Democracy on the Defensive

Before he became a recognized historian and a Guggenheim Fellow, Quinn Slobodian BA ’00 was a 17-year-old Canadian arriving at Lewis & Clark with a full scholarship and a deep curiosity about the world. “The liberal arts model at Lewis & Clark was immediately attractive to me,” he says. “It seemed kind of magical—this hilltop campus, this close-knit community of thinkers.”

Raised in Canada, southern Africa, and the South Pacific, Slobodian grew up with a global outlook shaped by his Baha’i upbringing and his parents’ humanitarian work. At Lewis & Clark, he majored in history—initially focused on East Asia—and found an early mentor in Professor Andrew Bernstein, who introduced him to environmental history, “the idea that the past could be populated with all of these other unexpected characters, human and nonhuman.” He also worked at the campus radio station, wrote for the school newspaper, and even found time to play pickup soccer on lower campus.

Now a professor of international history at Boston University, Slobodian is known for his work on neoliberalism, globalization, and the new frontiers of political power. His writing connects historical ideas to today’s biggest challenges—from billionaire-led governance to the fraying relationship between markets and democracy. In this conversation, he reflects on the deeper forces shaping our political and economic world—and the social responsibility scholars have to help interpret it.

Tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel (in)famously said, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” What do you make of that?

I think it’s worth seeing Thiel as a stand-in for the Silicon Valley intellectual class and the special role that Big Tech has played in our politics for the last 20 years. Essentially, he was saying, “Hey, we’re being told that we’re like gods, so why are we being constrained by these puny mortals? Why should we need to worry about regulations or taxes or laws?”

Then, when Donald Trump was elected in 2016, Thiel realized that if democracy worked in the precise way that he wanted it to, then he could live with it. And in this last election, the highest level of the Silicon Valley class agreed with him.

I think Thiel was definitely making a provocative statement. However, I’m not sure it’s a sign that democracy, as a principle, is in secular decline, or even that some people on the right won’t be happy to live with democracy as long as it’s going their way. I think that it is, though, a way of thinking about human progress that marks the advance of civilization by ways other than progress toward an ever-more-pure form of democracy. There are new yardsticks for measuring human development and progress, and they have more to do with growth rates, GDP, and stock market capitalization rather than any abstract ideals about universal representation or participation, let alone human rights.

In your book Crack-Up Capitalism, you explore the global rise of special enterprise zones, charter cities, and privatized jurisdictions—places where laws are suspended or rewritten to attract capital. Are these “exit” strategies just fringe experiments?

The master thesis of Crack-Up Capitalism is that we shouldn’t just think about global politics as working in two registers, either at the scale of the world or the scale of the nation. After the election of Trump, the victory of the Brexit campaign, and the rise of the far right, I think there was a tendency to say that these were examples of the pendulum swinging back from globalization to nationalism. That’s clearly true in some ways. But I think if you look more closely at certain forms of far-right politics, you’ll find they tend to be interested not just in strengthening the nation or increasing national autonomy, but also in pursuing all kinds of schemes for secession—within the nation or from the nation. Entities like special economic zones or export processing zones are attempts to create forms of geographies within nations that are freed from normal taxation, laws, or labor oversight. They’re being used by high-profile members of the far right, like Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Giorgia Meloni in Italy. In the U.S., they’re promoted as opportunity zones or freedom cities.

How do these strategies erode democracy?

The U.S. right is very interested in what one activist called “soft secession”—ideas like taking your children out of public schools, evading taxes, changing states according to your political preference, and creating a media silo that doesn’t interact with the rest of society. As a result, you end up shedding many of the obligations that used to be associated with national membership or citizenship.

It’s not just about billionaires creating their own bunkers in New Zealand or planning to colonize Mars, although those are interesting symptoms of the problem. It’s more about how these practices create what one scholar called an “underthrow” rather than an “overthrow.” It’s the idea that you can corrode a social state, a redistributive state, a regulatory state by simply ignoring the rules or underfunding the government such that it can’t function as it once did. We see this in the mass firings of bureaucrats and experts, eliminating departments and agencies, changing laws so that states can effectively skirt civil rights legislation, and so on.

This is the bread and butter of the American conservative movement now. It’s not just a minority elite that’s undertaking these acts of crack-up or internal secession. I think it’s happening at scale in the current administration.

From the New Deal to the Reagan era to now, Americans have debated how big or small government should be. Today, we’re seeing dramatic cuts to federal programs. As a historian, what’s your take?

