In 2017, Duke historian Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains argued that the libertarian movement had helped make overt racism in American politics mainstream and undermined liberal democracy. Later that year, the paleolibertarian Ludwig von Mises Institute held a student seminar that preached the importance of “blood and soil and God and nation.” A few weeks after that, white nationalists marched and clashed with antifascist counterprotesters at the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

This seemed like a dream environment for MacLean’s book, but she missed the real story. Bizarrely, MacLean focused on Nobel laureate James Buchanan.¹ The far better target would have been “Mr. Libertarian” and co-founder of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Murray Rothbard. Buchanan was an academic libertarian, while Rothbard spent his later career arguing that libertarianism should ally with the racist, nativist populism of the nationalist right.

MacLean’s mistake prompted much-needed debunking.² Unfortunately, for many libertarians, that’s also where their response ended. The historian Quinn Slobodian takes up MacLean’s task (from a different angle) in his 2025 book, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right. This book gives libertarians another chance for the broader self-examination too many have spent decades avoiding.

Slobodian explains how connections between (some) libertarians and (some of) the alt-right formed, deepened, and helped bring about the political moment where libertarians would preach blood-and-soil and white nationalists would march in greater numbers again—foreshadowing the blatant racism we see on so much of the American right today. Hayek’s Bastards is the most serious attempt yet to reckon with that history from outside institutions and argumentative spaces that adherents call (or at least called) “the libertarian movement.”

Slobodian doesn’t—he probably can’t—tell the whole story. He is an ideological outsider. An outsider’s perspective means Hayek’s Bastards is inherently limited. (This is what creates an opening for libertarians.) Despite its limitations, it demonstrates that libertarians had the intellectual tools to resist the far right’s encroachment but, on the main, chose not to use them.

Those familiar with paleolibertarianism—the ideological camp most entangled with far-right extremists—may wonder why the book isn’t called Rothbard’s Bastards. Rothbard’s work to fuse anti-government libertarianism and Austrian economics with racist and reactionary politics seems an obvious starting point. (His 1992 essay “Right-Wing Populism: A Manifesto for the Paleo Movement” began with an ode to David Duke’s failed gubernatorial campaign.) But it’s the bastardization of Hayek and his thought that earns the book its title. Slobodian has said that he suspects that Hayekians see little benefit today to allying with the political right.

This book does not argue that libertarians—whom Slobodian considers a faction of “neoliberals”—were always destined to end up in the alt-right. Slobodian chronicles only one side of what he calls a “civil war” within libertarianism. He is not primarily concerned with the overtly political project pursued by Rothbard, but a more subtle project to provide its intellectual backing.

Slobodian’s backstory goes like this: once the Berlin Wall fell, the old fusionist coalition—previously held together by opposition to communism—reoriented against mainstream left-wing politics. Slobodian demonstrates that illiberal actors and arguments found an audience with parts of the fusionist coalition. He argues that these illiberal voices invoked classical liberal rhetoric and heroes like F.A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises to brand reactionary arguments about race, IQ, immigration, and gold as libertarian-enough to gain a toehold with more mainstream fusionist activists and organizations. 

Rather than indict the intellectual giants of libertarianism that the far right co-opted, Slobodian shows that those giants left behind the ammunition with which the libertarians who followed could have defended their intellectual institutions to short-circuit the elevation of deeply illiberal ideas.

Much has been made of what really were misleading, out-of-context Mises quotes in Slobodian’s earlier work, and with good reason. But here, a critic of Mises and Hayek comes to their defence. That Slobodian defends figures he has been so eager to criticize should make skeptical libertarian readers take notice.

Following a Mises quote on race science used by the far right, Slobodian writes that Mises’s failure to anticipate and head off these misinterpretations

In other words, to interpret Mises’s words as proof that he always supported racism would be reading in bad faith. Whatever Slobodian wrote in earlier books, he is not condemning Mises as irredeemable here. Slobodian also insists that references to Hayek’s work by the far right are “barely discernible.” (20)

Slobodian shows that several libertarian luminaries provided arguments that undermine racist co-opting. For example, Hayek argued that social and biological evolution operate through fundamentally different mechanisms,³ explicitly distancing himself from social Darwinism. For his part, Mises took a hard stand against eugenics,⁴ objected to Nazi racial science, and handily refuted⁵ the claim that people naturally segregate by race. Institute for Humane Studies founder F.A. “Baldy” Harper, an American contemporary whose project, the Institute for Humane Studies, continues to distribute works of Hayek, Mises, and other liberal thinkers (disclosure: I am a contributing fellow at a project housed with the IHS), flatly rejected the idea that race and heredity had explanatory power in social science.⁶

Though we might wish that all of these thinkers had risen more decisively above their time in some important respects, they nevertheless left legacies that could have been—should have been—emphasized as bulwarks against their co-opting by illiberal voices.

