Alexandr Dugin is Putin (and apparently Tucker Carlson's) favorite philosopher. His critique of the modern West taps into real frustrations. But his cure is the collapse of America itself.
An excellent piece by J. Michael Waller about Alexander Dugin with whom I was not previously familiar! Thank you, Dr. Martin for republishing it! Alexander Dugin claims to have the antidote to what ails the modern West, destroy it. Yep, you read that right. He says to save the West it must be destroyed including the United States of America. That widespread cultural despair and a desire for a revival of national sovereignty and Christian tradition abound in the West there is no doubt. But Dugin’s answer to these fond wishes is horrifying! Dugin is quite explicit that the United States needs to be destroyed. His personal geopolitical theory sees the United States as the main enemy. He for Russia to undermine the United States from within using propaganda to promote racial and political division and social instability and to push the individual states to succeed from the Union. Dugin also despises America’s founding principles. Dugin furthermore embraces some of the tenets of Marxism. He also has a soft spot for Italian fascism and German national socialism. Never mind that both ideologies led to millions of people being murdered, the creation of brutal totalitarian states and the rise of two of history’s worst monsters. Allow to educate you, Mr. Dugin. Benito Mussolini came to power using brutal violence and murder, committed horrific war crimes in Libya, Ethiopia, Albania, and Yugoslavia, dismantled democracy in Italy, passed racial laws that stripped Italian Jews of their citizenship, barred them from the professions and education and banned them from owning land, and deporting thousands of Italians Jess to concentration camps. Adolf Hitler murdered six million Jews and five million others in the Holocaust, through labor union leaders abs political dissenters into concentration camps, tried to conquer the world, invaded numerous countries, committed too many war crimes to count, destroyed the Weimar Republic, did terror bombing of cities, passed the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, and tried to destroy his own country when he realized it was all over for him and his “thousand year Reich.” That’s the people and ideologies you admire so much.
Dugin doesn’t advocate for national sovereignty, he basically advocates for Russian imperialism. He wants to see a huge Eurasian empire created with Russia at the center of it. Russia will form alliances with Europe, Japan and Iran. Africa and the Middle East will be administered by Russia and their European allies. Basically he believes in Russia ruling the world. He’s not too crazy about individual freedom either. In fact, he wants it abolish altogether. Dugin is not a fan of Christianity either, doesn’t believe there is anything as right and wrong and is a pagan. Dugin wishes to use all the world’s religions as a way to indoctrinate people into supporting his Eurasian empire. Dugin is a HUGE antisemite who sees Jewish conspiracies everywhere and he detests Zionism. Something tells me in Dugan’s world, Israel wouldn’t exist and the Jewish people would be second-class citizens. He intends to use conspiracy theories about Jews as a way to destabilize and polarize the West. Lastly, Dugan wants the whole world to become pagan. Tucker Carlson is platforming and treating as a hero, this nutcase who wants Vladimir Putin to rule the world and for our glorious republic to be demolished. He wants the Russian bear to slaughter the American Eagle. Dugin is a madman who should NEVER be allowed anywhere near power! Nor would any responsible journalist ever do a fawning interview with him or lend credence or subscribe to his ideas. Tucker does both and it won’t be long now before Tucker just brings a Neo-Nazi on his show and starts talking about how Adolf Hitler was just misunderstood! Ai yi yi! Tucker had lost it!