Murray Rothbard, a leading figure in the last century’s libertarian movement, said he wanted to “repeal the 20th century.” What he meant by that was first of all, income tax, and second of all, the Federal Reserve System. These two things—plus the proliferation of government agencies—have only existed for a bit over a century. Much of what’s called the administrative state is actually pretty recent. So the idea that you could deconstruct that administrative state and thus restore more self-rule to states and smaller communities is something that has definitely animated the conservative movement for some time. And I would say right now, they’re advancing on that goal more quickly than they have in decades.

But what you get afterwards is the real question, right? I think the peculiar thing about the current government is that there’s a combination of decentralization of some matters back to the states and then a real focus on centralizing power in other areas, especially immigration control. It’s working on two different scales. I think it’s notable that often the people who speak in the language of small government are nonetheless very happy to increase funding for military ends and for border measures, even if there doesn’t seem to be much connection between people’s quality of life and those large central expenditures.

You’re writing a new book with Ben Tarnoff about Elon Musk (Muskism). Why did you choose him as a subject?

Like many others, I spent a long time trying to ignore Elon Musk, but it became harder to do so when he was staging a quasi-authorized mission against the federal government. The way in which he’s gone from this hero of the energy transition to a very powerful actor within the global far right is a historical puzzle that’s hard to resist because it raises a lot of questions: How is history made? Is it made by powerful people, or are those powerful people themselves, in certain ways, agents of deeper structural forces? He’s kind of an irresistible subject for the question of how history is made.

Why did people who were primarily interested in economic freedom end up making alliances with those interested in racial purity or national essence?”

We’ve undertaken the book to depersonalize the question of Musk and instead ask what kind of political economy, what kind of belief system is he operating by—even without realizing it—and who might be interested in emulating such a system? If we’re so critical of all the things he’s done, why has he been rewarded so generously by the world economy? There’s something to be explained there, it seems.

How does Musk represent the current trend toward privatizing state functions, from defense to space exploration?

Musk owns over half of the satellites in orbit. He is the sole launch provider for NASA with no viable replacement. NASA even tried to figure out how they could replace him after he had his fight with Trump and concluded they couldn’t. He’s become structurally intertwined with the very function of government, which gives him a great deal of leverage but not unlimited leverage. I think that question of how private actors are becoming public infrastructure is something really worth keeping an eye on.

Your Guggenheim-funded project is a new book about the history of human nature. How does this project fit in with your past work?

While writing Hayek’s Bastards, I found myself asking, “Why did people who were primarily interested in economic freedom end up making alliances with those interested in racial purity or national essence?” That question led me to explore different theories of human nature and their origins—particularly the idea that humans are bound by animal instincts in some essential way, a view common on the far right. I became interested in when the analogy between humans and animals emerged, what scientific breakthroughs produced that sense, whether political motives were embedded in the research, and how those ideas were received at the time.

As it turns out, I live less than a mile from Divinity Avenue on Harvard’s campus, where many of these developments occurred—from behaviorism to sociobiology to evolutionary psychology. That coincidence inspired my next project, Divinity Avenue, an intellectual history of the human sciences told through the debates and discoveries that took place along that single street.

How do you approach the writing of history in this era?

I try to address that history is a continual struggle between different political ideas. It’s not just that we live in a succession of powerful beliefs that continue to marginalize and oppress the majority of people for the benefit of a minority of the wealthy, though that is often the case. But I also try to be attentive to a counterhistory of potential futures that were defeated or suppressed or that briefly won only to lose again. And that recovery of histories unrealized, I think, is a big part of the way I see my discipline working as well. We shouldn’t only write the histories of the victorious and the powerful but also those of the defeated and the marginalized.

What motivates you to share your scholarship with the general public?

I think part of it is a sense of concern and urgency about what I see as a pretty perilous state of affairs, both nationally and internationally, and then a compulsion to say something about it, and the good fortune that some people are willing to give me a platform or a forum in which to sound off on my opinions. But there’s also another side of it, which I think reflects the erosion of the field of history in terms of its institutional support and its stability. As a tenured professor, I think there’s a kind of social obligation to try to speak to a larger audience.

We live in challenging times. What renews your sense of optimism?

My one-word answer is “cities.” Whenever I’m feeling despair, I actually just walk around the middle of the biggest city I can find and marvel at the kind of harmony of people living in coexistence and improving each other’s lives by the proximity to one another, and often coming up with novel solutions to the never-ending series of problems that humans make for themselves. I still think that urban life is the great laboratory for progressive solutions to collective problems.