Slobodian also acknowledges that some strains of libertarian thought proved inhospitable to race realism. “Market process” Austrian economists, especially those working with and under Don Lavoie, argued that free markets need no “protection” from free societies (more on that argument later). In response, paleolibertarians tried to write the market process crew out of libertarianism entirely. Still other libertarians voiced criticisms of the paleo turn—this was a distinct fault line in the movement for decades—but there was never a clean break. 

Anthony J. Evans is correct that Slobodian doesn’t reveal deep ties between academic or intellectual libertarianism and the far right. And Matt Zwolinski is right that the experience of libertarian liberals is completely passed over in Slobodian’s story. Readers could be forgiven for walking away thinking every libertarian was reading VDARE.⁷ That’s simply inaccurate.

And yet. It would also be wrong to say no libertarian intellectuals take “race realists” and their fellow travellers seriously, or that these less-savoury elements didn’t influence libertarianism. There are significant libertarian communities in which League of the South founding member Tom Woods and racist anarcho-monarchist Hans-Hermann Hoppe, who champion Rothbard’s paleo legacy, are thought leaders. Likewise for fellow travelers like Lew Rockwell and Jeff Deist. As the rise of the global illiberal right became undeniable around 2016, these were all examples of a type Hayek called—not necessarily as a compliment—the “intellectuals” who shape society by popularizing and promoting more academic or otherwise complicated arguments. 

Many libertarians chose to refer to Rothbard's earlier work while waving away his paleo legacy. They never engaged thinkers like Hoppe, Woods, Rockwell, or Deist. But many who did follow paleo intellectuals became popular leaders within the libertarian movement. At the same time, those critical of the paleo movement too often rolled their eyes, lamenting efforts to delegitimize allegedly fringe figures as “infighting” or a waste of time. This conflict shaped which arguments the movement developed and which it dropped.

For most of my life in libertarianism, libertarians couldn't even say that immigration restrictions are straightforwardly illiberal—a "both sides" issue, to be analyzed only in the abstract and not according to its realistic implications. Refusing to take a stand on a massive market intervention—the area in which fusionist libertarians were supposed not to have to compromise—is symptomatic of an implicit concession that anti-immigration arguments like Hoppe’s were not beyond the pale.

Likewise, libertarian activists were not armed to debunk Hoppe’s Democracy: The God That Failed. But even liberal libertarians were taught arguments about why democracy fails, with very few defences of democracy on libertarian terms available until after the rise of the alt-right was underway.⁸ On so many issues, many libertarians were unprepared for an illiberal assault from their right flank.

These were all parts of the story about how the meaning of “libertarian” slipped away from its liberal adherents until, finally, racists captured the brand.⁹

Slobodian frames his narrative around “three hards” on which libertarian-conservative fusionists and the far right found common ground: hardwired biology, hard borders, and hard money. Slobodian eventually gets in his own way with this neatly constructed narrative, but the early sections are valuable.

Slobodian starts with what he calls a “new fusionism” based around racism, anti-immigration, and hard currency. But classic fusionism—the original coalition of libertarians, traditionalists, and Cold War hawks that shaped Reagan-era conservatism—deserves its own reckoning first. 

A libertarian movement in an alliance with proponents of the Southern Strategy or the anti-Civil Rights and pro-segregation National Review¹⁰ couldn’t get too worked up about its members entertaining race science. Understanding which contradictions fusionism required its members to set aside helps explain how people who were not inherently sympathetic to racism were primed to accept it anyway, at least into polite conversation. Scientific racism required remarkably (depressingly) little effort to make it into respectable libertarian circles.

Anti-government and anti-communist rhetoric created plausible deniability. Affinity for taboo truths primed the ground. Toss in occasional sympathy for biological determinism in fusionist spaces. Platforms and funding became available for ideas—defending racial hierarchies, denying political equality—that should have horrified liberals in the fusionist coalition as much as communism did. To prevent the association that resulted, more libertarians should have, from the start, expressed themselves as liberals, concerned with both liberty and equality, first and foremost.¹¹

Returning to Slobodian’s story: His section on hardwired biology in the new fusionism is the story of the sanitization and normalization of scientific racism. It is valuable for those trying to understand how once-fringe ideas from the far right became so mainstream.

It’s useful to know some context that Slobodian doesn’t provide if we want to understand how non-racist people got wrapped up in all this. The liberal hope behind establishing scientific proof of human diversity was to settle arguments about whether people could be moulded and perfected (by secret police or eugenicists) or rendered interchangeable (by economic central planners). If each person is fundamentally unique, the argument goes, then such illiberal attempts at top-down control are doomed to fail.

