Donald Trump, Silicon Valley, and the Neoliberal Roots of an Unlikely Alliance

In an interview with VF, Hayek’s Bastards author Quinn Slobodian unpacks how libertarians and neoliberals made race and intelligence an intellectual hobbyhorse, laying the foundation for today’s nativist right.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/donald-trump-silicon-valley-neoliberal-roots

https://archive.ph/vHb5F



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.”

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