2500 - Neoliberalism's Far-Right Evolution w/ Quinn Slobodian

Summary

The Majority Report with Sam Seder
Episode 2500: Neoliberalism's Far-Right Evolution with Quinn Slobodian
Release Date: May 19, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this landmark 2500th episode of The Majority Report with Sam Seder, host Sam Seder delves deep into the intricate evolution of neoliberalism and its intersection with far-right ideologies. Joined by Quinn Slobodian, a distinguished professor of International History at Boston University and the author of the seminal work Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ and the Capitalism of the Far Right, the conversation navigates the historical trajectories that have shaped contemporary political landscapes.

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US Political Landscape

The episode opens with Sam Seder outlining several pressing national issues:

• Medicaid and SNAP Cuts: Recent legislative movements have seen the passing of a significant budget reconciliation bill, which includes substantial cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Seder highlights the bipartisan support these cuts are garnering, noting, "Republicans are going to vote for this. They're going to do this," emphasizing the scale of the financial reductions involved ([04:33]).

• US Credit Rating and Economic Concerns: The United States faces a downgrade in its credit rating, leading to increased borrowing costs and a declining dollar. Treasury Secretary Bessant acknowledges impending price rises caused by tariffs imposed during the Trump administration ([04:33]).

• Trump Administration's Internal Struggles: The Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division is experiencing a significant exodus of attorneys, which Seder speculates might be indicative of systemic issues within the administration ([04:33]).

• Biden's Health and Natural Disasters: President Biden disclosed an aggressive cancer diagnosis, adding to national concerns. Concurrently, the Midwest grapples with deadly storms exacerbated by GOP SNAP cuts, and the New Jersey transit engineers' union has reached an agreement to end their strike ([04:33]).

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Israel-Gaza Conflict

A significant portion of the episode addresses the escalating conflict between Israel and Gaza:

• Intensified Israeli Operations: Israel has intensified its military actions in Gaza, targeting civilian areas with missile strikes aimed at consolidating Palestinian populations into increasingly confined zones. Seder critiques these actions, likening them to historical atrocities: "the Nazis concentrated people and then shipped them to extermination camps. Now with this kind of 21st-century drone warfare... Israel is basically saying we can starve them to death and then bomb them to accelerate the genocide" ([11:12]).

• Humanitarian Aid and US Complicity: Despite Israel agreeing to allow some humanitarian aid, Senator Chris Van Hollen condemns the US for its complicity. Van Hollen stated, "The United States is complicit in the gross violation of international law," highlighting the dire humanitarian situation with over two million Palestinians allegedly facing starvation ([07:21]).

• Media Suppression: The BBC has reportedly refrained from naming journalists in Gaza out of security concerns, a move Seder interprets as an indirect acknowledgment of the targeting of journalists by Israeli forces ([12:00]).

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Interview with Quinn Slobodian

Introduction to Quinn Slobodian and Hayek's Bastards

Sam Seder welcomes Quinn Slobodian back to the show, acknowledging his previous works, Globalists and Crack Up Capitalism, and introduces his latest book, Hayek's Bastards. Slobodian provides an overview of his literary journey, emphasizing that Hayek's Bastards shifts focus from geographic and legal transformations to the ideological underpinnings that have steered neoliberalism toward far-right currents.

The Three Hard-Wires of Neoliberal Far-Right Evolution

Slobodian identifies three core elements central to the fusion of neoliberalism with far-right ideologies:

1. Hard Borders:
   Originally, libertarian thought often advocated for open borders, believing that the free movement of labor would harmonize markets. However, in the 1990s, mainstream neoliberalists began to enforce stricter border controls based on criteria like IQ and economic contributions. Slobodian notes, "a lot of the mainstream people setting the tone for the libertarian and neoliberal movement started to come to different compromises with that idea in the 90s and afterwards" ([26:57]).

2. Hardwired Human Nature:
   Slobodian observes a shift towards "IQ racism," where intelligence metrics are used to justify racial and gender hierarchies. He states, "why has it now become so common to refer to high IQ, low IQ as synonyms for good and bad people?" ([30:08]).

3. Hard Money:
   The advocacy for gold-backed currencies and other stringent monetary systems represents a radical departure from traditional capitalist frameworks. Slobodian explains, "that would mean forms of debt and credit would be very difficult. Fractional reserve banking would no longer be possible" ([26:57]).

From Neoliberalism to the Alt-Right

Slobodian elaborates on how these hardwired elements facilitated the alignment between neoliberal elites and alt-right thinkers. He highlights figures like Peter Brimelow, once a mainstream financial journalist who transitioned into alt-right leadership by leveraging economic arguments to promote exclusionary nationalism. Slobodian remarks, "he walked his way through a bunch of arguments about economic freedom and what he saw as welfare dependency tendencies among certain populations based on certain bad science" ([47:18]).

The Role of Science in Far-Right Capitalism

A critical discussion point is the utilization of scientific rhetoric to legitimize far-right capitalist agendas. Slobodian asserts, "science gets folded into the current moment... [the far-right] does have its own economic reasoning and its own economic rationality" ([42:48]). This scientific veneer provides a pseudo-intellectual foundation for discriminatory policies, distancing them from overt racism while maintaining exclusionary practices.

Trumpism and Its Intellectual Underpinnings

The conversation transitions to the phenomenon of Trumpism, exploring its roots in paleoconservative and libertarian thought. Slobodian compares Trumpism to other global far-right movements, emphasizing its hybrid nature:

• Strategic Alliances:
  Trumpism is portrayed as a "Frankenstein's monster" composed of diverse and sometimes contradictory ideologies. Slobodian explains, "Trumpism, if we want to call it that, is another version of [the Paleo Alliance]... it's people like in his first term, Arthur Laffer... holding their noses and saying, 'we don't like what he talks about protectionism, but we'll support it for the tax cuts'" ([52:27]).

• Economic Policies Versus Libertarian Principles:
  The alignment of neo-liberals with protectionist policies under Trump, despite contradicting core libertarian ideals, illustrates the pragmatic compromises made to achieve broader political goals. Slobodian notes, "their gamble worked" referring to the tax cuts, yet questions the sustainability of such deviations from ideological purity ([55:52]).

Global Implications and Future Trajectories

Slobodian touches upon the international ramifications of neoliberal far-right strategies, particularly in regions like the Middle East and South America. He discusses Argentina's current political climate under figures like Milei, who embody the "perfect high ex bastard" by balancing populist rhetoric with market-friendly policies necessary for economic survival. Slobodian reflects, "he can act as a disruptive tribune of the people one minute, and then the next minute... tell the head of the IMF what she needs to hear to get the next round of loans cleared through" ([73:47]).

He further contemplates the impacts of US policies toward China, suggesting that the fear of Chinese economic ascendancy is driving increasingly isolationist and protectionist measures. Slobodian posits, "the real story here is how has China created such a threat to American dominance that the US now feels increasingly obliged to cut off all of the normal ties of globalization" ([76:30]).

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Conclusion

The episode culminates with a reflection on the complexities of neoliberalism's transformation and its entanglement with far-right ideologies. Slobodian emphasizes the need to understand these developments not merely as emotional or reactionary moves but as extensions of a calculated economic and ideological strategy. Sam Seder echoes the necessity for nuanced analysis beyond surface-level political dynamics, advocating for a deeper comprehension of the historical and intellectual currents shaping today's political environment.

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Notable Quotes:

• Sam Seder ([04:33]): "Republicans are going to vote for this. They're going to do this. They can squawk a little bit more than they had before..."

• Quinn Slobodian ([26:57]): "There are three hard wires that represent a certain kind of calcification and radicalization of neoliberal or libertarian thought archetypically."

• Quinn Slobodian ([30:08]): "Why has it now become so common to refer to high IQ, low IQ as synonyms for good and bad people?"

• Quinn Slobodian ([47:18]): "He walked his way through a bunch of arguments about economic freedom and what he saw as welfare dependency tendencies among certain populations based on certain bad science."

• Quinn Slobodian ([73:47]): "He can act as a disruptive tribune of the people one minute, and then the next minute... tell the head of the IMF what she needs to hear to get the next round of loans cleared through."

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Further Resources

For listeners eager to explore Quinn Slobodian's insights further, his book Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ and the Capitalism of the Far Right is available for purchase at Majority.FM and linked in the episode's description on YouTube and podcast platforms.

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Note: This summary excludes advertisement segments, intros, outros, and non-content portions of the podcast, focusing solely on the substantive discussions and insights provided.