My promotion of America’s 250th birthday continues! 🇺🇸🤍❤️💙🎉🎂🥳 Here are some great books on our glorious republic in the 1990s and 2000s:
• The Totally Sweet 90s: From Clear Cola to Furby, and Grunge to "Whatever", the Toys, Tastes, and Trends That Defined a Decade by Gael Fashingbauer Cooper & Brian Belmont
• Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s by Nicole Hemmer
• The Age of Clinton: America in the 1990s by Gil Troy
• American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing by Lou Michel
• Ruby Ridge: The Truth and Tragedy of the Randy Weaver Family by Jess Walter
• Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and A Legacy of Rage by Jeff Guinn
• The Breach: Inside the Impeachment and Trial of William Jefferson Clinton by Peter Baker
• Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House by Peter Baker
• Bush by Jean Edward Smith
• The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III by Peter Baker & Susan Glasser
• To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America into Iraq by Robert Draper
• The American War in Afghanistan: A History by Carter Malkasian
• The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 by Garrett M. Graff
• Clinton's Elections: 1992, 1996, and the Birth of a New Era of Governance by Michael Nelson
• The Finish: The Killing of Osama bin Laden by Mark Bowden
• The Jordan Rules: The Inside Story of Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls by Sam Smith
• Three-Ring Circus: Kobe, Shaq, Phil, and the Crazy Years of the Lakers Dynasty by Jeff Pearlman
• Boys Will Be Boys: The Glory Days and Party Nights of the Dallas Cowboys Dynasty by Jeff Pearlman
• Love Me, Hate Me: Barry Bonds and the Making of an Antihero – A Nuanced Biography of Baseball's Celebrated, Controversial Icon by Jeff Pearlman
• Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain by Charles R. Cross
Dugin’s philosophy is what I call “Little Debbie Political Theory”: looks good, maybe even tastes good to some, but in the end it’s nothing but cheap and fake trash for the body.
Cardinal Manning (1808-1892) has been credited with saying, “All human conflict is ultimately theological”. Theology matters, and bad theology hurts people. Dugin is a testament to this, writ large. God-less political theory leads to the God-less government of a God-less society. It will always be humanism on full display, and the only option is for it to be ruled by the sinful, unregenerate heart of an evil dictatorship or aristocracy.
Alexandr Dugin is an outright Satanist and a follower of the teachings of Satanist Allister Crowley. Don't believe me, do your own research. It is readily available on the internet. Tucker Carlson has gone off the plantation into the anti-Semitic insane asylum of the Nazis. He claims to be a Christian yet harbors a real hatred for anything Jewish. Go figure?
If you do the research, you will probably discover that Dugin has at one point followed literally everything. He takes whatever ideological darkness is available and sells it to whoever is willing to buy it. If he were selling rubber ducks, you would probably end up buying two or three of those as well.
It contains theses that are almost correct — but correct in roughly the same way that a broken clock shows the perfectly correct time twice a day. The problem is not with the facts the author presents, but with his misunderstanding of Dugin as a figure.
A little context.
Dugin comes from a family belonging to the Soviet military-intelligence nomenklatura. He is the only son of a GRU lieutenant general and, very probably, the father of a Foreign Intelligence Service operative. It is therefore fair to place Dugin within the milieu of the Soviet military-intelligence elite — what might informally be called the chekist nobility. He received no systematic foundational education in philosophy and has no completed higher education.
Almost everything we know about the young Dugin consists of his continuous participation in magical, ritualistic, esoteric, far-right and far-left circles, sects and political laboratories. There was a great deal of experimentation: from attempts to marry Thelema, Traditionalism and Christianity to writing programmatic texts for the National Bolsheviks.
All the glittering depths of his intellectual degradation coincided with the age of the internet and social media. The development of Dugin as a specialist in narrative influence can therefore be traced almost day by day.
A characteristic quotation:
|| “Russians need our own, Russian economy — Islamic banking, for example.”
This is an almost perfect demonstration of the method. The concepts do not need to be logically compatible. It is enough for them to point toward the same enemy and to be attachable to the required audience.
Now let us return to the clock — that is, to the article.
The phrase “Putin’s favorite philosopher” contains an entire cloud of smoke and mirrors.
First, Dugin is not a philosopher.
Second, there is no basis for speaking of any “favorite philosopher of Putin.” Putin is unlikely to construct policy as an attentive reader of philosophical treatises.
But Putin and Dugin really do share one important understanding: both recognize the ability of the written and spoken word to influence people. One searches for and uses the instruments of that influence. The other specializes in producing them.
