focused in a very narrow way on this group of thinkers in the neoliberal movement and used them as a lens to observe larger trends.

I have never tried to claim that there was a cabal of puppet masters in Geneva that was coordinating the world’s laws and policies. But I do think that this mole’s eye view of the organic intellectuals of the neoliberal movement can be illuminating in one direction. I don’t think that we should expect an intellectual history to stand in for all other forms of analysis, but it can help offer one angle.

However, things like the present project of destroying the world trading system, the dismantling of the federal state, the attack on institutions and ecology of research and development in the United States, the self-radicalization of Silicon Valley elites and their banding up with nativists are not explainable by simple structural incentives. Nor is it simply madness incarnate. It has a very strange intellectual coherence, but one that you can map out.

Once you have done so, what do you do about it? I don’t know, but I think it’s helpful to begin to get a handle on things.

Well, there’s a standing way of interpreting the American right that goes by name of fusionism, which argues that it was the reconciliation of Christian traditionalists with free-market libertarians in the 1950s that gave the US conservative movement its specific shape and appearance.

What I noticed noticing was that beginning in the 1970s, but really accelerating in the ‘80s and ‘90s, the discussion inside neoliberal circles was returning more and more to ideas of both the hard sciences such as biology but also the social sciences and ideas of cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychology, and sociobiology. These people were discussing how they could use science to uphold neoliberal arguments.

By the 1990s, the breakthrough of a book like The Bell Curve — which was written by a Harvard psychologist with a libertarian think-tanker and stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for almost a year — then seemed to me like a tipping point. If you wanted to make the case for a larger audience, and maybe bring the center closer to your position, it made sense to not use the language of God and Jesus anymore but that of DNA and evolution.

Following the rise of the so-called alt-right in 2016, people were very confused by what they understood as the return of race science — there was an idea that after the Third Reich, nobody would take the idea of a scientific hierarchy of humans seriously again. But what my book shows is that race science continued in the shadows until it was given new credence in the 1990s and 2000s by the rise of the prestige of genetics, including the Human Genome Project, and neuroscience — the idea that brain chemistry determines behavior and that the truth of humans was written into their body and genes.

I think the starting point is a counterintuitive one that kind of surprised me when I encountered it. And it was the sense on the part of neoliberal intellectuals that they hadn’t actually won the Cold War.

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.

I think a lot of this is behind the wild and chaotic energy of politics in the last couple of years — something I try to capture in the conclusion by talking about the figure of Javier Milei. Something of the kind could be said also of Elon Musk, although he hadn’t really gone off the deep end by the time I finished this book. 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. So that the question of who comes after the bastards is a pretty pregnant one.

Yeah. I think that the metaphor that Murray Rothberg uses in the early 1970s is helpful, when he talks about the “rock of biology” that stands in the way of egalitarian fantasies.

So there I think we need to understand the whole book as describing a backlash — not a backlash against neoliberal globalization but a backlash against the 1960s social movements and the attempt to rectify historically entrenched inequalities of race, gender, and global geography. The appeal to biology was rhetorically useful because it suggested there was something beyond human manipulation that prevented social efforts of transformation. Likewise, the idea that different capacities and talents were hardwired in different ways into populations would render quixotic and impossible the efforts of social reform that came out of the 1960s.

So that hardwired idea immediately puts to death a lot of the reformism of the second half of the twentieth century. If you look at the operations of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and the US government right now, you can see that being turned into a political program where all of the things designed to rectify historical inequalities are being targeted and removed.

The hard borders aspect emerges from that, because debates about immigration are often framed as debates about community and social cohesion and the threat to internal stability and security. And what I show in the book is that if you think about populations as having built-in capacities for economic activity, then you can also create a new immigration regime that is letting in some populations because you assume them to be more effective market participants, while keeping out others because you assume them to be inevitable welfare parasites and dependents.

Now those two things can work together without a belief in hard money or the need to dismantle the fiat currency system and return to precious metal–backed currencies. But in the more extreme forms of right-wing libertarianism, the three go together. The belief that science and nature dictate order extends also to the means of storing value and exchanging commodities — and money, too, is subjected to this scientization.

