Only a rare few in the alternative right knew Alexander Dugin before the publication and translation of his book, The Fourth Political Theory, in 2012. Suddenly, the contents of this book became the subject of lively discussion and he was hailed as “arguably the most prominent New Right thinker in the world.” . . .
Through the first pages, I was fairly impressed by Dugin’s laconic treatment of the way liberalism had created the normative conditions for a humanity predisposed toward a world government in its “glorification of total freedom and the independence of the individual from any kind of limits, including reason, identity (social, ethnic, or even gender), discipline, and so on” (18). With the “liberation” of man from any necessary, pre-ordained membership in any community or identity, and the universal morality of human rights widely accepted, few obstacles now stood in the way of a totalitarian global market. . . .
But it soon became apparent that Dugin’s FPT was more than a critique of American hegemony and Atlanticism; it was an unrelenting attack on the very essence of Western civilization. . . .
Dugin defends the Russian people and empire from the perspective of tradition while criticizing the West from the perspective of postmodernism and cultural Marxism. It has escaped the attention of commentators in the alternative right that Dugin relies almost entirely on cultural Marxists in his assessment of liberalism. I don’t think we should take it lightly that he celebrates Karl Marx’s ideas as “tremendously useful and applicable” (50), calls Franz Boas “the greatest American cultural anthropologist” (63), and believes that Levi-Strauss “convincingly showed” that primitive cultures in Africa were as complex and rich as European cultures (109). . . .
He is oblivious to the fact that without Peter the Great’s assimilation of European knowhow in industry, the Russian empire Dugin so admires, and aberrantly identifies with tradition per se, would have disintegrated in the modern era. . . .
He accepts Foucault’s condemnation of the Enlightenment as a carrier of “all the signs of intellectual racism, apartheid, and other totalitarian prejudices” (133). With statements like this Dugin would easily fit into a Western university environment. His depiction of all that is Western as racist and evil combined with his identification of non-Western traditional cultures as authentic, natural, and truthful are no different from the multiculturalist template enforced in academia. We are supposed to believe that the Chinese with their suppressed minorities and official discourse of racial hierarchies, the Russians with their history of breaking national heritages, and the Indians with their filthy caste system are not racist but possessors of healthy empires that should be supported by White nationalists in opposition to American hegemony. . . .
Dugin welcomes postmodernism and envisages its proponents as allies, not enemies, of a common front against Western modernity and liberalism. Postmodernists and cultural Marxists (“New Leftists”) are positively portrayed for their complex attack on the West . . . .
He rejects categorically the concept of nations with ethnic boundaries as a modern idea that works against traditionalism and empires. He envisages a role for White nationalists only within the context of a Europe thoroughly watered down by mass immigration and postmodern diversity where proud European ethnics will somehow find a niche alongside Africans, Asians, and Muslims against American universalism. . . .
The Fourth Political Theory is a theory for Russian geopolitical strategists, not for European ethno nationalists.
Roman (was) in Ukraine
