In 2013 Charles Murray traveled to the Galápagos Islands to deliver an address to the Mont Pelerin Society—that font of neoliberalism, founded in 1947 by Friedrich Hayek. But Murray’s talk didn’t run through the usual neoliberal script: economic liberty, free trade, the genius of the entrepreneur. Instead, his subject was “the rediscovery of human nature and human diversity.” New discoveries in genetics, he argued, would induce “reversions to age-old understandings about the human animal” and undo “the intellectual eclipse of human nature and human diversity in the United States.” He welcomed these developments not only to fight the pernicious effects of what he called the “equality premise” but to better recognize and organize patterns of aptitude in a changing economy.
Though it’s not part of conventional wisdom about the ideological core of neoliberalism, this appeal to nature was a central part of neoliberal thought in the aftermath of the Cold War. Communism had died, but neoliberals feared Leviathan would live on. The poison of civil rights, feminism, affirmative action, and ecological consciousness—forged in the social movements of the 1960s and ’70s—had suffused the body politic, emboldening what they saw as an overbearing state and breeding an atmosphere of political correctness and “victimology,” which in turn stultified free discourse and nurtured a culture of government dependency and special pleading.
Neoliberals sought an antidote to all that, and they found one in hierarchies of gender, race, and cultural difference, which they imagined to be rooted in genetics as well as tradition. Meanwhile, changing demographics—an aging white population matched by an expanding nonwhite population—led some of them to rethink the conditions necessary for capitalism. Perhaps cultural homogeneity was a precondition for social stability, and thus the peaceful conduct of market exchange and enjoyment of private property?
The strain of the neoliberal movement that crystallized in the 1990s out of these ideas marked the rise of a new fusionism. While the original fusionism of the 1950s and 1960s melded libertarianism and religious traditionalism in the style of William F. Buckley and the National Review, the new fusionism defended neoliberal policies through arguments borrowed from cognitive, behavioral, and evolutionary psychology and in some cases genetics, genomics, and biological anthropology. The phenomenon was apparent as early as 1987 to conservative historian Paul Gottfried. Whereas older conservatives may have used a language of religion to back up claims about human differences, Gottfried noted that they had begun to use disciplines like sociobiology in order to “biologicize” ethics, in the words of E.O. Wilson.
Contrary to claims that recent years have seen a decisive repudiation of neoliberalism by right-wing populists, it is this strange new coalition that underlies in part the ascent of today’s global right. In its ranks we can count not only a host of bit players—the likes of Murray Rothbard, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and Peter Brimelow—but some of the right’s ringleaders: Steve Bannon, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk. (Gottfried, for his part, has been a “reluctant mentor” to Unite the Right’s keynote white nationalist in Charlottesville, Richard Spencer.) In many ways, ideas like Murray’s are the glue holding the whole edifice together. Over the past two decades, the self-avowed libertarian’s melding of genetic pronouncements with bootstrapping family-values talk has served as the bridge spanning divergent factions of the racialist right, from its IQ-obsessed, DEI-hating Silicon Valley wing to its white nationalist fringes.
Far from rejecting the dynamic of market competition, this new formation deepens it. From the United States and Britain to Hungary and Argentina, so-called populists on the right have not rejected global capitalism as such. Rather, they have rejected the 1990s model of governing global capitalism that revolved around large multilateral trade agreements—opting instead for unilateral action, as in Trump’s use of tariffs as leverage to open markets for U.S. investors and U.S. products and services. In general, the leaders of this right offer few plans to rein in finance, re-industrialize, or restore a Golden Age of job security. On the contrary, their calls to privatize, deregulate, and slash taxes come straight from the playbook shared by the world’s leaders for the past thirty years.
In other words, this new right does not really reject globalism but advances a new strain of it—one that accepts an international division of labor while tightening controls on certain kinds of migration. It assigns intelligence averages to countries in a way that collectivizes and renders innate the concept of “human capital.” It appeals to values and traditions that cannot be captured statistically, shading into a language of national essences and national character. The fix it finds in race, culture, and nation is but the most recent iteration of a pro-market philosophy based not on the idea that we are all the same but that we are in a fundamental, and perhaps permanent way, different.
To understand this transformation, one must go back to the 1990s and early 2000s. This period is often portrayed as representing a decisive victory for neoliberals in the war against communism—the achievement of the end of history, with nothing else for neoliberals to do but polish busts of Mises and Hayek and gloat over their triumph. In fact, they feared the Cold War had been lost.
“It is fitting that the Mont Pelerin Society, the world’s leading group of free market scholars, was meeting the week that communism collapsed in the Soviet Union,” the Wall Street Journal reported in September 1991. But those gathered saw that as “Communism exits history’s stage, the main threat to liberty may come from a utopian environmental movement that, like socialism, views the welfare of human beings as subordinate to ‘higher’ values.” Communism was a chameleon. It was changing shades from red to green. “Having fought back a red tide, we are now in danger of being engulfed by a green one,” warned Fred Smith of the Competitive Enterprise Institute at a Mont Pelerin Society meeting a decade later. “The forces that once marched under the banner of economic progressivism have regrouped under a new environmental banner.”
