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- [00:01]
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Thomas Small
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Thomas Small
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Quinn Slobodian
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- [01:50]
Thomas Small (Narrator/Host)
Friedrich von Hayek the grandfather of neoliberalism, Hayek believed that individual liberty, private property, and free exchange offered the surest protection against the coercive power of the state. The Road away from Serfdom
- [02:10]
Thomas Small
but some
- [02:11]
Thomas Small (Narrator/Host)
of the thinkers who claimed his inheritance traveled in a very different direction towards racial hierarchy, hard borders, biological determinism, and authoritarian politics. Quinn Slobodian is professor of International History at Boston University and the author of Hayek's Bastards. In this conversation, he describes Hayek's theory of cultural evolution, Murray Rothbard's strange journey from courting hippies to courting racial nationalists, the politics behind the Bell Curve, and the libertarian networks that helped incubate parts of the modern far right. The question is, does Slobodian's genealogy truly explain the weird world we now inhabit, or does he give too much weight to a perverse, if influential, fringe? I'm Thomas Small. This is my Conflicted Conversation with Quinn Slobodian.
- [03:23]
Thomas Small
Hello, Quinn. Welcome to the show. It's really nice to meet you. I'm glad that you agreed to come on Conflicted. How are you doing?
- [03:29]
Quinn Slobodian
I'm doing great.
- [03:30]
Thomas Small
I am sweating bullets for a couple of reasons, Quinn. First of all, there's a terrible heat wave impacting England at the moment, and I don't have air conditioning. So, dear listeners, if you're watching this on video and I'm sweating, that's one reason why. The other reason is. And at the outset, I just want to come clean about this. I'm rather nervous about this conversation because. Well, why? We're here to talk about your work in general, specifically a book that you published last year called Hayek's Bastards, subtitled Race Gold, IQ and the Capitalism of the Far Right. And the reason I'm nervous is I'm not very good at economics. Economics slightly bedevils my mind. What I'm aware is that people have very strong views on it, and yet they always couch those very strong views in the language of maths and science, and yet they can reach such totally different conclusions, leaving someone like myself kind of bewildered. So that's confusing for a. For a regular guy like me. But mainly it's because temperamentally, and I can only say temperamentally because I'm not a very political guy, but temperamentally, I'm not a man of the left. I'm sort of temperamentally a man, more of the conservative disposition.
- [04:54]
Thomas Small (Narrator/Host)
Right.
- [04:55]
Thomas Small
So when I was reading High Ex Basterds, I was aware the author, Quinn Slobodian, this is a guy who's a man of the left. It's animating his work. And so I thought, oh, God, is this going to be like some kind of fight? Because I never want to have fights. I just want to. Want to chat. So that's why I'm a bit nervous. But you are a man of the left, Quinn. What is your sort of ideological background, your development as a person?
- [05:17]
Quinn Slobodian
Well, I mean, it's probably helpful to point out first, my disciplinary background, because I, too, am not an economist. That wasn't my training, that wasn't my background. And that ends up being actually fine, I'm sure, as we'll get on to with the book itself, because, in fact, the titular character of the Book Hayek, I would say, after the 1940s, isn't really an economist either. He's been described by some of his best biographers, including Bruce Caldwell, as much more of a political philosopher. And again, as I'm sure we'll be talking about, he has a kind of magpie like quality to his intellectual development that is very much of the kind of Viennese coffee house variety that is, you know, Catholic in his interest, small C, and very interdisciplinary by reflex. And Hayek, and indeed the whole Austrian school that ends up following him, is also allergic to the kind of quantitative methods and the turn to game theory and econometrics that has now really swallowed the practice of economics in the United States and also even in places like Germany and Austria, too. So we don't have to worry about that part of, you know, feeling conflicted, I guess, because I won't, I won't try to. I won't try to hit you with the My economic science proves my point bludgeon. That's never been one I've had available, and it's one I'm usually more interested in trying to, you know, dispossess people of rather than to try to use myself. But maybe I can just say quickly, you know, for people who are listening who haven't picked up the book yet, what the kind of the big argument is, because it helps make sense of a lot of the nitty gritty we're discussing here. So the, I mean, the argument that really, or the, the puzzle that spawned the book for me was why did neoliberals who had been fighting communism for 45 years, you know, from the end of the Second World War to 1989, not feel more excited when the Cold War ended? Why is it that when you read the Wall Street Journal account of the first Mont Pelerin Society meeting, Mont Pelerin Society being the neoliberal sort of debate society that, that Hayek founded in 1947.
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Sponsor/Ad Voice
Why do they.
- [07:40]
Quinn Slobodian
Why are they also depressed? I didn't get it. And the answer, as I discovered, is they thought that the enemy had not been vanquished, it had just changed color. So there were new enemies now after the Soviet Union and sort of official party style, communism was dead. In fact, it had been dead for decades, right? I mean, by the late 80s, early 90s, I mean, communist parties were, except for maybe a couple of Western European countries, more or less a dead letter. So who are the new enemies? Well, the new enemies were, first and foremost the environmental movement, which we forget had a great deal of momentum in the late 80s, the ozone layer and push against greenhouse gases. It was also the civil rights movement, which hadn't died after the 1960s and was actually in some ways going stronger with affirmative action, with quotas and with workplace discrimination laws. It was also anti sexism, again, workplace harassment laws. It was things like the American Disabilities act, which passed us in the early 1990s. If you read Milton Friedman in the 90s, he's pointing to all these things. He's saying, if socialism is dead, why isn't it lying down? State budgets are still huge. The foreign policy beast is not dead either. They're just off finding new wars to fight and the state and the deficit to GDP ratio is not going down at all. So we just have a new set of villains.