Seen from this perspective, Dugin’s life consists almost entirely of three types of activity:
1. exercising narrative influence over heterogeneous groups, sects and political movements;
2. creating laboratories for producing and testing such narratives;
3. constructing the ideologemes themselves and the methods used to deliver them.
His legacy then appears not as a philosophical system, but as a package of carefully developed functional ideologemes created in the tradition of Soviet propaganda and political warfare.
The Soviet Union had an almost century-long history of cultivating friendly regimes, parties, movements and influence groups around the world. A substantial practical and theoretical school was developed for this work. It would be naive to assume that its only targets were young communists somewhere in Zambia. Young leftists at Cambridge, as we know, could also be successfully indoctrinated.
The Soviet Union knew how to scale successful startups. It sought to influence every sufficiently stable and ideologized constituency: left-wing, right-wing, migrant, nationalist, Christian, Muslim — any of them. Or it created its own. Social media merely made this work cheaper: entering a Cambridge postgraduate program is no longer required.
An agent of narrative control can operate openly and publicly, even declaring his intentions directly.
This is how Dugin should be understood: as a functional agent of narrative control. His writings should be understood as instruments of that control.
The first clearly visible laboratory was the so-called Yuzhinsky, or Golovin, circle. Esoteric Traditionalism, far-right metaphysics and radical Islamic political thought were developed there simultaneously. Dugin’s partner and mentor was Heydar Dzhemal — a “Muslim thinker” of no lesser caliber. Researchers describe this circle as precisely the environment through which the metaphysical underground entered post-Soviet radical politics.
Then came the work with the National Bolshevik milieu: the production of programmatic texts, symbols, newspaper language and political aesthetics.
After that came *Foundations of Geopolitics* — a major programmatic product aimed at military, security and statist audiences. Eventually, the product found its way into an entire zoo of American right-wing figures. Dugin began appearing with Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones and other conservative media personalities, offering them a specially adapted package: opposition to woke politics, globalism, LGBT people, Soros and the “decline of the West.”
It was probably at this stage that an ordinary Russian narrative operator received the opportunity to become “Putin’s favorite philosopher” in Western eyes. Long-term influence over the bottom of American politics is an expensive investment, but, as we can see, a promising one with a time horizon measured in decades.
Let us return to the article.
The author positions Dugin fairly accurately as an ideological enemy of the United States. For some reason, however, he forgets to explain the origin of that hostility. He does not mention that we are looking at a representative of a hereditary service milieu that spent decades regarding the United States as the “main adversary.”
Well, he forgot.
And then the sadness begins.
The attempt to extract some stable meaning from Dugin’s works and identify important diagnostic quotations is largely futile. It is a search through smoke and mirrors.
Today one can find Dugin declaring that Trump is a knight with golden wings. Tomorrow one can find the opposite. Neither means very much. Quotations extracted from different periods — when he was herding multicolored fascists, radical Christians, Islamists, communists or imperialists — mean just as little.
Understanding Dugin as a functional operator should have shifted the respectable author’s attention away from ideologemes and toward methods.
And there really is something to study here, even within a single case: Rod Martin, Waller and Tucker Carlson.
Carlson performed the legitimizing function first. He cleansed Dugin of his political biography, presented him as a persecuted philosopher, allowed him to explain America and barely required him to answer for Russia. He gave the Russian product a Western audience and extended to it his own credit of trust.
Waller recognized the toxicity of the product but accepted its packaging. He correctly describes its anti-Americanism, imperialism and use of conspiracy theories, religion and political extremism. He even describes *Conspirology* as something resembling an operational manual. Yet he continues to search inside that manual for a coherent philosophy and an authorial worldview.
You, Rod, completes the operation. You place the phrase “Putin’s favorite philosopher — and apparently Tucker Carlson’s” in the headline and uses Dugin as a weapon in the internal war among American conservatives.
All three enter Dugin’s operation voluntarily and for different reasons.
