Science, tech and the authoritarian turn in the alt-right
Having bastardised Hayek, neoliberals are taking us in a Russian direction
The alt-right movement that today has seized control of the US and is on the march in Europe including the UK is at heart a kind of neoliberalism that defines itself through three hards – hard borders, hard money and hard science. Hard borders – a state, or statelets, with negligible immigration. Hard money – a state stripped of the power that comes with a fiat currency. Hard science – a state dominated by a single race whose superiority to many would-be fellow citizens is a function of its superior genes.
This is the persuasive thesis that Quinn Slobodian lays out in Hayek’s Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right. It is a corrective to the story the alt-right tells about itself, that it is a rebellion against the neoliberal globalists who held sway after the end of the Cold War. On the contrary, the core of the alt-right is revealed to be just another turn of the neoliberal screw, but this time with science displacing the conservative morality of Reagan and Thatcher as the faithful companion that explains away the harshness of capitalism.
For all that scientific racism and scientific sexism has been disputed by leading scientists, the folk success of this biological turn will be familiar to anyone who has glanced at discussions of differences between groups in society on Reddit or X. Evolutionary psychology, sociobiology, eugenics and IQ are never far away.
Nonetheless, the book leaves us with a puzzle, since highlighted by Slobodian himself. Neoliberalism is associated with the Austrian, laissez faire school of economics and many of its allies in the alt-right have a libertarian bent. So how does it come now to be at the centre of the avowedly authoritarian movement led by Donald Trump?
Science vs Culture
The book is called Hayek’s Bastards because while the alt-right honours Friedrich Hayek and the rest of the Austrian school, in many ways it is an illegitimate descendent. The most important aspect of this deviation lies in the difference between culture and biology.
Hayek believed in a certain kind of human nature he evoked with a story set on the primeval savannah. According to this (made up) story, in the small groups in which we then lived, bonds of solidarity between individuals were of great adaptive value. Today, with market capitalism the driver of improved human wellbeing, these bonds are instead a liability that interferes with the dispassionate reckoning of monetary value that capitalism relies on. Because this human solidarity was so basic to us, Hayek thought neoliberalism could never be sold on its own and would always need to be fused with something else to win public support – an attitude that lies behind the mixing first with morality and then with biology.
However, Hayek never placed much weight on biology as an explanation of differences between groups. For example, he emphasised culture rather than race. As Slobodian shows, his thinking has been bastardised by the alt-right to generate the paleo variety of libertarianism in which primeval hard-wiring in humans justifies social hierarchy today. To understand this bastardisation therefore, we should compare culture and biology as explanations of differences between groups in society. Such an approach does not require us to embrace the whole of Hayek’s thinking but, thanks to Hayek’s support, has a unique potential to disrupt the alt-right’s grip on folk understandings.
There seems little point discussing whether there are differences between groups in society. The question is how the groups should be defined, what are the differences between them and where do the differences come from – questions to which the alt-right’s turn to the just so stories of its hard biology provide ready answers.
In searching for other kinds of answers, there are a clutch of explanations that have nothing to do with either biology or culture, and which the alt-right’s focus on biology serves to obscure. These are straightforward material and historical explanations. For example, in the 1950s and 1960s the United States chose to foster the semiconductor industry in east Asia. If, instead, it had chosen Africa for what has turned out to be the most lucrative industry on the planet then economic comparisons between the two parts of the world today would look very different.
Still, the importance of such explanations does not exclude racial or cultural explanations, still less weaken the grip of the alt-right on folk understandings. Let us focus on the scientific racism of the alt-right that is the basis for its ethno-nationalism. Let us compare this with a cultural explanation, first at the conceptual level and then in terms of the narrative offered about our history and our future.
The alt-right’s conception of race (simply “race” from hereonin) establishes hard boundaries between groups defined as Africans, Ashkenazi Jews, East Asians, Europeans and so on. This easily lends itself to the most poisonous kind of racism in which any kind of intermingling of the races is considered an abhorrent violation of purity.
The alt-right’s idea is that culture is hard-wired by race. This makes race the more primitive feature but also entails accepting that culture is the more proximate feature. To use a biological analogy, in this conception race is the genotype, culture the phenotype. Thus almost any alt-right explanation of an observable feature in society today that starts with race is obliged to run through culture.
However, this rather peculiar idea of culture has often been challenged, and I think rightly. It seems pretty obvious that cultures are always evolving and intermingling; just as Japanese printmakers of the 19th Century seized on the long-desired blue pigments that arrived from Europe, so Europeans seized on the vibrant wood cuts that resulted.