- [09:01]
Thomas Small
But is that so surprising? Because this, this tendency which became known as neoliberalism in the 80s and 90s, it had always opposed the New Deal. It had always seen the erection within the United States of this new sort of social democracy. The United States never had it to the same degree as Western European countries, obviously, but nonetheless the New Deal is gesturing towards social democracy, which the neoliberals, as they would be called, always opposed. So is it so surprising that when one enemy, the enemy outside died, they would turn their attention to the enemy that had always existed?
- [09:38]
Quinn Slobodian
To me, it wasn't surprising. No, you're absolutely right. And even more than the New Deal, the Great Society programs, right?
- [09:43]
Thomas Small
Oh yeah, of course, from the 60s which President Johnson inaugurated. Yeah, yeah.
- [09:47]
Quinn Slobodian
So it's Social Security, it's Medicare, it's Medicaid that bring up the state share of GDP in the United States, you know, not far off from its Western European counterparts like the uk and people pointed to the fact that political scientists have for years said, if Thatcher and Reagan dismantled the welfare state as it was claimed, then why did the amount of state spending actually effectively not drop? So no, you're absolutely right that neoliberals, if they were focused on, you know, the principles of austerity, balanced budgets, running the state more economically, had always a lot of targets and many of them were domestic it through the Cold War period as well. Things that they blamed for the economic irrationality of the conduct of even so called capitalist countries. As far as my, my own kind of socialization or politicization, it does end up being, I think, relevant to the topic of the book too. The book actually the title is an homage to a book called Voltaire's Bastards by a Canadian intellectual named John Ralston.
- [10:55]
Thomas Small
Saul, great book, great book.
- [10:56]
Quinn Slobodian
Okay, right, You've read it. So, you know, I read as well as a teenager and it was one of the first kind of big ideas books I read. I mean I was reading a lot of literature in my teens. Very self serious, wannabe intellectual.
- [11:10]
Thomas Small
I have no idea what that feels like, Quinn.
- [11:13]
Quinn Slobodian
Yeah, I mean there, maybe we'll be on common ground. Jean Paul Sartre, the Russians, whatever I could get my hands on from the used bookstore that looked heady and deep. And then I came across that book because it had just come out at the time, talking about the, the mid-90s. I just love the way he wrote essayistically to kind of use this idea of rationality or reason and then show how it had been bastardized through rationalization and rationality as applied to things like war fighting and the organization of the workplace. And so the arc from a Voltaire to a Macnamara ended up being, you know, something one could write your way through and that. So as a method, I was very excited by that at the time and in a way it never left me. I think that that's still kind of what I do is, is I practice that kind of argument driven, essayistic, intellectual history. Yeah.
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Thomas Small
So a historian of ideas, but then your own, let's say, political commitments. I mean, I think they play a role.
- [12:21]
Quinn Slobodian
Surely they do. I mean, I was in college in Portland, Oregon in the late 90s.
- [12:28]
Thomas Small
That's it. You've given the game away, Quinn. Portland, Oregon. I know what you're going to say now. Portland, Oregon in the 90s, no less. Oh goodness, yeah, the good old 90s.
- [12:36]
Quinn Slobodian
And I was not by disposition much of an activist at that age. Anyway, I history then, and in some ways now too, tends to be more of a quietist or kind of, you know, intellectually critical, but not activist field in comparison to in the U.S. things like, let's say, you know, ethnic studies or women's and gender studies or sociology even, where people will be more likely, literally, you know, community organizers on the weekend and then academics during the week kind of thing. But in the late 90s, there was this little thing you might have heard of called the WTO meeting in Seattle in 1999. Yeah, and we're talking about like three hour drive from where I was in Portland. And a lot of my cohort were, were heading up there and they were, you know, getting ready for the big protest. And I remember someone I knew, my old like lab partner from biology, like making a big paper mache red fist that he was going to, you know, strap onto a Backpack and walk around downtown Seattle wearing. And when they went up, of course, it was a kind of epic, now kind of historically important clash in the streets. Ended up, you know, shutting down the WTO through the direct action conflict and the overreaction from the police and so on. And they all came back, you know, shell shocked, these sort of war stories. And some of them had spent nights in jail. And that was the first moment where I, I think I was kind of like jolted into a sense of being in the course of history taking place, that there was something important happening, which was a kind of fight over what globalization meant and should mean. And I was observing from the sidelines, and that was slightly uncomfortable feeling for me because I felt like I should have a stake, I should have a stance like, what am I defending the people inside the building or am I on the side of the people in the streets? I don't want to just be wishy washy somewhere in the middle unless I've really thought about it.
- [14:39]
Thomas Small
That's really where we part, because I'm very wishy washy, kind of on the fence.
- [14:43]
Quinn Slobodian
Yeah. I mean, well, the way that I ended up solving this problem is also, you know, maybe ended up me also making peace with my own quietism in a certain way because, you know, I became a historian of the people who my friends were protesting against. So, you know, rather than saying, let me figure out what all the, you know, the grievances in the sweatshops and the, you know, the degree of, you know, coral reef devastation or biodiversity loss or whatever is, as some people I knew did, I said, like, what was going on? The head of heads of the lawyers in the negotiations, negotiators who were inside the hotel, you know, arguing for the next round of WTO legislation and rules. And that's really what the book Globalist that came out years later was about. And it was the beginning for me of writing the history of neoliberalism as an intellectual movement. In that case, in an arc from the Austrian Empire at the end of the First World War all the way to the 1990s. It does end with, with Seattle and trying to ask the question, you know, why would people argue for something like one world economy? You know, what were they, what were they motivated by, what were they opposed to, what were, what were their blind spots, etc. And that, that was my kind of my politicization, I suppose. And it's, it's continued from there through the opposition to the Iraq war and so on.
