The Brink: Right-wing populist voters—and voters generally—likely haven’t heard of the intellectuals you profile. How influential have the latter really been in politics and government globally?

Slobodian: One exception to the obscure rule would be Charles Murray, whose book [The Bell Curve] was an enormous bestseller and is still in print. The mainstreaming of IQ and race discussions that he helped carry out would be an example of direct influence on popular debates, intersecting with rising fascination with neuroscience and the information economy and the Human Genome Project, which was giving strength to a renewed idea that race and its differences were grounded in science and not purely social fantasies and constructions. 

Peter Brimelow is not particularly well known, but he did have a high-profile book in the 1990s called Alien Nation, which, I argue, prefigures a lot of the nativist talking points that MAGA uses, and people like [White House deputy chief of staff] Stephen Miller would adopt as their own. Brimelow also was a pioneer in online agitation by creating an early platform for virulent white nationalist, anti-immigrant sentiment. That’s one way to have real-world influence.

When people talked about Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, they might have invoked Friedrich Hayek or Milton Friedman as the ideas men behind the politicians. And in some ways, I think we have new sources now for ideas. The people I was profiling in the book are ones who tried to combine a faith in free markets and competition through a capitalist system with a renewed interest in hardwired human nature and racial difference.

The Brink: Donald Trump isn’t libertarian, or really “populist,” but he seems to act more on his instincts than anything else. How does he fit in this movement?

Slobodian: One of the conclusions of the people in my book was that the death of socialism was prematurely declared. They needed to find allies against this transformed threat. The people that I’m describing found Trump-like figures as useful for their cause—in the same way that, for example, in the first Trump administration, the tax reform in 2017 was written by libertarian think-tankers who didn’t share Trump’s love for tariffs, but saw that he could be useful for their ends. They’re not just coming up with their ideas about human nature for the libraries or for the seminar room; they’re trying to figure out how they can inspire new political formations, new messages to the public that might get them further.

The Brink: How do you explain Trump’s success last year with voters of color and with those whose native countries he has sometimes demeaned?

Slobodian: Scholars of populism separate out the so-called supply side and demand side. The demand side is the question: why do people vote for certain figures? There are many answers. The supply side is: what kind of language are they being offered to organize their resentment around? That’s the terrain of ideas and political parties and manifestos, and there’s a dynamic between those that’s sometimes hard to unpick. Sometimes people are supporting political actors for reasons that are inconsistent with the internal political ideology of the party or movement themselves. Trying to seek a one-to-one relationship is often a fool’s errand. I wouldn’t understand a vote by a person of color for Trump as an endorsement of all aspects of the American right in the last 30 years, because then that would be quite confusing. 

But there are parts that do come into focus. There is a materialist reading of the last several elections in the United States that I find pretty convincing. People experienced an environment of low interest rates and high rates of growth under Trump I—partially based on policies of his predecessor. When COVID hit, inflation kicked in, interest rates rose, and people got dissatisfied with the economy. They voted in Biden. When Biden had to deal with the long tail of inflation, it was impossible to shake the idea that it was his fault, that the economy was not doing well and people couldn’t pay for mortgages anymore. So they swing the other way. 

And yes, there’s been wage stagnation in this country for 40 years. Yes, there’s been a loss of manufacturing jobs through automation and outsourcing. And those kinds of grievances, which were very regionally focused, have been long ignored by both parties. The fact that someone came in as an immigrant themselves does not mean they will be sympathetic to the next person coming through the door, because if there’s a sense of scarcity and general secular decline, then people are worried about protecting whatever edge they have, and they can be just as hostile toward future competition in the form of the next immigrant.

The Brink: What research did you do to write the book?

Slobodian: The main archive I used was at the Hoover Institution [at Stanford University]. They have the papers of the Mont Pelerin Society, this gathering of [pro–limited government] intellectuals from the 1940s up to the [present]. And then a lot of it was watching YouTube talks and using the Wayback Machine for websites from the ’90s, because some of these groups I was studying have gone defunct or some of the alt-right stuff got deplatformed.

The Brink: How serious a threat to democracy are Hayek’s bastards, short- and long-term? What can pro-democracy citizens and leaders do to counter them?

Slobodian: The point of this book, and of a lot that I write, is not necessarily to provide the best diagnosis of the present as such, but to take on lazy generalizations or pieties about the state of politics. Since 2016, we’re seeing more of a frontlash than a backlash against capitalism, in that a lot of the far-right parties are themselves deepening these dynamics of intergroup competition and hyper-individualism, rather than softening them or trying to decommodify everyday life.

As far as democracy, one of the through lines in my work is that people focused on economic freedom as the primary goal of politics tend to be willing to subordinate political freedom to that goal. It can lead to law that limits the amount of sovereignty that nations have over their own trade policy or environmental policies. But it can also lead to the creation of forms of government that are anti-majoritarian or counter-majoritarian, that involve so many constraints that people can’t actually realize their popular will.