WHY THE GLOBAL RIGHT IS SPOILING FOR A FIGHT

A VIEW FROM THE VANISHING MIDDLE

Let’s begin right out on the fringe. Aleksandr Dugin, dubbed as—among other things—'Putin’s brain’ and ‘Putin’s Rasputin,’ believes that we are on the brink of World War III. Dugin holds no official position ‘at court,’ and his direct influence on Putin’s strategic thinking is uncertain, but that he ‘speaks to Putin’s soul,’ and moreover, the those of his generals, doesn’t seem to be in doubt. He is a 61 year-old public intellectual in Russia, widely seen on TV by the Russian people, a sort of televangelist for the mythos of Russian spiritual exceptionalism that has, so far, kept the man in the street in Putin’s corner. He is the author of a number of books and tracts, including The Foundations of Geopolitics and The Fourth Political Theory, which argue that the Eurasian world, led by Russia, is ascendant, and must eventually engage in a civilizational war with the decadent ‘Atlanticist’ West, represented principally by the U.S., the U.K., and of course, NATO. This conflict will be nothing less than apocalyptic, a reclaiming of the world from the Kingdom of Anti-Christ and the ideologies of liberal democracy, most prominently those that Dugin contends undermine the institutions of nation and family and champion things like gender “fluidity” and transhumanism.

That a scenario this dramatic would be written by a Putin loyalist with his back against the wall isn’t all that surprising. We know that, in Putin’s Russia, state and church have formed an unholy alliance, and that wounds are still being licked in many quarters over the abrupt dissolution of the Soviet Union. What is striking, however, is the extent to which very similar sentiments (minus the Russian jingoism) are held in places like Sweden, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Des Moines, Iowa. The feeling that we are fast approaching a stand-off—possibly a bloody one—between two entirely different ways of looking at the world. (Yes, Aleksandr Dugin has a number of prominent fans in the evangelical community that constitutes 25% of the American electorate and is still in Donald Trump’s corner).

Dugin, whose daughter was recently killed by a car bomb probably intended for him, has been a fierce proponent of Russia’s war against Ukraine, a conflict that has challenged the belief held by some American conservatives that Russia is a beacon of spiritual hope. He is one of those smart men who say stupid things. But he’s not stupid, and his critique of Western consumerist society is often on the mark, as are his assertions that the social fabric is fraying and that we’ve lost our ‘moral fiber.’ If you want to understand why so many who have moved in recent years toward the global reactionary right seem to be itching for holy war, he’s not a bad place to start. Often, the best way to suss out sociocultural phenomena is to start on the edges and work your way back to the center. Dugin aligns himself with a school of thought known as traditionalism. If the word ‘tradition’ makes you think of Tevye in Fiddler On The Roof, you’re actually not far from gist of it—at least the For Dummies version. The thinkers most closely associated with this school are René Guenon (French, died 1951), Ananda Coomaraswamy (Ceylon, died 1949), and Frithjof Schuon (Swiss, died 1998). Broadly speaking, traditionalists believe that the West took a wrong turn at the Enlightenment and has been going farther and farther off course since. Despite the marvels of science and technology that the Enlightenment ushered in, something essential was lost. Something which had been passed like the Olympic torch down the chain of human culture from the beginning, which transcended human enterprise but had fostered all that was spiritually and morally good in it. If you insist, you can think of this ‘something’ as whatever God is, but it’s really more accurate to describe it as perennial wisdom. Probably the most concise description of traditionalism is Schuon’s quote, “If to recognize what is true and just is ‘nostalgia for the past,’ then it is quite clearly a crime or a disgrace not to feel this nostalgia.” And it is nostalgia, more than any other single thing, that inspires the ascendant reactionary right in our era, from populist figures like Viktor Orban in Hungary and Giorgia Meloni in Italy to the mother in Skokie, Illinois who is shocked to learn that her grade school child has been taught that he can identify not only as he, she, or they, but as ‘tree’ or ‘fish,’ or in Washington state discovers that the concept of “gender affirming care” embraces the notion that a twelve year-old can opt for puberty blocking drugs with long-term effects on cognitive development--or even a clitoradectomy--without parental consent. What happened to the world we knew? she asks. Who took it away? Can we get it back please?

In fact, if you survey the strain of thought advanced by leaders and thinkers of the New “Populist” Right across all borders, you’ll find that ‘gender issues’ are at the core. Immigration, issues of national, ethnic, and religious identity and their impact on social cohesion, law and justice—all these take second place or encode the central complaint: the blurring of lines between man and woman.

Human society does change, and the arc of the moral universe—as Dr. King said—does bend toward justice. There is probably no better example of this in recent history than the movement for black civil rights that he led. Human beings are wired to detest unfairness—evolutionary psychologists will tell you that this goes back a very long way. Once unfairness and injustice are thrust in our face, as they were by television footage of of the mistreatment of black Americans in places like Alabama and Mississippi, we respond with revulsion. The same rejection of unfairness eventually led to the acceptance of homosexuality in all but the most regressive parts of the world, and even to the legal recognition of gay marriage. But these changes were hard-won and long in the making, and if you looked in the rearview mirror, you could see a line of events that led to their inevitability. Likewise with other epoch-making social changes: the displacement of hereditary aristocracy, the abolition of slavery, the extension of full rights to women. We are more comfortable with change that arrives like the closing cadence of a symphonic movement, preceded and prepared for by all that comes before. In other words, as a modulation rather than an outright abandonment of tradition. There is little of this ‘modulatory’ quality in the transgender rights movement or in the ideology that declares that we are all either oppressors or oppressed by dint of our lineage and pigmentation, and if we’re identified as the former, must atone or be sent into the wilderness of Gehenna. These ideas arrived like stormtroopers, commanding classrooms and corporations without ever having been voted in by the PTA or the stockholders. It’s really no wonder that they put many people into a defensive crouch.