- [16:10]
Thomas Small
And it's safe to say that throughout that research, you adopted a critical view on those developments. You're not in favor of thing called neoliberal globalization, on balance, is that fair to say?
- [16:22]
Quinn Slobodian
Yeah, I think that is fair to say. I mean, I think that it's always contextual, right? I mean, as a historian, you look at what other people are saying and then you want to correct the most egregious errors that are being circulated, or you want to fill in a part of the conversation that's absent. So the reason I hedge it like that is that when I did that book early, you know, started early 2000s, the discourse about globalization was very weak. So Martin Wolf types financial times that were just like, globalization is good, it's great, it's better for everyone.
- [16:54]
Thomas Small
Thomas Friedman, baby, right?
- [16:56]
Quinn Slobodian
Exactly. Top rising tide lifts all boats. And then you had people who were angry, but often, I think, not giving the full narration from inside the belly of the beast that they were describing. And so I was like, okay, here's my strongest critical take on the long arc of neoliberal globalization. Nowadays it's so common to argue against neoliberal globalization and in favor of near shoring protectionism, economic nationalism, that I actually sometimes find my impulse pushing me in the other direction. Not for neoliberal globalization per se, but to say, hold on, let's not abandon the idea of commerce over borders, of exchange over borders. So it, I think where I'm intervening often depends on where the. What seems to me like the ignorance is the most thick. And I go in there now, you
- [17:46]
Thomas Small
call the book Hayek's Bastards. You've mentioned Friedrich Hayek. He was born in 1899 in the Austro Hungarian Empire. He died. He lived a long time. He died in 1992. He is kind of mainly known in terms of political philosophy and economic thought with a critique, a kind of epistemic critique, basically saying that command economies, centralized economic planning is doomed to fail because economic systems are too complex for any one person or one committee of people to actually run. They would never have all of the information required to efficiently run a big economic system. And he would say that is what a market provides, much better through the price signal. Many, many millions of people using their freedom and their money to decide how much things cost, how many resources should be allocated here and there. So that was basically his, his primary thesis. Is that thesis sound, would you say? I mean, is that something that he legitimately contributed to the debate in the 20th century about how economies were best run?
- [19:01]
Quinn Slobodian
I think absolutely. I mean, you know, this is often referred to as the Knowledge problem. So, you know, the knowledge problem being if everyone's daily, short term and long term needs are known best only by them and are difficult to aggregate through whatever means, however many, even now censor or mainframes you might have to do that computational work, then you need to leave some degree of individual autonomy built into the system to allow people to, you know, process and then communicate or upload, as it were, their own needs to the rest of the society or the collective. And it's also sometimes referred to as the socialist calculation debate, as launched originally by his mentor Ludwig von Mises, a few years earlier. And it's no exaggeration to say that socialists have been wrestling with that critique ever since it was launched. So for over a hundred years now, people who believe in the possibility of socialism have been forced to return again and again to this knowledge problem and to say, so what is your solution to this now? And there's been, of course, waves and waves of responses to that. Some to do with the advances in digital technologies, some to do with more faith in human nature, perhaps you could say, than what Hayek seemed to event sometimes. But no doubt it's incredibly meaningful. And like many of his arguments, drew on an understanding of society that was folding in insights from the time. So he was not just an economist, narrowly speaking, he actually trained or hoped to be a neurologist and a psychologist first, and became very interested in the way that nervous systems reacted to stimulus and spread signals throughout the organism, and in some ways moved from that analogy to the human collective as something that responds to signals now carried in price and onward to, you know, reflections on galaxies and so on. So he was a thinker of systems.
- [21:16]
Thomas Small
So having introduced us to Friedrich Hayek and his mentor Ludwig von Mises, like Hayek, an Austrian economist and political philosopher, who really provide the base of what would eventually become neoliberalism, or at least one very important stream within neoliberalism. You then, chapter by chapter, introduce the reader to Hayek's bastards. These are people who to some extent at least follow in the line of Hayek and his mentor Mises and that libertarian tradition in economics and politics. These bastards include a man called Murray Rothbard, his follower Hans Hermann Hoppe. So these are guys who are politically radically libertarian, like anarcho libertarian. They don't believe in the state, and in pursuit of that political ambition, destroying the state, they sort of were happy to feel fuse rather dicey hereditarian race theory, sort of political separatist movements and eventually paleo conservative kind of right wing Populism. So that's one stream that you talk about. And then you talk about a guy called Peter Brimelow, a financier, I think, a kind of financial journalist as well, who on the side developed a model of globalization in which goods and capital should move freely but culturally or sort of racially bounded nations should remain intact and human migration should be restricted. Then you talk about Charles Murray, the writer of the notorious book the Bell Curve, that argued that IQ was hereditary, was genetic, and that various races and within racial disparities, class distinctions as well, were sort of natural, genetically conditioned, sort of innate, based on iq, and that therefore it is futile to adopt policies like welfare or affirmative action or foreign aid to mitigate inequalities, which he argued were more natural, sort of genetically grounded. And finally, a chapter on gold bugs. Men who were sort of, maybe in America, often overlapped with Ron Paul's brand of libertarianism in the Republican Party, who used a paranoid narrative about the coming collapse of civilization, the collapse of late statist capitalism, as a way of often making money through a dynamic ecosystem of email newsletters and gold bar selling and buying. A kind of weird American subculture that played a role in the end, in the rise of the MAGA movement. So those are Hayex bastards. Your words, not mine, but that's who they are. And having introduced the listener to them, I think that what I really want to do now is get a bit confessional. Because the truth is, as I was reading your book, Quinn, I had a very freaky sense that a deep, dark part of my past was being exposed. So let me just give you a little overview of my own intellectual development, because it was weird reading Hayex bastards. I was also born in the late 70s. I grew up in California, in the suburbs, to a kind of very standard lower middle class, Republican voting Christian family. I, in the 90s, felt increasingly like that environment was pretty uninspiring and had a what I now would think, with the help of some therapy, a kind of narcissistic ego inflation experience like a lot of young men have. Like, I wanted to be a better kind of intellectual guy. And I found myself, through the advice of some professors at college, sort of initially enchanted by the work of the perennialists like Rene Guynant. Like, these are serious reactionary, kind of hierarchy obsessed traditionalists, right?
