A Flawed Defense of the Man Known as ‘Putin’s Brain’

By Michael Lucchese

Sunday, January 29, 2023

 

Vladimir Putin is doubling down on the war in Ukraine. Far from signaling an increased openness to peace talks, earlier this month, he appointed a new top commander in the hopes of reversing his fortunes on the battlefield. But what explains his persistence? This question continues to flummox some Western observers. A few analysts have claimed that the invasion is about “balance-of-power politics.” Others have focused narrowly on territorial conquest. But, in truth, Putin’s ferocity and willingness to push ahead despite the war’s immense costs both speak to the true nature of the conflict; he views this as an existential challenge to the world order the West built. For him, this is a war about ideas.

 

Canadian political scientist Michael Millerman is one Westerner who has explored those ideas. In the latest issue of First Things, he published an “explanation” of Russian intellectual Alexander Dugin, one of the foremost proponents of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, who in recent months has been a vocal advocate of waging a “total war” — potentially including nuclear exchanges — to win a “clash of civilizations” with the West.

 

Millerman insists that Dugin’s ideology is “compatible with Putinism, but . . . not reducible to it.” He would prefer readers to consider Dugin “the chief philosophical mastermind of an ideologically coherent alternative to Western political modernity.” Unfortunately, though, Millerman and Dugin’s other Western admirers make the same mistake as Dugin himself does: They underestimate the philosophic value of the American regime, and overestimate the “philosophical coherence” of their own position. Conservatives who believe in American exceptionalism should take Duginism seriously only as a threat to ordered liberty, and look to better political theorists for guidance.

 

Millerman begins his essay by praising the creativity of Dugin’s political theory. “From my first encounter with Dugin,” he writes, “I was grateful for the freedom to think about the political future of the West outside the confining framework of the three political theories that claim to be our only options.” In The Fourth Political Theory, which Millerman has translated into English, Dugin argues that the 20th century was defined by the battle between three major ideologies or political theories:

 

1.       Liberalism, the ideology of individualism arising from the Enlightenment, represented by Western Europe and the United States;

2.       Communism, the Marxist critique of class structures, capitalist economics, and bourgeois values, represented by the Soviet Union; and

3.       Fascism, a “traditionalist” reaction to both liberalism and communism which asserts the primacy of the state, represented by Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, and Franco’s Spain.

 

Dugin believes — in an almost-Hegelian sense — that the story of the 20th century is the story of these three ideologies clashing. By outlasting the Soviet Union, Dugin argues, the U.S. and its allies made liberalism the world’s hegemonic ideology. He proposes that a “Fourth Political Theory,” a combination of communism and fascism that he has sometimes called National Bolshevism, should arise to combat liberalism. Russia, in his view, should adopt this theory and become an “existential empire,” dedicated to tearing down the liberal world order and replacing it with multipolar chaos.

 

The first problem with Dugin’s “Fourth Political Theory,” from a philosophical standpoint, is its intense relativism. For Dugin, truth is culturally conditioned, dependent on (to quote Millerman’s summary) the “authentic existence native to a people’s most outstanding figures, its philosophers and poets.” Dugin looks to changing experience, not eternal principle, as the arbiter of truth.

 

Leo Strauss — a Western political thinker whom Millerman professes to admire — well understood the dangers of this kind of relativism. In his magnum opus Natural Right and History, Strauss criticized what he called “historicism,” the notion that principles of justice are contingent on historical circumstance. For Strauss, philosophy is the quest for truth — the pursuit of the very universal principles Dugin rejects.

 

In many ways, the four-political-theories framework Millerman praises Dugin for inventing is simply a retread of the historicist approaches Strauss devastatingly critiqued. Millerman even admits that “the culture-specific reflection that we find in Dugin sounds a bit like leftist postmodernism, which sometimes champions multiple, relativistic ways of knowing.” But he attempts to argue that Dugin’s postmodernism is more “rooted” than its left-wing equivalents.

 

Millerman writes that he’s particularly attracted to Dugin’s treatment of “the unique character of Russian thought.” But he fails to fully address the unique character of American thought. He simply lumps the American regime into the broad category of “liberalism,” rather than exploring what makes American political thought exceptional. The Founders aimed to build a different, better type of government than anything that had come before. Yet Millerman scarcely seems interested in what makes the American political system unique.

