From the Cesspool to the Mainstream: The “new fusionist” intellectuals are the missing link between nineteenth-century race science, twentieth-century libertarianism, and the contemporary alt-right.
Posted by Standard_Ad7704
From the Cesspool to the Mainstream: The “new fusionist” intellectuals are the missing link between nineteenth-century race science, twentieth-century libertarianism, and the contemporary alt-right.
Posted by Standard_Ad7704
5 Comments
Archived Link: [https://archive.ph/RWbAp](https://archive.ph/RWbAp)
Isn’t Charles Murray like the grandfather of this movement? It disappointed me a lot when Sam Harris was glorifying the dude.
*Summary:*
* Quinn Slobodian’s book, *Hayek’s Bastards*, is presented as an intellectual history of the American far right’s “new fusionism.”
* This movement, featuring figures like Murray Rothbard and Peter Brimelow, is shown to have emerged from mainstream neoliberal institutions.
* Theories of immutable genetic and racial difference were used to argue for market supremacy, with government intervention for equality being framed as futile.
* Friedrich Hayek’s original philosophy is described as being inverted: the market was seen not as a discipline to overcome nature, but as a tool to enforce its innate hierarchies.
* The movement’s ideology is summarized by the book through the framework of the “three hards”: hardwired human nature, hard borders, and hard money.
* The concept of an “ethno-economy” was developed to justify “closed-border libertarianism,” where the movement of capital is championed but the movement of certain peoples is restricted.
* While the book is praised as an indispensable historical work, it is critiqued as being a better analysis of the first Trump administration than of the current political moment.
* It is argued that the contemporary far right has increasingly shed its libertarian principles in favor of a strong, protectionist state.
* This shift suggests that the economic philosophy was more disposable to the movement than its underlying racial and hierarchical project.
The alt-right is a rejection of fusionism. They started in parallel to the libertarian movement in the 80’s and 90’s of right wing dissidents disillusioned with Reagan and Bush SR. Rothbard, Murray, and Hoppe aren’t really relevent to the alt-right as we consider it today(which it really doesn’t exist anymore, but that’s a seperate discussion). Their origins are more a combination of 80’s and 90’s European fascist underground and American style white nationalism. The ancaps evolved into the Thiel form of politics, but its not really relevant these days.
Imagine explaining to Von Mises that his likeliness in the future would have been used to by basement dewellers with ideas exactly opposite to his loved multi-ethnic liberal Austria-Hungary lol