- [25:47]
Quinn Slobodian
Yes.
- [25:48]
Thomas Small
And that led me, weirdly, to Greece, where I joined a monastery, became Greek Orthodox, totally wacky. Then 2001 comes 911 occurs, and in the midst of that I swing and become obsessed with Noam Chomsky and that kind of critique of the American empire, which actually at the time felt like it overlapped with that more reactionary critique of the modern world that I had already absorbed. So basically massive critiques of the global order, which identifies America and Britain, capitalism, finance, et cetera, as just evil. Terrible.
- [26:27]
Quinn Slobodian
Yeah. Against modernity, kind of, in both cases, against modernity. Yeah.
- [26:31]
Thomas Small
You know, and then I kind of had a brief, more romantic phase. D.H. lawrence, Richard Wagner, you can imagine the kind of young man I was. Real hoot at dinner parties. And then the financial crisis occurred. And my kind of blog reading turned me on to the Austrian School of Economics, which at the time, and this is the period of the Tea Party movement in America, et cetera. Ron Paul, Yep, at the time seemed to offer very historically grounded and rigorous explanation of what was going on. And so then Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Murray Rothbard, eventually, and most crazily, Hans Hermann Hoppe and his strange idea of libertarianism best provided by an absolutist monarch. So you kind of get to the totally wacky fringe of this movement.
- [27:28]
Quinn Slobodian
You got back to traditionalism in the end there.
- [27:30]
Thomas Small
Yeah, I know. I found it all kind of interesting. But eventually I grew up and I stopped being a young person. I had personal crises. I kind of woke up out of this strange 15 year fever dream and now I'm on the fence. I've learned a bit of epistemic humility maybe, and I don't really know what to make of all that kind of radicalism. So you can imagine reading High Ex Basterds, I was like. It was almost like someone was revealing this sort of slightly embarrassing, rather naughty part of my own history because. Interesting, because that world went in some dark places, largely around race.
- [28:07]
Quinn Slobodian
Yeah, no, I think that you are probably a good reader for that because for some, you know, people, the. The esoteric angles that I delve into are off putting or, you know, they seem too fringe to be meaningful or something. Or I think that's sometimes the response that people have. But, you know, it's not a coincidence, actually, that the Internet opened up these portals in the late 1990s to people like yourself and myself and many of the I'm writing about that made this proliferation of intellectual subcultures and political identities and strange recombinations of seemingly disparate strands of thought possible, and not just possible, but gave them oxygen and space to grow and develop. So I think that when my motivation for writing the book was feeling that that entangled strangeness of the early Internet and the shock Waves of politics you're describing the respons to the Iraq war, the response to the global financial crisis had actually acted as electric shocks often do, to create the proliferation of combinations in the ecosystem that were being overlooked in what I thought was a rather crude pundits line about there had been a peaceful period of globalization. Then 2016 came along with the election of Trump and the yes vote on Brexit. And suddenly now the pendulum has swung back to nationalism and away from the global. And I was sure that that wasn't the whole story. And the characters that I pick out in the book, from Charles Murray to Peter Brimelow to Hans Hermann Hoppe himself, are people who are not easily scanned as one thing or another thing, as either, you know, neoliberal or reactionary, either globalist or nationalist separatists. They managed to kind of combine a commitment to the marketplace, a commitment to economic rationality, often with harking back to these supposedly superseded ideas of racial essences and biological essentialism. And that was the contradiction I really set out to try to work my way through.
- [30:31]
Thomas Small
And it was the part of all of that thinking that I always kind of hated. You know, I always felt like it was clearly tainted because every now and then you know, you'd get some email newsletter from Lew Rockwell or something and you'd be like, oh, these guys are racists.
- [30:46]
Quinn Slobodian
Sure.
- [30:47]
Thomas Small
And I don't really see how the racism necessarily follows from some of the economic political critiques that actually seemed, as I said, to be somewhat aligned with the more leftist critiques that I had previously been reading. So by calling your book Hayeks bastards, are you saying that these other figures, like Murray Rothbard, an anarcho libertarian like Hans Hermann Hoppe, this strange absolutist, monarchist libertarian, very strange mix, and others that they betrayed Friedrich Hayek in some way, they're downstream of him and betrayed him or. Because sometimes reading the book, it seemed like you were happy to slightly frame Hayek himself as in a slightly villainous mode, slightly like in a way these men were his bastard children, but they were also in a direct continuation from him. So which way is it?
