Quinn Slobodian on New Fusionism, Libertarian Eugenics, and Far-Right Capitalism

Quinn Slobodian, thanks for joining us and congratulations on your new book, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right. The subject of the book is an ideology and political movement that you call “New Fusionism.” Can you say a few words about the “old” Fusionism, and what was added or abandoned in the transition to its newer iteration? What are the “three hards” that you argue define the “New Fusionist” ideology?

“Fusionism” is a term that historians of American conservatism and the American right have used for some time to understand the alliance between religious traditionalist conservatives on the one hand, and more free market-oriented libertarians on the other. From the National Review and William F. Buckley to think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and ultimately the discourse of someone like Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush are all conventionally seen as fusionism because they appeal both to ideas of Christian morality and family values, as well as economic freedom and usually some kind of commitment to deregulation, free trade, and so on.

The “New Fusionism” that I talk about in the book was observed by one of the people I’m describing—Paul Gottfried, a conservative historian—already in the late 1980s, when he noted that his fellow intellectuals on the right were making their arguments less frequently on the basis of traditionalism and Christian doctrine and the like, and more often appealing to science and its specific subfields, like genomics and evolutionary psychology. Sociobiology had begun to take a seemingly central epistemological role for some people on the right in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Probably the most high profile artifact of that “New Fusionism” would be The Bell Curve from 1994, authored by the libertarian think tanker Charles Murray and the psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein, which made arguments about small government and attacked the welfare state not on the premise of traditional morality, but in the language of IQ racism.

Already in the late 1980s, […] intellectuals on the right were making their arguments less frequently on the basis of traditionalism and Christian doctrine […], and more often appealing to science and its specific subfields, like genomics and evolutionary psychology.

That seemed to me something that had been overlooked by historians of the right and historians of neoliberalism. It deserves more attention because it provides, as I argue in the book, a prehistory for what became called, around 2016, the “alt-right.” In the run-up to the first Trump election, this curious combination of people interested in cranial capacity and birth rate statistics alongside people who are interested in ideas of anarcho-capitalism and the shredding of the welfare state represented the blossoming of the New Fusionism as a strain that had started to coalesce some decades earlier. The original impetus for me was to try to make sense of this strange flower of the alt-right circa 2017 and figure out if there was any coherent intellectual genealogy, or if it was just an ad hoc collection of people who were, for different reasons, white supremacists.

The first of the “three hards” that I use to describe the New Fusionism is the idea of a hardwired human nature. Part of the turn to social and even natural sciences was to refute the consensus claim of the post-war decades—represented by people like Franz Boaz, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead—that race was a social construction and that there was no meaningful truth hidden in our skeletons or DNA. Tapping into scientific breakthroughs like the completion of the Human Genome Project and the rising prestige of disciplines like neuroscience, the New Fusionists argue that there is in fact a hardwired human nature that we ignored at our peril, and that projects like affirmative action were blunting the potential talent search process that a genuine free market would be able to carry out. Reasserting hierarchies of gender and race became something that they did in part through the idiom of academic science rather than blood and soil ideas of natural essences or references to the scriptures or prescriptions of the Holy Books.

The second “hard” is that of hard borders. The standing of immigration in neoliberal thought is often misunderstood. There’s a common assumption that neoliberalism prescribes open borders for everything and that the movement of people from one labor market to the other to chase price advantages is a natural outcome of this system. But neoliberals themselves—the kind of people I write about in my trilogy of books of which this was the third—tend not to have that opinion. Many neoliberals since the 1930s have been very circumspect about the free movement of people, not for economic reasons, but really for sociological reasons and sometimes political reasons: they feared the disruption of mass migration and were skeptical of the ability of populations to change their ideas of human difference quickly. Friedrich Hayek, for example, backed Margaret Thatcher’s nativism and hard border stance in the late 1970s because he thought human nature was imperfect, so it made sense to concede that people might take time to adjust to new populations. This is the charitable way of describing the mainstream Austrian position in neoliberal thought.

By the 1990s, you get a much more virulent version of that with the belief that there were essences within national populations that had emerged evolutionarily to be more and less adaptive to a market system. This became central to a lot of neoliberal thinkers, meaning that their opposition to immigration and their racism had an economic rationality to it. You could, and many have, oppose the immigration of say, people from Muslim-majority countries into Germany, not because you wanted to protect the Fatherland or the white race, but because your understanding of IQ science was that they have time preferences and other behavioral traits as a part of their genetic inheritance that make them less capable market actors. You get this whitewashed, science-washed version of racism that acts as the foundation for a hard borders neoliberal policy.

