Dr Henry Maher1
1University of Sydney, Australia
Biography:
Dr Henry Maher is a Lecturer in Politics in the Discipline of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney. His interests lie in post-structuralist approaches to neoliberalism, international relations and international political economy. His main body of research concerns the survival of neoliberalism in times of crisis, and the relationship between neoliberalism and the far right. Henry’s work is published in International Studies Quarterly, Contemporary Political Theory and the British Journal of Politics and International Relations.
Abstract:
Central to contemporary iterations of fascism is the ‘Great Replacement Theory’, a racist conspiracy theory that claims western elites are conspiring to replace the ‘white’ population through unlimited mass migration from the global south. In some iterations of the Great Replacement Theory, globalisation and ‘neoliberal elites’ are held responsible for orchestrating the great replacement, reinforcing the general scholarly view of a fundamental antagonism between neoliberalism and fascism. In this paper, I challenge this presumption by documenting a neoliberal iteration of the Great Replacement Theory. Proponents of the neoliberal Great Replacement Theory argue that global elites are conspiring to encourage mass migration to entrench support for the expansion of the welfare state and other left-wing policies, in the process undermining the cultural homogeneity necessary to maintain functioning free market societies. I locate an early version of this narrative in leading neoliberal thinkers Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, who both claimed that white-western market society faced destruction at the hands of non-white immigrants whose perceived cultural or racial incompatibility, and higher birth rates, threatened to overwhelm western liberal societies. Secondly, the paper turns to contemporary iterations of the neoliberal Great Replacement theory, analysing the public output of neoliberal thinker Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and billionaire Elon Musk. Both evidence a worldview shaped by the neoliberal Great Replacement theory, claiming that western elites are weaponizing non-white immigration to undermine the western liberal order. Hoppe and Musk are therefore mainstreaming a euphemistic and neoliberal version of the previously fringe Great Replacement Theory.