While a liberal who wants to insist on political individualism might like the idea of biologically proven differences as something to point to when arguing against collectivism, that’s not the only way such a conclusion can be used politically. If relevant differences between groups of people are biological rather than the product of environmental, social, and economic factors, then no amount of education, policy, or institutional design can change the underlying order. This would be a convenient finding for those looking to oppose government welfare programs, whatever their motivation. 

Slobodian reports on how Baldy Harper took the liberal hope of bolstering their arguments with biological science seriously, organizing conferences on “human differentiation” to show that coercive homogenization was doomed to fail. Enter, unfortunately, Murray Rothbard. 

At the second conference on human differentiation, Rothbard didn’t argue that egalitarianism was a concept that could be misapplied. He argued it was a dangerous fantasy: a “revolt against nature.” Here was the basis for using biology not as a political tool to protect individuals, but to establish that hierarchy was real, natural, and therefore legitimate.

From there, for thinkers like Rothbard, the logic ran one way: if hierarchies are natural, then the most important question isn’t how to protect people from coercive sorting into what planners deem their “appropriate” places in society. The most important question is how to ensure the sorting happens correctly. Advocates of hard biology claim that attempts to change natural orders are, at best, simply wasted. They sometimes argue further that any concerted drive to change natural hierarchies will dogmatically and dangerously¹² funnel resources to a larger and larger state.

“Egalitarianism” is still a word that makes classical liberals squirm. They fear (in more cynical cases, they claim for effect) that it implies the forced, violent pursuit of equality that led to communist gulags and famines, or fascist imposition of homogeneity through programs like ethnic cleansing. Through actions like this, and in the absence of coalition members pushing back, classical liberals and libertarians became allergic to “egalitarianism” in a way that they did not to arguments about predestined biological inferiority. 

Slobodian lays out a case that the new fusionists ran genetics, IQ data analysis, and evolutionary psychology through the methods of economic and policy analysis. The result was hybrid research areas that shed the standards of the fields they borrowed from while projecting an air of rigour. 

The Bell Curve, by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, appears throughout Slobodian’s narrative as an illustration of this approach. The book didn’t foreground race, but built its argument on junk IQ data from racist academics like Richard Lynn and J. Philippe Rushton. And, whatever Murray claimed about his intentions, he admitted in 1991 that he had already abandoned his belief that outcomes were driven by systemic incentives rather than innate biology, before the book was even published.¹³

With the foothold established by such hybrid research fields, and arguments like Murray’s in particular, it became easier to blur arguments about the relevance of IQ with arguments about physical place, history, and “culture”. For example, one argument is that only cultures that emerged among people from cold climates (what colour is their skin?) produce and support the types of norms and institutions that can support free markets. 

Slobodian shows how these claims undergird the “free market” argument for restricting immigration presented in his discussion of hard borders. The argument is that markets need protection from populations of the wrong race, where that argument lands, and the wrong culture, where the race argument isn't acceptable. Free trade in goods and capital, a related argument goes, allows access to world markets without admitting foreigners that would endanger our pro-market politics and institutions. 

As is often the case when they are not pre-empted from doing so, far-right arguments retreated to find cover behind the defence of more acceptable, less illiberal arguments. Because of the incentives facing liberals in the fusionist coalition—their coalition partners, personal relationships with people and organizations, and the funding available—they too often did not pre-empt this strategy. With the global ascendance of the illiberal right, pretenses dropped, and classical liberals were forced to confront who we’d been standing next to. 

In contrast to the value added by the sections on hard biology and hard borders, Slobodian’s story about hard money threatens to undermine the book. While gold bugs provide many connections between the libertarian world and the populist right, Slobodian’s evidence doesn’t suggest the same sort of explanation that he was able to tease out from hard biology and hard borders. The reason is that he’s misidentified the cause. What has happened is that conspiratorial thinkers have fallen in behind the new right. This might be where Slobodian’s harshest critics have a point, and his opposition to neoliberalism gets in his way. 

Monetary economists and economic historians who argue for the benefits of a gold standard have not fallen in with the new fusionism with anywhere near the consistency that researchers who insist on the social importance of group differences in IQ have. Those who believe that global (read: Jewish) elites use currency as a tool for societal control have always been conspiratorial, but support for such thinking has drawn in not only paranoid anti-state libertarians and the antisemitic far right, but also anti-war activists¹⁴ and natural health enthusiasts who once felt at home on the political left.¹⁵

This section also moves the goalposts. Slobodian’s earlier narrative explains how otherwise fringe figures used classical liberalism to hitch themselves to respectable institutions and secure resources and audiences. When he gets to “gold bugs”, the story is not about the ideas world anymore, but the political and fundraising world represented best in some ways by newsletters like the Ron Paul Survival Report. Here, in the realm of political activism, is where Rothbard’s paleolibertarianism had its most straightforward influence. In contrast, there was pushback to the arguments and connections Slobodian documents in his discussion on hard money from the intellectual world he discusses earlier in the book.