Carlson needs a foreign authority who confirms his diagnosis of American decline.
Waller needs a comprehensible ideological enemy who can be divided into ten theses.
Rod needs a club with which to strike Carlson.
Dugin receives from each of them something Russian propaganda cannot produce on its own: Western recognition of his status.
Carlson certifies him as a philosopher.
Waller certifies him as a serious enemy.
Martin certifies him as a philosopher capable of capturing one of America’s most influential conservatives.
None of them needs to receive instructions from Moscow. Each independently finds the Russian product useful for his own domestic purposes and voluntarily becomes one of its delivery channels.
There is, however, one thing in the article that deserves particular recognition.
Whether instinctively or analytically, Waller comes close to recognizing Dugin’s texts as a mirror. And here: bravo.
Because that is exactly how they work.
Dugin does not transmit a single coherent doctrine to different audiences. He returns to each audience its own fears, grievances and hatreds — only slightly edited so that they lead toward the required geopolitical conclusion.
The left sees anti-capitalism and resistance to American imperialism in the mirror.
The right sees Christianity, tradition and opposition to woke politics.
Islamists see resistance to the West.
Nationalists see sovereignty.
Conspiracy theorists see the hidden hand of the globalists.
At the center of every reflection remains the same proposition: the United States and the Western constitutional order are the principal enemy.
This is what the article gets right.
It is only a pity that, while examining the mirror, the author once again mistook the manufacturer of mirrors for a philosopher.
P.S. From an analyst connected to the Department of Defense, I naturally expected something with sharper teeth. Just as I would expect the institutions charged with defending the U.S. Constitution to drag Tucker Carlson into the swamps and introduce him to the most handsome alligator they can find.
Instead, the analyst appears toothless, while the Constitution appears defenseless.
I suspect there may be some connection between the two.
Tears are making it hard to speak. Looks like someone read the covers of half of Dugin’s books. Should I offer a critique of the article?
I might even be able to get you a debate with the author.
An excellent piece by J. Michael Waller about Alexander Dugin with whom I was not previously familiar! Thank you, Dr. Martin for republishing it! Alexander Dugin claims to have the antidote to what ails the modern West, destroy it. Yep, you read that right. He says to save the West it must be destroyed including the United States of America. That widespread cultural despair and a desire for a revival of national sovereignty and Christian tradition abound in the West there is no doubt. But Dugin’s answer to these fond wishes is horrifying! Dugin is quite explicit that the United States needs to be destroyed. His personal geopolitical theory sees the United States as the main enemy. He for Russia to undermine the United States from within using propaganda to promote racial and political division and social instability and to push the individual states to succeed from the Union. Dugin also despises America’s founding principles. Dugin furthermore embraces some of the tenets of Marxism. He also has a soft spot for Italian fascism and German national socialism. Never mind that both ideologies led to millions of people being murdered, the creation of brutal totalitarian states and the rise of two of history’s worst monsters. Allow to educate you, Mr. Dugin. Benito Mussolini came to power using brutal violence and murder, committed horrific war crimes in Libya, Ethiopia, Albania, and Yugoslavia, dismantled democracy in Italy, passed racial laws that stripped Italian Jews of their citizenship, barred them from the professions and education and banned them from owning land, and deporting thousands of Italians Jess to concentration camps. Adolf Hitler murdered six million Jews and five million others in the Holocaust, through labor union leaders abs political dissenters into concentration camps, tried to conquer the world, invaded numerous countries, committed too many war crimes to count, destroyed the Weimar Republic, did terror bombing of cities, passed the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, and tried to destroy his own country when he realized it was all over for him and his “thousand year Reich.” That’s the people and ideologies you admire so much.
