WHEN YOU “JUST TRUST THE SCIENCE”…
Blood-and-Soil Neoliberalism: An interview with Quinn Slobodian, the author of Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right (Nick Serpe, April 29, 2025, Dissent)
Serpe: You call this the “new fusionism.” What’s the substance of this project? Does it supplant the old fusionism of the right, or is it building on top of it?
Slobodian: There’s a very famous way of describing the conservative movement in the United States as one of fusionism between people primarily interested in economic freedom and market liberalism, on the one hand, and people primarily interested in Christian values and traditional order on the other. Historians have described an alliance between these two wings of the American right starting in the 1950s, which we can later see achieving power in certain ways in the Reagan administration and the second Bush administration.
The new fusionism I describe in the book starts to come together in the 1990s. The people who were arguing about the danger of the state and persistent socialism, and the need to defend capitalism and economic freedom, started to appeal, rather than to categories from religion, to categories from science—in particular evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, and even race science. This was a domain of great excitement and intellectual ferment in the 1990s, especially as books like The Bell Curve mainstreamed ideas of racial differences and intelligence, and scientific breakthroughs like the human genome project made it seem like our bodies contained a particular kind of truth that could not be denied by all the humanities professors in the world. Appeals to science became an effective way to fight this fight within the realm of ideas—in the academy, in the pages of magazines, and on talk shows. They somehow had more solidity than the longstanding appeal to Christian doctrine.
They’re garden variety Darwinists.