Transcript

[Emma Vigland]

You are listening to a free version of the Majority Report. Support this [e-mail] and get an extra hour of content daily.

[Sam Seder]

It is Monday, May 19, 2025. My name is Sam Seder. This is the five time award winning Majority Report. We are broadcasting live steps from the industrially ravaged Gowanus Canal in the heartland of America, downtown Brooklyn, usa. On the program today, Quinn Slobodian, professor of International history at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. His latest book, Hayeks Bastards, Race, Gold, IQ and the Capitalism of the far right. Also on the program today, as Israel expands its slaughter in Gaza. They agreed to allow a trickle of aid to relieve international disgust. Don't think it's going to work. Massive Medicaid snap cutting Republican giveaway to the rich. Big beautiful bill passes out of committee late last night. Meanwhile, US Credit rating drops, increasing borrowing costs and dropping the dollar. Treasury secret Secretary Bessant admits prices are about to go up because of Trump's tariffs. Trump's civil rights division at the DOJ saw suffers a mass exodus of attorneys. That's probably a feature, not a bug for them. Biden revealed. Biden reveals he's received an aggressive cancer diagnosis. Midwest hit with killer storms with less info because of GOP doji cuts and New Jersey transit engineers union agree to end their strike and women's rights groups push back on Quack Kennedy's mifepristone review. All this and more on today's Majority Report. Welcome ladies and gentlemen. Thanks for joining us.

[Emma Vigland]

Funday Monday.

[Sam Seder]

Funday Monday says Emma Vigland. Thank you all for joining us. At the beginning of the week. A lot of news obviously as is it's the era. That's the era we're in. Last night late the budget committee voted to pass on the reconciliation bill. You recall Friday they couldn't pass it out of the bill because four principled conservatives were concerned about there were not enough cuts and they have been. These guys are also the type of principal conservatives who complain like, you know, we need to have this out in the open. We need transparency, we need time to read the bill, et cetera, et cetera. 72 hours. They had some backroom deal that they're not talking about and they voted present in the committee last night so that the bill can move forward. Exactly. I mean every Republican is going to vote for this. Maybe one or two will be released if they can afford to be released. But Republicans are going to vote for this. They are going to do this. They can squawk a little bit more than they had before because Elon Musk has sort of been sidelined at least a little bit and shown to be a bit of a paper tiger because of Wisconsin. But at the end of the day, these drones are going to vote for it. And we're talking hundreds of billions of dollars in Medicaid cuts. We're talking hundreds of billions of dollars in snap cuts. We're talking things like states won't be able to regulate AI in the with the failure of maybe the federal government not regulating AI. Kudos to the Abundance Institute for pushing that.

[Quinn Slobodian]

Why would you want to regulate the thing that's driving teenagers to like, among other things, suicide and things like that.

[Emma Vigland]

Or we just did an interview last weekend about how the AI job crisis has already arrived. How even if they're not, even if these systems aren't available or ready to replace these workers, the cuts are still happening and using it as a disciplinary labor tool to cut cost.

[Sam Seder]

Okay, Luddites, but we'll go on and on over the next couple of days. We'll get more reporting about what's in this bill and we'll go through it tomorrow. But you should just know that's where it stands. Meanwhile, Israel has turned up the volume or the intensity of the attacks on civilians in Gaza, just blowing up tent after tent with missiles. And now they are moving into the south and again attempting to corral Palestinians living in Gaza into smaller and smaller, concentrated, almost camps, if you will, within a larger concentration, you know, which started out as a larger concentration of project. And in the wake of Donald Trump's wheeling and dealing in the Middle east over the weekend, we have a sense of what the deal was. And it doesn't look like it was much at this point. It looks like what these Arab nations were looking for was just a little air out of the tires. And so the Netanyahu government has supposedly going to allow a trickle of humanitarian aid in. Here is Senator Chris Van Hollen speaking about how the United States is complicit in this and is really not doing anything about it as well.

[Emma Vigland]

Right.

[Chris Van Hollen]

We just showed some reporting from our colleague Deborah Patto with incredible pictures from our, our shooter inside of Gaza, Marwan. It's hard to look at pictures of children in that level of starvation. You have said the Israeli government is starving civilians and the US Is complicit in the gross violation of international law. The UN Is begging to go in. The Israeli government says they don't want to work with the UN Here. They want to work with this Gaza humanitarian foundation that's just being set up. What do you know about this? Should there be US Support for it?

[Margaret]

So, Margaret, you're right. It's very hard to look at those pictures. And the United States has been complicit. President Trump was in the region and really did nothing, said virtually nothing about what's happening in Gaza, which is on fire. We're in 77th day of a full blockade. 2 million Palestinians are starving. This is collective punishment that is clearly illegal under international law. And this other idea that's being been cooked up either by Israelis or by the Trump administration is clearly not fit for purpose when it comes to trying to address this burgeoning famine. And all it will do is further allow food to be used as a weapon of war. So I hope the United States will back off this plan. None of the credible international organizations have said that they will participate because it violates, you know, international norms and how it's structured. And so I hope the United States will back off and immediately call today to allow the trucks right now that have food to be able to come provide food to starving people. These are provided by international aid organizations.

[Chris Van Hollen]

Is there anything that the United States can do in terms of leverage? You were, you've been bipartisan in your criticism. You said that what happened in Gaza is a black stain on Joe Biden's legacy as president. You are criticizing the current administration for not doing more here. What leverage is there? I mean, is what you're saying falling on any ears that want to listen?

[Margaret]

Well, I've had conversations with some people in, in the Trump administration and made clear that they need to do more. One of the very obvious things they could do is President Trump today could call upon the Netanyahu government to let aid in. I mean, the president acknowledged there are people starving in Gaza the other day. He said so. But why hasn't he called on, you know, Netanyahu to let the aid in? Let's just start with that.

[Emma Vigland]

I mean, the, the proposal that the Trump administration has to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip and send forcibly over a million Palestinians to Libya is drawing international condemnation, as Chris Van Hollen mentioned there. But the thing that is just so hard to watch is that the United nations is essentially has been begging for weeks. It's been 11 weeks of no food coming in, and people have been posting side by sides of the Holocaust, the Warsaw ghetto, the starvation there, and children in Gaza. And when you talk about concentrating people into smaller and smaller enclaves and starving them, I mean, The Nazis concentrated people and then shipped them to extermination camps. Now with this kind of 21st century drone warfare, why even wait? The Israelis are basically saying we can starve them to death. And then to accelerate the genocide and this final solution that they're engaging in, let's just bomb them to death. We don't know the true death toll. I keep repeating that, but it's clearly in the hundreds of thousands. And yeah, I mean, Van Hollen is doing the right thing here. He's been consistent on this, criticizing Biden too. And like when Biden's, Biden's cancer diagnosis, it's a horrible thing for people to go through. But this broke over the weekend that Gaza's only cancer hospital, which had 10,000 patients in it, is being forced to shut down because Israel keeps bombing it. Remember at the start of the genocide when Israel was claiming that it was Hamas rockets? They would never bomb hospitals.

[Quinn Slobodian]

How dare Rashida Tlaib suggest that they would do such a thing.

[Emma Vigland]

Obviously anti Semitic. They're now doing precision strikes. They killed a journalist in a burn unit last week. The Israeli capacity in terms of its military versus, you know, Hamas doesn't have an air force. They can be so precise that they can go into a burn unit in a hospital to kill a journalist. And they admitted it too.

[Sam Seder]

BBC, I noticed the other day had a report where they were talking about we will not name our journalists, right, for security reasons. And it's like, wait, hello. They're afraid to say the name of their own journalists because they know Israel is killing and targeting journalists.

[Emma Vigland]

It's the deadliest conflict. And it's not a conflict, it's a one sided genocide. But deadliest conflict in the history of records in terms of keeping for journalists.

[Quinn Slobodian]

What BBC is doing is taking Gary Lineker off of Match of the Day because he criticized Israel.

[Emma Vigland]

And this is why we were stunning.

[Sam Seder]

I mean, can you imagine that? Like, we're not going to name, we're not going to name our reporters in Gaza because we know Israel may or will target them for assassination. Yet let's not criticize this country in any way.

[Quinn Slobodian]

I don't know how these editors think that this is sustainable. Like Zoran was accused of being pro Holocaust over the weekend by Politico because he didn't sign on to announcements saying I support Israel and would pledge to go there.

[Emma Vigland]

Like, well, he voted.

