Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right

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 [the] 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. (Apr.)