Don Flynn on ideology of the new right
Hayek’s Bastards: The neoliberal roots of the populist right by Quinn Slobodian published by Zone Books
Wone Bookshether in the form of the Trump MAGA, Farage’s Reform UK, the German AfD, the French Rassemblement national or the Italian Fratelli d’Italia, the far right is united in its claim to be leading the fight against the liberal elite’s plans for globalisation. Against cosmopolitan diversity, they represent a popular revolt standing for national patriotism, cultural homogeneity, and the traditional family.
The usual version of the history of right wing political activism tells us that it tracks back to the intellectuals gathered around Mount Pelerin who were intent on following the teachings of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. In this free market utopia, the factors of production – capital, labour, and goods – flow unimpeded across the globe. Its genius would perform magic in spontaneously optimising output to the benefit of all, maintaining its equilibrium without the interference of politics and the state.
But despite the significant wins for this ideology achieved by Pinochet’s overthrow of Chilean democracy in 1973, the partnership between Thatcher and Reagan in the 1980s, and the Washington Consensus that rolled on from the 1980s into the 90s and the collapse of Russian-style state socialism, the free market utopia never really arrived. In its place, we got stagnant wage growth, declining public services and rising inequality.
In Hayek’s Bastards, Quinn Slobodian looks at the evolution in right-wing thought, which has been attempting an escape route for an ideology which promised so much freedom but only opened the gates to much more misery. The name for this progression is paleolibertarianism.
As Slobodian explains, both Mises and Hayek had anticipated the weakness in reasoning that saw the liberation of the homo economicus who supposedly lay at the heart of human existence as the surest way to secure universal freedom. Human nature was making a prior claim on the way people related to each other, and that had been conditioned across tens of thousands of years to place a high value on cooperation and collective life. The neoliberal doctrine had to pull back from gratification of human needs by way of the market to complete its appeal, and that meant reaching beyond simple economics to build roots in the social and the political.
The result was a new fusionism in right-wing thinking, promoted by such luminaries as Lew Rockwell, Charles Murray, Gerrard Radnitzky, Murray Rothbard, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Peter Brimelow, and others. Making use of a network of think tanks and academic networks, they worked to close the gap between capitalist libertarians and the more traditional conservative right, which anchored its programme in the values of Kinder, Küche, Kirche – children, church and kitchen. If Mises and Hayek had once, mistakenly, signalled an interest in open borders and radical cosmopolitan outlooks, all this was to be reviled and replaced with a return to the patriarchal social order, with fealty to nation, kith and kin at its centre.
The advocates of the fusion of neoliberal libertarianism with old-style conservatism claim a scientific basis for their claims about human society. Social order is seen as arising from the ascendancy of the most able to the top spot, which cues IQ measurement as the guide as to who is best fitted. Charles Murray’s infamous claims about racial difference, as set out in the Bell Curve, have a revered place in paleolibertarian writings. Apartheid and Jim Crow segregation are praised as a rational means to regulate relations between ethnic groups, and firmly applied immigration control was a routine feature at national borders. To cap it all, the paleos make gold-based money a part of their credo, though for Nayib Bukele, the paleolibertarian president of El Salvador, there is a ‘new gold’ option available courtesy of the blockchain-based cryptocurrencies.
Is all this really a counterblast to the ‘globalists’ so reviled by the populist right? Not really. An elite – looking a lot like the tech bros of Silicon Valley – will remain at the top of the global order, Capital will rule the roost and roam footloose across the world, the disadvantaged will be left to scrabble for the crumbs, and the universal principle of property rights over human rights will ensure that those of us without our own Lear jets will live and die wherever we are born. Sounds just like old-style neoliberalism.