- [31:42]
Quinn Slobodian
Well, I think that you need to talk a little bit about how his thinking progressed after his big breakthroughs that you just described. So the article and work for which he received the Nobel Prize Memorial Prize in economics in 1974 were things written before the end of the Second World War. So the economics and knowledge stuff dates back to there. And you're right that that's still seen as his biggest contribution so there are decades and decades. There are actually 50 years of production that follow that. And it's sometimes not looked at carefully enough about what was he writing for those remaining 50 years of his life? We all know about the road to serfdom, but that came out also in 1944, and again, decades and decades later, he dies. What is he writing in the interim? Well, one of the things that he becomes very interested in is the ide of cultural evolution. So rather than just thinking about the Great Society as he and Mises used to describe a kind of a global commercial society as an aspirational endpoint for their politics and their thinking from the 20s to the 40s, Hayek starts to think about the world as subdivided into populations. And those populations which are roughly mapped onto cultures, nations, and also races, are more and less adept at interpreting and responding to the price signals that economic information produces. So, as he sees it, some parts of the world have developed through emulation over time, through a kind of Lamarckian inheritance, certain cultural traits of, you know, thrift, foresight, entrepreneurial grit that allow them to become more economically successful, allow them to accumulate more, and thereby also allow them to reproduce more, and also, not incidentally, allow them to take over and dominate other populations in other parts of the world. So the world isn't just one undifferentiated blob of kind of would be consumers and producers. For Hayek, especially beginning in the 60s into his death, it's actually subdivided into different groups, which he is willing to concede have a kind of hierarchy of capacity for economic activity, and that maybe some groups are able to succeed in economic terms and some simply are not. So by the 1980s, he's saying things like, you know, there is one inheritance which is the inheritance of Western civilization, and that is the one that cannot be replicated, at least not easily. And so things like foreign aid, things like development, things like the prospect of a kind of global economic evenness are not just unlikely because of the inability for one central organization to redistribute or allocate resources most efficiently, but also because there's something about some populations in the world that make them resistant to quickly adopting market activities.
- [34:58]
Thomas Small
This is what makes Hayek quite different from a lot of the more libertarian thinkers. If I've understood correctly, a lot of libertarian thought begins with a sort of thought experiment, it's called the Robinson Crusoe thought experiment, which basically makes the individual on an island the beginning of a sort of explanation of how economic development occurs. Whereas Hayek actually was smarter he realized that at base human beings are communal, tribal, you know, let's say in a negatively inflected way of describing it, tribal, but they were communal creatures. But that some of those communities over time developed institutions, laws, orders of thinking that restrained the merely tribal and allowed on top of it, a civilized, let's say, mode of being that protected the individual. So he was aware that something like that had happened. He, I think, feared the possibility of the tribal overwhelming the individual. He, I guess, saw that as part of his anti communist sort of view. But I guess the question is, and this is a question about the book in general and your critique, if you like, of this way of thinking is to what extent is Hayek's view and some of the views which become quite extreme of his bastards, to what extent is it that they're wrong or that they're just very unpleasant? This is what it's hard, I think for me sometimes to gauge when I read what seems to be more left wing explanations of this intellectual heritage. Sometimes a view will be stated, like this view, that some places in the world developed in one way and other places didn't develop. And that might mean that there was some kind of cultural inheritance factor in differentiations between outcomes and stuff. And I read it and I think, well, that's obviously true. I mean, it's unfortunate if you're an egalitarian, but it is true. So is it that these ideas are wrong or that they're just unpleasant?
- [37:07]
Quinn Slobodian
Well, I mean, if in the case, in the case of Hayek, I mean, he wasn't a particularly unpleasant person in his presentation of these things. Right. So in fact, this is, this ends up being, this is coming around to answering your question about are they, are the bastards sort of legitimate heirs of a sort or illegitimate? So the, the people who followed him along the line of thinking that I'm just describing, I describe in the book as the cultural Austrians and they end up clustering at the George Mason University. Through, you know, generous funding from the Charles Koch foundation, they managed to set up a school of Austrian economics. There's also one at NYU. And by the 1980s they're following Hayek on this idea of cultural evolution, but doing so in a way that I think leaves open many different conclusions. So it's not just being used explicitly as a way to, you know, let's say, fight USAID or to, you know, to attack affirmative action programs or something. It's actually in a quite open ended mode, which is like a sociological exploration. The Austrian insight is that meaning and value are Subjective. And even the price mechanism is only the kind of second best way of accessing how people actually feel about things. It's not accessing the truth because you can't access the truth. It's lost, locked inside of our, our heads and our experiences.
- [38:35]
Thomas Small
In some ways sounds quite postmodern, actually.
