Hayek's Bastards
Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right
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Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
How neoliberals turned to nature to defend inequality after the end of the Cold War
Neoliberals should have seen the end of the Cold War as a total victory—but they didn’t. Instead, they saw the chameleon of communism changing colors from red to green. The poison of civil rights, feminism, and environmentalism ran through the veins of the body politic and they needed an antidote.
To defy demands for equality, many neoliberals turned to nature. Race, intelligence, territory, and precious metal would be bulwarks against progressive politics. Reading and misreading the writings of their sages, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, they articulated a philosophy of three hards—hardwired human nature, hard borders, and hard money—and forged the alliances with racial psychologists, neoconfederates, ethnonationalists, and goldbugs that would become known as the alt-right.
Following Hayek’s bastards from Murray Rothbard to Charles Murray to Javier Milei, we find that key strains of the Far Right emerged within the neoliberal intellectual movement not against it. What has been reported as an ideological backlash against neoliberal globalization in recent years is often more of a frontlash. This history of ideas shows us that the reported clash of opposites is more like a family feud.
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Despite "lazy media framing" that presents Trump-era populism as a backlash against capitalism, many of the movement's "supposed disruptors of the status quo" are in fact agents of a new capitalist vanguard, according to this incisive account. Historian Slobodian (Crack-Up Capitalism) explores a new right-wing capitalism that emerged around the turn of the millennium—a "fusion" of populism and free market ideology undergirded by "appeals to nature" wherein neoliberal policies are defended "through arguments borrowed from cognitive, behavioral and evolutionary psychology." This thinking developed in the 1990s as the "solution to problem" that "communism was dead" but "public spending continued to expand." Eager to stem the flow of funds, conservative thinkers turned to the natural sciences, birthing a new kind of "evolutionary libertarianism" that sought to establish a scientific basis for inequality (and thus for dismantling the welfare state) by reviving long-taboo topics like race science and eugenics, as in Charles Murray's infamous 1994 book The Bell Curve. Such thinking merged with a neoliberal embrace a new kind of "big government" in which the state itself would act to "restrict democracy" in order to "save capitalism," and with destabilizing calls for a return to the gold standard and, later, a devotion to cryptocurrency. Quinn's robust analysis snaps many disparate lines of questioning into place. It's a bravura performance of intellectual inquiry.
