Fetishizing the Right

“Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right by Quinn Slobodian. Zone Books, 2025. 272 pages.”

“the conservative subject continues to be on the receiving end of a peculiar academic approach: the intellectual portrait.”

“The initial notoriety surrounding McCarthy and other “fringe” subjects overdetermined the subject matter’s importance relative to the rest of the American populace.”

“Slobodian’s new book argues that the 1990s are the key to understanding the Far Right today and its rise to power because of, not in opposition to, neoliberal capitalism as a form of “frontlash.””

“He focuses on a select group of thinkers and writers who can be connected back to the free-market guru Friedrich A. Hayek in their common emphasis on hard money, hard borders, and hard cultural differences.”

“the “new fusionism””

“Chapters include topics such as IQ and neurocastes, ethno-economies, and what he calls “goldbugs”: libertarians obsessed with profiting off economic disaster and doomsday prepping.”

“Compared to the “old fusionism” of religion and the free market that defined the core of conservative ideation for much of the 20th century, this “new fusionism” of the 21st looks to science and nature for inspiration for its various claims about intelligence, race, and capitalism.”

“Part of the difficulty of understanding Slobodian’s argument, however, is that his usage of “neoliberals” is reductive and at times confusing.”

“Slobodian’s subjects may be best thought of as paleolibertarians and paleoconservatives.”

“Forgoing an explicit analysis of neoliberalism to explore instead its obscene intellectual tributaries, Slobodian’s story connects unexpected entities together on ground that is perhaps not as common as we’d like to think.”

“the intellectual profile approach to such conservative figures has in fact helped to normalize their ideas, thus contributing to the very phenomenon under study in Hayek’s Bastards: changing sentiments of common sense.”