Late Neoliberalism. Interview with Quinn Slobodian – 1 February 2025

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When Donald Trump won the presidential election for the first time, the initial shock, among liberals and progressives, soon gave way to two kinds of interpretations.

For some, the real estate tycoon owed his victory to a misdirected rejection of the neoliberal world order. Billionaire though he was, Donald Trump had managed to galvanize the “losers” of globalization by promising them to bring back industrial jobs, to deport undocumented migrants and to humble arrogant cultural elites. Conversely, the second interpretation emphasized the continuities between the new administration and its predecessors. For all the populist posturing, the argument went, regressive taxes and financial deregulation were more than ever at the top of the agenda. The much-trumpeted radical change, therefore, amounted to little more than a facelift for a capitalist system still reeling from the 2008 crisis.

While unconvinced by the “end of neoliberalism” thesis, the Canadian historian Quinn Slobodian did not believe that the novelty of Trumpism should be underestimated. Hence the relentless attention that his work has henceforth paid to the mutations of neoliberalism eventually leading to Trump’s second coming. For Slobodian, the term neoliberal is not the name of an economic doctrine professing that money, goods and labor should move freely. Instead, he sees it as the changing expression of an ongoing concern: that of protecting the accumulation and profitability of capital from the threats posed by popular sovereignty and democratic oversight.

In the wake of the Great Depression, Slobodian explains, early neoliberal thinkers were mostly alarmed by totalitarianism, whether Nazi or communist. Then, in the postwar era, their worries shifted toward the “creeping socialism” that they associated both with Keynesian economic policies in the West and with the decolonization of the Global South. Their purpose, however, was not to turn back the clock to pre-1914 laisser-faire. Instead, the intellectuals depicted in Slobodian’s book Globalists sought to redeploy state intervention and international legislation in order to shield market mechanisms from social demands for equality.

Until the end of the Cold War, neoliberal intellectuals remained fairly confident about the possibility of disciplining democratic regimes. Paradoxically, however, the fall of the Soviet Empire found them disenchanted but also in the grips of new ambitions. Now convinced that democracy, even duly curtailed, is incompatible with the exercise of freedom as they conceive it, some of them, generally described as libertarians, have been looking for more radical solutions.

A first cohort, whose adventures are recounted in Slobodian’s book Crack Up Capitalism, stake the advent of unbridled capitalism on the proliferation of so-called “free zones”. Whether constituted as sovereign city-states or inserted into the territory of existing nation-states, what distinguishes these enclaves is that they operate without any form of democratic oversight.

As for the second cohort, the protagonists of Hayek’s Bastards, Slobodian’s most recent book, their vision of a society impervious to egalitarian demands is predicated on the rehabilitation of long discredited perspectives on money, intelligence and race. Until recently, the views championed by these goldbugs, IQ enthusiasts and so-called “race realists” were confined to the shadiest margins of the academic world. Today, however, they occupy the hearts and minds of the people at the helm of the world’s greatest power. This is why we found it so important to interview Quinn Slobodian at this juncture, to help us shed light on the intellectual genealogy of Trumpism.

Late Neoliberalism. Interview with Quinn Slobodian – 1 February 2025

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