[Deborah Patto]

It's ridiculous.

[Emma Vigland]

He didn't co sponsor that resolution because he hadn't been co sponsoring resolutions, but he voted to recognize Holocaust. It's just A smear by quote.

[Quinn Slobodian]

But it's when they added on and saying, also, do you support Israel? And that's what he takes issue with, which he should.

[Emma Vigland]

And the Trump administration, it's important because we talked about this with G a lot on Friday about like, how he is breaking certain norms with like DC national security, think tank orthodoxy. But if he's just breaking these norms so that he can get cash from the Qatari or he can do some sort of deal with live golf and the Saudis to have live golf tournaments at Trump courses, which it seems like that's in the works, then if he's doing these corrupt deals alongside it and he isn't addressing the Palestinian issue in any meaningful way and is in fact the Palestinian issue. Yeah, I shouldn't even use that framing. But is proposing ethnic cleansing, then it's meaningless, what he's doing.

[Sam Seder]

Breaking the order. At the end of the day, the real question is what are the Qataris, what are the Emirates, what are. What is Saudi Arabia asking? Like, what's their ask in on behalf of the Palestinians? Because the Trump administration does not care. And it's really a question to the extent that there's any opportunity for Gaza to survive this. It is simply a function of what the ask is of either Arab nations. I mean, I don't even know what kind of, you know, international common condemnation obviously has some but very limited influence in this circumstance right now. I mean, it has to start being like embargoes and, and whatnot. But you saw J.D. vance didn't want to be in Israel when they started this next wave of an assault. And, you know, Netanyahu is putting in some aid again. Even the plan is not to provide more than aid for 60% of Palestinians there. And that's the pie in the sky plan. So this is, you know, this is the situation. It's hard to know where the leverage points are other than just sort of broadly supporting it. But I will also say it was graduation season. I saw some great young people get up and. And despite the sort of threats looming over them, spoke out against this genocide. I don't know if we played that the other day, but there was one student from. I think it was nyu.

[Quinn Slobodian]

I think we played the NYU on Thursday.

[Emma Vigland]

Well, on Thursday when you were out. But there was a. George was Washington University kids.

[Sam Seder]

Yes, I saw that. That one as well. And that was really exceptional. They seem to deal with it a lot better, as far as I can tell. I don't know what they did after it, but at least in the moment. You know, I think. I don't know who it was. The dean came up and said thank you for. For saying that. But it is amazing.

[Quinn Slobodian]

I think she might be an investigated all of.

[Sam Seder]

Oh, really? Yeah. All of these students. At the very least. Cheering that's.

[Emma Vigland]

This is the new McCarthyism. There's nothing. No, there's no other way around it. It's Zionist McCarthy ism. And they're coming for our institutions and for people who dare to speak their conscience.

[Sam Seder]

In a moment we're going to be talking to Quinn Slobidian.

[Deborah Patto]

He is.

[Sam Seder]

What?

[Quinn Slobodian]

Slobodian.

[Sam Seder]

What did I say?

[Quinn Slobodian]

Slobidian.

[Sam Seder]

I mean, I. So close. That is so close. I can't believe that's where you chose to correct me.

[Emma Vigland]

Drew the line there. Oh, will we play some later on?

[Sam Seder]

Well, regardless, Professor. International History at the Frederick S. Pardet School of Global Studies at Boston University. Boston University High Ex bastards. Race gold. IQ and the capitalism. The far right. But first, a couple of words from our sponsors. Cozy Earth. This is the time of year where my Cozy Earth sheets really pay dividends. Starting to get a little warm. You can't turn your air conditioning on because it's just too early. I don't feel it's appropriate. Have you been doing that?

[Emma Vigland]

Speak for yourself.

[Sam Seder]

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[Emma Vigland]

No.

[Sam Seder]

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[Emma Vigland]

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[Sam Seder]

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[Quinn Slobodian]

Sam.

[Sam Seder]

We are back. Sam Cedar, Emma Vigland on the Majority Report. It is a pleasure to welcome back to the program. Quinn Slobodian is a professor of international history at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. His latest book, Hayeks Bastards, Race Gold, IQ and the Capitalism of the Far Right. Professor, welcome back to the program.

[Deborah Patto]

Happy to be here.

[Sam Seder]

We've had you on in the past for the last two books that you had, Globalists and Crack Up Capitalism. And talk about this just broadly speaking in the context of those other two books because in many ways it's sort of like an ongoing intellectual history of a movement that started in the wake of World War II and Mount Peloran.

[Deborah Patto]

Yeah, I mean Globalist was a really big scope. History begins in the ashes of the Habsburg Empire, the end of the First World War. And it tells this kind of 90 year story of the attempt to reassemble the collapsed golden age of capitalism that had been ended by the Great War. So the new institutions and legal forms of encasement in a way culminating with the World Trade organization in the 1990s, by which there could be a kind of a harmony restored to what many neoliberals saw as the the lost beauty of an earlier age. So it was really about scaling up and integration and creating new institutions and laws. The Crack Up Capitalism book that followed that was about the way that some people started to think the way to protect capitalism wasn't by building new encasements surrounding it, but by exiting existing states. So it was a kind of intellectual history of the special Economic Zone. People might have been hearing about things like the the network state and charter cities. And I told the story of this attempt to kind of privatize government at a micro level. The new book High Bastards is less geographic and less about laws and forms of territory. And it's more about this, I think, under observed fact that in the 1990s and 2000s, a lot of people on the libertarian right started appealing to science in new ways to ground their claims about the market. So Tyler Cohen, the famous libertarian a few years ago, said that the movement had cracked and half and one half had done his kind of thing like state capacity libertarianism, and the other half, he said, had gone off into Ron Paulism and less savory forms of the alt right. And my book High Ex Basterds is basically a history of that second path. Like what happened to this libertarian to alt right pipeline that we've heard so much about, but still so little understood.

[Sam Seder]

What I love about your book is for many years it doesn't happen so much anymore. But I used to get a lot of phone calls from libertarians and have these prolonged debates and then every now and then someone from Europe would call in and go, these are not libertarians. And this in many respects sort of, it sort of outlines how that happened. But so in, in many ways what your book does too, is it sort of like it makes one understand how a movement that ostensibly is anti globalist can sort of find some type of common ground with these folks. So let's start with the three hards as to where we are, and then we'll go back to the 90s and sort of track the way that that fell apart.

[Deborah Patto]

Yeah, the three hards that I talk about in the book are this idea of hard borders, hardwired human nature and hard money. And all of them represent a certain kind of calcification and radicalization of neoliberal or libertarian thought archetypically. You might think about a libertarian policy on borders as being open borders, that workers should be able to go where they're needed. The self ordering qualities of the market should coordinate in ways that the state could never possibly itself comprehend. And there are indeed some libertarians, for example, Bryan Kaplan at George Mason, who are very strong, consistent advocates for open borders. But on the other hand, as I describe in the book, a lot of the mainstream people setting the tone for the libertarian and neoliberal movement started to come to different compromises with that idea in the 90s and afterwards. So the idea became, well, we can create spaces where you have to, you know, pay for entrance or there's certain kind of criteria for entrance arranged along lines of capacity. You know, what kind of IQ do you have? And that gets to the question of hardwired human nature, which hadn't really been a discourse too much in the neoliberal movement. Hayek himself talked about culture and cultural evolution. The reason why I call them Hayek's bastards is because they harden and in many ways distorted the work of their master, so to speak, by grounding ideas of difference in ideas of scientific racism in the 1990s and 2000s. So a lot of the knitting together of the alt right and libertarian movement come on this agreed space that there is a scientific basis for racial difference, for gender difference and other kinds of differences as well. Charles Murray becomes an important advocate of that. And, and then thirdly, hard money. Money is a great source of endless debate inside the neoliberal community. It's probably one of the more interesting and politically important sites of difference. Whether you argue for gold backed currency, whether you argue for private competing currencies, whether you argue for some kind of central banking that works by rule. These things have consumed endless reams of paper and endless hours of seminar debate. The part of the neoliberal libertarian movement that I home in on the book is what, what Tyler Cohen refers to as the Ron Paulist wing of the movement, which is the rather small faction that believes that you need to go back to completely gold backed currency. And that is a radical move that in many ways would destroy the existing economy that we have now. It would mean forms of debt and credit would be very difficult. Fractional reserve banking would no longer be possible. Liquidity would dry right up. So that's partially why I'm interested in this as a kind of radical capitalism that is almost so committed to its ideals that it would arguably roll out a new system in theory that would itself destroy existing capitalism as we know it.