Interviewed by the journalist and later restrictionist firebrand Peter Brimelow in 1992, Milton Friedman expressed a similar sentiment. Asked about the Cold War’s end, he responded:
Look at the reaction in the U.S. to the collapse of the Berlin Wall. . . . There weren’t any summit meetings in Washington about how to cut down the size of government. What was there a summit meeting about? How to increase government spending. What was the supposedly rightwing President, Mr. Bush, doing? Presiding over enormous increases in paternalism—the Clean Air Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act, the so-called Civil Rights quota bill.
Friedman saw ecological protection and the “special interests” of disabled people and minorities as the growth areas for post-communist statism.
In other words, “the enemy has mutated,” as economist Victoria Curzon-Price, one of only three women to serve as president of the Mont Pelerin Society, wrote. “In 1947 the founders of our Society battled with outright communism, planning and hard Keynesianism. Today our opponents are more elusive.” At the very first meeting of the society after the wall fell, its president, Italian economist and founding member of Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, Antonio Martino, declared that “socialism is dead, statism is not.” The three biggest threats were environmentalism, state spending, and European integration.
On the first, those in attendance heard that the depletion of ozone layer could just as well be due to kelp beds, ocean currents, and volcanoes as human activity. More pressing was the problem of Europe. The supranational institutions that had once promised to be engines of what Curzon-Price called “the Ferrari model of integration”—speeding up competition between labor, product, and finance markets—had proved to be socialist Trojan horses. The parallel of the unification of Europe to the dissolution of the Soviet bloc struck many libertarians as uncanny and frightening. “It would be an irony of history,” German historian of science Gerard Radnitzky said at the Mont Pelerin meeting in Munich, “if, at the time when the ‘postsocialist’ countries attempt to de-socialize, to make the transition to freedom, a European super-state should embark on the road to more government and more bureaucracy, to creeping socialism and hence to less freedom and less growth.”
Europe was only part of the problem. “Leviathan not only lives,” Radnitzky wrote, “but has been growing.” At the next year’s meeting, the new president, University of Chicago economist Gary Becker, repeated the refrain:
The mission of the [Mont Pelerin Society] may appear to have been largely accomplished with the collapse of communism in most of Eastern Europe. . . . But unfortunately much remains to be done. The vast majority of the world’s populations still live in countries that sharply curtail both economic and political freedoms. And even in the democratic countries of Western Europe, the U.S., and elsewhere, government control and regulation of economic activities is expanding, not contracting.
Part of the problem for neoliberals was that they had been so concentrated on their opponent that they had not spent enough time reflecting on what Day One in their utopia would look like. The neoliberal quandary at the Cold War’s end was that decades of “collectivism” and state dependency—even in the capitalist world—had eroded the virtues of self-reliance that would allow for the reproduction of social life. Speaking at the fiftieth anniversary meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society at the Hoover Institution in 1997, the president of the Bradley Foundation, Mont Pelerin member Michael S. Joyce, said that “attention has consistently failed to focus on a very important and very sobering reality. Were we tomorrow to have the political forces to dismantle the welfare state, and should we set about dismantling it, we would face a frightening but unavoidable fact: behind the welfare state, there is almost nothing.”
Neoliberals’ own logic dictated that the dependency produced by the nanny state had left thin roots where the dense connective tissue of community and family should be. “The mechanisms which existed prior to the welfare state and in some measure served to fulfill its functions are gone,” Joyce observed. This posed a problem: “the fuzzy and attractive promise that the private sector and the free market will fill the gap instantly —like Athena sprung fully born from Zeus —thus replacing the welfare state and making the new order acceptable to our citizens is an utter chimera.” Here we find something remarkable. It was not just that neoliberals denied they had won the Cold War. They were afraid of the reality that would result if they actually had.
Murray himself expanded on this theme in a paper circulated for a Mont Pelerin Society meeting in Cancún in 1996. Because “a radical liberal reform . . . now seems potentially within reach in the United States,” neoliberals needed to think about “how a liberal state may be expected to deal with the human suffering that persists after liberal policies are in place.” As he pointed out, many neoliberals claimed that “the last thirty years represent an aberration which goes against human nature, and all that is required for health is to stop the poison and let the healing process begin.” Yet these remained hypotheses, and “scholars have yet to flesh them out with data.” It was precisely because neoliberals were so close to success that they needed to look with clear eyes at the painful transition out of the world of the social state. Would recovery of the masses be possible, or was the very existence of the dependent population a problem in need of solution?
