(First published on Kiltr Feb 2015)
(Some of this weekend’s events coincided with what I had intended to write today, with a whole pile of backed up notes etc, it was going to be a long post, so I’ve added some context from the weekend and split the piece into two, its long enough, couldn’t have you all dropping off...now, it's kind of a deep dive into some murky places, strap in!)
As the world got to know just what ‘America First!’ looks like, and for the most part was abhorred, very few people would have been thinking, ‘See, what we need are more philosophers!’. Yet the enforcement of the Executive Order which saw immigration restrictions applied to immigrants from seven countries with Muslim majority populations, making it in effect a ‘Muslim immigration ban’, takes on an even less palatable hue when viewed in light of the new Commander-in-Chief’s ‘streamlining’ of his ability to act on intelligence from the National Security Council.
In this newly politicised process, Trump’s chief strategist and alt right Svengali, founder of Breitbart News, Steve Bannon, now has a full seat on the ‘principals committee’, normally reserved for generals, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Director of National Intelligence, who will now only attend when the council is ‘considering issues in their direct areas of responsibility', find themselves downgraded. It is an unprecedented elevation of a political advisor to a status alongside the Secretaries of State and Defence, and over the President’s foremost military and intelligence advisors. It is a distinct shift in how data becomes message from the Whitehouse and its first repercussions were being felt in airports across America and around the world over the weekend.
Bannon is crucial in determining the signal amidst the noise generated by ‘the most powerful Twitter account on the planet’. It would be a shortcoming of analysis to see this only in light of the ultra right wing, populist manipulation of the vote and electoral system. Rather, a much fuller picture of the impact of this shift can be found by looking at the foundations of what will be/is being built by the Trump administration and its underlying connection to the rise of right wing populism around the globe as an orchestrated reaction to the perceived failings of globalisation.
The key to how the ducks line up, how the rising concerns over issues like hacking, authoritarian control, human rights and of course immigration, is perhaps in understanding the political philosopher inspiring Bannon, Trump, Farage, Le Pen, Geert Wilders and just about every other right wing ideologue emerging from the shadows. His pernicious thinking is in turn inspired by the more fascistic interpretations of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy. His name is Alexander Dugin and he is often referred to, particularly in Russia, as ‘Putin’s Brain’.
Dugin's ascent has been in part masked by a complex and at times contradictory intellectual biography. Having been an outspoken anti-Communist in the 1980’s, after the break up of the Soviet Union, Dugin worked closely with the remains of the Communist Party. From the mid 1990’s he was closely associated with National Bolshevism, which openly espoused a combination of communist economics and radical Russian nationalism.
Since then, Dugin has organised his views into a geostrategic ideology and a fairly complex political metaphysics referred to both as ‘Neo-Eurasianism’ and the ‘Fourth Political Theory’. Neo-Eurasianism posits an ongoing tension, often erupting into warfare, between archetypal societal organisation, between land based and marine civilisations. The theory extends to further posit that the struggle is between harmonious, land based societies organised around history and traditions and inherently liberal ‘Atlanticist’ ‘empires of the sea’, whose colonialist, capitalist drive is seen as abhorring and undermining tradition.
According to Dugin, while contemporary Atlanticists have entrenched their position through international organisations and political elites and hierarchies, their Eurasian position is largely defenceless. This is seen as being through Atlanticism’s prioritisation of individual liberties above all else, dissolving social bonds and obligations, devaluing cultural legacy, destroying what Neo-Eurasianism believes allows traditional societies to exist. The hegemonic impulse of Atlanticism is seen as being proven through its perception of any opposition to its political or economic interests as counterintuitive to its notions of freedom.
Dugin has posited his solution as being for Eurasia to become a Grossraum, or ‘great space’, analogous in scope to the Atlanticist world. Within this he proposes a complex distribution of power between a ‘strategic centre’ and its subdivisions, known as ‘autonomies’, based on culture, tradition and history. In this model, the centre coordinates the economy and the military, with the autonomies, in theory, left to organise their own affairs according to their traditions. Whilst there appears to be scope for a range of differing political, economic and social systems of internal organisation in this system, they are underpinned by an absolute subscription to traditionalist nationalism and Dugin is clear he imagines most will also adopt a conservative and corporatist paradigm.
Dugin's 'Fourth Political Theory', being based in some of the most pernicious aspects of Heidegger’s philosophy, extends from the first principle that modernity is a form of scientific objectification of the world, which only accepts cultural or traditional knowledge when it remains secondary to allegedly objective inquiry. For Dugin this is fundamental to what he sees as the three most powerful political philosophies of the modern era: Marxism, fascism and liberalism. He rejects all three but believes they contain elements from which he has constructed a better basis for their postulated successor, the Fourth Political Theory. It bases its understanding of history, unlike its three predecessors, not on class, race or the individual but claims to build from a basis in Heidegger’s ‘daisen’, humanity.