Dugin doesn’t advocate for national sovereignty, he basically advocates for Russian imperialism. He wants to see a huge Eurasian empire created with Russia at the center of it. Russia will form alliances with Europe, Japan and Iran. Africa and the Middle East will be administered by Russia and their European allies. Basically he believes in Russia ruling the world. He’s not too crazy about individual freedom either. In fact, he wants it abolish altogether. Dugin is not a fan of Christianity either, doesn’t believe there is anything as right and wrong and is a pagan. Dugin wishes to use all the world’s religions as a way to indoctrinate people into supporting his Eurasian empire. Dugin is a HUGE antisemite who sees Jewish conspiracies everywhere and he detests Zionism. Something tells me in Dugan’s world, Israel wouldn’t exist and the Jewish people would be second-class citizens. He intends to use conspiracy theories about Jews as a way to destabilize and polarize the West. Lastly, Dugan wants the whole world to become pagan. Tucker Carlson is platforming and treating as a hero, this nutcase who wants Vladimir Putin to rule the world and for our glorious republic to be demolished. He wants the Russian bear to slaughter the American Eagle. Dugin is a madman who should NEVER be allowed anywhere near power! Nor would any responsible journalist ever do a fawning interview with him or lend credence or subscribe to his ideas. Tucker does both and it won’t be long now before Tucker just brings a Neo-Nazi on his show and starts talking about how Adolf Hitler was just misunderstood! Ai yi yi! Tucker had lost it!
The antisemitism part is funny. What nationality do you think Dugin is, if his father is Jewish and his mother Ukrainian?
Exactly.
The icon of Russian fascism.
My promotion of America’s 250th birthday continues! 🇺🇸🤍❤️💙🎉🎂🥳 Here are some great books on our glorious republic in the 1990s and 2000s:
• The Totally Sweet 90s: From Clear Cola to Furby, and Grunge to "Whatever", the Toys, Tastes, and Trends That Defined a Decade by Gael Fashingbauer Cooper & Brian Belmont
• Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s by Nicole Hemmer
• The Age of Clinton: America in the 1990s by Gil Troy
• American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing by Lou Michel
• Ruby Ridge: The Truth and Tragedy of the Randy Weaver Family by Jess Walter
• Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and A Legacy of Rage by Jeff Guinn
• The Breach: Inside the Impeachment and Trial of William Jefferson Clinton by Peter Baker
• Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House by Peter Baker
• Bush by Jean Edward Smith
• The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III by Peter Baker & Susan Glasser
• To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America into Iraq by Robert Draper
• The American War in Afghanistan: A History by Carter Malkasian
• The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 by Garrett M. Graff
• Clinton's Elections: 1992, 1996, and the Birth of a New Era of Governance by Michael Nelson
• The Finish: The Killing of Osama bin Laden by Mark Bowden
• The Jordan Rules: The Inside Story of Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls by Sam Smith
• Three-Ring Circus: Kobe, Shaq, Phil, and the Crazy Years of the Lakers Dynasty by Jeff Pearlman
• Boys Will Be Boys: The Glory Days and Party Nights of the Dallas Cowboys Dynasty by Jeff Pearlman
• Love Me, Hate Me: Barry Bonds and the Making of an Antihero – A Nuanced Biography of Baseball's Celebrated, Controversial Icon by Jeff Pearlman
• Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain by Charles R. Cross
• Columbine by Dave Cullen
• Tiger Woods by Jeff Benedict
I'm not sure this is the list you thought you were posting. LOL
I wanted to add some variety to it and try to cover all aspects of the 1990s and 2000s.
Dugin’s philosophy is what I call “Little Debbie Political Theory”: looks good, maybe even tastes good to some, but in the end it’s nothing but cheap and fake trash for the body.
Cardinal Manning (1808-1892) has been credited with saying, “All human conflict is ultimately theological”. Theology matters, and bad theology hurts people. Dugin is a testament to this, writ large. God-less political theory leads to the God-less government of a God-less society. It will always be humanism on full display, and the only option is for it to be ruled by the sinful, unregenerate heart of an evil dictatorship or aristocracy.
Thanks for playing, Dugin. Try again.