[Emma Vigland]

How does the racial science element, how is that distinct from past eugenicists movements on the right? Is it that it's kind streamlined with capitalism? But you could also argue that race science was a motivating factor or an excuse in chattel slavery and of course in genocides like the Holocaust, etc.

[Deborah Patto]

Absolutely. I mean race science in some form or another was attached to most political movements, you know, before the 1940s, including Keynes himself was a member of the eugenics society and the progressive movement had strong beliefs in the need for positive and negative eugenics. All kinds of race science was bouncing around. In this case, what I find distinctive is the turn to intelligence and IQ racism, which I think is a kind of eugenics for the information age. So I think it's not for Nothing that, you know, Charles Murray broke through with the Bell curve talking about IQ in the very decade where everyone was talking about the knowledge economy, the rising prestige of neuroscience, this belief that, you know, Silicon Valley and people looking at screens all day was the future of the American economy, that led to this new obsession with like, the idea of the hardwired brain and the idea that that's maybe the primary variable that means most in selecting immigrants, selecting, you know, ideal forms of future populations and so on. So that's the part that I wanted to home in on. The book is the. Is why the IQ racism now? Why has it now become so common to refer to high iq, low IQ as synonyms for good and bad people? This is something that seems to have bubbled up in the discourse almost unremarked on in recent years. And I think I give a bit of the history of it in the book.

[Sam Seder]

So what was it about the 90s? And this is where your book essentially, you know, sort of starts. Like, what was it about what was happening in the 90s? I mean, obviously, obviously follow the Wall. And also in many respects, Clinton's triangulation sort of took some stuff off the table for the right. And I would also argue it was the rise of like right wing talk radio at this time. But what were the. Where was the neoliberal movement? And people should understand like this, we're talking about neoliberalism in the strict sense because the, the term has been sort.

[Deborah Patto]

Of diluted and thrown around.

[Sam Seder]

Yeah, yeah, it's, it's, it's been Chris Rufo'd in a way to mean a lot of different things for people. But where were they at that time? Yeah, and, and were they just sort of casting about looking for something to gravitate towards in terms of which would continue their message forward?

[Deborah Patto]

No, I mean, this is, in a way, the starting point of the book was this surprising discovery. On looking at the writings of this, as you say, it's a group of people who are, beginning in the 1930s, called themselves neoliberals and then had gatherings and discussions over the decades, mostly loosely organized around this thing called the Mont Pelerin Society. And what I was surprised to find, looking at the records and speeches and things that were being written in the early 1990s, was these neoliberals and free market conservatives seem to have felt like they'd actually lost the Cold War, which was, to me, the startling thing that needed to be explained, became a kind of the core riddle for the book, in a way, was how could they think that, right? I mean, the Soviet Union fell, the Berlin Wall fell. It looked like capitalism was triumphant. It had no real contesters and enemies anymore. And yet this ends up being the important thing. They believed that the enemy had not disappeared, it had just mutated. So as it was often put, the enemy had turned from red to green. So environmentalism became a real subject of concern very early. Already we're talking about 1990, 1991, the civil rights movement and affirmative action, the women's movement, the nascent gay rights movement. These were all things that bundled under the. What was then the popular umbrella term of political correctness in the early 1990s became seen as ways that, you know, the socialist desire to regulate, intervene in space of individual liberty, intervene in the space of individual free enterprise had been, you know, nested now into the very center of power in the United States itself, in the centers of industrialized power. So this now needed to be rooted out. It was no longer a kind of external enemy, but now the front had come home. So the dominance in civil society, the dominance in the bureaucracy, the dominance in the universities and the press were all things that now became the new fronts of battle. And you can see the direct line there to the obsession now with the idea of wokeness and DEI. That discourse was there already in the early 1990s, and it colored the way that they decided to, you know, fight the fight in that decade and afterwards. The things that had been promising before, things like European integration, global economic governance, began to be seen as Trojan horses for a rollout of this progressive leftist ideology. So. So the United nations, which might have been either benign or useless before, was now seen as the place that you were getting gender ideology rolled out from on high. So you needed to go from, in effect, in many cases, people who had been more globalists themselves, to now making allies with people who wanted to break up what they saw as the stranglehold of international organizations and the capture of civil society by the progressives. So there was these. There were these two really, for me, interesting insights that they had on their own terms, which I think were basically false, but they were persuading themselves that, one, they had lost the Cold War, and then, two, there was this fear that if they had actually won, if welfarism and state ideology had in fact been rolled back to the point of disappearance, then you'd be confronted with a whole new problem. And Charles Murray described this as the problem of, you know, the opium eater being taken away from their drug. So if the addict, as they saw people, you Know, who make use of state welfare being removed from the, you know, the teat of the state, then would they survive or would they die? And how would we rebuild the world after, you know, the, the, the twilight of 20th century welfarism? And that became another real serious question for them. How to sort of rebuild from ground zero. What kind of communities would need to be built? Would they have to be racially homogeneous? Would you have to use traditional morality? Would they have to be modeled on the heterosexual couple and so on? There was a real like degree zero thinking which was very common in the 90s.

[Sam Seder]

And before we get into that part, because you can see almost like the, you know, what we call the tradcon elements showing up in that notion. We get it to start over again with Adam and Eve and we'll do it right this time. But what I found really interesting about that is the assessment which I think was sort of founded in some truth. I mean, you have a very anti democratic movement, largely. Right. The neoliberalism eschews that from its very beginning, it seems to me. And then the idea of, of wokeism or rights for people who have been marginalized in the past, their biggest concern is that it also threatens like economic, like these are to them. It's also economic rights. And I think it is. But that's been sort of largely lost in their saying cultural Marxism. When they say cultural Marxism, which I never fully understood what they, what they meant until your book, on some level was the culture part is a way to sneak in the Marxism. It's not a different type of Marxism.

[Deborah Patto]

Right, Exactly. Yeah. No, it's a way to describe what the right and the left actually sometimes describes as a meta political strategy. Right. I mean, when you hear Bannon or Breitbart say that politics is downstream from culture, what they mean is that you shouldn't think about strategy in terms of just seizing the heights of power. You think of it in terms of a more granular level. First you take the universities, then you take the magazines, then you take the, you know, the Internet service providers. This is a Gramscianism of the right, which was widely discussed from the 1960s on in the a European New right that someone like Bannon has, you know, very deliberately brought into the American context. But you're right, the idea of that cultural Marxism is this corrosive political ideology working not through the workplace or the ballot box, but through the seemingly apolitical spaces of everyday culture.

[Sam Seder]

Yeah, it's so much to tell Jordan Peterson that, because I feel like he has A different idea of what it means means. But so we go through this. The first step is this notion of. In your chapter, Rock of Biology is this idea of like, you know, a lot of this stuff is predetermined, and so we should just go with it. Where does it follow after this sort of establishment? And it's sort of building on a lot of the stuff, like it's taking, like, what we saw, like in the Moynihan Report in the, I guess, 60s and 70s, saying that there is a culture that's problematic and saying, well, the reason why the culture is problematic is because we have a fundamental biological biology problem.

[Deborah Patto]

Right.

[Sam Seder]

And then where does it. Where does it go from. From there as we. As we track it to where we are today?

[Deborah Patto]

Yeah. So the 1960s moment is pretty relevant because one of the points I think I want to make in the book is that the right and the neoliberal right has often used science as a way to push back at the expansive demands for equality. So sometimes it's the same people doing it. In the case of Richard Herrnstein, who is the famous Harvard psychologist who co authored the Bell Curve with Charles Murray in the early 1970s, he already wrote a book in a famous article in the Atlantic Monthly called iq, in which he said, you know, these attempts to create same outcomes and public education are doomed. The attempt to have a world of equality is doomed because we have written in our genes unequal capacity that sets these things in train from the beginning. And so we'll only be harming ourselves if we try to create more equality. We'll be, you know, diminishing the capacity of the entire society. It's interesting that then he comes back in the 1990s with Murray at another moment after the Cold War where you could think it could be a time to rethink, you know, what the social contract is. Maybe there should be a more sort of expansive middle ground between capitalism and communism. Could have been a moment for a third way, social democracy. And once again, then they deploy science and say no, because group differences in iq, in race are stubborn and cannot be changed. We also cannot have equality, and therefore we need to, as they say, beginning living with inequality. So I. My argument is that that was kind of a consoling message for many of the middlebrow readers of that decade, because in an era of, you know, mass incarceration, seemingly failed outcomes with things like the policies in public education, it was a way of, a fatalistic way of saying, well, I suppose the Great Society experiment is failed. Finally now, too and we should just give in to the reality of permanent inequality in this country. So it served a kind of compensatory psychological function. I think, for many of the readers as well.