I think that’s one thing that helps to make sense of the otherwise unlikely alliance of right-wing traditionalists and Silicon Valley techno-libertarians. It can reinforce a drive toward segregation or the reproduction of white supremacy. But for Silicon Valley, I think IQ operates a little differently and offers the prospect of certain forms of social engineering and the sorting out of populations according to their best productive use.

I think that as with many things on the far right these days, it works not because it has one shared goal but because there are certain languages and ideas that can stand together many different goals and imaginations of the future.

I think that the way that the Trump administration is unfolding this second time shows some pretty serious differences, actually, from the ideology I lay out in the book. I would say the aspiration of the Silicon Valley figures like Thiel and Marc Andreessen and Musk would be more of a “neo-fusionist” administration that still seeks out capitalist imperatives of efficiency and productivity while happily trampling on any ideas of human equality or redistribution.

In late 2024, there was this debate between Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy with Steve Bannon about immigration, where Bannon was saying there should be a policy of American jobs for Americans, and Musk and Ramaswamy were saying that certain kinds of jobs in tech required highly skilled workers. So we could do mass deportation at our borders while selecting this boutique class of mobile workers from around the globe to plug into their companies in Silicon Valley. That, to me, was a good example of “new fusionism” in action.

That wasn’t simply saying that there’s one principle that goes for all humans, but that we should differentiate between higher-value or higher-worth individuals and lower ones. I think the Trump policy about the gold card, which would allow people to buy citizenship, would be another perfect expression of the kind of thing I’m writing about in the book — fusing citizenship with monetary value in ways that would be completely illegible to old-style fascists. One cannot imagine the Third Reich offering this option — you know, one million Reichsmarks and you get to become an Aryan.

At the same time — maybe this is the bias of just the last week or so —the trade policy that’s being rolled out and the attitude toward annexation of adjoining countries and territories like Greenland and Canada and Panama is quite out of step in a very fundamental way with any genealogy of the neoliberal movement. Because if there’s one thing that the neoliberal movement is built on, it’s that states should be subordinate to markets at some level, and economic power should trump state power. States are very important, essential, but they are servants of capital, and I think that to overstep the bounds of national sovereignty in such a direct way is to practice the kind of politics against which the original neoliberals formed in the 1930s.

I think that in softer ways, Viktor Orbán remains a very important leader of this post–Cold War mutation of the Right. He’s really someone who at the Conservative Political Action Conference and elsewhere has articulated most clearly this idea that Marxism didn’t go away. It just went underground and transformed and so still needs to be rooted out, because the Cold War never ended in a way. But I say “softer” because he also combines his anti-left politics with some vision of social welfarism. A very strong pronatalist policy, for example, and some attention to what they call welfare chauvinism.

And that I think gets more to the other factions of the post-fascist right, in Europe especially. I’ve always thought that Marine Le Pen, and even Matteo Salvini and Meloni, represent a slightly different strain of the far right that is often willing to be anti-austerity, is willing to play with ideas of direct cash payments and certain kinds of social protections while also playing the game of competitiveness and hospitality to capital and military alliances. So I wouldn’t say that what I describe in the book perfectly captures the far right in every country.

I think there’s a big difference between the conservatives who led Brexit and the AfD and the Belgian far right. So I would place it on the spectrum there, but the book does not attempt a one-stop shop explanation for everything that we are seeing.

I think that scholarship requires an ecosystem to sustain it at a basic level: universities, funding for graduate students, classrooms, libraries. One of the really frightening aspects of the present moment is the assumption that those things will persist over the medium term is not certain. There’s a concerted effort right now in the United States to make the practice of scholarship as we’ve understood it impossible. It’s really an effort to defund higher education.

So in earlier periods, when we could depend on relatively stable research funding and cohorts of graduate students and jobs for those graduate students once they graduated, I think it was possible to imagine a kind of autonomous space. However, because the far right has politicized the existence of universities, I think anything being done in a university is now de facto political.

It’s presenting itself as a potential target for elimination or presenting itself as a potential justification for the further choking out of resources. So I would like to imagine we were still in a space where autonomous research is possible, but I think that freedom has currently vanished.

So the choice to act politically inside the university is not one we have to make. It’s been forced on us. I think that our work, by definition, is now part of contested politics, so it is probably a good idea to start thinking about it that way and come to terms with the consequences that also come along with that.