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Neoliberals should have seen the end of the Cold War as a total victory—but they didn’t. Instead, they saw the chameleon of communism changing colors from red to green. The poison of civil rights, feminism, and environmentalism ran through the veins of the body politic and they needed an antidote.

To defy demands for equality, many neoliberals turned to nature. Race, intelligence, territory, and precious metal would be bulwarks against progressive politics. Reading and misreading the writings of their sages, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, they articulated a philosophy of three hards—hardwired human nature, hard borders, and hard money—and forged the alliances with racial psychologists, neoconfederates, ethnonationalists, and goldbugs that would become known as the alt-right.

Following Hayek’s bastards from Murray Rothbard to Charles Murray to Javier Milei, we find that key strains of the Far Right emerged within the neoliberal intellectual movement not against it. What has been reported as an ideological backlash against neoliberal globalization in recent years is often more of a frontlash. This history of ideas shows us that the reported clash of opposites is more like a family feud.

Quinn Slobodian teaches international history at Boston University. His books include Globalists (2018), Crack-Up Capitalism (2023), and Hayek’s Bastards (2025). The last won the National Book Critics Circle award for criticism. With Ben Tarnoff, he published Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed in 2026. He has written for The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Financial Times, Spike, and others. A Guggenheim Fellow for 2025–2026, he has also been a fellow at Chatham House, Harvard, and FU Berlin.