- [38:37]
Quinn Slobodian
Well, so that's where, that's where this funny moment, and I didn't know about this stuff until I went digging around in their journals from the 80s and 90s, but they're reading postmodern theorists, they're reading Paul Ricoer, they're reading Hans George Gadamer, they're thinking about hermeneutics in ways that I found as someone who, you know, took graduate classes on German studies, like, quite familiar. Why is that important? It's important because it's at that time that this meaningful schism takes place within the Austrian School of Economics. And so you can't sort of lump together Hayek, the George Mason people, and then Rothbard and Hoppe as if they're all in one group, because in fact they are quite aggressively not. By the 1990s, Hoppe and Rothbard have created and or helped build the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, which sees itself openly in opposition to this cultural Austrian investigation happening at George Mason. So whether or not the conclusions of George Mason type people were just politically uncomfortable to me or wrong is actually a conversation I would be able to have with those people which include, for example, Peter Betka, who I have had interesting conversations with and who is arguing things that I think are valid, like, like after the Soviet Union ends, is it possible to simply import a market economy overnight, or are there certain sociological realities on the ground that make that difficult? Perfectly reasonable question. Where it gets to me unreasonable is the open politicization of knowledge that happens with the attack of the, what I call the racial Austrians around Rothbart and Hoppe from Auburn, Alabama against the George Mason University folks. The brunt of their critique is that the cultural Austrians are overlooking what they claim is the kind of hard fact of racial difference which they turn to, I believe, falsely, really, the works of Ludwig von Mises in particular, to substantiate. So they say, look, you guys are being too wishy washy. You're getting lost in all this postmodern business. This, let's be honest, some races are different than others and they're never going to be the same. And until we face that fact as our primary purpose, really, then we're never going to get anywhere. So Hayek's bastards are people who actually adopt a position that Hayek himself always opposed, what he called scientism, which is the belief that you can just have hard, empirical facts that are beyond interrogation, that guide social policy and political decisions, regardless of their wobbliness in. In. In actuality. And the way that the racial Austrians and also Charles Murray to a great extent, embrace IQ as a kind of unquestionable bedrock truth about human nature, falls afoul directly, I would say, of Hayek's warnings about scientism.
- [41:41]
Thomas Small
Yeah, I remember, you know, again, a young guy kind of. Of generally on the Republican right as a teenager when the furore erupted over the Bell Curve, Charles Murray's book. I remember just being predisposed to be like, well, is it just true? You know, because it seemed like the debate was between people who said something was true and other people who said, that cannot be true. But there must be in the middle something that might be a bit true, no matter how unpleasant it is for those who say it cannot be true. You know, again, I must say, in the end, I rejected all of this kind of radical thinking. You know, for me, I just kind of came back to my Christianity and it was like, no, we're all made in the image of God. Everyone is equal, has dignity. As a result of that, all of this, all this stuff is crap, but that, for me is like a spiritual commitment. I don't really know on the level of just hard science. I just never know what is actually true. Do you see what I'm saying? Sure. It's like, it's hard to know when people are. Are rejecting unpleasant science in favor of an idealism that they just. They can't allow it to be the case that within certain populations, maybe slightly for genetic reasons, there are these different outcomes. I mean, again, I don't know if it's true, but couldn't it be true?
- [43:01]
Quinn Slobodian
Yeah, no. And I mean, I think that we can see something similar to this happening now over retrospective discussions about the origins of COVID for example, right? Where, you know, serious people, including the WHO and the Department of Energy, have said, listen, the idea that this was a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology or something is an hypothesis that one cannot simply reject out of hand. And there is inconclusive evidence for a series of different hypotheses. And there are people now, for political reasons, who will either say, absolutely, it's true, and I will not listen to anything except the fact that it's true. And there are people who will say absolutely that can never be true. And I will not listen to any argument that it could ever be true. And neither of those are scientific arguments. Both of them are sort of rejecting confrontation with evidence and so on. So as far as the Bell Curve itself goes as a scientific work, there have been many books written by psychologists getting into the details of the way that Herrnstein and Murray use data and often torture data for conclusions, that this is where my argument comes in, that my book is the first book to use the correspondence and the archives of Herrnstein to see, like, what were they talking about when they were publishing this book, who were they talking to? And what I found, and I show in the book, is that they already knew what they were going to say before they started investigating the topic. That this. That the book was explicitly intended as a political intervention, that. That they knew was going to be used as they wanted it to, to discredit the idea of racial equality as a policy outcome, especially in the field of education and workplace compensation.
- [44:49]
Thomas Small
Yeah, it all comes out of the civil rights movement and this idea of a larger federal government in the United States with new powers granted to it in order to ensure that previous racial disparities, basically social injustices, were undone. At least they attempted to do so. It doesn't seem to have been very successful, really, but they attempted to do so, making the state more powerful, which of course offended the sensibilities of. Of people like Murray Rothbard, who was an anarchist. Like, he literally thought there should be no state. Which just seems crazy to me now, but when I was 24, I thought, well, maybe there should be no state. Which is exactly what Noam Chomsky was sometimes saying. You don't need states, you just need collective committees to discuss things. Now, what about Rothbard? So Murray Rothbard, this anarcho libertarian, anarcho capitalist, he was very influential. It always seemed to me somewhat unlikely that he himself was actually, like, really racist. It seemed like maybe he was cynical and got into bed with racists, especially in the American south, let's say, just to make his own political movement more powerful. What is the truth? I mean, it's called, I think, the outreach to the rednecks. So what happened there?