[Emma Vigland]

It's also essentialist. Right. In that it's a way to solve complex problems by either opting out of the politics that would be necessary to alleviate these ills or just blaming people who are victimized by, like, inequality for their own kind of demise. And you can even see, or not demise, but at least immiseration. And like the Obama. The election of Obama in 08, he very much leaned into the meritocratic myths and was a believer in that kind of thing. And it's. It almost serves to back what you're saying, like this desire to move past racism because of how tired people were of even engaging in it. He almost served to bolster that. Right. Given his. The historic nature of his election.

[Deborah Patto]

Yeah, I mean, I think that the. The simplicity story is really important. Right. And it's another part of the way that Hayek's legacy has kind of been bastardized. Because one thing about Hayek is he was a believer in complexity. He believed that it was very difficult to actually understand how one thing was connected to each other. That's why we needed to give it over to the magic computer that we call the marketplace. By contrast, in that book, the Bell Curve, I even counted at some point how many times the word simple was used because it was just over and over. It's simple. It's simple, it's simple. Here's the data. We can't do anything about it. It's over. So there is, I think, a kind of surrender of some of the more productive forms of classical liberalism and neoliberalism in that kind of handing over policy to the data and acting like it speaks for itself, which it obviously doesn't. But the Obama phenomenon is interesting because this isn't something I get in too much in the book, but we all remember the era of the gifted child, right? I mean, the 90s and the 2000s were really not just an era of stigmatizing, you know, the poor for their own poverty, but also celebrating the kind of talented 10th charter schools, the time of charter schools, the time of talent searches, whether I know something called the Julian Stanley center for Talented Youth, American Idol, but also just like finding the smart kids, where are the smart kids? We need to get them because they are the natural resource of this nation in a way. So Obama was really a poster child for that. And I think that that confused a lot of People on the right. But this fetishization of the very intelligent mixed with a condemnation and stigmatization of people at the bottom end of the bell curve, or the left hand tail, as it were, is really what brings together in some ways the tech right and the MAGA right at this moment. Because the tech right also feels like they are the self appointed aristocracy, intellectual aristocracy, and they're being stifled by, you know, the socialists and the egalitarians. And then the MAGA people, for their own reason, feel like they have, you know, special status above others and that they can, you know, condemn and dismiss entire swaths of people as being low IQ by virtue of their genes. So there's all kinds of, I think, politically convenient ways that science gets folded into the current moment. And I think I, you know, I was just trying to pick it apart in ways that right now, I think when the far right is discussed, it's. And explained. It's often described and explained in terms of emotions, hate, resentment, you know, backlash, fear, or even, or even, you know, intelligence, you know, ignorance, lack of information. These are ways that the left often tries to understand the far right. And my point with the book was to say, well, actually, if you look at it on its own terms, it does have its own economic reasoning and its own economic rationality, and it also has its own version of capitalism that it's proposing. So we shouldn't only talk about the ethno state, for example, as a proposal, but as I title one of the chapters, we should talk about an ethno economy. Because even arguments for total nativism and exclusion often have their own, you know, twisted economic logic for the people who are propounding them.

[Sam Seder]

Let's talk about Peter Brimlow in that, because he becomes the figure at least that I guess provides one end of the Overton window for that ideology. He's. Tell us about him.

[Deborah Patto]

Yeah, so Peter Brimler, people might have heard. I mean, he's now become quite actively trying to like tweet at me and like draw me out and make fun of the lady journalists who reviewed my book and all kinds of other really charming behavior.

[Emma Vigland]

They were probably being hysterical.

[Deborah Patto]

Lady journalists.

[Sam Seder]

Did they write it with a quill?

[Emma Vigland]

Yeah.

[Deborah Patto]

They had a couple fainting fits halfway through the first paragraph, but they managed to get it through.

[Emma Vigland]

That happens.

[Deborah Patto]

It does. That's why the couches are there. So Brimelow, he was one of those names we all remember the explainer articles from 2016, 17. What is the alt right? Well, it's this guy named Richard Spencer and da da da. And one of the people who is often mentioned was Peter Bremello, the founder of this website called vdare.com named after Virginia Dare, the first white child born in the New World. And he was often described as the godfather of the alt right, a nativist, et cetera. The New York Times called him a white nationalist. He sued them for it. He didn't win. But I was interested in his, in his formation and where did he come from. And it turns out that it's not often mentioned that he was a financial journalist for decades. So he wrote for the, for the Financial Post in Canada, Fortune and Forbes in the United States. And so just looking back at his columns was really educational because you could see how he was finding his way to what became, you know, exclusionary nativism in the pages of the financial press through economic reasoning. So he wasn't, you know, it's not like one day he woke up and saw, you know, the hyperborean Aryan sun or something and wanted to, you know, walk towards it. He walked his way through a bunch of arguments about economic freedom and what he saw as welfare dependency tendencies among certain populations based on certain bad science. And in doing so, he actually forged a new language of justification for exclusion in that kind of a financial discourse that was pretty unusual at the time. So one of the shockers for me researching this book was that in the late 1980s, the Wall Street Journal every Fourth of July would publish an editorial saying there shall be open borders. And they meant it. They said it should be added to the Constitution, that, you know, they had that faith in the self ordering powers of the market. And here comes Brimelow, who says in those same pages, well, I don't think so. You know, according to this new science, some populations are more, et cetera, et cetera. So he helped, I think, create the possibility where people who were just business elites, for example, could agree with someone who was, you know, someone who was coming more from a white nationalist perspective and they could agree about something like the economic wisdom of, you know, decreasing border flows or even, you know, to follow it through ending birthright citizenship or family reunification policy and replacing it more with like a points based system on the model of, you know, a Canada or a Japan. So that roundabout way that you could get to, you know, what has now become a bipartisan consensus was something else. I was, you know, trying to track through one, you know, cookie crumb trail in the narrative.

[Sam Seder]

And then as we move up into sort of like what we call Trumpism now, I guess The. You start talking about the sort of, the. Some of the contradictions that exist within that. But what is, what is Trumpism? And then where, where. How have those strains become that? You could trace some of the DNA, I guess, into Hayek that have come in, and it's like the. I was asking the Isle of Dr. Moreau or something like some other. Some other things come out.

[Deborah Patto]

Some other, like, mutations getting. Yes, you know, born in the lab there. So that's a hard one. Right? I mean, I always resistant to the idea of defining Trumpism, because I feel like what we call that is a kind of collage in itself, a kind of Frankenstein's monster of many different policy ideas and people pursuing them that then, you know, staggers forward without one mind, as it were. But I think the best way to explain that is to go back actually to the early 1990s, where there was something called the Paleo Alliance. And this, I think, will be interesting to, you know, some of your listeners and viewers, if they haven't heard of it. But there were people on the right, conservatives, who were dissatisfied with neoconservatives. So the neoconservatives, they felt, had won the Cold War and now wanted to carry it on by other means through forms of democracy promotion. So the human rights agenda was going to be a way to keep American troops overseas, you know, in perpetuity. And they were Paleo conservatives. They. They thought, no, now that Soviet communism is over, we need to come home and fight that enemy at home that.

[Sam Seder]

I, Buchanan, being maybe the most Epicanon.