This fluidity distinguishes the idea of culture I’m relying on here from both the alt-right’s hard-wired conception and the civilisations that Samuel Huntington in the 1990s argued were destined to clash. Still, I think there are aspects of culture that are deep, enduring and consequential. For example, it is almost impossible for a Brit like me to imagine a society that does not lean heavily on the concept of mens rea (criminal intent). To us, the gulf between doing something by accident and on purpose is huge – but other cultures, such as the Germanic tribes that Christiandom displaced, don’t have the same attitude. An example of a more evidenced deep difference is that between low- and high-trust societies, hypothesised by Francis Fukuyama as an underlying explanation of economic performance and pursued empirically by economists for 30 years.
Race and culture are similar in that they shape us but are given to us rather than chosen. A child is born into a culture (or cultures) and naturally takes it on, having very little say in the matter. On the other hand, they are different in that an adult may take on a new culture, perhaps in a limited way, or repudiate a culture.
Race and culture are also similar in that both are a source of difference between groups that is intrinsic rather than extrinsic. So they complicate, but do not eliminate, so-called blank slate forms of argument that compare the flourishing of different groups in society and argue that groups with less flourishing can be presumed to be suffering from a form of discrimination.
Stories
So much for concepts, on to the alt-right’s stories. Let’s take America. Looking backwards, the story is that the United States was created by Europeans and owes its success to distinctive features of the European race, particularly its high IQ and consequent propensity to embrace capitalism. Looking forwards, its story is that the future is threatened by miscegenation with other races that have lower IQ, and by social disharmony that is inevitable when races are combined in a single state; the solution is an ethno-state of the European race.
A culture-oriented response to this starts with the observation that, for a thousand years, Europe has consisted of two cultures rather than one – one in the west rooted originally in the Catholic church and one in the east rooted in the Orthodox church. It is the western culture that gave birth to the United States and its success through the religious motivation of early settlers, the overwhelming mass of early immigrants, the impetus for national self-determination, the basic ideas of capitalism, liberty and democracy in the US Constitution, and the scientific and industrial revolutions that enabled its economic and military dominance. Meanwhile, Russia’s colonisation of Siberia produced… Siberia. This suggests that culture can explain what race cannot.
An important difference between the two European cultures is that the eastern one is monolithic and the western one polylithic, or fractured, twice over. First, there is a separation between church and state that can be traced back to the papal bull In nomine Domini issued in 1059. Second, there is the geographic fragmentation into principalities and later nations. Neither of these divisions has been anything like as strong in the east where neither Czars, nor the Soviet Union, nor Putin have been inclined to recognise the limitations on their power that result from either form of fracturing.
The political landscape that resulted in Western Europe was highly varied. An example of the importance of this can be found in the latitude it gave scholars to pursue their inquiries even against the wishes of popes and kings. If one university was shut down, scholars could move to another; even the conviction by the Church of Galileo for heresy, along with the banning of his books, failed to stop the spread of his heliocentric ideas.
The intellectual development of the fractured west could be described as evolutionary: ideas and scholars moved around and evolved, like organisms flitting from island to island, niche to niche. By contrast, development in the monolithic east could be described as engineered: ideas and ideology were centrally controlled. I use these anachronistic terms because they have been used by Slobodian in a recent podcast (starting at 45:30) while reflecting on the failure of his book to account for the authoritarian turn in the alt-right:
“I think even the kind of paleo-libertarian alliance that I describe in the book is also arguably starting to come apart in certain ways because I think that the domination of the belief in absolute concentration of power, whether it's in a president or in a CEO or a tech founder, actually has no tolerance for the space of open innovation, mutation, and play that at least the ideologically pure version of neoliberalism allowed for. That sounds very convoluted but let me use another analogy that I've been thinking about a lot, which is the difference between biology and physics. I think you can't really overstate how important communities of scientists are as ideal communities for neoliberal intellectuals.
Hayek and others, and Michael Polanyi, Karl Polanyi’s brother, organized in the 1930s, specifically to defend science in the UK against what they saw as the Stalinist takeover of Lysenkoism, in what was called the social relations of science movement that was a post-structuralism avant la lettre, in a way, in the sense that they said that truth is dependent on class relations – what we consider to be science is always coloured by whatever structure science is being undertaken in. And so Hayek and Polanyi and others really defended an idea that there needs to be a pure science that is aware of its conditions of production but is also somehow insulated from ideological intrusion.