- [46:08]
Quinn Slobodian
Yeah, so I think that. I mean, first of all, I think it's best to think about people like Rothbard and Murray and Hayek and Brimelow. Well, let's bracket Hayek, but say Brimelow, Rothbard and Murray. Three big subjects of the book as very much. Political thinkers, first, and political thinkers who were willing to subordinate questions of scientific truth or conviction to their politics that they were doing what you're describing, many critics of say the Bell Curve did, which is say they start out with a political position and they say, okay, what science will help me advance my political goals? And for Rothbart is very interesting, right, because as I recount in the book, in the 1960s he has a different strategy. It's not outreach reach to the rednecks, it's outreach to the hippies. And his belief was that there are people in the streets protesting the US government over the Vietnam War. They're burning their draft cards, they hate the state, and that's amazing. And we need to stoke the fires of that state hatred as much as possible and try to turn these hippie dippy kind of like dropout kids into card carrying anarchists. And he did everything right up to doing kind of entryism into the Amaoist party to try to win people over from the inside. While doing that, he was engaged in a racial politics quite openly. Right, and what was the racial politics? Well, it was encouraging black nationalism. He was vocally supportive of the idea of black secession from the United States in the South Republic of New Africa sometimes, it was sometimes called. He was pro Malcolm X against Martin Luther King Jr. Because he thought, and this is the core of the argument I'm making in the book, is that if you're going to get rid of states, as he quite sincerely wanted to do, then you're going to have to have something to replace them. So there will have to be some kind of social tissue, some kind of connective institutions that will do the stabilizing work that we have so long relied on states for. And one of the things that he comes back to for his entire life from at least the 60s until his death in the 90s, is racial homogeneity is a very effective social glimpse of blue. And it reduces distrust, it increases a sense of mutual confidence in one another, and it also makes an in group identity more resilient against attacks from the outside. So as he was supporting black nationalism in the south, he was supporting white nationalism in the North. And he said so directly at the time. Thirty years later, he is very much working with the League of the south, the neo confederate group around Chronicles magazine, including Tom Fleming and Sam Francis and others. And for the same reason, Justin Raimondo, his, his biographer and close friend, who incidentally was the guy who ran antiwar.com. you know, going back to your point about the connection between anti imperialism and Austrian libertarianism in the late 90s, very, very, very popular website in the late 90s and early 2000s. Justin Raimondo in his biography says, you know, I know what he said in the 60s and I heard him saying the same thing in the 90s, that the audience was just different, but it was the same case. So that that willingness to instrumentalize racial feeling or even racial science, which was part of the Rothbard package by the 1990s is something that I think didn't sit well with a lot of other, say, neoliberals who were trying to reconcile actually the integrationist dreams of someone like MLK with the kind of market friendly proposals that they were making. In fact, the standard neoliberal argument about race is the market is colorblind. Once you enter, you compete in equal arena as well as people of different racial backgrounds. And that over time meritocracy will kind of find talent and bring it to the top and you will be rewarded, you know, commensurate to your, to your abilities and your efforts and your talents. For people who genuinely believed in secession, which include hapa, which include Rothbart, if you really believe that existing states need to be cracked up and broken up, then you're thinking more like as Rothbart openly was in the 19s at something like post collapse Yugoslavia, where you're looking at Yugoslavia and you're saying this is actually great. The Serbians are hanging out with the Serbians, the Croats are hanging out with the Croats. That's they're expelling people from the opposite religions and opponent nationalities. And it's showing what that this Wilsonian dream of multicultural commercialism is always a thin grill and it'll always run out in the end. You're going to have to come back to something harder. But this, this moment in the 1990s ended up being important because it, it helps explain why, you know, when you were a reasonable person opposing the Iraq war in the early 2000s or wondering about the bailout after 2008 or excessive levels of consumer debt and why the state was encouraging them and banks were making such money off of them. Why, when you went to find critiques of that in places like Lou rockwell.com or, or in Ron Paul or antiwar.com often it would come bundled up with pretty toxic racial politics. Right? I mean, it's quite amazing. You can still do this if you want go on the Wayback Machine and just scroll through Lou Rockwell.com from 1990 and it's a baffling comb of themes, right? From like the collapse of the white race one minute to military spending the next and immigration policy the next. And the reason was that this very important split happened. And John Ganz has written about this now quite well. But I think if you don't understand this, you don't know how we got to where we are in American politics, which is that in the early 1990s you had a faction of the Republican party conservatives who did not want to abandon the global role for the American military establishment. So they are now were known then and we know them as the neo conservatives. Yeah, the neocons. Right. And it is absolutely true that, and this would be a Chomsky line, right, that in the 90s the US switched from anti communism to democracy promotion or human rights wars to justify its presence globally. Its in frequent intervention. Why are they, why are there US bombers in the Balkans? Why are they in Mogadishu? Why are they in Haiti? The answer to all these questions is well, America just changed up the storyline. Instead of fighting communists, now we're, we're defending human rights and democracy. And that was pretty obvious to some other members of the conservative movement who didn't want to go along with this neocon turn, this neoconservative term. And they then called themselves paleo conservatives to distinguish themselves from the neoconservatives and they became known as Paleo cons. And this is the group that Murray Rothbart starts hanging out with.
- [53:29]
Thomas Small
And this includes like Patch, Pat Buchanan, Ron Paul, a kind of motley crew of anti neo conservative Republicans and third party people. Reform party people.
- [53:38]
Quinn Slobodian
Exactly. And they are arguing against the continuation of America's aggressive overseas foreign policy. But they're also arguing for the re establishment of a more ethnically homogeneous, religiously deepened version of American society that would have to go along with that. So there was both an external demand and an internal demand. The external was stop fighting these foreign wars. The internal demand was make America a white European derived nation. Again either that could happen at the scale of the entire kind of logo map of the U.S. u.S. Or as the neo confederates believed it would happen at the size of a rebooted US South. Or if you're Rockwell and Rothbart, you say hey, maybe we just need things no bigger than, you know, metropolitan Dallas or whatever and those things could become
- [54:31]
Thomas Small
laboratories or just an hoa, a libertarian hoa. You know, just no.
