Editor Jon Skolnik interviews Quinn Slobodian for Vanity Fair. The two discuss Slobodian’s new book, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right. Read the interview here. Purchase Hayek’s Bastards here. An excerpt appears below:

“Vanity Fair: Tell me what inspired you to report on “new fusionism,” as you call it, and the sudden racial or biological turn that political theorists made to fight back against a wave of progressivism after the Cold War?

Quinn Slobodian: It seemed that the real competitor to capitalism was defeated in the 1990s. So I was curious how the neoliberals understood their mission at that point. And looking into it, I was startled to see that they had this belief that they had actually not really won—that socialism was dead, but “leviathan” lived on, as they usually framed it. The social state was still quite large. You still had all kinds of entitlement programs. And to make matters worse, you also had the expansion of what they saw as a toxic wave of political correctness and affirmative action and feminist demands, as well as, perhaps most worryingly, environmental demands—all of which were presenting new challenges to capitalism and economic freedom.

So it was pretty quickly clear that a lot of the things that the right refers to as “cultural Marxism” or “gender ideology” and, more recently, “wokeness,” were labels that they were using to describe the new guises that socialism was taking. This led to some pretty wild alliances that I noticed first in something called the Property and Freedom Society, which was created by the anarchocapitalist Hans-Hermann Hoppe as a way to organize the diverse opponents of a new nefarious leftist ideology. At his gatherings, you’d get financial advisers talking to Afrikaner nationalists talking to revisionist historians of the Second World War talking to race scientists and people who end up appearing in the book—like Richard Spencer, who became the face of the alt-right in 2016 and ’17; and Peter Brimelow, who was the face of nativism already in the 1990s and increasingly in the 2010s as well. So it was at the time when everyone was trying to get their head around the alt-right in 2016 and ’17—and was shocked by the effects of the Charlottesville protests—that I started to cobble together this genealogy of people who were primarily interested in economic freedom (or libertarians) making alliances with people who had very different priorities, including racial purity, monetary stability, the removal of the historical stain of Nazism from German memory and so on.”