And the fact that for Hayek the master metaphor became that of evolutionary biology in the population is really important, because his idea was we need to create polities in which mutations can happen. We might not expect them. In fact, we won't expect them. We don't know when they're coming. But the idea of a well-functioning economy is one in which individuals are able to draw on their own isolated knowledge in the location they're in, to plunge down and look at the earth and look at the people around them and make better use of the resources available to them. Let's say fair is not the right word, but there is an attitude of arms-length construction of this kind of ant farm terrarium – even a larger space where experimentation can take place, like a biosphere. Whereas I feel like the takeover of MAGA by tech people like Musk has displaced that biological metaphor of adventure and innovation and mutation with an idea of total control and total transparency.
It's the assembly line instead of the biosphere, where society must act according to certain algorithms, and if it doesn't, then someone is wrong, someone needs to be punished, someone is out of line. So the permissiveness and the give and the play, which I think one has to grant at some level to libertarian and neoliberal philosophy has now been displaced with a much narrower idea of what human behaviour ought to look like. Which makes me, when I look at it, wonder if the kind of way I'm describing the essence of a kind of libertarian right-wing fusion is even a good way to describe what we're seeing anymore because the engineering mind seems to have really crushed the evolutionary biologist's mind.”
The parallels are crystal clear. The historic reality of a Europe divided between a polylithic, evolutionary west and a monolithic, engineered east is mirrored today in the attempt by the alt-right to displace the polylithic, evolutionary character of the United States with a monolithic, engineered regime. The generality of this move can be seen in the determination of Trump 2 to curtail the autonomy of all institutions outside the White House, including that of individual states, Congress, the judiciary, the civil service, universities, the media and law firms.
The tech mind
As a matter of terminology, I don’t think the “engineering mind” is in fact what Slobodian is describing. Engineers can be as evolutionary as anybody, as for example in the widespread enthusiasm for agile forms of software development. Rather, the idea of “total control and total transparency” seems to me to be more reminiscent of his earlier nod towards Silicon Valley, being both a reflection of the attitude of the control freak CEOs celebrated in Silicon Valley and intrinsic to the global monopolies of Silicon Valley that rely on network effects. It’s not an engineering mind but a Big Tech mind he is observing.
The Big Tech mind expresses itself in a variety of other monolithic ways. When a tech company creates a lucrative prize, it does not, as Alfred Nobel did, give it away to an autonomous academy; it holds onto it for itself. When a tech company goes out to raise funding, it invites investors to imagine complete ownership of some huge domain, as when Demis Hassabis promotes the Google spin out Isomorphic Labs with the claim that AI will eliminate disease in the next 10 years. When the Big Tech mind runs into a difficult problem, it can always solve it with the magic of tech, as Robert Kennedy can solve the problem of lengthy and expensive drug trials by replacing them with AI.
However, even with this revision, I don’t think the monolithic turn Slobodian is highlighting can be traced exclusively to Big Tech. The political playbook that is being followed was originally developed in Eastern Europe by Igor Kolomoisky and Rinat Akhmetov in Ukraine, Andrej Babiš in the Czech Republic, Victor Orbán in Hungary and Vladimir Putin in Russia – examples that lack anything like Silicon Valley but share with Trump a naked kleptocratic desire for power and personal enrichment. We also should I think pay attention to what is happening in US churches. Henry Farrell has pointed out the importance of integralism, a doctrine that accepts no separation between church and state, to the right today. And in Cross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy, Jonathan Rauch describes how the separation between the secular and the divine is breaking down in evangelical churches that are increasingly dominated by MAGA activists.
Today we would usually label the regime Trump is aiming to create authoritarian rather than monolithic or engineered. The advantage of introducing these historically-inflected terms is that they steer us towards a long view of events in the US and thus begin to offer an alternative to the alt-right’s narrative.
The alt-right argues that cultural homogeneity is needed for markets to work effectively, from which it is only a short step in its own logic to a nation of racial purity. However, even if the need for homogeneity of the alt-right’s idea of culture were right, the homogeneity couldn’t be of any kind. In particular, a society that is so homogenous that it squeezes out the evolutionary, polylithic heterogeneity that is foundational to Western European and the United States would not be like one of these countries in the past; it would be utterly different.
So the alternative narrative tells us that MAGA is now trying to move the US from one culture to another, from the polylithic, evolutionary Western European culture to the monolithic, engineered Eastern European culture. Put simply, the destination envisaged for the US is Russia 2. This move is thus a repudiation of the history of the US, including the distinctive features that made it successful. The transformation it aims at is truly revolutionary but its destiny is decline not greatness. If it wins, the American working man can look forward to a future life that in its powerlessness echoes that of Russian men today on the wrong side of the Caucasus – poverty, alcoholism and drugs; entry into the army because there is no alternative either economically or legally; being driven across minefields to an explosive death in ‘meat assaults’; a wife left pleading for a pension that never comes.