The third “hard” is hard money. Money is also something that is poorly understood in neoliberal thought. Thankfully, there’s a new book just published called Freedom for Capital, Not People by Matthias Schmelzer, which is excellent. It gets into the heated neoliberal debates about the relationship between money, the market, and governance: floating versus fixed exchange rates, gold versus fiat, and, in more recent years, crypto versus fiat. These are often some of the most important battle lines drawn between factions inside of intellectual neoliberal circles.

There’s something really interesting here: people are making political capital on the idea of the inevitable collapse of the system that they’re making a bid to govern. They’re almost advertising the fragility of their own system and selling you the remedy for the unraveling. Catastrophism is an important place where far-right currents converge, especially in the online world of listservs, websites, and social media platforms over the last decade or so.

I want to look further at the divisions between the heterodox neoliberal thinkers explored in this book and those of your previous book, Crack-up Capitalism. Both share a fixation with “secession” or “exit” from state institutions and authority, and their visions clearly have some overlap: I imagine “Hayek’s Bastards” would have few objections to the proposal of turning Bantustans into unregulated export-processing zones. And yet, it seems they have different priorities, thinking about exit more in terms of hoarded gold and gated communities than the ambitious global project envisioned by crack-up capitalists. What are the similarities and differences in these two notions of secession? Do they indicate wider divides on economic policy within Western conservative and far-right movements?

It might be important context that these two volumes were originally supposed to be one book until my editor told me, “You tried to do too much here.” So, Crack-up Capitalism became more of an intellectual history of the special economic zone. My goal was to write an accessible global history of the post-Cold War world that placed East Asia centrally. As someone who teaches global history classes, I have always been dismayed by how we often narrate the last century: from the First World War, to wars of decolonization, the Cold War, and then the nineties become an era of globalization until, at some point in the 2000s, there’s this almost deus ex machina arrival of Chinese economic power that changes the whole calculus and now helps explain the current period of geo-economic retrenchment. My ambition was to focus on the zones and how China was able to kind of game the global economy partially through emulating Hong Kong’s version of “micro-ordering,” as I call it. The fact that someone like Milton Friedman, the hero of the Chicago School, was so enamored with Hong Kong in the late 1970s just seemed like a wonderful puzzle. What did he love about it? What did he think he could do with that obsession? How could it possibly be replicated?

However, the story of the proliferation of special economic zones that I told is one that gets to a place that isn’t really describing far-right capitalism by the end. It just offers a new lens to understand actually existing global capitalism and gives credence to the exhortation of geographers since the early 1990s that globalization works through fragmentation as well as integration, and we need to have histories that reflect that. There is a point in the book, however, a fork in the road of the narrative where some of the people I’m describing take a right turn that ends up in the Hayek’s Bastards extended universe. Murray Rothbard appears halfway through Crack-up Capitalism, celebrating the end of the Soviet Union as a time for the possibility of “Nations by Consent” and a total rewriting of the social contract, and then reappears in Hayek’s Bastards as a key figure in this paleo alliance in the early 1990s, linking disaffected people in the conservative movement with disaffected people in the libertarian movement.

I think the core difference between the political economic template I’m describing in Crack-Up Capitalism and the one in Hayek’s Bastards is that the zone is relatively ideologically neutral. It can and has been used for many different political projects; usually more statist and with lighter labor and environmental regulations, but it also can and has been used for other things. In Wales, they have proposed setting up a freeport that has stronger labor and environmental standards than the territory outside; in Scotland, they’re discussing a green freeport. I wanted to keep open the kind of heterogeneous political possibilities of the zone as a subnational container.

The story, by contrast, in Hayek’s Bastards is of a project trying to undo the 20th century, as Rothbard himself says, by somehow getting around the welfare, fiscal, and bureaucratic state, all of which they see as an impingement on economic freedoms. They end up coming to a kind of zone-like solution. In the concluding remarks from one of the first couple meetings of the John Randolph Club—one of the places where this alliance between exceptionally far-right conservatives and right-wing libertarians was forged—they say after a long conversation, we realized that we find common ground on one thing: the idea of a “contractual community.” They imagine the subsidiarity principle leading to self-regulation and self-reliance on principles that are then united by the glue of common belief systems and sometimes common culture and race. It becomes an alternative response to the end of the Cold War, which is not the same as creating the gearworks of globalization in the same way that zones do. Yet the paleo consensus I describe in Hayek’s Bastards is always haunted by the possibility of some in the alliance wanting to withdraw from the world and secede from broader interactions while the anarcho-capitalists who are invested in these contractual communities hold that they could be separate but global, that they could still profit from mobile investment and trade while living in a more sealed and traditionalist bubble.

Early in the book, you criticize arguments that understand the rise of the far right as a backlash to neoliberalism; instead, you use the word “frontlash,” arguing they represent a “mutant strain” of it. However, you’re saying here that there is a branch of the far right that does perhaps better resemble the backlash thesis, supporting tariffs and greater state ownership. Is this other movement separate to the one you describe in this book? Why do think this other approach seems to be winning out in the US for now? In which camp do newer, more tech-related figures like Richard Hanania, Curtis Yarvin, and Elon Musk fit?

