The story everyone’s heard about the Cold War is that capitalism won out. The fall of the Berlin Wall, it goes, extinguished the last embers of communism, while the flames of neoliberalism blazed on.
But that’s not the story that all neoliberals actually believed, according to Quinn Slobodian, the author of Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right, a rousing relitigation of the 1990s’ ideological scorecard. In it, the Boston University history professor reveals that some of the most fervent neoliberals, like Charles Murray, Murray Rothbard, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, worried that the red enemy had not, in fact, vanished. Rather, it shape-shifted—into feminism, environmentalism, and civil rights. To these men, Slobododian writes, “communism was a chameleon.”
Desperate for a new intellectual underpinning, neoliberals and libertarians sought refuge in the work of economist Friedrich Hayek, who famously argued in his 1944 polemic The Road to Serfdom that government intervention in markets is antithetical to individual freedom. But Murray, Rothbard, Hoppe, and others fatally twisted Hayek’s message, claims Slobodian, and took it so far as to argue that only Western countries are intellectually and culturally primed for capitalism.
The politics of this cohort, which he dubs the “new fusionists,” was rooted in “three hards,” argues Slobodian: “Hardwired human nature, hard borders, and hard money.” They forged sordid alliances with biologists, evolutionary psychologists, and ethnonationalists, spouting pseudoscience about the link between race and IQ, a topic famously repopularized in the 1994 best-seller The Bell Curve, coauthored by Murray and psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein. They railed against lax immigration policies on the premise that they led to cultural decay. But perhaps most strangely, they ballyhooed the value of gold as a backstop against a looming economic cataclysm caused by incompetency in Washington. (Talk about apropos.)
In an interview with Vanity Fair, which has been edited for length and clarity, Slobodian analyzes Donald Trump’s radical agenda through this new prism of neoliberalism. He also unpacks the distressing parallels between goldbugs and crypto bros, and details why the tech set has suddenly taken up with the MAGA right. Silicon Valley’s “willingness to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Donald Trump,” he says, is indicative “of the embrace of an ideology that pretty frankly ranks human capacity along the spectrum of intelligence and IQ.”
Vanity Fair: Tell me what inspired you to report on “new fusionism,” as you call it, and the sudden racial or biological turn that political theorists made to fight back against a wave of progressivism after the Cold War?
Quinn Slobodian: It seemed that the real competitor to capitalism was defeated in the 1990s. So I was curious how the neoliberals understood their mission at that point. And looking into it, I was startled to see that they had this belief that they had actually not really won—that socialism was dead, but “leviathan” lived on, as they usually framed it. The social state was still quite large. You still had all kinds of entitlement programs. And to make matters worse, you also had the expansion of what they saw as a toxic wave of political correctness and affirmative action and feminist demands, as well as, perhaps most worryingly, environmental demands—all of which were presenting new challenges to capitalism and economic freedom.
So it was pretty quickly clear that a lot of the things that the right refers to as “cultural Marxism” or “gender ideology” and, more recently, “wokeness,” were labels that they were using to describe the new guises that socialism was taking. This led to some pretty wild alliances that I noticed first in something called the Property and Freedom Society, which was created by the anarchocapitalist Hans-Hermann Hoppe as a way to organize the diverse opponents of a new nefarious leftist ideology. At his gatherings, you’d get financial advisers talking to Afrikaner nationalists talking to revisionist historians of the Second World War talking to race scientists and people who end up appearing in the book—like Richard Spencer, who became the face of the alt-right in 2016 and ’17; and Peter Brimelow, who was the face of nativism already in the 1990s and increasingly in the 2010s as well. So it was at the time when everyone was trying to get their head around the alt-right in 2016 and ’17—and was shocked by the effects of the Charlottesville protests—that I started to cobble together this genealogy of people who were primarily interested in economic freedom (or libertarians) making alliances with people who had very different priorities, including racial purity, monetary stability, the removal of the historical stain of Nazism from German memory and so on.
