“Markets can remain irrational much longer than you or I can remain solvent.” Though often misattributed to John Maynard Keynes, this little turn of phrase was in fact coined by American economic analyst and Forbes columnist A. Gary Shilling. Shilling was a prescient man, as was fellow Forbes-columnist and economic analyst Peter Brimelow. In 2006, Shilling knew there was something wrong with the housing market and since 1995 Brimelow has been explaining the looming issues arising from American, and by extension western, immigration policy or lack thereof. The pages of Slobodian’s book are littered with rational men, like Brimelow, who fell victim to history and the market’s long arc of irrationality. For men like Brimelow and Jared Taylor the story is more than a little tragic, while for others like the libertarian “goldbug” analysts who in the 70s, 80s, and 90s encouraged their unfortunate readers to divest from the stock market and put their savings into gold it is more darkly comic.
Hayek’s Bastards is about the “libertarian to alt-right pipeline.” With the honorable exception of Brimelow, it could have been subtitled something like “the men who gave us Mr. Lobe.” One can find little to recommend it; the writing itself and the figures on whom it dwells are, for the most part, not very interesting. Slobodian details various free marketers who, from the 60s onward, noticed that the rising tide of color was distinctly unfriendly to laissez-faire capitalism, among other things, and so turned to anthropology and social science to find intellectual justifications for such people’s disenfranchisement and exclusion. Intellectual activities pursued to justify some tenuously related political goal, as opposed to those pursued out of genuine interest, are seldom fruitful and often tedious; witness ‘evopsych’ as it is deployed on twitter and the blogosphere, the botched descendant of the pursuits Slobodian chronicles. When Slobodian tells us about Hayek deploying something called the “Savannah Story” to explain the “inherited instincts” which give rise to “tribalism” and “collectivism,” we are probably just a few steps removed from internet luminaries using clips from the “whatever podcast” to explain female hypergamy.
There is some good in Hayek’s Bastards. Not all the characters are as dreary as I’m making them sound. We are introduced to figures like Nathanael Weyl, a man who redeemed his otherwise boring biography of ex-Trot turned National Review writer by becoming possibly one of the most active and enthusiastic activists for eugenics and Southern African whites of the latter 20th-century. Weyl’s story reminds somewhat of Marvin Liebman, another ex-Communist Jew who championed Rhodesia.
The best thing about Hayek’s Bastards is the brief focus on the arresting life of Peter Brimelow, and the opportunity it offers for reflection on the nature of victory and defeat in politics. Slobodian’s potted biography of Brimelow is a nice testament to this interesting man; an econ columnist and Stanford MBA who explored a variety of topics before discovering the work of a lifetime in attempting to explain and correct the bizarre relationship between the post-sixties west and the colored world as manifested in our immigration policies. From his first quote, “the fact is that a belief in free markets does not commit you to free immigration,” Brimelow’s is the voice of clear-minded common sense and over the course of the chapter Slobodian shows us Brimelow again and again winning the debate with the fluffy-headed champions of diversity in the nineties.
This retread of the debates of the nineties is genuinely interesting. We find mind-numbing quotes from such eminent figures as Francis Fukuyama, writing in Commentary on the hypothetical benefits of English versus African immigrants: “it may or may not be right that a million Zulus would work harder than a million English, but a million Taiwanese certainly would, and would bring with them much stronger family structures and entrepreneurship to boot.” Slobodian fails to find anyone decisively refuting Brimelow’s arguments in Alien Nation, indeed he shows it sweeping the conservative commentariat before it, which makes it all the more poignant that the book failed to make any great dent in American immigration policy. Much the same happens with the intelligence research of Murray, Hernstein, and co. After decades of having the evidence laid out for them, the Republican party of George Bush gave America No Child Left Behind and an abortive push for illegal migrant amnesty.
A fellow J’Accuse contributor once explained the 90s thusly:
In the late 21st century, the fruits of the 1960s cultural revolution were contested. Licio Gelli as much as Hayek was in the limelight when the USSR collapsed. What ought to have followed was a second cultural revolution where the collection of ‘dissident’ theories replacing them could be unified into a new worldview; a “paradigm shift”. Instead, the outdated ideology of the 60s radicals survived as an empty, pseudo-religious public doctrine; while the novel advances in various fields were fragmented into ‘postmodern’ zaniness without a unifying grand narrative. The welfare state ought to have been refocused to selecting and patronising those identified as having inborn talent, instead it was simply dismantled except as a rent-seeking operation on urban decline.
Hayek’s Bastards is essentially about one of these novel advances and its splintering off into ‘postmodern’ zaniness in the absence of a grand narrative more compelling than Hayek’s Savannah story. It functions best as a workable enough catalog of minor economic thinkers and heterodox postwar social scientists wrapped around a compelling Guardian Sunday long read about Peter Brimelow. Pinochet in Piccadilly by Andy Beckett covers similar territory and is far better written, far more absorbing, and involves in-person interviews with primary sources like John O’Sullivan in contrast to Slobodian’s JSTOR trawling. John O’Sullivan himself wrote an excellent essay on the fight over immigration 2007, which would be your best source for that topic. /
As for the sisyphean nature of these debates, Slobodian's work is simply a good reminder that intellectual shifts take time. To compare a similar movement, consider that Plessy V Ferguson, the American Supreme Court case which enshrined segregation for fifty years, was engineered by civil rights activists as an early attempt at lawfare against the incipient Jim Crow system. Sometimes one loses for sixty years in order to later win for twenty.