Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right, by Quinn Slobodian, Zone Books, 272 pages, $29.95
Quinn Slobodian, a historian at Boston University, has convinced himself that Trumpism traces its intellectual origins to the Austrian economists Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. He first postulated his Austrianism-to-Trumpism thesis in a pair of academic articles in 2019, which claimed that Hayek's work contained a subtle streak of biological determinism that made them attractive to various eugenicists and IQ-obsessed cranks on the far right. He made even more direct claims about Mises, who allegedly left a "parenthetical opening to the possibility of race theory" that modern race theorists then "drove the proverbial truck through" until arriving at their present Trumpian destination.
Hayek's Bastards is a book-length expansion of these arguments, characterizing today's populist right as the product of a "new fusionism" between the "three hards": genetically hardwired human nature (often predicated in racial determinism), the hard borders of immigration restrictionism, and hard money. While each of these elements certainly hovers around the far right today, Slobodian's attempts to situate the first two in the works of Hayek and Mises suffers from a lack of clear evidence for the parentage.