[Deborah Patto]

Is a very good example. But also, you know, John Gans and Nicole Hemmer have written very well about this. People like Sam Francis and Thomas Fleming, people like that. So they created an alliance with some people who were Paleo libertarians, who similarly wanted the state to be smaller. They wanted the federal government to have less role in people's lives. They certainly wanted things like income taxes to vanish. And there was. Murray Rothbard is the most famous of those. And he advises Pat Buchanan and his. In his first run for president in 1992, not because he believes everything Pat Buchanan is saying, but because he sees the usefulness of having someone who's a kind of a locomotive, who's saying things that nobody else is going to say and who's stirring up kind of populist passions that might break some of the sclerotic coalitions that they thought had already fused into a kind of, you know, what they call on Fox News, the Uni Party. Right. So the feeling was you could make compromises with your partnerships in order to get to a trend, you know, a transitional goal that you might have slightly further down the road. And the far right, if you look at Europe, if you look at South America, if you look at Southeast Asia, is filled with moments like this where people who technically don't agree with each other in the abstract will nevertheless work together for the purpose of getting a larger agenda pushed through. So the alternative for Germany party is an example of this where you've got pretty straight laced or liberal economists who end up working with ethno nationalists, figuring out some common ground and making it work. I think that Trumpism, if we want to call it that, is another version of that. It's people like in his first term, Arthur Laffer, right, Ronald Reagan's first advisor and Stephen Moore guy straight out of the free market think tanks who held their nose and said, we don't like what he talks about protectionism, but hey, if we can get the 2017 tax cut through, then like war game. And sure enough, they did, and now it's going to be made permanent with even less state spending. So like their gamble worked. So, and meanwhile someone like Robert Lighthizer and now, you know, Jameson Greer or Peter Navarro are trying to get their policy through on trade, which actually isn't very Hayekian or libertarian at all. And yet it's all happening within the same, you know, governing coalition. So I think, you know, it can help to pull out policy areas and see where people like the Heritage foundation, of course, editor compilers of the Project 2025 document, which they've been giving to Republican presidents since 1980, where they thought they could, you know, have access and sort of pressure points and where they're willing to give up some of their, you know, long standing principles. Very weird for someone like the Heritage foundation now to be going along with the tariff policy. And yet they've made the calculation. We can get a bunch of other things through if we accept this deviation and we, we, we live with it. And that's wise politics in a way. Right?

[Sam Seder]

Well, I'm curious, like what ends up being the, is it literally just a, like a financial calculation? Like, you know, one of the guys I used to debate on this program was Walter Block, Paul's advisor.

[Deborah Patto]

And he believed you could sell yourself into slavery, right?

[Sam Seder]

He believed you saw yourself in slavery at a real issue with consent laws. And you know, like, it took a couple of like hours in talking to him before I realized like, oh, the whole property thing where we're going to base it on, on some concept from France. And when we, we come over and we work the land, it becomes ours. It said, like, wait, what about, what about the people here, here before us? Well, we're just starting to count from, from France. Like, when we come over, that's when the clock starts. But like, guys like him and Lew Rockwell also, I'm thinking, I mean, Rockwell is a little bit, but Block in particular, he held out for like, it felt like six months as a libertarian. Then he became full on Trump and buying, you know, buying into a lot of stuff that we don't perceive as libertarian, even in the more sort of like American sense of libertarianism.

[Deborah Patto]

Yeah.

[Sam Seder]

Like, is the calculation just like, as long as I'm along for the ride, or are there fundamental principles that are, you know, that function like, you know, the Heritage Foundation, I feel like they could do a, you know, business like a calculation like we could roll back the tariffs, but it's going to be, if we get the taxes in, that's going to last for a couple of decades or something like that. But is there one from a more intellectual perspective?

[Deborah Patto]

Yeah, that's a good question. So, I mean, it's worth there mentioning that Lou Rockwell and Murray Rothbard are the ones who founded the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama in 1982, and Walter Block, of course, closely connected to that. So that's if people want an idea of where the center this kind of paleo libertarianism is. It's the Mises Institute and it differentiates itself from the Cato Institute or the Heritage foundation by being what they see as more radical. And they often, you know, Trump won, for example, the head of the Mises Institute said we need to see right wing populism as a gift that we need to, you know, open up and use. Not again, because it's in line with principles of natural law, property of the kind you describe, necessarily. But I think two reasons. One is purely strategic, which is you can use it to get to somewhere on the other side. You can ride the tiger, as Julius Evola said it. And then when the tiger is tired, you can jump off and be there to rebuild in the ashes, so to speak. The other one, though, is the question of who the enemy is. So there is alliance question of working with someone as long as you share the common enemy. And the common enemy for both Paleo conservatives and Paleo Libertarians in 1991, as it is in 2025, is what they see as the progressive statists who have occupied the heights of discourse, creation and opinion. Creation and need to be dethroned, and the institutions need to be dismantled. So there is that common goal, even if what is going to happen in the aftermath might follow a different blueprint. But then that's where a question of total decentralization comes in. And that in the 1990s, when the different parts of the Paleo alliance got together, they decided, like, the one thing they agreed on was how to create things afterwards would be through what they called contractual communities. So you should be able to have scaling down in politics to a much smaller level where you could have some small areas that are, you know, completely traditionalist, governed by Christian morality, some that might be more libertine, some that might be multiracial, some racially homogeneous. So that vision of like a patchwork or a mosaic the day after is something that in the 90s for sure animated this Paleo Alliance. I think for me, one of the open questions now, if you transpose that to the MAGA coalition, is how many people still share that vision or if there is a desire indeed to create a much more centralized oversight and control of the whole territory. I think that's being worked out right now.

[Sam Seder]

I want to talk about that because, you know, that also is reminiscent of like, what guys like Andreessen want and Trump has been talking about, but it's more like, here's one where we're going to create, you know, build these type of chips, and here's another one where we're going to have manufacturing and the network, the network state stuff. But it also occurs to me that the other thing that they share, you know, Lew Rockwell was obviously was famous for supposedly writing the Ron Paul newsletter that got a little anti Jewy and a little racist. And, you know, Ron Paul had no idea. And I got to imagine when they see the rise of Trump and him sort of, he. His racism, I guess that was at least encouraging. Like, you know, like, we know we may not win exactly the terms we want, but we know broadly who the winners are going to be in this fight, and we're all on that same team.

[Deborah Patto]

Yeah, I mean, if it's about the restoration of what you see as a natural order that is about, you know, preserving, you know, status quo gains and inequalities against any effort to flatten them or redistribute existing wealth, then absolutely any ally is the worthwhile one. But I think that the bigger question, and this actually relates directly to Ron Paul's survival report, which is how it was renamed after Clinton came to power the first time, which I read through two volumes of, to write the last chapter of this book is it shows really a strong version of what Murray Rothbard called paleo populism. And this is I think the big reversal that you do get in my book. If you've read some of the intellectual history of neoliberals and you read about things like, you know, international investment law or balance budget amendments, you might think, or the European Central bank, you might think about neoliberal state strategy as being basically counter majoritarian. So someone like Hayek was basically distrustful of the masses. He thought that they were likely going to tend towards socialism. They would probably mobilize to try to expropriate their bosses and the elites. So, so you needed to introduce democracy, okay, but make sure that democracy has a pretty short leash on it and there's all kinds of checks and balances to make sure that democracy doesn't tend towards socialism as at mid century. People from, you know, Schumpeter onward thought that it probably would. So that's 1930s neoliberal thinking, 1950s, 60s. By the time you get to the 90s, Murray Rothbard says openly, the old Hayekian model isn't the correct one anymore. We don't actually need to restrain the masses because the masses aren't socialist anymore. The masses aren't a mass industrial working class. They're not organized in trade unions. They haven't had any sort of prefigurative experiences of what life in a decommodified world could look like. They are bought in, like they are individual little capitalists and savers. And so we can actually use them against the elites who they believe are the last remaining socialists. So it's reversed. The socialists aren't the masses anymore with the elites needing to constrain them. But now it's the elites at the universities and in Brussels and in D.C. who are the last socialists standing. So we need to just stir up whatever kind of anger and resentment we can to try to destroy their stranglehold. And that means a lot of alarmism and a lot of fear mongering. And that's what the Ron Paul survival report was all about, was about scaring the bejesus out of people and then offering them the means to, you know, save themselves in the impending apocalypse. You know, tell them that the currency is collapsing and then say you can buy collectible coins at the address below. Tell them that the, you know, Haitians with HIV positive, you know, like cases are coming on rafts and see below for ways to get a passport for another country or how to fortify your home against the coming race riots. So that entrepreneurial politics, which I think we all recognize now in someone from Glenn Beck to Alex Jones and onward, in which you stir up the emotions of the fear of one's fellow citizens and, and then, you know, monetize that in many cases directly into a form of political support. Is that an entrepreneurial alarmism that I think is very different from old style, you know, Hayekian elite persuasion politics.

[Sam Seder]

And there's a sense that we can agitate the working class because they don't have the mechanism to organize into a, a potentially revolutionary or even reform movement in any way.

[Deborah Patto]

The culture is gone, like the sinews of socialist civil society don't exist anymore. They've been thinned out to non existence. So there's nothing to fear there anymore with the masses.

