"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

"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/

"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)

[#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

"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

Isn't it awkward that the arguments of the custodians of capitalism are generally so self-serving and LAZY, full of clichés and meaningless concepts? It just so seems that these billionaires have become dumb by leaving all critical thinking skills at the foot of the altar of holy money

"Pairing “personal liberties” and “free markets” is a staple of libertarian rhetoric. It is, in fact, the slogan of the libertarian magazine Reason: “Free Minds and Free Markets.” But these abstractions obscure far more than they clarify. What happens when freedom of thought and speech come into conflict with “the free market,” i.e., with letting business owners do whatever they like?

In 2017, socialist writer Freddie deBoer wrote an essay for the Post titled “Corporations are cracking down on free speech inside the office — and out.” In it, he cited a variety of cases in which employees had been fired at various companies for expressing opinions during their free time that their bosses disliked and concluded that as “businesses gain new ways of observing the private lives of employees, they will become more adept at policing those off-the-clock moments,” and “all of us will become less free.”

Could the deBoer piece be published in WaPo now? It depends on whether Bezos cares more about the “personal liberties” half or the freedom of capitalists to police their workforces however they see fit. Given his own history of firing workers for criticizing his company at union rallies, it’s pretty clear that he’d choose the latter."

https://jacobin.com/2025/03/bezos-washington-post-free-market

"[T]he AfD in Germany is actually a really good example of one of these sort of strange bedfellow-type parties that I actually think is sort of unhelpfully described as either neo-Nazi or Nazi-curious. What it actually is is it was founded by ordoliberal economics professors who disliked the way Merkel was handling the eurozone crisis, and thought you needed more monetary discipline and more fiscal discipline. They then created an alliance with basically ethnonationalists, traditionalist members of the so-called New Right, who felt that modernity had produced a fallen world, and we needed to get back to more rooted links to the land and that certain populations belonged in some spaces and not others. And now they have created this kind of this far-right neoliberal party, that Alice Weidel sort of gives voice to when she says that, you know, “We’re actually a libertarian conservative party,” as she said in her Spaces chat with Musk.

The AfD is one of only many far-right parties that now Musk is aggressively platforming. In the last few days, he has promoted Viktor Orbán, Giorgia Meloni, the AfD, and in the past has gone as far as promoting Tommy Robinson, the sort of far-right figure from the U.K. He has adopted not just sort of a tame language of democracy, as Vance tends to be using, but a language as he used in the rally that he zoomed into of “Germany for the Germans” and saying that multiculturalism must not be allowed to dilute the German people. So these are now proper tropes of the far right as such, and indeed tropes of the “great replacement” theory, which suggests that liberals have used welfare policy and refugee policy to buy voters, which can then swamp and dilute the native population.
(...)
The thing that I think is interesting and important, and perhaps a sign of rare optimism these days, is that Germans actually don’t like Elon Musk interfering in their politics."
https://www.democracynow.org/2025/2/20/quinn_slobodian_maga_doge_capitalism

As you will know I'm no stranger to typos, so this cartoon goes out to anyone who sent me a massage about a typo in a post (as always thanks for your help, much appreciated) bit also to my Mastodon friend @h4890 who will appreciate this on a Saturday morning.

Hopefully anarchocapitalists will now see that their ideology does not work in the real world, but I'm not holding my breath

Persuading others who support the right wing extremist views can be challenging, but it's possible through thoughtful, empathetic communication and evidence-based arguments.

Here are some approaches to help foster understanding and shift perspectives: 1)
#farright #rightwing #Facist #Liberal #conservative #Libertarianism #Libertarian #totalitarianism #Counterview #misinformation

#Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology by David Golumbia, 2024

An urgent reckoning with digital technology’s fundamentally right-wing legal and economic underpinnings In a timely challenge to the potent political role of digital technology, Cyberlibertarianism argues that right-wing ideology was built into both the technical and social construction of the digital world from the start.

@bookstodon
#books
#DigitalTechnology
#RightWing
#libertarianism
#internet

Clearly, we need to get back to this and the new questions filling my brains…. When did the #enshittification of #libertarianism begin? Because we all agree the origins of it, rooted in labor unionizing and anarchist movements, are far removed from the weird racist beast it’s become today.

Even Penn Gillette gave up libertarianism. So something is definitely up.

From: @ErickaSimone
https://mastodon.social/@ErickaSimone/113970995862679953