In any case, the future society would have to be constructed from ground zero. It was necessary to return to first principles, to open a wide-ranging discussion on the human condition and the prerequisites for market order—one that took in insights from disciplines beyond economics. Enter science and the return to nature. “Much of liberal thought has assumed that the human animal is fitted for liberalism everywhere and under all circumstances,” Murray wrote. He continued:
It is now beyond serious scientific dispute that a great many of the most individual human capacities are fixed before a person reaches an age at which they have any control over the matter. . . . Of the variation attributable to the environment after birth, much is determined within the first few years of life—probably within the first months of life. This combination of genetic and early environmental influences is so powerful that IQ scores stabilize around the age of six, before anyone can be called an independent moral actor.
The advantages that led to long-term prosperity were implanted deeply in particular cultures and could not be extracted or replicated easily.
In the idea of human nature, the new right had found a one-size-fits-all explanation: now, they could ground neoliberalism—and explain away its brutal inequalities, both at home and globally—in something beyond the social. Murray’s ideas quickly filtered out of the think tanks and into politics. One of the first to seize upon these themes was the self-described Austrian economist and libertarian Murray Rothbard, also a Mont Pelerin member, who advised Republican presidential candidate Patrick J. Buchanan and outlined a strategy of “paleo-populism” in the early 1990s as a way of using electoral democracy as a transition to the libertarian goal of a stateless society. He pushed a hard line on racial difference and saw the dissolution of Yugoslavia, for example, as evidence that culturally homogeneous secession was the only viable form of organization.
Rothbard’s intellectual heir Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a speaker at Mont Pelerin meetings, radicalized his mentor’s program further, vilifying democracy as “the god that failed,” proposing racial explanations for patterns of economic behavior, and creating forums for exchange between theorists of eugenics, ethnic secessionism, and Austrian economics. Hoppe was active in both the United States and Central Europe, acting as a bridge to dissident Mont Pelerin members in Germany and Austria who sought to create their own alliances to the right of the mainstream parties to counteract both European integration and the demographic threat of nonwhite immigration.
In Germany, the racialist right position crystallized in the unlikely figure of a card-carrying Social Democrat and central bank board member in 2010. Thilo Sarrazin’s book Germany Abolishes Itself has sold more than 1.5 million copies and draws on the same body of research as Murray, Rothbard, and Hoppe to make the case for race differences in cognitive capacity. Sarrazin’s synthesis of free trade, independent monetary policy, and biological racism is the intellectual core of the insurgent Alternative for Germany and Austrian Freedom Party. Hoppe’s rhetoric of violent suppression of difference and program of racialized secession has been embraced by the alt-right.
It’s little wonder the new right has found neoliberalism such an attractive host organism. Both camps scorn egalitarianism, global economic equality, and solidarity beyond the nation. Both see capitalism as inevitable and judge citizens by the standards of productivity and efficiency. Perhaps most strikingly, both draw from the same pantheon of heroes.
A case in point is Hayek himself, an icon on both sides of the neoliberal/populist divide. Speaking alongside Marine Le Pen at the party congress of the French National Rally in 2018, self-described populist Steve Bannon condemned the “establishment” and the “globalists,” yet built his speech around Hayek’s own metaphor of the road to serfdom and invoked the authority of the master’s name. “The central government, the central banks, the central crony capitalist technology companies control you and have taken you to a Road to Serfdom in three ways,” he said. “The central banks are in the business of debasing your currency, the central government is in the business of debasing your citizenship, and the crony capitalist technological powers are in the business of debasing your own personhood. Hayek told us: the Road to Serfdom will come through these three.”
Less important than the barely discernible link to Hayek’s actual writing was Bannon’s reflexive appeal to the Austrian thinker for authority. In Zurich the week before, Bannon also summoned Hayek. There he was hosted by a newspaper publisher, right-wing Swiss People’s Party politician, and member of the Friedrich Hayek Society, Roger Köppel, who presented Bannon with the first issue of their magazine, Die Weltwoche, while whispering sotto voce that it was “from 1933”—a time when that very magazine was supportive of the Nazi seizure of power.
“Let them call you racists,” Bannon said in his stump speech in France. “Let them call you xenophobes. Let them call you nativists. Wear it as a badge of honor.” The goal of the populists, he said, was not to maximize shareholder value but “maximize citizenship value”—less a rejection of neoliberalism than a deepening of its economic logic into the heart of collective identity.
At a moment where once marginal forms of rhetoric, aesthetics, and action are increasingly mainstream and, in many countries, have come to in power, it is worth looking again at the genealogy to ask how we got here. What we often find is the far right is less neoliberalism’s antithesis—a horde of enemies coming in from the countryside with torches and pitchforks—than neoliberalism’s children, nurtured from decades of conversations and debates about what fixes capitalism needs to survive.
This essay is adapted from Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right by Quinn Slobodian, published by Zone Books.
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