Hayek’s Heirs

Against the backdrop of the Soviet Union’s recent death, Slobodian stages the 1994 death of Hayek in his first chapter a bit like early scenes in Ellen Raskin’s beloved childhood classic The Westing Game, or Netflix and Gerard Way’s Umbrella Academy: a questionable patriarch has died, and his squabbling potential heirs must fight over his material and political legacies. Philosopher of science Gerard Radnitzky, for instance, argued that private property had foundations in primate genes. Conservative political scientist Kenneth Minogue found himself alarmed by such appeals to nature — why was something natural automatically preferable, and where would this leave religious morality?

The neoliberal diaspora of the 1990s ranged from onetime Ayn Rand devotee and now Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, whose job was to manage the US dollar, to Murray Rothbard, who hoped to abolish the United States and its dollar in order to replace them with a political order of private money, privatized social services, and capitalist rule. With their Soviet enemy dead but the welfare state and government regulation still very much alive, what was the right path forward for neoliberals and libertarians?

One answer, Slobodian argues, was a political formation he calls “new fusionism.” The old fusionism refers to the twentieth-century American conservative alliance formed by Cold War hawks, religious conservatives, and libertarians. Slobodian contrasts this “original fusionism” of “William F. Buckley and the National Review,” which “may have used a language of religion to back up claims about human difference,” with the new version, which “uses the language of science to justify the extension of competitive dynamics ever deeper into social life.” Ironically, Hayekian thought offered both a warning against, and a blueprint for, doing so.

On the one hand, Hayek was a critic of what he called “scientism,” the “uncritical application” of physical sciences’ methods to the very different world of social sciences. In his view, economists needed to abandon hubris for humility and accept that the individual market actor on the ground always knew more than the distant theorist. Neoliberalism was an epistemology, not a policy agenda: we cannot know much of anything about human affairs, so we have to let competition order our society and work out decisions without higher-order intervention. This was a critical part of his arguments for market competition.

Yet Hayek had a habit of grounding his arguments, if not in science, then in the nature it purports to describe. As Slobodian points out via Kenneth Minogue, Hayek did not so much make political arguments about what should be true as descriptive arguments about what he felt was possible. Socialism was not wrong in the sense Christians believe sin is wrong — that it hurts people, or is in contradiction with our nature, and so on. Rather, socialism was wrong in the same sense trying to fly by flapping your arms is wrong: it doesn’t work, and if you count on it working, disaster will ensue.

This neoliberal tendency to collapse normative questions about what ought to be into positive ones about what is or can be presented an opening for exactly the “scientism” Hayek decried. Searching for answers amid the somehow-hollow triumph over communism, the new fusionists landed on what Slobodian calls the three “hards”: hard money (gold), “hardwired human difference” (a racist and eugenicist understanding of IQ), and hard borders. Each of these was simultaneously an argument and a goal. Only a nation that recognized these “hard” natural truths could succeed.

Hard Truths

The “three hards” schema is illuminating. When the paleoconservatives of the 1990s — figures like Pat Buchanan and Murray Rothbard — asked themselves what a nation was, they turned to scientific racism. Language, culture, or politics were too soft. Likewise, macroeconomics offered too many answers they might disagree with on money and budgets. Gold did for money what IQ did for race and racial hierarchy: it naturalized existing inequality. Slobodian writes that “IQ-centrism offers a simple and powerful story about the world that naturalizes and hardens existing hierarchies, reinforces folk understandings of difference, and disempowers efforts of collective reform.” This is also, he argues, what goldbug political economy and hard-borders xenophobia do. Each of the “hards” represents an insecure retreat into supposed immutability, an attempt to win at politics by escaping it.

Of course, the hardness of gold, borders, and human difference was a fantasy. Supposedly “hardwired” human difference is anything but. The IQ tests so beloved of the Right are not an objective metric of human capacity that sits outside of time: they are a specific instrument used by particular institutions for specific reasons.

Pearson, the publisher that holds the rights for the current edition of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC), does not have to deal with haunting questions about the nature of intelligence, because the WISC is not used for assigning a child’s position in the “neurocastes” of Slobodian’s villains. It is used for things like deciding what services they might need in a twenty-first-century US school environment. Tests like the WISC have to be renormed frequently, with different populations, because their purpose is to measure someone relative to a broader population — a soft and moving target.

Indeed, they are so far from hard, immutable permanence that I would be disrupting the validity of these tests by sharing specifics about them. And as a psychologist could tell you, the “IQ score” is not always the most important part of the test result. Slobodian insightfully observes that oversimplification is the whole point of the Right’s use of IQ, as it finally lets them present their vision as inescapable reality “with the elegance of a single number.”

