The meaning of MAGA’s visa schism

Historian Quinn Slobodian on why neoliberalism won't die, what far-right infighting is really about, and how progressives can build for the future even now

When the American far right erupted into infighting this past week — with white supremacists squaring off against tech oligarchs over H-1B visas and free trade with China — it was tempting to dismiss it all as another day in the office for the leopards-eating-people’s-faces party.

But looking a little deeper, it's about a seeming contradiction at the heart of today’s far-right movements. Are they the inheritors of a conservative tradition that’s about the free movement of capital, and maybe even people? Or are they actually hardcore closed-borders nationalists rebelling against the globalist impulses of neoliberalism?

For historian Quinn Slobodian, it’s both, or at least it’s a distinction without much difference. As he argues in his forthcoming book, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right, when you step back and look at neoliberalism in the broadest terms, it shows no sign of dying out. Rather, Slobodian sees the far-right forces that dominate our politics as inheritors of neoliberalism’s core project: “the ongoing effort to protect capitalism from democracy.”

We talked to Slobodian about how really understanding what’s going on with the far-right demands that we deal with the contradictions in how we’ve defined the concept of freedom, about why supposedly post-neoliberal right-wing movements like MAGA Republicanism as a continuation of libertarian neoliberal movements like Reaganism and the Third Way, and about how progressives can build a real alternative in the years ahead.

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For a long time you’ve been looking at the history of neoliberalism and the reactions against it, and you suggest that rather than neoliberalism ending, as many have argued, that within neoliberalism there’s been the growth of what you call a “bastard” movement that leads directly to the alt-right, to MAGA. How does that explain this seeming incoherence on the American right these days?

It's helpful to just go back to the core tension in the idea of liberalism itself, in the more classical sense. So whether you look at the U.S. Constitution or people like Locke and Rousseau, there's this tension between economic freedom and political freedom.

First, what does it mean to enjoy liberty? Does it mean the ability to choose what kind of life you want to live and what part of the economy you want to engage in, who do you want to trade with? Or does it mean the ability to make collective decisions to transform society in ways that might actually impinge on certain kinds of economic freedom, right? So the tension between basic principles of economic liberty and the way they might clash with the principle of popular self-determination is not new. It's actually quite old. And it was solved for about a century by just not letting poor people vote, right? That was the fix for the tension between economic and political freedom for a long time — just don't give political freedom to people who might transgress certain basic ideas.

So if you limit the idea of citizenship, you can get all kinds of positive effects for the people on the inside?

Exactly. And you can just preserve a certain kind of stability and status quo from decade to decade as long as you can keep down the revolutionary masses. So sometimes we can be aided by thinking about the problem of democracy as more like the question of majoritarianism, which sounds like an overly long and academic word, but actually is a pretty simple idea, a system in which 50 percent plus one can determine entirely the set of laws under which you live.

We don't live in a majoritarian system. In fact, much of what has been done to limit the powers of discovery inherent in democracy is to lock in principles through what you could call counter-majoritarian institutions.

You’re talking about the Electoral College and that kind of thing.

The Electoral College, the Supreme Court; things like the European Union institutions, multilateral trade agreements, and the obligation of countries to rely on the financial markets for the everyday funding of their activities.

So if the oldest traditional form of counter-majoritarianism was just disenfranchisement — not letting large parts of the population vote — the challenge of the 20th century has been how to have universal suffrage while still limiting exactly how much people can change the ground rules of the system. And one of the reasons why I define neoliberalism as the ongoing effort to protect capitalism from democracy, is that it shows how from decade to decade, a project like that might look different.

What made the post-war golden age of capitalism — in particular, the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, in the U.S. and Western Europe — was that the problem of the tension between democracy and capitalism was solved through a kind of redistributive bargain between the wealthier parts of the population and the middle and working class, saying that you will enjoy the fruits of the growing economy through collective bargaining agreements and increased consumer power and progressive taxation and the expansion of the social state. That was how the tension between pure economic freedom and political freedom was solved in the era of social democracy.

But the chaos of politics that we have become so familiar with is a result of the collapse of that particular social bargain and social contract in the last 40 years. You've had a series of wild attempts to solve the problem of the basic tension between economic freedom and political freedom. And something like Trumpism or populism can look wildly different from the more technocratic cosmopolitan capitalism of Bill Clinton. But they do have in common the fact that they're trying to make sure that whatever people do, they don't throw the economic locomotive off of its tracks by asking for too much, or for the wrong things in such a way that capitalism will cease to function. And if you squint and look at a lot of these disruptive, seemingly anti-systemic political movements globally, often they are just wilder and wilder ways to make sure that efforts counter to the smooth functioning of capitalism don't end up in power.

And that's what draws a line from the Third Way to MAGA, even though it seems like we're talking about different sides of the fence?