In their right mind

Right-wing populism is sweeping the world. A historian examines its origins - and sounds a warning of sorts.

- BY ANNA RANKIN

The past decade has seen right-wing populism surge across the globe. Donald Trump leads a Republican Party refashioned in his image; in Britain, Reform UK is seriously challenging the traditional British political parties; and in Europe, right-wing groups are the ruling or the largest parties in Hungary, Italy, Sweden and elsewhere. Here, NZ First's steady agenda of populist rhetoric has been rewarded in the polls.

Many right-wing populist parties are now seeking to unwind the neoliberal consensus installed by conservative and centrist governments in the last quarter of the 20th century.

It is the intellectual genealogy between modern neoliberalism and the far right that Canadian historian Quinn Slobodian discusses in Hayek's Bastards. His previous two books, Globalists, covering the birth and goals of neoliberalism, and Crack-Up Capitalism, about how capitalist extremists have sought to escape the fetters of democracy, examined themes within the same family of thought.

At the head of the family tree is Friedrich Hayek, the Austrian-born British economist and philosopher who laid out the economic and political underpinnings of libertarian and neoliberal thought in the post-war era through his own writings and the Mont Pelerin Society, which he founded in 1947. Hayek's neoliberalism, the blueprint for Thatcherism, Reaganism and Rogernomics, championed individual liberty, free markets, property rights and limited government. The “bastards” are the successors who adulterated his original vision — in Slobodian’s words, the “mutant strands” of neoliberalism that combined with other forms of reactionary politics in the 1980s and 90s.