There are parts of this book I wrote in 2017, when there was a real frustration for me and my collaborators about how the political convulsions of that era were being described as the end of neoliberal globalization and a return to nationalism. Many people were using the Polanyian language of the double movement: the assertion that the disembedding of the market from society has been excessive and now the state—or the society—is re-embedding the market but from the right as Polanyi always warned us it might.

Yet, it takes just a superficial glance at those who were involved with that supposed backlash to see these were not people who actually wanted to stall or even slow down projects of global international competition. Who started the Alternative for Germany party? Who led the campaign for Brexit? Who was advising Trump on economics? This was a new strategy for the same project, drawing more on languages of ethnonationalism and open civilizational hierarchy than they had done for some time. But if you looked, you often saw a familiar language of austerity tax cuts for the wealthy, and the acceleration of inter-jurisdictional competition. Brexit was about getting out from under the dead socialist hand of the EU and going global again. That doesn’t look to me like a backlash against globalization. I think much of the forcefulness, if not peevishness, of my intervention is explained by how stultifying the popular pundits’ narratives were back then.

This was a new strategy for the same project, drawing more on languages of ethnonationalism and open civilizational hierarchy than they had done for some time. But if you looked, you often saw a familiar language of austerity tax cuts for the wealthy, and the acceleration of inter-jurisdictional competition.

Since then, there’s been a learning process. It’s not as surprising anymore for people to think about Bolsonaro or Milei or even Meloni as being both capitalist and far right. I’m happy we don’t have to make that base level argument anymore. And yet, at the very moment where we’ve all gotten our heads around that, the project now seems to be taking another turn of the dialectic.

The organization for which I’m doing this interview is called the Illiberalism Studies Program. If you look at the genealogy of illiberalism, through national conservatism, right-wing communitarianism, and Orbán and the Polish PiS, it actually has quite a different genealogy from the one I describe in Hayek’s Bastards. For one, it’s overtly religious in the old fusionist sense; it’s often taking cues directly from the Vatican on questions of gender ideology and the dangers of trans people and LGBTQ and so on. It’s also often much more flexible on economic prescriptions: more willing to break the rules of free trade, to do welfare chauvinism when it’s politically expedient, and to call into question a lot of the baseline assumptions of the 1990s neoliberal era.

I think what we’re seeing now in the States is the displacement of even the heuristically helpful coordinating role of institutions like the Mont Pelerin Society, or the OECD, or the World Economic Forum: places that you might go to see what the dominant consensus or hegemonic ideology is. Nowadays, you get that transnational self-description much more persuasively and helpfully if you go to CPAC meetings. Theirs is a discourse that gives a subordinate place to economics: it’s not primarily about economic principles. Economic principles are very important, but everything is subordinate to ideas of national belonging, moral community, civilizational coherence, and so on.

As with the first Trump administration, we’re looking at a mélange of policy projects that are not internally coherent being pushed through and implemented mostly because of the success of this or that advocate at catching the ear of the President at the right time. There is not a lot of coherence between the desires of Silicon Valley CEOs to have world-dominating industries and products and the punishing tariffs that make supply chains wobbly and keep American investment out of certain countries. You can bang your head against the wall all day, you’re not going to find a common ideology there. It’s a battle between factions inside of a government.

That leads to the question of where the New Fusionists are in this: how important are the people trying to make sense of the world by blending scientific arguments with libertarian ones? I don’t see them in a leading role. Their ideas are more latent within the Silicon Valley coalition, but that’s still different from the New Fusionism I describe because I don’t think that tech ideology—which I’m describing in another book with my friend Ben Tarnoff, coming out in the spring—is a libertarian ideology.

I think the reason why liberalism has been so successful for so long—whether as neoliberalism, libertarianism, or its more centrist and social forms—is that it purchases consent from the governed by allowing for some sphere of self-creation and self-understanding; providing a space of individual autonomy is an essential part of the governmentality of any strain of liberalism. I’m not sure that’s true for people who see the world primarily in cybernetic terms. I think Musk sees the world like a factory floor and he finds individual autonomy to be a source of friction and drag. There’s this famous passage from Michel Foucault where he says the problem with socialism is that it doesn’t have a governmentality. That’s the problem with Silicon Valley too: I don’t think it has a way of ensuring social stability while also advancing profitability for itself.

The New Fusionism is also still relevant in the renewed language about biomedical research and the obsession with pro-natalism inside of the MAHA faction of the Trump coalition. I recently wrote an op-ed in the Financial Times about the idea of libertarian eugenics: that sounds like a contradiction in terms, but it’s actually emerging in a few different ways.