[Emma Vigland]

But even the way they construct their enemies is also an admission that they feel that this is a cultural Marxist fight as opposed to actual Marxists, which translates into racial minorities or ethnic minorities. And that is where what you highlight so well is the complete hysteria of it that we, you know, in the 90s and on this should be victory lot for capitalism with the fall of the Soviet Union, but instead they find new enemies. And now in 2025, these are people, when we're talking about the immigration fight, who are also the victims of global capitalism in the global south, who are forced to migrate because of either political or environmental ills in their home countries. And now they are the ones who are being, I guess, at the bottom ring of the totem pole or whatever that they're trying to create in terms of reifying that hierarchy.

[Deborah Patto]

Yeah. So I think, you know, people like us, the progressives, people on the left, have often told a story about the 90s and the early 2000s that aligns with what Nancy Fraser calls progressive neoliberalism. Right. So I think a very common way of thinking about what happened after the Cold War is you had the tokenistic attention to forms of civil rights demands, feminist demands, even environmental demands that were folded pretty seamlessly into the ongoing functioning of capitalism. So you could have a little bit of diversity in the boardroom, you could have some carbon credits here and there, people could have electric vehicles, but, you know, nothing was really changing in terms of the status quo distributions of wealth. Certainly in the United States, in fact, the gap was widening. What's so interesting about this parallax view or this other perspective that I offer from the people in my book is they didn't see that as harmless at all like the things that we probably assumed to be superficial and inadequate to the task, to them were the thin edge of the wedge. Right. No, seriously. So like, why are they. If you've been at a university and you know what DEI has looked like for the last several years, you would know that it is not. Was never going to transform the way that the university operated. And that was, you know, actually a tragedy. It was a co option of things like the Black Lives Matter protests. It was a co option of radical demands of marginalized communities and turning it into bureaucracy and, you know, empty formalisms. But to them, no, no, no, that was, that was a specter that was now entering the very halls of power and capitalism and needed to be. So they've told themselves these scary bedtime stories for decades. You know, that's what the Survival Report is, is just like bedtime stories. But now, you know, they think it's real and they're acting as if it is. And therefore now the effects of it are real and very material and in everyone's lives.

[Sam Seder]

You write about Malay at the. Towards the end of the book, and on some level it's sort of like a way, it's. He can function as a sort of a Trump like figure without having to actually sort of like, you know, make it about Trump. But it gives a sense of how this coalition comes together, maybe in a place that it's easier to see because it's not sort of fraught with different American politics. But in looking at that, at his rise, how does that say that it's more replicable than we had hoped? Or do you need a unique figure to be able to tie these things together? Because one of the things that Trump is able to do, it seems to me, is he has absolutely no principles whatsoever, except for some very, a couple of, of ones. Biggest one being whatever puts money in my pocket. So he has the ability to do these like 180s within a day and a half, you know, in the way that like a, a YouTuber would. If no one, like people aren't interested in this topic, tomorrow I'm going doing something different.

[Deborah Patto]

Yeah. I mean, the United States is, is an exceptional place. Right. I mean, there is a status as global economic superpower and still military superpower which allows it to have that kind of wild gyration without the collapse of the economy outright. Right. I mean, even though crazy tariff policy of the last month has been received not so poorly by the markets. Right. I mean, it's bumping along. People have figured out how to make money off the turbulence, people have figured out ways to probably influence carve outs and things. So that kind of erraticness is not available to most parts of the world, and certainly not to a place like Argentina. Right? You know, the processes of market discipline that have been internalized for most of the world leave no space for that kind of creativity, if you want to call it that eccentricity. Instead, you get a figure like Milei, who to me is fascinating partially because he's such a direct product of the intellectual lineages that I describe in this book, right? He sees himself as a disciple of Murray Rothbard. He named one of his many clone dogs after him, among other things. He calls himself an anarcho capitalist, which is extraordinary because he's the head of state and anarcho capitalists are supposed to not believe in states at all. So already, you know, it's in a way defeating, but also really exciting in a way for an intellectual historian to be like, wow, how do I make sense of this thing that actually makes no sense at all? And the way you see it making sense, finally, is he's able to code switch really effectively, right? He can act as a disruptive tribune of the people one minute, and then the next minute, when he's speaking at Davos, as he did, he can address the room full of extremely wealthy business people and politicians and heads of civil society and international organizations and say, you here are the real important people in the the world. You are holding the line against communists, Christian Democrats, feminists, environmentalists, and goes down this laundry list of all of the enemies that they all share. And then he gets an ovation. So this is a sign of great political talent for sure, right? To be able to navigate that many contradictions, but then also to know how to speak to the right audience at the right time and to eventually tell the head of the imf, Kristalina Georgieva, what she needs to hear to get the next round of loans cleared through. And if it's at the expense of, you know, cultural workers and women and university students and union activists, which it is in the streets of Argentina, then so be it. I mean, he has figured out, well, the ordinal ranking of who he actually needs to care about to keep the credit worthiness of his economy bumping along. So in that sense, he's like a perfect high ex bastard where he plays populism just well enough to elicit a kind of buy in, but then also can speak the language of the markets to the people who need to hear it.

[Sam Seder]

I know this is, as a historian, out of your portfolio. But do you have a sense of trajectory? Where does it go from here? Or is that a function of how, how erratic Trump may be in terms of like where he sees some threat to his power and he has to pivot in a certain way. Like, I don't know, maybe he comes out in six weeks and goes like, you can't cut Medicaid. We're not going to do tax. I mean, you know, I doubt it.

[Deborah Patto]

But it's hard to predict. So I think, you know, this book is an intellectual history of a very small number of people. So it's not trying to make grand structural claims. If I tried to, and I'm happy to, the way I would see it is actually it's helpful to depersonalize this. So I think actually focusing too much on Trump is, is counterproductive for big picture analysis. I think there's, there's a recent book, maybe you've had him on, a guy named Edward Fishman wrote this great book called Choke Points and he's really describing the rise of the sanctions and export control regimes since Obama. So it's really since Obama that the United States has entered a defensive posture vis a vis the world economy and specifically vis a vis China. Right. So that's the real story here is how has China, how has China created such a threat to American dominance that the US now feels increasingly, increasingly obliged to cut off all of the normal ties of globalization that had actually profited so well from the 1990s onwards. So, you know, stopping all kinds of offshorings, trying to recreate supply chains at home, stopping the trade of the exchange of scientific information, by now just choking right out funding for science and health research altogether. It's becoming an increasingly self destructive sequence of actions that are being done out of a fear of being outcompeted by power that, you know, as recently as the year 2000 only accounted for, you know, less than 10% of world trade, which is what China did. And now they're an American peer. So that I think if I had to say, where are things going? I say that's what needs to be managed by a non Trumpian politician would be, well, how do you propose, you know, how does a Democrat propose managing this problem of Chinese competition? I think that the continuities in things like trade, industrial policy, even immigration across Trump, Biden, Trump are more telling in some ways than the differences.

[Emma Vigland]

How about the Middle east policy, which is also a way to keep China out? Like I think people, it can be oversimplified when we Say, oh, we, we, we killed a million people in Iraq for the oil or we're helping facilitate a genocide in Gaza because of the Suez. You know, it can be more just about keeping Chinese influence out of this region. They were threatened by the fact, I think, that China brokered talks between Iran and Saudi Arabia over Yemen. And there's more soft power that China is engaging in and the United States is destroying its soft power in this isolationist, almost Brexit type move. And we're just pure militarism now and we're going to bomb this region into submission to curb Chinese soft power influence.

[Deborah Patto]

Yeah, and I think that's where this discussion of the Paleo conservatives of the early 1990s is actually quite relevant because there is clearly part of the mega coalition that believes that you need to withdraw from, you know, military influence beyond the Monroe Doctrine, space of the Americas, and effectively let those parts of the world manage themselves and allow for, you know, mega regions under the control of Xi Jinping here, Putin there, Erdogan there, etc, and then there are factions of the coalition who still think that you need to keep a military presence and, and show muscle and you know, show war fighting prowess wherever American interests are threatened. And I don't think that's settled yet actually inside of the Trump administration. But to go, to follow through with what Trump said in his speech in, in Saudi Arabia this last week, to actually become a non interventionist would be an extraordinary U turn, not just away from Republican policy, but away from Democrat policy too. And I don't think we know what that world would look like actually if it did go towards a more, you know, sense of regional self direction and self control. And the parts of the latest trade war that seemed to be gesturing towards something like autarky or self sufficiency were very striking and certainly very different from the first Trump administration. Nobody thought they were going to try to embargo the goods of basically the entire world to kickstart some kind of shock reindustrialization. Yet for a couple of weeks it looked like that was what was happening. So I think that's, we need to put it all in this context of geoeconomic shifts that are not localized in the figure of the president and are, you know, distributed throughout the labor force and throughout the expectations of consumers and workers. And so getting back actually to the challenges of something like bidenomics and the ira, which actually was an attempt to take on a complicated problem through both sticks and, and carrots, is something that, you know, with some optimism, we'll be able to have those kind of serious conversations again before too long.