It is no coincidence, then, that the IQ-worshipping heroes of scientistic neoliberalism are usually not psychologists and often not even social scientists. William Shockley was an electrical engineer. Charles Murray is a political scientist who wouldn’t know the WISC if it was opened in front of him. Richard Herrnstein actually was a psychologist . . . but one who studied pigeons rather than human beings.

The new right’s obsession with IQ is where they look most like Hayek’s bastards rather than his sons, for all their similarities to their father. Charles Murray and company make exactly the mistake Hayek warned of in his 1971 Nobel Prize speech: they take methods used by one group of practitioners and apply them with motivated reasoning to an entirely different context in which they have no meaning and cannot work.

A “pseudoscience” critique is not enough to respond to the Right on this, however. On its own, criticism of scientific inaccuracy risks turning into the IQ version of an anecdote Slobodian relays late in the book about gold. In it, the German central bank, pushed by goldbugs to demand the return of gold reserves from the United States, actually puts a portion of Germany’s gold on display. Rather than placating them, engaging with them on their own ground legitimized the goldbugs, and they swiftly concocted a whole new layer of criticisms about the appearance and quantity of the display itself.

While offering useful context for a practice-focused takedown of the “hards” — a psychology-centering critique of the eugenicists, or a macroeconomic critique of goldbugs — Slobodian’s focus is on why there is money and power behind these movements — as he puts it, critique of the new right “on the terrain of capitalism” rather than “the terrain of science.” Someone who wants to torture numbers into proving the intellectual inferiority of nonwhite people will find a way — and someone who wants to pay for this will find someone willing to do it. In a grant from (ludicrously) 1990, Richard Lynn was paid to study “the characteristics of the intelligence of Mongoloids.” “Mongoloid” is a slur, not a scientifically useful category.

Slobodian helps us understand why there is money and an audience for this. Through attention to what he calls the “profane space” of wild-eyed popular literature rather than just monographs, he examines how alt-right networks extended to and developed with the broader voting public. Newsletters and then the internet allowed right-wing thinkers to bypass mainstream gatekeepers — and to profit while doing so. Books like Harry Browne’s You Can Profit From a Monetary Crisis built on this “scene of authors” to become bestsellers. Germany’s far-right AfD was literally funded with the sale of gold coins, operationalizing both the networks and tactics of the goldbugs to reanimate fascism. Slobodian’s analysis of vernacular right-wing economic thought complements his attention to similar literature on race and IQ, where such a focus on popular extremist literature is more common.

IQ racism is merely the most obvious example of the new fusionist attempt to naturalize social hierarchies by finding objective answers in the “natural.” Gold provided what AfD’s Peter Boehringer called “natural money” for white supremacy’s “natural” elite, within hard borders that would protect both from the unworthy. These three hards are best understood together, as forming an ideological and practical unit: for instance, the race and IQ frame explains how some of the most strident advocates of hard borders can nonetheless also offer golden passports and “designer immigration” from East Asia.

Slobodian’s analysis of how the Right thinks about race and money together — with similar publishing tactics, connected networks, and shared philosophy — makes it that much more disappointing that Hayek’s Bastards lacks similar depth on a third subject that any invocation of IQ demands: disability. Slobodian’s approach “on the terrain of capitalism” has a great deal to offer on this and other areas where the Right grounds its claims in the “language of science.”

The persecution of trans and gender nonconforming people, for example, is not a subject Slobodian addresses — though his book mentions in several places the significance of supposed sex-based neurological differences in right-wing thinking — but his analysis would describe a great deal of that too. Slobodian’s international account of right-wing networks is a forensic investigation of how the Right sows hate and encourages the wide adoption of its framing of key issues. The trajectory of transphobia is quite similar to that IQ-based racism, albeit even more successful and swift: via bigoted newsletters, right-wing astroturfing, just-asking-questions legitimation by credulous mainstream publications, and finally an insistence that the Left is suppressing free speech and basic truth.

Here as elsewhere, Slobodian’s reconstruction of how the Right naturalizes hierarchy can be useful for combating it. Goldbug economics relies on a narrow and deranged conception of money that hurts the very markets it claims to protect; likewise, the transphobic position that trans women are not “real” women relies on a reified vision of womanhood that invariably harms cis women too. In both cases, the Right’s misleading appeals to “hard” science are an attempt to escape the “soft” and contentious realm of politics. Understanding that these hards have been constructed is an important foundation for dismantling them: when the Right asks us to recognize “reality” on these issues, it is really demanding we valorize their delusions as fact.

Spencer’s Shadow

Hayek’s Bastards also raises questions about a longer intellectual arc. Virtually every feature of new fusionism Slobodian describes can be found in nineteenth-century antecedents to neoliberalism, above all the work of Herbert Spencer. Evolutionary arguments that blur (and gravely misunderstand) both biology and culture? Ostensibly liberal arguments for free markets alongside brutally repressive arguments for hard borders and antidemocratic states? Toggling between dispassionate global-scale arguments about sociology and fire-breathing political interventions against reasonable regulations? Spencer’s got it all. “Survival of the fittest” itself came from Spencer, not Charles Darwin. And while Hayek himself claimed he had never read Spencer — a claim that anyone familiar with both should find, frankly, a bit hard to believe — he did not have to in order to imbibe his ideas. Spencer was one of the most popular thinkers in the world in his day, and Hayek undoubtedly got doses of Spencerism from his mentor Ludwig von Mises, who did read and cite Spencer.