In Dugin’s ideal, Heideggerian ‘authentic’, the basis for individual and societal organisation is tradition. In this, history becomes the ‘history of tradition’ with politics in a secondary role. His goal has been to cultivate a Eurasian socio-political network to rival its, until now, US dominated, Atlanticist counterpart, in which he sees Russia as the natural leader in its resurgence and in the formation of a Grossraum. The nodes of this network are diverse and numerous, aimed at exploiting the shadow side of liberal institutions and technologies.
Prolific, constantly publishing and touring the world lecturing on his political philosophies, Dugin rarely seems to rest. His clear objective is, and has been, to attract like minded thinkers from what used to be the international intellectual fringe, fast becoming normalised, imitating mainstream discourse which has shunned or excluded them in the past. His philosphies, whilst clearly an indirect influence on many others, have been a direct influence on Germany’s National Democratic Party, the BNP and their apparently more socially acceptable cousins, UKIP, the Golden Dawn in Greece, Jobbik in Hungary, Front Nationale in France, the Dutch Party for Freedom and of course the Trump movement in the US.
Active involvement with Russia’s political elite has seen Dugin serving as an advisor to state Duma Chairman and key Putin ally Sergei Naryshkin. His disciple, Ivan Demidov, serves as head of the Ideology Directorate of Putin’s United Russia party, while Mikhael Leontiev, Putin’s ‘favourite journalist’ is a founding member of Dugin’s Eurasia Party.
This contemporary Rasputin may also claim to be suspicious of the liberalising effects of communications technology and networks but utilises it adroitly for his own objectives. Numerous websites traced to Dugin and his allies, or their parties/groups, constantly cross reference and backlink to each other, creating an alternative feedback loop to mainstream news or general social networks, serving as an aggregator for former political outcasts. Despite Dugin’s alleged and professed anti-racism (which is difficult to substantiate with a philosophy based in ossified nationalistic traditions!), one of the most consistent pathways to his internet neck of the woods is via US based, white supremacist media. He claims he doesn’t denounce them because his tactics favour the empowerment of destabilising agents everywhere, as long as their common enemy is liberalism and the overarching liberal order.
The internet, often an arena where the espousal of anti-intellectual world views can be found readily, and where ‘manufactured’ facts have long been considered no less robust than ‘provable’ ones, has been an ideal medium for Duginism to take hold and disseminate. In particular it has exploited the mechanisms of instantaneous publishing, retraction and dissociation, without harming the ability of the withdrawn ideas to propagate further. The implications of Dugin’s views, his place in Russian society and government, and his relationship to Putin and to movements/thinking beyond Russian borders should not be underestimated in its influence on, and threat to, our current geopolitical reality.
On Jan 1st 2015, the Eurasian Economic Union came into existence with Dugin’s intellectual fingerprints smudged all over it; its founding members were Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan, soon to be joined by other states from the former Soviet republic. Although Dugin has stated ‘I support Putin because he declares and fulfils the goals that are essentially mine’, it is in fact Putin who supports Dugin because of the pathways he creates in national and foreign policy.
Dugin has perfected the diversionary tactic of filling ideological vacuums created around the world by the stutterings of globalisation and neoliberalism, creating suspicion and scepticism around perceived liberal powers, like the EU and US. His ideology already resonates with some ‘high’ intellectuals and the ‘conspiratorial fringe’ whilst seeming tailor made for, and thus having much success in, exploiting continuing economic uncertainty and stagnation, distrust of EU bureaucracy, manipulated anxiety at refugee/migrant numbers and their perceived threat to traditions and economies, and crucially, the anxiety of those refugee/migrants themselves, who fear the perceived assault on their own traditions which comes with resettlement in the West.
There has been an increasing focused intent on maximising the ‘potential’ of Duginist philosophical ideology among its adherents, through political, intellectual and social media networks. He has, personally, met with members of the French military critical of President Hollande, the US and NATO, discussing French preparations for intervention in Mali, cyber warfare, terrorism and friction between China and the US. His ‘Foundations of Geopolitics’ is used in training by Russian military academies, so wherever there are Russian troops, there is Dugin.
Until recently, Dugin’s crowning achievement was to have become the philosophical spokesman for a systematic anti-liberalism, which has allowed Putin to advance in the eyes of his international supporters, not as an unprincipled tyrant but as the representative of a cohesive, international philosophy whose writ and remit stretched from the backwaters of Russia to the capitals of Europe. That was until the 20thJanuary 2017, when the game changed entirely.