[Sam Seder]

Hope springs eternal. In the meantime, we got to wait and see what Laura Loomer decides and then and that will know.

[Deborah Patto]

Extremely off brand of me to end on a light note, but I think I'm just going to leave it and be hopeful for a change. There you go.

[Emma Vigland]

Laura Loomer gives us hope. We shouldn't say that.

[Sam Seder]

Quintean. The book is High Ex Bastards, Race Gold, IQ and the Capitalism of the Far Right. We'll put a link to that at Majority FM and in the YouTube and podcast descriptions. Thank you so much. Very much. Appreciate it. And we'll put a link to your other the last two books as well to give folks a sense of how they can maybe follow this trajectory. We really appreciate your time today.

[Deborah Patto]

It's my pleasure.

[Emma Vigland]

Thanks so much.

[Sam Seder]

All right folks, gonna take a break and head into the fun half of the program. Just a reminder, it's your support that makes this show possible. You can help us survive and thrive by becoming a [e-mail] when you do, you not only help us survive and thrive, you get the free show free of commercials. And then of course you can IM in the fun half. So check it out. Also, don't forget am quickie amquickie.com there's so much news, so much to digest. You want to get a sense of what to expect or what's going to be a big story on any given day from a left perspective. Amquickie.com free three times a week, five minutes worth of reading in your email inbox every morning at 9am and of course we've got all sorts of merch@theshop. Majorityreportradio.com so check that out if you want to have conversations about stuff that you've heard on the show or just really anything. Great place to learn like organizing skills or resources. Our discord majority discord.com check it out. And also if you have other type of social media and I'm not just talking twitch poggers, I'm talking things like Instagram or TikTok. Follow us there. Just a Google Majority. I can't even remember what our handles are there. We probably should have had one handle across all platforms, but that's that would have involved a lot of of centralized planning.

[Quinn Slobodian]

It's good that we started calling it Majority Report Radio, right as we pivoted to video.

[Emma Vigland]

Yes, I mean.

[Sam Seder]

That'S my you remember what radio is kids counter programming thing. I don't want anything to die.

[Quinn Slobodian]

Mr. Facts.

[Sam Seder]

There you go. Exactly.

[Emma Vigland]

It's like those buildings in like Chelsea or something that still have the factory sign on it from back in the 20th century or something.

[Quinn Slobodian]

Like the pneumatic tubes.

[Sam Seder]

It's nice to give it. Those are actually cool. I remember.

[Emma Vigland]

Character gives the show character.

[Sam Seder]

Thank you. Thank you.

[Quinn Slobodian]

Roosevelt island is all connected by pneumatic tubes. Did you know that?

[Sam Seder]

I did not know that.

[Quinn Slobodian]

Yeah. I don't know if it's still functioning, but back in the day that's how you move things around there.

[Sam Seder]

There was a place called Spags in Shrewsbury, Mass. That was like a pre runner to a big box store and they wouldn't even have like they barely put stuff on shelves. It was all in boxes. And they would just open the box and stack them up and you'd walk through and you buy a bunch of stuff and they had pneumatic tubes because they had so much cash they had to put it into the tubes and it goes.

[Emma Vigland]

Can you explain to me what pneumatic tubes are?

[Quinn Slobodian]

You ever been to a bank where you put the little canister in the bank and it goes through a tube? That's a pneumatic tube.

[Emma Vigland]

Oh. So like when they do draft lottery.

[Quinn Slobodian]

Sure.

[Sam Seder]

Matt. Left reckoning.

[Quinn Slobodian]

Yeah, left reckoning. We had a Sunday show, Arun Ano on talking about India, Pakistan also he has a really great documentary series, series on the Tamil genocide in Sri Lanka. We put this up. This is from his YouTube channel. Go give him a follow. And this is the second part of a three part series on Sri Lanka and a lot of parallels to say what's going on in other, say, colonization efforts in the world. And this doesn't get covered as much because as Arun pointed out to me that pretty much everyone is selling weapons to the Sri Lankan forces that are conducting it. So there's not really anyone to make a stink about it.

[Sam Seder]

Folks, see you on the fun half. We may may have a brief check in with the majority report. Middle school correspondent, right? Chief. Middle chief. Middle school.

[Emma Vigland]

Just get promoted.

[Sam Seder]

Yeah. So we may check in with him a little bit later in the program. See you in the fun half. Three months from now, six months from now, nine months from now. And I don't think it's going to be the same as it looks like in six months from now. And I don't know if it's necessarily going to be better six months from now than it is three months from now, but I think around 18 months out we're going to look back and go like wow. What? What is that going on? It's nuts. Wait a second. Hold on. Hold on for a second. Emma. Welcome to the program. Fun Half.

[Deborah Patto]

Matt.

[Sam Seder]

Fun Path. What is up? Everyone?

[Emma Vigland]

No.

[Sam Seder]

McKee.

[Deborah Patto]

You did it.

[Sam Seder]

Fun Path.

[Emma Vigland]

Let's go, Brandon.

[Sam Seder]

Let's go, Brandon. Fun path. Bradley, you want to say hello?

[Quinn Slobodian]

Sorry to disappoint everyone. I'm just a random guy.

[Sam Seder]

It's all the boys today.

[Margaret]

Fundamentally false.

[Emma Vigland]

No. I'm sorry.

[Deborah Patto]

Women.

[Sam Seder]

Stop talking for a second. Let me finish.

[Deborah Patto]

Where is this coming from?

[Emma Vigland]

Dude.

[Deborah Patto]

But. Dude.

[Sam Seder]

You want to smoke this?

[Emma Vigland]

7A.

[Sam Seder]

Yes.

[Deborah Patto]

Hi, Mickey.

[Sam Seder]

You're safe. Yes. Is this me? Is it me? It is you. Is this me?

[Deborah Patto]

Hello? That's me.

[Sam Seder]

I think it is you. Who is you.

[Emma Vigland]

Up?

[Sam Seder]

No sound. Every single freaking day. What's on your mind?

[Emma Vigland]

Sports.

[Deborah Patto]

We can discuss free markets. And we can discuss capitalism.

[Sam Seder]

I'm gonna go star life. Libertarians.

[Quinn Slobodian]

They're so stupid.

[Sam Seder]

Though common sense says of course.

[Emma Vigland]

Gobbledygook.

[Deborah Patto]

We nailed him.

[Emma Vigland]

So what's 79? 21.

[Sam Seder]

Challenge. Man. I'm positively quivering. I believe 96. I want to say 857. 210. 35. 501. One half. Three.

[Quinn Slobodian]

Eight, nine. 11.

[Deborah Patto]

For instance.

[Emma Vigland]

$3,400. $1,900. 54.

[Sam Seder]

$3 trillion. Sold. It's a zero sum game.

[Deborah Patto]

Actually.

[Emma Vigland]

You're making me think less.

[Sam Seder]

But. But let call it satire. Sam goes satire.

[Deborah Patto]

On top of it all. My favorite part about you is just like every day, all day. Like everything you do.

[Sam Seder]

Without a doubt. Hey, buddy. We see you. All right, folks, folks, folks.

[Emma Vigland]

It's just the week being weeded out. Obviously.

[Sam Seder]

Yeah. Sun's out, Guns out. I, I, I don't know.

[Emma Vigland]

But you should know.

[Sam Seder]

People just don't.

[Quinn Slobodian]

Like to entertain ideas anymore.

[Sam Seder]

I have a question. Who cares?

[Quinn Slobodian]

Our chat is enabled.

[Sam Seder]

Folks. I love it.

[Emma Vigland]

I do love that.

[Sam Seder]

Gotta jump. Gotta be quick. I gotta jump. I'm losing it, bro. Two o' clock. We're already late and the guy's been being a dick. So screw him. Sent to a gulag.

[Emma Vigland]

Outrageous.

[Sam Seder]

Like, what is wrong with you?

[Emma Vigland]

Love you.

[Deborah Patto]

Bye.

[Sam Seder]

Love you.

[Deborah Patto]

Bye.

[Sam Seder]

Bye.