Quinn Slobodian, whose new book—Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right—is being debated far and wide, has penned for The Ideas Letter a magisterial romp through metaphor. The natural sciences loom large in the neoliberalism conception, and Slobodian walks us through its myriad permutations, concluding with metaphor’s corrosion at the hands of Silicon Valley’s reactionary accumulation regime.
Minna Salami follows with a twist on the populism debate as it pertains to Africa. Salami deploys Nietzsche to wade through the thicket of power relations in the human mind and how this relates to fundamental questions around decoloniality. Her conclusions may rankle, but they demand a response.
Leif Weatherby then poses uncustomary questions about the AI condition. For Weatherby, we should be laser-focused on controlling data in the face of digital bureaucracy. Instead, we are seduced by the sci-fi dimensions of AI reasoning and thus blind to the main event. He reframes the debate accordingly.
Our curated section commences with the Zambian economist Grieve Chelwa and his effort to reanimate a weather-beaten developmentalist debate. For Chelwa, the concept of emancipation can’t be overlooked; it must be grappled with, as it is intrinsic to any conception of progress. His frame is orthogonal to Salami’s.
Then for our curated content, Jacob Dreyer, in American Affairs, deploys the great Chinese intellectual Wang Hui to make sense of the dialectical dynamic around nationalism and capitalism—as well as Dreyer’s own sustained concern:the dialectical relationship between China and the U.S.
This Ideas Letter concludes with a podcast on empathy—indeed, the war on empathy as it has emerged from the precincts of the tech, fundamentalist, and reactionary right. We ignore this war at our peril.
Our musical selection for Ideas Letter 41 comes from the celebrated oud player Anouar Brahem. His quartet here performs the lead track from his recent record, After the Last Sky (taken from a Darwish poem: “Where Should the Birds Fly, After the Last Sky?”). The music is, in equal terms, magical, haunting, and sublime.
—Leonard Benardo, senior vice president at the Open Society Foundations
Garden, Swarm, Factory
Quinn Slobodian
The Ideas Letter
Essay
Slobodian traces the evolution of political metaphors used to understand and justify different models of economic order—from the self-organizing coral reef and garden of neoliberal thought to the anarchic swarm of early Silicon Valley and finally the authoritarian factory model embraced by today’s tech elites. He argues that contemporary politics has shifted from celebrating spontaneous, decentralized systems to enforcing centralized control through surveillance and algorithmic governance, revealing how metaphors not only shape our economic models but also signal deep transformations in the meaning of freedom and social order.
“The neoliberal imagination, when it looked to nature, saw spontaneous order, unplanned complexity, and the beautiful unpredictability of emergent systems. But it often underestimated the possibility of collapse—not as failure of planning, but as a systemic consequence of the very freedom it prized. … In our current moment, we are no longer just asking how order emerges, but how it vanishes. We are watching the garden trodden underfoot, the swarm militarized, the factory reinstalled as a total system of command. And in this long shift—from polyps to protocols, from butterflies to drones—there is a profound political lesson.”
Africa’s Populist Trap
Minna Salami
The Ideas Letter
Essay
Salami argues that a new wave of anti-Western populism in Africa—which she dubs “populist anti-Western nativism,” or PAWN—disguises authoritarianism and dogma in the language of liberation, simplifying complex postcolonial struggles into binary narratives of us vs. them and feeding on historical wounds rather than healing them. While some leaders like Ibrahim Traoré, the interim president of Burkina Faso, use anti-imperialist rhetoric to gain popular support, their politics often undermine democratic values, pluralism, and the prospects of a future genuinely stripped of colonialism’s legacy.
“PAWN is effective precisely because it mimics the language of decolonization. It sounds like freedom. The people should have a voice. They should resist injustice. They should challenge Western domination. Many hear the messages of PAWN and think this must be what liberation looks like. But listen closely and you’ll notice that what’s being planted isn’t freedom at all. It is nativism. It’s conservatism. It’s authoritarianism that speaks the language of anti-authoritarianism. It’s dogma speaking the language of liberation. And dogma, even when dressed in the language of resistance, always ends in confinement. PAWN gives us an enemy and then calls that gift freedom.”