Formerly, in the US, Dugin’s ideas had gained some limited traction through Bannon and his Breitbart network and also through ties to alt right, zeig heiler, yeah, this guy...
...and crowd sourced punch bag...
...Richard Spencer, whose scholar wife, Nina Byzantina, has translated his works for release in America. Dugin has had articles published on both Breitbart and Spencer’s Alternative Right website and recorded a speech entitled ‘To My American Friend in Our Common Struggle’, for a white supremacist, nationalist conference in 2015. Those somewhat tentative footholds in the ‘land of the free’, the arch-Atlanticist US, were soon to take firmer hold with the nomination of Donald J.Trump as the Republican candidate for the presidency and his use of Bannon from there forward as his strategist.
Dugin has since championed Trump. He is in favour of Trump’s nationalism, largely founded on Dugin’s philosophy, and is excited by his lying outside the established liberal political order. He viewed the other Republican candidates as neoconservatives intent on expanding US global power and the Democrats as even worse. Here he is singing Trump’s praises in a video published shortly after ‘Super Tuesday’, in March last year:
Dugin has no qualms about how Trump will go to change the US outlook, thus undermining the Atlanticists’ power and setting the stage for Neo-Eurasian world domination by subterfuge, chillingly claiming, ‘In Trump we Trust!’. After the election of President Trump, Dugin told the Wall Street Journal he was elated at the result, saying ‘For us, it is joy, it is happiness. You must understand that we consider Trump the American Putin.’.
And now, the ‘American Putin’ has a direct acolyte of ‘Putin’s Brain’, who can rest easy knowing his disciple, not only as Chief Strategist but as a key member of the National Security Council, is his own ‘mini-me’ Rasputin, ensuring his American Putin declares and fulfils the goals that are essentially his.
So, on the other side of the Atlantic, whilst the process of the Brexit vote, declared 'a blessing for the world' by the great orange poobah, cheerled by UKIP, the Brexiteers and a right-wing UK media, may not have left us with a Westminster government, enacting the ‘expressed will’ of the referendum electorate, which could be said to be directly influenced by Dugin, the process of association through those cheerleaders is easy to see. Paul Spicker’s fantastic social policy blog has been doing a fine job of summarising how the entire process, from vote to triggering of Article 50, has been a traditionalist, right wing, British nationalist assault on liberal democracy; I’d like to paraphrase and borrow from him a little in giving a brief summary to underline my point here.
From the outset, even though upheld in a British but not a European court, so deemed technically legal, a million British citizens directly affected by it were excluded from the vote, rendering the process neither ‘democratic nor legitimate’. One of the fundamental principles of liberal democracy, defined by James Madison in the ‘Federalist Papers’, is that ‘every majority has to be understood as a coalition of minorities’, with the convention of majority rule being based on respect for the rights of those minorities. In a genuine liberal democracy, a government has the duty to find a resolution for any vote which will maintain the fundamental rights of the citizens it is bound by law to protect. Yet nothing, in the entire Brexit process, from debates to vote, to current plans for triggering Article 50, has given any attention at all to this issue.
Something we are also all too aware of in Scotland, is that the Westminster government is proceeding without respect, save lip service, to any previous assurances of due and involved consultation with the devolved administrations. I underline this here not to emphasise the legal point made in Miller but to question further the legitimacy of the process. The UK government has proceeded in a way 'inimical to democratic conventions’. We could, here as in the US following events at the weekend and in the lead up to it, question whether our forms of government function any longer as ‘liberal democracy’, with the added conspiratorial caveat of wondering if they ever really did.
The philosophical framework around which political debate has hinged in the post WWII era has, for at least two decades, been undermined and usurped by a philosophical base given cohesion by Dugin. This now frames the context of most debate; retreating further into the binary oppositional modes of cognitive dissonance which entrench the illusory bubbles of a broken system have allowed that usurpation to bring about the worrying domino effect of right wing coup d’etat after right wing coup d’etat, while the sound of any genuine alternative is drowned out in the noise.