- [54:36]
Quinn Slobodian
And that's, I, I don't know if you've read the, this other book I wrote, Crack Up Capitalism, but I have a whole chapter about gated communities. And quite literally people were theorizing HOAs as of laboratories, of self governance from inside of this paleo libertarian community in the 1990s.
- [54:54]
Thomas Small
Now, Quinn, I know we don't have much more time, so I, I just want to. I got two questions for you. I hope you can give maybe if you need to give me two more minutes. First of all, this is a critique, okay? This is me criticizing high ex bastards, okay? And I do it with in fear and trembling. I don't like conflict, even though this podcast is called Conflicted. So as I was reading it, it, I felt that sometimes the case was a bit overstated. Sometimes what seemed to be a fringe movement in the right was portrayed as if it was much more leading the right over those decades. But mainly what I felt as I, as I read it, that I thought, I've read books like these before and I was thinking of those right wing books that try to explain everything from the 1960s through the prism of cultural Marxism or a kind of grand conspiracy amongst radical liberal leftists to take over our institutions and make us all woke. I thought, I think there's something similar here. And so maybe it's fruitful to read both kinds of books. But for me, the result is the radical fringe in America, which, because it is the kind of country it is, where the paranoid style of politics just sadly permeates the whole. The radical fringe is big. It kind of just lost its mind. Like when you read Hayek's Bastards and you just see the degree of weird, weird convictions. Just like when you do, you know, you think back to some of the more extreme leftist sort of ideas that proliferated over the 90s noughties and teens, you know, sometimes standing in the face of more scientific ways of understanding things and shutting down any debate, all that, it just seems so similar. Like you're charting one splinter of a larger societal mental breakdown, but maybe portraying it it as more influential than it. Than it was. Is that fair for me to ask if that was my feeling?
- [56:51]
Quinn Slobodian
Yeah. No, I mean, I think it's a, it's a fair criticism. I mean, it is, as I said from the beginning, if the John Ralston Saul was the kind of template, then, you know, one could read that and say, you know, was Voltaire really the reason for McNamara, for example? Right. And the answer would be no. But the response I think would be it's an essay way in its writing. And so it's designed not to provide the final comprehensive analysis, but it's designed to make us think differently about things we thought we had already understood. And I think that in the Case of. I would defend the way I would defend the method in the case of high ex Basterds would be, say, the chapter on the Bell Curve, for example. Right. I mean, you as a teenager remember that Ferrari, as you say, and indeed it stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for a whole year and is still in print today, sold hundreds of thousands of copies. So in that case, not really fringe, right? Actually about as mainstream as it gets.
- [57:53]
Thomas Small
Yeah, that's true. That's true. Not fringe. Yeah.
- [57:56]
Quinn Slobodian
And not hard to say that it brought language of race science back into the mainstream in a way that it hadn't been before. I think that when it comes to the breakthrough out of which this book was really spawned of 2016 17, the Unite the Right protests the emergence of the alt right as a kind of power player in some ways, inside of the MAGA movement, then there was a real kind of prominence from previously completely marginal and strange beliefs that. That I think, you know, needed to be accounted for. And. And when Brimelow, for example, was presented as the godfather of the alt right regularly in the media and was never presented as a, you know, a business columnist for decades, then for me it's like, oh, we're really missing part of the story here. That in fact, in some ways it's the opposite of the cultural Marxism argument. Because I'm not. What I'm not saying is that there were these people who only focused on culture. I'm saying, in a way, they were. Were also focused on economics. And they were focused. They're more mainstream than we realize. Right. They were writing for Fortune and Forbes. And to treat them as if they were this strange virus that just popped out of the corners of America's mental derangement is actually letting the rest of America off the hook. I think so. So I. I completely. I see what you mean, and I think it would be. I would love to read a dual review of, like, the strong version of the cultural Marxism from the right alongside this to kind of compare the way that they work with evidence. But I would still say that my book's better than theirs.
- [59:40]
Thomas Small
Well, Quinn, I'll save my last question for another time. Maybe you'll come back and tell us all about what muskism is. That's the title of your new book. Obviously, you'll probably turn your withering critique on Elon Musk and everything he stands for. That's what I assume you're doing.
- [59:56]
Quinn Slobodian
Yep.
- [59:57]
Thomas Small
Thank you for coming on Conflicted. I'm absolutely melting here. It's so hot. I'll bring this to an end. Thanks for coming on. I had no reason to be nervous at all. You've been a great conversation partner.
- [60:07]
Quinn Slobodian
Great.
- [60:08]
Thomas Small
Certainly your book High Ex Bastard as an essay is worth reading. And for me personally, it was like it was sort of a little bit of a shining a little bit of a light on a dark corner of my own personal past, which I did cringe a little bit to be right reminded of. So thank you very much for that.
- [60:24]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
All right.
- [60:24]
Quinn Slobodian
It was my pleasure. Thomas, Nice to speak to you.
- [60:27]
Thomas Small (Narrator/Host)
That was Quinn Slobodian. His book Hayeks Bastards, Race Gold, IQ and the Capitalism of the Far Right is available from all good booksellers, as is his latest book, A Guide for the Perplexed. And remember for deeper dives into the ideas we explore on this show, including including extended conversations and Q&As with my CO host Eamon Dean. Check the show notes for details on how to join the conflicted community. I'm Thomas Small. Conflicted is a Message Heard Production Our executive producers are Jake Warren and Max Warren. This episode was produced and edited by Thomas Small.
- [61:19]
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