Fetishizing the Right, from McCarthy to Musk

L. Benjamin Rolsky explores Quinn Slobodian’s “Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right.”

By L. Benjamin RolskyJune 8, 2025

• Politics

• History

BORN IN A Cold War crucible of shame and spectacle, the academic study of the political Right has always been drawn to subjects who capture our collective attention for all the wrong reasons. These days, its most vocal representatives tout the wares of race science and IQ to determine ultimate human value in American society. The study of such subjects, however, began with the most notorious of conservative actors: Joseph McCarthy. The infamous senator helped define the conceptual contours of the study of the Right and what was called the “lunatic fringe” based on the analyses of sociologist Daniel Bell and historian Richard Hofstadter. Reading these and other works from today’s vantage, one begins to realize that the conservative subject continues to be on the receiving end of a peculiar academic approach: the intellectual portrait.

The initial notoriety surrounding McCarthy and other “fringe” subjects overdetermined the subject matter’s importance relative to the rest of the American populace. As a result, the intellectual interest in the conservative subject as “the Right” was both scholastic and prescriptive. It had to be studied but also slightly feared and certainly monitored. This project had a voyeuristic aspect to it as well, both inside and outside the academy: the pleasure you feel from reading something that is dangerous and disturbing, and yet you’re the expert. In 2025, it’s the perfect recipe for algorithmic content. Since Donald Trump’s 2016 victory in the presidential race, the fetish for information about the Right has become the cottage industry of our time—and its demands are insatiable.

The latest book to assume this approach to studying the right is historian Quinn Slobodian’s Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right. Slobodian’s new book argues that the 1990s are the key to understanding the Far Right today and its rise to power because of, not in opposition to, neoliberal capitalism as a form of “frontlash.” He focuses on a select group of thinkers and writers who can be connected back to the free-market guru Friedrich A. Hayek in their common emphasis on hard money, hard borders, and hard cultural differences. Such subjects include Charles Murray, Patrick Buchanan, Murray Rothbard, Peter Brimelow, Curtis Yarvin, and Javier Milei.

Slobodian’s primary interest is the rise of what he calls the “new fusionism” among a handful of subjects that serve as the book’s primary evidentiary base. Chapters include topics such as IQ and neurocastes, ethno-economies, and what he calls “goldbugs”: libertarians obsessed with profiting off economic disaster and doomsday prepping. The book spans five chapters, but it covers more than a century of time both in the United States and abroad. For Slobodian, IQ becomes the litmus test for his subjects because it represents an investment in the “intelligence hierarchy” that reflected the 1990s’ emergent information economy.

This emphasis on hucksters and a cultural shift in common sense make for a much-welcomed contribution to the study of the Right in the United States. Compared to the “old fusionism” of religion and the free market that defined the core of conservative ideation for much of the 20th century, this “new fusionism” of the 21st looks to science and nature for inspiration for its various claims about intelligence, race, and capitalism. While the specter of Elon Musk roams throughout the book’s chapters and interpretive claims, its primary focus is on those “bastards” who have read Hayek in less than credible ways. At times, however, the severity of the conservative subject turns character into caricature. The analysis hovers over the historical record, picking and choosing when to settle for context, blending movements, categories, and subjects together to excavate the intellectual lives of its subjects.

Less about the material circumstances of such figures, neoliberal or otherwise, than about their profiled ideological commonalities, Hayek’s Bastards looks to find common ground between white supremacists of the alt-right and Hayek’s bastard descendants. Part of the difficulty of understanding Slobodian’s argument, however, is that his usage of “neoliberals” is reductive and at times confusing. His subjects may read Hayek, but that doesn’t necessarily make them neoliberal, especially since Hayek himself was largely against claims about society grounded in eugenic principles. If anything, Slobodian’s subjects may be best thought of as paleolibertarians and paleoconservatives. “Understanding the marriage of libertarianism and the Far Right,” argues Slobodian, “requires entering the profane space of the newsletter, the advice manual, and eventually, the website, the feed, and the chatroom.”

Forgoing an explicit analysis of neoliberalism to explore instead its obscene intellectual tributaries, Slobodian’s story connects unexpected entities together on ground that is perhaps not as common as we’d like to think. Hayek’s Bastards does a fine job capturing the harmony between neoliberal capital sentiment and the Far Right on a global scale (always with an eye to South Africa), yet it largely fails to explain why someone like Trump has assumed the presidency for a second time beyond the demands of the op-ed pages. “This book is a warning not to be taken in by false prophets, fooled by appearances or lazy media framing,” Slobodian tells us on the very last page of the book, reminding us of the true danger of the conservative subject before we close the book for good. “Many supposed disruptors of the status quo are agents less of a backlash against global capitalism than a frontlash within it.”

The emergence of a “scientized neoliberalism” that finds common ground with far-right content within the spirit of capitalism is certainly a powerful reframing of past conversations about such subjects when it comes to the Right, yet it fails to illustrate why such developments are particularly novel—especially in the United States, with its history of conservative movements. After all, race science and eugenics are as old as the Enlightenment itself, and the United States possesses its own history of racial thinking.

If the 1990s are important at all, it’s not because of some inane clock breaking but because the emergence of reality TV would soon swallow the nation whole and make way for one Donald J. Trump by remaking the country and its interests in his image. In many respects, the intellectual profile approach to such conservative figures has in fact helped to normalize their ideas, thus contributing to the very phenomenon under study in Hayek’s Bastards: changing sentiments of common sense. Javier Milei may name his dogs after Rothbard and others, thus reminding us of the notoriety of the conservative subject, but what does that do for us long-term in the study of the right? Do we actually understand it any better?

Times like ours call for sober treatments of historical subjects, conservative and otherwise, beyond the interests of magazine editors. If I have learned anything about the study of the Right over the past decade, it’s that scholars of slavery both in the United States and abroad should do more intellectual profiles of the very worst slave owners. An alternative approach to the Right would be to understand its more mundane manifestations in American public life and how they shape notions of common sense and the political in the everyday. As we saw with the 2024 presidential election, bumper stickers, direct mail marketing campaigns, and social media advertising told us much more about the state of American conservatism and how people were actually thinking than could intellectual genealogies of the radical Right’s more obscure thinkers. As Stuart Hall argued years ago, theory must elucidate its subjects as best as it can without concern for the academic or intellectual reputation of its author. The sooner we stop intellectually profiling the Right and its myriad complexities, the better.