It is no longer only the debate being framed by Duginists and the wider right but, as more power is usurped, its levers are further applied to disrupt the Western liberal consensus. Ever since Mr Bernays and his uncle Sigmund became conduits for the collective manipulation of the individual as a functionalist aspect of economic society (perhaps reaching its apotheosis in the application of CBT as a psychological panacea in many Western societies, in particular the UK, where it is far and above the predominant method used for psychological referrals within the NHS, despite widespread misgivings about its genuine effectiveness among the academic psychological community), through the double barrels of Freudian psychoanalysis and its applications to the world of marketing and advertising, not only in a commercial sense but in a political and civic/social sense too, there have been dubious psychological levers applied to economics and politics. In usurping these too, through their corporate, conservative coup d’etat, which manipulated the idiosyncracies of the out moded Electoral College system to circumvent the democratic vote as strategy, the new American Duginists moved a step closer to manipulating ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ itself.
Sound far fetched? A PPP National Poll in the US, conducted last week, revealed first exclusively by MSNBC host Rachel Maddows, may give the lie to that, if talk of ‘alternative facts’ hasn’t. Although the poll featured on Maddows’ show on Wednesday night, it barely registered anywhere else, despite it having polled statistically significant numbers and being the first since President Trump’s election, before the weekend’s events dominated the news cycle, worldwide:
So, in a pollng question asking how favourably respondents viewed Putin, 67% of American people responded unfavourably and 10% favourably. This, in and of itself shouldn’t be surprising given the long term distrust of all things Russian inculcated in US society, still hanging over from the Cold War and exacerbated by perception of more recent events. What many Trump voters may not know though is that their ‘President’s Brain’ is a diminutive of ‘Putin’s Brain’ and is the chief strategist who has manipulated their realities to the point where, according to the poll, even though a clear margin of some percentage points of the US electorate believe President Trump’s Inauguration was attended by less people than attended the Inauguration of President Obama, likewise the Women’s March in DC was attended by more people too; whereas, a majority of Trump supporters believed Trump’s Inauguration had the biggest crowd of any in history, especially more than Obama’s and are absolutely convinced, by significant margins, it was attended by more than the Women’s March in DC, which they also believe was attended mostly by women paid to do so by George Soros!
Now it is not an unfamiliar position, as Rachel Maddows points out, for political candidates, parties, officials, governments, to have a core support which likes or trusts them whilst the rest of the country doesn’t. Or for them to have different opinions or feelings which set them apart from the rest of the country; but it is another thing entirely if your supporters are operating from a provably, mostly false set of ‘alternative facts’, which they do not share with anyone else. It is this core group of supporters, in which the cognitive dissonance is so strong as to form the basis of an alternative reality, for which they will become the propagating agents, constructed around a Duginist, traditionalist, nationalist, conservative, right wing philosophical base.
This is the strategy now, perhaps an accelerated version if it hasn’t always been, of the US government administration’s chief strategist and the swift enactment of the Executive Order on Friday saw it reverberate around the world. The clear position of every other geo-political agent, according to the terms of the debate set and framed by that strategy, is or is being declared in relation to it. The terms of the game, reprehensible as they are, are being set by the antagonists and all of the other pieces must declare their intent according to them.
So, here’s the thing, if the intent all along, of Dugin and his acolytes, has been to disrupt Western liberal foundations and they have been increasingly allowed to dictate the terms of debate, so much so that the West barely resembles liberal democracy, can, should its perniciousness be countered by more liberalism? Or will Western liberal democracy finally own up to the existential crisis it has been fighting against for at least two decades and find, quick sharp, a new philosophical base from which to build anew? If the US has dropped the mask its colonialist foreign policy gave the lie to, can the EU reform from its neoliberal economic core to present the only effective, continental counter to the spread of the Fourth Political Theory and Neo-Eurasianism? What can technology and neuroscience do to help?
And what of Scotland, once home to the Age of Enlightenment ‘Athens of the North’? Amidst geo-political existential crisis, can it respond and find an alternate philosophical base to suit its aspirations in that fast changing geopolitical context, beyond vague affiliations to now floundering liberal or social democracy? Has history, even though it was supposed to be dead, simply moved beyond the process of the Hegelian dialectic to something other, as the breakneck pace of technology and networked communication effects change, in belief and behaviour, faster than comprehension allows?
I’ll have a wee stab at answering some of those questions and a few more besides in next week’s ‘big read’ from me, ‘The President’s Brain Isn’t Missing Pt2’!
(Thanks for reading this far, I know it’s been a slog with barely a chuckle to lighten the shadows! Here’s a wee treat for seeing it through to the end, in tribute to the May/Trump era of the ‘special relationship’, which has the Donald calling Theresa his Maggie, episode 1 of Spitting Image’s original Reagan/Thatcher era ‘The President’s Brain Is Missing!’, enjoy, and remember, all philosophical shit aside, if they don't respect existence, they damn well should expect resistance!✊🏻✊🏻✊🏻✊🏻✊🏻✊🏻✊🏻✊🏻:)