All of this comes back to a broader point: I think neoliberalism is a spent ideological force right now. I don’t see it having the ability to define people’s expectations in the way that it did in the late 1990s and early 2000s with the idea of the world market as a naturalized force to which we simply had to surrender ourselves. No policymaker on the planet today would say something like that and yet it was the only thing you were allowed to say just a generation ago. Given this, we now need to look at other intellectual storylines and families of thinkers and be open to the fact that we’re in an insurgent moment intellectually.

That leads to the question we often ask: to what extent do you think illiberalism is a valuable term for describing these intellectual movements? On one hand, it seems like it could be useful for connecting all these right-wing factions you mentioned with different ideological roots: at their core, they share the goal of “undoing the 20^th century,” like you said, regardless of whether that refers to the welfare state, the mass consumer society, or whatever. On the other hand, part of your book’s achievement is precisely to question the clear distinction between liberalism and its darker outgrowths. What do you think?

I think “illiberalism” faces a lot of the same conceptual challenges that any use of the prefix “post-” does. We just did a special issue of the Socioeconomic Review about “post-neoliberalism,” and we referred there to the category of “post-Fordism” because both concepts are open to very different interpretations. One says the prefix suggests a negation—or even the opposite—of what preceded it, in the same way that postmodernism is perhaps the undoing of modernity. Alternatively, someone like Bob Jessop would describe post-Fordism sequentially and dialectically: as he put it, it wouldn’t be post-Fordism if there wasn’t something Fordist about it, and it wouldn’t be post-Fordism if there wasn’t something “post” about it—this is what we land on. We’re using those terms to designate the relationship between a sequence of ideologically dominant sets of ruling principles.

I see “illiberalism” similarly. The shortcoming of the category is that it suggests that the term can be understood mostly in relationship to liberalism: it doesn’t have its own autonomous content that precedes or unfolded parallel to the development of liberalism. But this is also a virtue. We can’t understand the emergence of illiberalism, as understood by someone like Orbán, except as a response and rejection of what he saw as an oppressive and damaging model for his country and people. This is why I don’t see illiberalism as representing the same ideology as the people I’m describing in this book, because Orbán’s illiberalism isn’t really an effort to undo the welfare state, for example: it’s an effort to shore it up along ethnically exclusionary terms.

There’s a funny anecdote at the end of your book about a UFC fighter shouting out his love for Ludwig von Mises after winning a fight. Last year, in a podcast, you discussed how the UFC has become a core cultural space for the American far-right with its “merciless” and brutal competition. Yet, in this book you argue that the self-declared disciples of Mises have actually departed from these cultural images. Neoliberal eugenics rejects the 20^th century’s fixation with muscled men powering industry and prioritizes intelligence and IQ. Could you tell us more about the role of the UFC in today’s American far-right? Are there links between the radical libertarianism you describe and the UFC’s cultural prominence?

The thing I found most interesting about the UFC, and pro wrestling in general, is its model of labor relations. Sports fans know that when there are walkouts and union actions by major league baseball, hockey, and football teams, it’s actually a quite well-organized sector; not quite Hollywood level, but organized labor definitely still lives in pro-sports in the United States. Likewise, professional sports offer a fairly rule-bound, locally evocative form of togetherness and often cross-class and cross-racial identification—this applies to football clubs in Europe too. There’s a case to be made for an analogy between these and the kind of mass culture and social-democratic world of the 20th century: in both, people are all able to collectively identify with these people who are not so different than themselves and celebrate their victories vicariously.

The UFC and pro wrestling model is very different because there are no labor rights whatsoever. The entire league is owned by one person. Everyone who fights is an employee or a contractor, and there are no workplace protections or medical insurance, which are necessary when you’re sacrificing your body as regularly as these people are. This is an extreme version of the merciless labor market that hardcore libertarians envision, where the idea of pastoral care for the population is basically just a distant memory.

But then, as you suggest, there’s also the spectacle, the way that it looks, and whether that’s a contradiction with the IQ fetishism of the people I write about. I don’t think so because part of the IQ fetishism is about the designation of a new cognitive elite that has certain tasks in society that others are not able to perform. There is a kind of compensatory function that spectacles like UFC play in this model, where you assume that not everyone will be part of the cognitive class, and they need distractions. It becomes the circus side of the social settlement, just as all the violent and evocative xenophobia and gleeful misogyny of the X platform under Musk does. After you assume that the social contract won’t exist anymore, at least you’d be able to get these dopamine hits by lording it over women and hapless refugees. The fact that they’re going to go watch people bash each other’s heads on the lawn of the White House on the 4th of July is therefore perfectly on the nose.

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Quinn Slobodian is professor of international history at Boston University. He has written or edited nine books translated into fourteen languages. Most recent is Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ and the Capitalism of the Far Right. Forthcoming with Ben Tarnoff is Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed. He has held fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation.