Let’s get into the book proper. Could you tell me more about what you term as “new fusionism” — that is, the neoliberal turn to nature and science as a way to neutralize the “egalitarian” impulse behind movements for social justice in the 1990s? And why is that an important starting point to understand the ideology of the far right today?
Well, there’s a standing way of interpreting the American right that goes by name of fusionism, which argues that it was the reconciliation of Christian traditionalists with free-market libertarians in the 1950s that gave the US conservative movement its specific shape and appearance.
What I noticed noticing was that beginning in the 1970s, but really accelerating in the ‘80s and ‘90s, the discussion inside neoliberal circles was returning more and more to ideas of both the hard sciences such as biology but also the social sciences and ideas of cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychology, and sociobiology. These people were discussing how they could use science to uphold neoliberal arguments.
By the 1990s, the breakthrough of a book like The Bell Curve — which was written by a Harvard psychologist with a libertarian think-tanker and stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for almost a year — then seemed to me like a tipping point. If you wanted to make the case for a larger audience, and maybe bring the center closer to your position, it made sense to not use the language of God and Jesus anymore but that of DNA and evolution.
Following the rise of the so-called alt-right in 2016, people were very confused by what they understood as the return of race science — there was an idea that after the Third Reich, nobody would take the idea of a scientific hierarchy of humans seriously again. But what my book shows is that race science continued in the shadows until it was given new credence in the 1990s and 2000s by the rise of the prestige of genetics, including the Human Genome Project, and neuroscience — the idea that brain chemistry determines behavior and that the truth of humans was written into their body and genes.