 

The only real attention Millerman gives the Founding is a few brief sentences on C. Bradley Thompson’s book America’s Revolutionary Mind. These sentences reference Thompson’s belief — shared by most conservatives — that in the 20th century the United States moved away from the philosophical principles of the Founding, and that the great task of the 21st century is to restore those principles to their rightful place at the center of American political culture.

 

But immediately thereafter, Millerman cites Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger’s contention that “America, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union, the three great powers, despite their differences, were ‘metaphysically the same,’ all technological enterprises uprooted from the soil of genuine philosophy and poetry.” Dugin, Millerman says, “applies that insight to his theory of global multipolarity, which affirms a plurality of civilizational spaces, interpreting civilizations in terms of their greatest souls, those who awaken and guide the Dasein of the people, the concrete expressions of its public life.” It seems like Millerman wants to simply breeze past the American Founders’ universalist principles and get straight to the subjective concept of a populace’s “genius” that Dugin places at the center of political inquiry.

 

Strauss would have considered Dugin’s — and Millerman’s — arguments historicist nonsense.

 

In the introduction to Natural Right and History, Strauss praises the American Founding for its dedication to a universal principle of justice. He cites the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence and, echoing Lincoln’s rhetoric at Gettysburg, asserts that “the nation dedicated to this proposition has now become, no doubt partly as a consequence of this dedication, the most powerful and prosperous of the nations of the earth.” In other words, for Strauss and many of his followers, America’s greatness is rooted in the Founders’ theory of natural right. In this light, the American regime seems to be the most philosophic of all.

 

The ideas of human dignity that animated the American Founding are worlds apart from the ideological radicalism of the French Revolution or the vapid materialism of Davos-class liberalism. But neither Dugin nor Millerman seem to understand that the Founders’ theory of equality is what makes America exceptional. They do not acknowledge the universal validity of the Founding’s conception of justice. In Dugin’s case, this leads him to support the horrific invasion of Ukraine. In Millerman’s case, it leads him to downplay Dugin’s support of that unjust war.

 

At one point in his First Things essay, Millerman praises Dugin for waking him up to the ways in which liberalism is anti-human. “The most important task for those who wish to preserve a humane way of life is to preserve the possibility of human freedom as such,” Millerman writes. “That task requires resisting the forces that are destroying the very being of the human, which is enmeshed in shared bonds and collective structures.”

 

Surely “preserving the possibility of human freedom as such” is a goal conservatives can support. But we ought to be clear about one thing: It is the Ukrainians, not the Russian aggressors Dugin supports, who are fighting in the service of this goal in Ukraine.

 

Putin has not waged his genocidal, unnecessary war on behalf of a “humane way of life” — he is fighting for raw power, and he has been utterly heedless of whom he hurts in the pursuit of it. Just this month, a Russian missile strike on Dnipro killed at least 40 Ukrainian civilians. Since the current invasion began, Ukrainian officials estimate that over 9,000 civilians, including nearly 500 children, have been murdered by Russian forces. That’s not even to mention the millions of civilians who have been displaced, and the tens of thousands who have died on the battlefield on both sides.

 

Millerman says that, for Dugin, freedom “means more than the freedom to choose among the options available within the context of a liberal political society. It must also mean the freedom to choose something other than a liberal political society.” But the invasion Dugin supports is giving Ukrainians no such choice.

 

Putin fights for inhumane tyranny, whereas Zelensky and the brave Ukrainians are motivated by the same ideals that inspired the Declaration of Independence. Their patriotism is not the milquetoast liberalism of the European Union or Davos-style globalism; it is the patriotism that moved American heroes at Bunker Hill, Gettysburg, and Iwo Jima.

 

The Declaration of Independence links the fight for individual rights to human nature. The Founders believed in limited government because they believed that “all men are created equal.” George Washington and John Adams were not fighting to abolish the human; they were fighting on behalf of God-given human dignity.

 

American conservatives ought to be grateful to Millerman for the work he has done translating and explaining Dugin’s work. As Dugin is a major proponent of the war in Ukraine, understanding his thought is key to crafting a strategy for defeating the Russian invasion and discrediting its ideological origins. But as we look long into the abyss, Americans should be very aware that the abyss is looking right back at us.