TRUMP HAS NEVER seemed to have an ideology or political principles, exactly--he always seems to be winging it--but his administration and core supporters seem to have a vast array of ideologies, not all of which designed to be complementary. Having read books by Kristin Kobes du Mez and Matthew Taylor on Trump's Christian supporters, I had difficulty imagining what those supporters would talk about with the supporters Quinn Slobodian describes. But every coalition has its share of awkward conversations, I suppose.
Slobodian's book is short (176 pages of text) but dense (90 pages of notes and bibliography) and he is looking at the hard-core free market / Austrian school of economics / Mont Pelerin Society people involved in the rise of the right both here in the U.S. and in a good many other places. As opposed to the Buckley-led conservative fusionism that married neoliberal economics to religion, Slobodian argues, this group marries neoliberal economics to racist and eugenicist fantasies. This group--key figures, besides F. A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises themselves, include Murray Rothbard, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Charles Murray, Markus Krall, Peter Boehringer, Peter Brimelow, Samuel Francis, Richard Lynn, and Curtis Yarvin--celebrates one or more of what Slobidian calls the "hards": "hardwired culture, hard money, hard borders."
Hardwired culture: racial differences, as revealed by IQ testing, are hereditary and permanent, so white people are rightly in charge and should remain so.
Hard borders: because of "hardwired culture," letting in many non-white people will lead to social deterioration and disintegration.
Hard currency: back to the gold standard for national currency, please. But, failing that, all the smart cookies will be amassing gold as a hedge against the coming race-war apocalypse.
The folks circulating these ideas are, by and large, not at colleges and universities, but instead at foundations and think tanks that have been created to foster free-market-friendly thinking. The racist, eugenicist, xenophobic ideas are an add-on, apparently, but stir up mighty passions.
If the people at major research universities and (say) the New Yorker and the New York Times are our broad-daylight intelligentsia, the people Slobodian writes about in this book are our in-the-shadows intelligentsia, mainly known to each other and to wide networks of website/podcast/newsletter subscribers. They are men of the underground, unlikely to break into the bestseller lists alongside Timothy Snyder and Jill Lepore, but often handsomely funded, shining stars in a dark firmament all their own. And they seem to have not a few disciples in the Trump administration.
So, when the Evangelical potentates meet the Mont Pelerin potentates, do they talk about the Rapture, or about Milton Friedman, or do they just talk about the Super Bowl?
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