Alexandr Dugin is an outright Satanist and a follower of the teachings of Satanist Allister Crowley. Don't believe me, do your own research. It is readily available on the internet. Tucker Carlson has gone off the plantation into the anti-Semitic insane asylum of the Nazis. He claims to be a Christian yet harbors a real hatred for anything Jewish. Go figure?
If you do the research, you will probably discover that Dugin has at one point followed literally everything. He takes whatever ideological darkness is available and sells it to whoever is willing to buy it. If he were selling rubber ducks, you would probably end up buying two or three of those as well.
A very unexpected article.
It contains theses that are almost correct — but correct in roughly the same way that a broken clock shows the perfectly correct time twice a day. The problem is not with the facts the author presents, but with his misunderstanding of Dugin as a figure.
A little context.
Dugin comes from a family belonging to the Soviet military-intelligence nomenklatura. He is the only son of a GRU lieutenant general and, very probably, the father of a Foreign Intelligence Service operative. It is therefore fair to place Dugin within the milieu of the Soviet military-intelligence elite — what might informally be called the chekist nobility. He received no systematic foundational education in philosophy and has no completed higher education.
Almost everything we know about the young Dugin consists of his continuous participation in magical, ritualistic, esoteric, far-right and far-left circles, sects and political laboratories. There was a great deal of experimentation: from attempts to marry Thelema, Traditionalism and Christianity to writing programmatic texts for the National Bolsheviks.
All the glittering depths of his intellectual degradation coincided with the age of the internet and social media. The development of Dugin as a specialist in narrative influence can therefore be traced almost day by day.
A characteristic quotation:
|| “Russians need our own, Russian economy — Islamic banking, for example.”
This is an almost perfect demonstration of the method. The concepts do not need to be logically compatible. It is enough for them to point toward the same enemy and to be attachable to the required audience.
Now let us return to the clock — that is, to the article.
The phrase “Putin’s favorite philosopher” contains an entire cloud of smoke and mirrors.
First, Dugin is not a philosopher.
Second, there is no basis for speaking of any “favorite philosopher of Putin.” Putin is unlikely to construct policy as an attentive reader of philosophical treatises.
But Putin and Dugin really do share one important understanding: both recognize the ability of the written and spoken word to influence people. One searches for and uses the instruments of that influence. The other specializes in producing them.
Seen from this perspective, Dugin’s life consists almost entirely of three types of activity:
1. exercising narrative influence over heterogeneous groups, sects and political movements;
2. creating laboratories for producing and testing such narratives;
3. constructing the ideologemes themselves and the methods used to deliver them.
His legacy then appears not as a philosophical system, but as a package of carefully developed functional ideologemes created in the tradition of Soviet propaganda and political warfare.
The Soviet Union had an almost century-long history of cultivating friendly regimes, parties, movements and influence groups around the world. A substantial practical and theoretical school was developed for this work. It would be naive to assume that its only targets were young communists somewhere in Zambia. Young leftists at Cambridge, as we know, could also be successfully indoctrinated.
The Soviet Union knew how to scale successful startups. It sought to influence every sufficiently stable and ideologized constituency: left-wing, right-wing, migrant, nationalist, Christian, Muslim — any of them. Or it created its own. Social media merely made this work cheaper: entering a Cambridge postgraduate program is no longer required.
An agent of narrative control can operate openly and publicly, even declaring his intentions directly.
This is how Dugin should be understood: as a functional agent of narrative control. His writings should be understood as instruments of that control.
The first clearly visible laboratory was the so-called Yuzhinsky, or Golovin, circle. Esoteric Traditionalism, far-right metaphysics and radical Islamic political thought were developed there simultaneously. Dugin’s partner and mentor was Heydar Dzhemal — a “Muslim thinker” of no lesser caliber. Researchers describe this circle as precisely the environment through which the metaphysical underground entered post-Soviet radical politics.
Then came the work with the National Bolshevik milieu: the production of programmatic texts, symbols, newspaper language and political aesthetics.