This is not to say Slobodian should have written Spencer’s Grandbastards. But it does raise the question of who, exactly, is the mutant or bastard. Charles Murray read Spencer (this is the reason Spencer appears briefly in Hayek’s Bastards), and The Bell Curve is an even less intellectually honest sequel to Spencer’s own eugenic arguments. Spencer himself drew on earlier ideas about race, psychology, and political economy, and so do Hayek’s neo-Spencerian bastards. The new right has even come close to even older “tropical degeneration” fears that were popular in the early modern period: as Slobodian explains, some right-wingers argue that the “boreal” European environment produced a hardier biology and culture than the supposedly easy environs of Africa. Like their IQ claims, this is as factually ridiculous as it is politically useful for them.

Hayek has the same kind of “bastards” as his progenitors too. Herbert Spencer wrote consistently against militarism and imperialism — like Hayek, he felt a militarized economy ran counter to liberty. Yet Spencer provided intellectual scaffolding for some of history’s most egregious militarists, including the Nazis. Likewise, Hayek’s heirs are now part of a political coalition that hopes to replace the twentieth-century hegemony of soft power and coups within borders with the nineteenth-century’s overt territorial conquests from Greenland to Panama. Nihilism breeds militarism, no matter what its original prophets might say to the contrary.

In this light, Hayek looks less like the complicated progenitor of a malevolent new right and more like a brief diversion on a longer road. Someone a little less obsessed with race, a little more well-adjusted, and particularly articulate among the neoliberal prophets of indifference. There is, however, particular utility in focusing on this particular moment and not zooming out. As Slobodian puts it, “Pedigrees hide mutations.” This is a book laser-focused on demolishing the distinction between neoliberalism and the far right — a necessary goal that it achieves, and one that a longer arc would not have helped with.

Putting aside earlier genealogy, there is still plenty in this book to trouble the “bastards” characterization. Slobodian is right that his subjects “lapse into the very intellectual errors that Hayek himself diagnosed.” But it was the very mechanism by which Hayek tried to avoid those errors, a preference for healthily funded motivated reasoning over honest engagement with reality, that taught them how to make them. Hayek’s savanna story was also an exercise in “scientism.” Hayek and Mises avoided the “pretense of knowledge” mostly by not pretending to actually know anything, with a body of thought free of numbers, experiments, or facts. The new right simply filled Hayek’s fact-free void with racist bullshit.

Still, this was a change, and a profound one. There is a material difference between Hayek chiding South Africans that if they properly insulated markets from the state, they would not need to fear democracy (an episode described in Globalists, one of Slobodian’s prior books), and Murray Rothbard arguing for an expanded “Grand Apartheid.” Hayek toyed with the idea of stripping welfare recipients of the right to vote, while Curtis Yarvin toys with the idea of rendering them into biofuels. Neoliberals contemplated cutting the state, while the new right hacks away at whatever it can while trying to profit from the rest.

On what is undoubtedly the Trumpist right’s most important break from neoliberalism, tariffs, Slobodian is surprisingly silent. His “hard borders” do not cover it: Peter Brimelow, a key character in the book, suggested free trade is a substitute for free movement, but key sections of the Right currently appear to want neither. Slobodian takes pains to note the bidirectional nature of IQ racism — demeaning African-descended people while fetishizing East Asians as superior. Between this and the goldbug economy, Slobodian has left us useful tools to explain the return of tariffs — and the specific geography of Trump’s trade barriers.

Neoliberals spent decades telling everyone the world was a competition. It should be little surprise that the Right eventually decided not to compete fairly. Race “works” for the Right, Slobodian writes, “because it conjugates with the economic assumptions of zero-sum competition.” Tariffs do too. The very search for “hards” seems to be a psychic necessity in the Right’s inegalitarian and compassionless vision. It might be too much to expect consistency here. This makes Slobodian’s focus on the material dynamics of intellectual history all the more salutary.

What’s at stake in any conversation about the supposed death of neoliberalism isn’t Hayek’s legacy but our reality. The book, Slobodian concludes, “is a warning not to be taken in” or “fooled” by the new right’s presentation of itself as a disruptive backlash to neoliberalism. Such a backlash helps explain voter behavior, but wanting change because of NAFTA or the opioid crisis or inflation does not explain why Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their bedfellows were the alternative on offer — for that we need Slobodian’s dive into strange gold museums and unhinged newsletters.