How neoliberals fell in love with “human nature”—the glue that still unites the divergent factions of the new right.
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. 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.