Here’s the difference. When it comes to studying biological differences between people, there are illiberal political reasons, liberal political reasons, and reasons of pure biological inquiry that might explain the interest. Racists can use the other reasons as camouflage while pursuing projects that wouldn’t otherwise find support, and this explains how racist ideas can end up in intellectually serious spaces. When it comes to gold bugs arguing that fiat currency is a tool of social control, that’s just one type of conspiratorial thinking among many. But they are all conspiratorial. They do not provide cover for one another. That one strand happens to have libertarian ties is descriptively true, but offers little in the way of explanation for libertarians influencing the overall conspiratorial swing.

Ron Paul’s newsletters were not so coy as the strategies described in earlier sections. The newsletters were openly homophobic, advocated unprovoked violence, and stoked fear of race war.¹⁶ Paul’s influence over the broader movement came not from clever posturing but from his surprising electoral showing in the 2008 and 2012 Republican primaries on a platform of anti-war foreign policy and fiscal restraint. Libertarians of many stripes projected views they hoped Paul’s success represented with voters. 

When Slobodian tries to bring his throughline from the intellectual movement to important political figures on the new right today, this also misses the point. The question is not how we got to today, but how we got to ten years ago, when prominent libertarians preached blood and soil and white nationalist organizations found likely converts in libertarian ranks. It’s no mystery how we got to the politics of 2026 from there. 

Slobodian’s commitment to the “three hards” narrative also leads him to neglect important criticisms of the libertarian movement. Sexism is almost entirely absent from his story, despite the importance of anti-feminism to new fusionism, the New Right, and anti-democratic arguments resting on the “hard biology” of gender. Among libertarian and fusionist organizations, these arguments centred on things like “feminization” undermining the culture required to support free markets. Libertarian spaces were also places that economists could linger creepily on the idea of access to sex from women as a resource, claim that women were freer in the Gilded Age, or argue for societal-level birth rates as a public policy concern. 

Peter Thiel, a self-described libertarian, infamously asserted in 2009 that welfare recipients and voting women make capitalist democracy impossible. Despite initial pushback to Thiel’s piece, libertarian women and queer libertarians spent years watching uncomfortably as “scientific” inquiries into our biologically hardwired compatibility with a free society—similar to those employed by racists—enjoyed polite reception. This story needs to be told, too, not only because of how much more explicit illiberal arguments from biology had become by then.

Libertarians’ focus on debunking Slobodian by proving what he makes explicit—that libertarian heroes made arguments that contradict the far right, that his evidence does not implicate all libertarians—is quixotic and precludes important self-inquiry. All political coalitions contain contradictions: that’s what makes them coalitions. Classical fusionism was pernicious specifically because it stripped the liberalism from classical liberalism by arguing successfully that liberal social disagreements with conservatives are irrelevant to politics. That doesn’t mean everyone involved had to be perniciously illiberal.

Liberalism offered guardrails, and libertarian heroes offered intellectual ammunition. Neither bulwark held in the ecosystem of fusionism, and that matters not only to libertarians whose heroes were hijacked, but to liberals who still can’t name bad faith when they see it, and liberal conservatives who still haven’t reckoned with what has happened to the political right. Intellectual charity is often a virtue, but when facing opponents who see liberalism and its openness as a weakness to be exploited, we can’t be so broad-minded that we make ourselves easy marks. 

Libertarian scholars would do better to address Slobodian’s harder-to-check sources, like speakers and attendance at Mont Pelerin Society meetings and funding and personal connections with respected think tanks. Slobodian often glides between correspondence between a libertarian and a racist to other correspondence between race scientists, implying stronger connections between all parties than he provides evidence for. To the extent that Slobodian is right about infiltration and co-opting of important libertarian institutions, liberals need the whole story. If he’s wrong, he deserves another trip through the wringer.

This story is worth telling by and for those whose political lives were upended by it. Not because classical liberals were doomed from the start, but because they weren’t.

There is something clarifying about that. Doing the work means treating the infiltration of racist ideas into classical liberal spaces not as a debating point to rebut but as an opportunity to diagnose honestly what happened. We should be asking which alliances made that infiltration easier, and be willing to lose them. 

Slobodian can’t do all that for us from the outside. But that’s not a reason to dismiss his book. It’s a reason to finish the work.

I’m indebted to Jonathan Blanks, Jacob Levy, and also to the crew at The UnPopulist for their feedback on drafts. Errors are, of course, mine.

These notes are so extensive because they contain not just context and references that those who aren’t familiar with libertarianism might find useful, but also that an earlier version of me would have wanted when reading this story. For some readers this will have always been obvious. For me, much of it was once a surprise. The intention is not to damn any particular figure, but to look honestly at where we are and how we got here.

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Featured image by David Clode on Unsplash.