Our Spreadsheet Overlords
Leif Weatherby
The Ideas Letter
Essay
Weatherby argues that the current discourse around AI, especially the buzz around “artificial general intelligence,” is a distraction from its actual impact: the expansion of bureaucracy through massive data systems powered by Large Language Models, which simulate human intelligence by manipulating language but lack true understanding. Instead of ushering in a new era of machine cognition, AI is enabling actors like Elon Musk to centralize control over vital public systems, with profound consequences for democracy and governance.
“Musk came to Washington promising innovation, but he is delivering a new, unaccountable form of bureaucracy. We cannot afford to continue to believe that anything that “AI” touches will be more efficient, its progress trending toward “smarter” systems. (By this point, we should know that “smart” does not mean “intelligent”; it just means “shiny.”) A general audit is a bureaucratic procedure, one that current AI is too limited to perform well. But so long as we believe the hype, it will sound like a good idea to inject AI models into the databases that contain our health insurance, our Social Security payments, and our tax records.”
Development as Emancipation
Grieve Chelwa
Review of African Political Economy
Essay
Chelwa argues that true development in Africa must be understood as a process of emancipation—liberation from poverty, foreign control, and the legacies of colonial exploitation—rather than mere economic growth. Central to this vision is the Lagos Plan of Action, a 1980 blueprint for self-reliant, industrial-led development rooted in African realities. But the plan was never implemented, after being undermined by externally imposed structural-adjustment programs that only deepened Africa’s dependency and underdevelopment.
Africa “has struggled to attain emancipatory development. This, however, has not been for a lack of trying. Many of the first generation of African leaders articulated a coherent developmentalist ideology that saw total emancipation as the goal. Unfortunately, and unsurprisingly, the scourge of neocolonialism cut short this brief period of promise and today the African continent is more dependent on the rest of the world (especially the West) than it was in the immediate aftermath of political independence. However, not all is lost. The various strategies for economic emancipation developed in the immediate post-independence period such as the Lagos Plan of Action and many national development plans contain the blueprint of what needs to be done if Africa is to attain emancipatory development in the 21st century.”
China’s Past, America’s Present
Revisiting Wang Hui
Jacob Dreyer
American Affairs
Essay
Dreyer explores the Chinese intellectual Wang Hui’s reinterpretation of nationalism and socialism as a response to global capitalism, arguing that the Chinese Communist Party is not simply an authoritarian force but also a unifying vehicle of historical struggle and national identity. By drawing parallels between China’s emergence as a collective entity and the United States’ current fragmentation, the piece suggests that both nations are now engaged in a deeper contest—not just for global dominance, but for the power to define sovereignty, legitimacy, and the very meaning of modernity.
“Today, in both China and the United States, there’s a sense that the moon is rising in the sky and everyone is going to turn into a werewolf no matter what. America and China are both empires with origins in anti-imperialist struggles, both seeking the frontiers of geography and of knowledge, without wandering too far from home. The two will continue to compete over what Stalin called “the commanding heights” of the economy, the most sophisticated technologies, like semiconductors, biotech, AI, and new energy: this encompasses the battle for human capital, and to a lesser extent, the battle for hearts and minds across the Global South and even the Global North. For those who believe capitalism will collapse due to its internal contradictions, what’s happening today in America can feel like a prophecy foretold, but nobody, much least Wang, is counting capitalism out just yet.”
The Roots of Elon Musk’s War On Empathy
Interview with Julia Carrie Wong
Paris Marx
Tech Won’t Save Us
Podcast
The podcast explores how Musk’s recent attacks on empathy reflect a deeper ideological alignment between Christian nationalist and pseudoscientific right-wing currents that portray compassion as a civilizational threat. Wong argues that this anti-empathy discourse is part of a broader project blending religious fundamentalism with reactionary tech-world narratives to justify harmful policies and dehumanizing ideologies under the guise of protecting “Western civilization.”
“It’s really a second step to say not only, ‘Do I not bother?’ but, ‘Those of you who do bother are actually harming civilization as a whole because now you’re actually creating this ideological justification.’ And the work that that’s doing is ultimately towards excusing the suffering of others and saying, ‘Actually, if you are caring about the suffering of others, you’re hurting civilization and hurting people more.’ I mean, it’s just specious. It’s not a good argument. It doesn’t make any sense. But that’s what they’re trying to do. I mean, they’re trying to kind of create this intellectual infrastructure so that people can justify to themselves that, actually, by hurting other people, ‘I’m saving civilization and I’m saving them from harm,’ which is quite a dangerous thing to do.”