The Oh, Hello and

welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Henwood.

As is traditional, as we used to say in the party of the right,

two guests today.

Quinn Slobodian continues his exploration of the history, theory, and practice of neoliberalism with a look at an underappreciated contributor to the movement, the white supremacist Peter Brimmolo.

And Derek Seidman looks at the ruling class of Alabama, which is passionately fighting the UAW's effort to organize auto plants in this state.

Much of the analysis of neoliberalism is an intellectual formation and a political movement has focused on high-profile economists, mostly

university-based like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. Hayek was the force behind the

Montpellar in society, known to Connoisseurs as the MPS, which held its founding conference at the base of that Swiss mountain in 1947.

It continues today, headquartered in a considerably less romantic setting, Lubbock, Texas, gathering together economists, historians,

philosophers, journalists, and business leaders to pursue the society's goal of insulating

markets and capitalists from what they see as maligned political interference, that is anything that looks

like socialism or social democracy. They are never so naive as to believe that markets are

spontaneous natural formations, they have to be created and nurtured through political means.

One of the leading contemporary writers on this topic is the historian Quinn Slobodian, a professor

of international history at Boston University who's becoming a frequent behind the news guest.

His book Globalists, The End of Empire in the Birth of Neoliberalism, published in 2018 by

Harvard University Press, is an illuminating intellectual and organizational history of the doctrine.

His most recent book, Crack Up Capitalism, Market Radicals and The Dream of a World Without Democracy,

just out in paperback from Metropolitan, is a chronicle of the attempts by free marketeers

to carve out safe spaces for a pure capitalism

in what they see as a hostile world,

...