Something to bear in mind, given our intrinsic fondness for tradition, is that the sweeping social change of the past two to three decades is the first such transformation to occur entirely in the secular domain. It’s not backed up by divinely authored moral law, but by some abstract postmodern ethos of self-invention. “I think I am, therefore I am.” Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King could never have argued so fervently for the change they sought if they hadn’t also argued persuasively that God was on their side. Nor does ‘woke religion’ well up from a spring of shared wisdom and experience, the way an idea like democracy seems to. The impetus for social change in our age is almost totally top-down, and the top in this case is what historian Christopher Lasch called “the thinking classes.” He also said this about them: “The thinking classes are fatally removed from the physical side of life… Their only relation to productive labor is that of consumers. They have no experience of making anything substantial or enduring. They live in a world of abstractions and images, a simulated world that consists of computerized models of reality – “hyperreality,” as it’s been called – as distinguished from the palatable, immediate, physical reality inhabited by ordinary men and women. Their belief in “social construction of reality” – the central dogma of postmodernist thought – reflects the experience of living in an artificial environment from which everything that resists human control (unavoidably, everything familiar and reassuring as well) has been rigorously excluded.” This ‘remove from physicality’ strikes me as the most potentially dangerous attribute of those who mold our thinking. Do we really want our world shaped by people who have never held a shovel? That mother in Skokie I mentioned earlier might not use Lasch’s words to describe The Elite, but this is what she thinks.

These cultural mandarins—urban, educated, highly mobile, often childless—have also been labeled by British journalist David Goodheart as ‘Anywheres’ (as opposed to ‘Somewheres’) and by writer N.S. Lyons as ‘Virtuals’ (as opposed to ‘Physicals’). They practice what journalist Mary Harrington calls “luxury Gnosticism” in the sterile, glassed-in remove of their Silicon Valley or Singapore offices. Their fringe, as contrasted with the fringe represented by someone like Aleksandr Dugin on the right, might subscribe to the transhumanist ethos, and to the borderline lunacy of thinking that we’ll soon be able to upload our consciousness to some galactic mainframe computer and escape the messiness of physical existence altogether. Those who lean conservative—not just Trumpists, or fans of Clarence Thomas, or British Brexiteers, or Austrian neo-fascists, but the people who operate the power grids and drive the trucks, and run little cafes and pizza parlors—look at the Anywheres and Virtuals and see a mortal threat to their very way of being. They ask: can we allow people who have no connection to place, family or community to make the rules? The most ardent and fearful of them spoil for a final confrontation: a shootout at the O.K. Corral.

It's critically important that those of us in the sensible center or center-left grasp how real and how deep this fear is, and that the greatest fear of all, the fear that is driving polarization more than any other, is the fear of losing a world forged by tradition, and with it, the meaning that world had. This is not the same thing as losing privilege or rank, despite what many on the left contend. Hardcore Christian Dominionists and white supremacists may be out for sheer power, but the typical non-crazy person who recoiled from the left in 2016 and voted for Donald Trump probably just wanted to strike a blow against the overlords. The thing in plain sight but unseen is that it is reverence for our shared traditions that could bring us back into the same dancehall again. Two very current events point to this.

Consider first the Queen. She was old, an anachronism who played no role at all in the lives of people outside the U.K., and only a ceremonial role for those within it, yet her death and burial stopped the world for a while, and turned ostensibly sovereign individuals into willing subjects. The pomp and pageantry of her funeral were more than theater. They spoke, even if only in cipher, to a deep need to feel that, in spite of storm and strife, war and economic peril, certain things are carried on and carried forward. Moreover, that it is often the task of certain people and even certain nations to lead that procession. The past travels with us into the future, and in this there is a timeless peace. This is the very essence of tradition. Slow down to a stately march. Think of what has been and always will be; the things that don’t change. And for a few moments, we may even feel the emergence of what we once called sacred. Without that sacral quality in our lives, we are almost guaranteed to be at each other’s throats.

And then there is Ukraine. In the rest of the world, entire generations of young men have fallen into a dolorous apathy that that tilts toward nihilism. In Russia, a clutching, resentful tyrant acts out the worst aspects of manhood in Shakespearean fashion. But then, as if in a play directed by an unseen hand, a diminutive (but well-muscled) actor with a scrubby four-day beard strides onto the stage in a t-shirt, raises his fist, and enthralls the world with a decidedly virile performance, showing all those disaffected boys and so many who have in recent years disparaged masculinity that a good man is, above all things, a protector and defender of the shire. As with the Queen in death, Volodymyr Zelensky managed to stop time, and when time began again, the entire Western world was with him. His performance put things in perspective, and this is what can happen when we step back from the line of fire and consider our greater common needs and our greater common enemies.

Once we get past food and shelter, there is no greater common need than freedom, and no greater common enemy than the enemy of freedom. On this, left, right and center ought to be in accord. Can we take a pause before Armageddon?