After that came *Foundations of Geopolitics* — a major programmatic product aimed at military, security and statist audiences. Eventually, the product found its way into an entire zoo of American right-wing figures. Dugin began appearing with Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones and other conservative media personalities, offering them a specially adapted package: opposition to woke politics, globalism, LGBT people, Soros and the “decline of the West.”
It was probably at this stage that an ordinary Russian narrative operator received the opportunity to become “Putin’s favorite philosopher” in Western eyes. Long-term influence over the bottom of American politics is an expensive investment, but, as we can see, a promising one with a time horizon measured in decades.
Let us return to the article.
The author positions Dugin fairly accurately as an ideological enemy of the United States. For some reason, however, he forgets to explain the origin of that hostility. He does not mention that we are looking at a representative of a hereditary service milieu that spent decades regarding the United States as the “main adversary.”
Well, he forgot.
And then the sadness begins.
The attempt to extract some stable meaning from Dugin’s works and identify important diagnostic quotations is largely futile. It is a search through smoke and mirrors.
Today one can find Dugin declaring that Trump is a knight with golden wings. Tomorrow one can find the opposite. Neither means very much. Quotations extracted from different periods — when he was herding multicolored fascists, radical Christians, Islamists, communists or imperialists — mean just as little.
Understanding Dugin as a functional operator should have shifted the respectable author’s attention away from ideologemes and toward methods.
And there really is something to study here, even within a single case: Rod Martin, Waller and Tucker Carlson.
Carlson performed the legitimizing function first. He cleansed Dugin of his political biography, presented him as a persecuted philosopher, allowed him to explain America and barely required him to answer for Russia. He gave the Russian product a Western audience and extended to it his own credit of trust.
Waller recognized the toxicity of the product but accepted its packaging. He correctly describes its anti-Americanism, imperialism and use of conspiracy theories, religion and political extremism. He even describes *Conspirology* as something resembling an operational manual. Yet he continues to search inside that manual for a coherent philosophy and an authorial worldview.
You, Rod, completes the operation. You place the phrase “Putin’s favorite philosopher — and apparently Tucker Carlson’s” in the headline and uses Dugin as a weapon in the internal war among American conservatives.
All three enter Dugin’s operation voluntarily and for different reasons.
Carlson needs a foreign authority who confirms his diagnosis of American decline.
Waller needs a comprehensible ideological enemy who can be divided into ten theses.
Rod needs a club with which to strike Carlson.
Dugin receives from each of them something Russian propaganda cannot produce on its own: Western recognition of his status.
Carlson certifies him as a philosopher.
Waller certifies him as a serious enemy.
Martin certifies him as a philosopher capable of capturing one of America’s most influential conservatives.
None of them needs to receive instructions from Moscow. Each independently finds the Russian product useful for his own domestic purposes and voluntarily becomes one of its delivery channels.
There is, however, one thing in the article that deserves particular recognition.
Whether instinctively or analytically, Waller comes close to recognizing Dugin’s texts as a mirror. And here: bravo.
Because that is exactly how they work.
Dugin does not transmit a single coherent doctrine to different audiences. He returns to each audience its own fears, grievances and hatreds — only slightly edited so that they lead toward the required geopolitical conclusion.
The left sees anti-capitalism and resistance to American imperialism in the mirror.
The right sees Christianity, tradition and opposition to woke politics.
Islamists see resistance to the West.
Nationalists see sovereignty.
Conspiracy theorists see the hidden hand of the globalists.
At the center of every reflection remains the same proposition: the United States and the Western constitutional order are the principal enemy.
This is what the article gets right.
It is only a pity that, while examining the mirror, the author once again mistook the manufacturer of mirrors for a philosopher.
P.S. From an analyst connected to the Department of Defense, I naturally expected something with sharper teeth. Just as I would expect the institutions charged with defending the U.S. Constitution to drag Tucker Carlson into the swamps and introduce him to the most handsome alligator they can find.
Instead, the analyst appears toothless, while the Constitution appears defenseless.
I suspect there may be some connection between the two.