The Fourth Political Theory： Part Three ｜ Guest： Michael Millerman ｜ 4⧸21⧸23
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Length
1 hour and 14 minutes
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171.2434
Summary
In Part 3 of our series on Alexander Dugan's The Fourth Political Theory, we continue our discussion of the concept of civilization, and how it has changed since the founding of modern civilization. In this episode, we discuss the role of civilization in the development of modernity, and the role it plays in the evolution of modern political theory.
Transcript
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We hope you're enjoying your Air Canada flight.
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Fast-free Wi-Fi means I can make dinner reservations before we land.
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Wi-Fi available to Airplane members on Equipped Flight.
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We've got some Philosophy Bright and Early here for you today.
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So we've been working on a series about Alexander Dugan and his book, The Fourth Political Theory.
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It's got a lot of very interesting things today.
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And so we're going to be delving in to our next set of chapters.
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I'm looking about at some concepts where he addresses kind of the changes of the idea of
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civilization, changes in the idea of liberalism, and all kinds of other stuff.
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He helped to translate The Fourth Political Theory, and he himself has written a book
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So we're going to jump in right where we left off in part two.
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But before we do that, guys, let's hear from today's sponsor.
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This episode is brought to you by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.
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The Intercollegiate Studies Institute is a conservative nonprofit dedicated to educating
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ISI understands that conservative and right-of-center students feel isolated on college campuses
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and compelled to defend their reputation and dignity while seeking to carve out a brighter
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ISI has a variety of different content, events, internships, and fellowships geared towards
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helping students and opening up career opportunities.
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ISI offers graduate students and entry-level journalists the opportunity to receive fellowships
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Nate Hockman, who's been a guest on this show multiple times, got his start on National
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Review through ISI, and he's just one of many journalists and academics who were able
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This spring, ISI is going to be hosting a debate between Michael Knowles and Deidre McCloskey
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on the subject of transgenderism that will be live-streamed on YouTube.
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In the fall, everyone's favorite Fox News host, Tucker Carlson, will be giving the keynote
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On all issues, both economic and cultural, ISI wants their students to know that they're
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not shying away from the problems facing our country, because letting the left win is a
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You can follow the link down below in the description of this video.
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If you'd like to catch up with our discussion, all the previous discussions about this book
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There's a playlist there, so you can make sure you're with us here.
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But on Chapter 7, Dugan starts talking about the concept of civilization.
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And he says, we need a better definition of civilization, because our very concept of
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The definition has been corrupted and kind of been wrapped around this idea of infinite
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He says that civilization has kind of become synonymous with the idea of progress and the
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idea that humanity will always move forward in a very particular way, advance in a very
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And because civilization has been redefined in this way, the liberal worldview becomes the
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So, Michael, let's go ahead and break down a little bit of that.
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So when he's talking about progress and its different meanings, what does the redefinition
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of civilization do to kind of the mindset when we address different possible ways to look
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Well, you get the sense now, the rhetoric of civilizational identity, like he wrote even
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then, and we see evidence of that now as well, is rising.
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So there are a lot of recent articles on the civilization state, for example, or the idea
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that Russia, China, Iran, they don't just represent savage or barbarian remnants, you know, like
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they're the developing world and we're the developed world.
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But rather, they have completely different modes of interpretation.
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So that's what Dugan's mostly interested in, this idea that there are several different
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ways of interpreting the character of political life, of political time, of political morality,
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So the older view of civilization that he contests is that civilization is the outcome of a kind
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of maturing process, you know, that you leave behind the stages of savagery and barbarism
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And because he sees this as a kind of ethnocentric universalization of one group's view of what
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it means to be civilized, he opposes that and he has this other model.
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So it's many of the things that he talked about earlier in the book, they recur here in
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So civilizations will have their own kind of myth, archaic, their interpretation of
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They'll have their own, in some cases, religious traditions that won't necessarily match with
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And so each civilization, well, let me take one step back.
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The main contrast is between civilization as a culminating phase or stage and civilizations
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civilizations as a simultaneously existing plurality of worldview types or of cultural
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So even as earlier in the book, he said, you know, the fourth political theory is going to
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reject individualism, class-based analysis, race analysis, and state analysis.
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And we talked a little bit about how Dasein, this notion from Heidegger's philosophy comes
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For sure, one of the key contenders for the main agents of the fourth political theory
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So some of the interesting things that he then kind of mines out of this examination of
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civilization, one I found particularly interesting was the idea that civilization is the point
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at which our kind of culture or our social system attempts to transcend the ethnos and tries
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to place itself in kind of the faith of systems of men, whereas the institutions become the
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thing that perpetuates it and it creates a universalization, or at least as he'll address
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later, the kind of the illusion of a universalization.
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And I found that very interesting because that dovetails a lot with kind of what Oswald Spangler
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And he references Spangler in this chapter as well.
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But he's definitely in very similar waters where Spangler talks about how you have the
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cultural phase and then you have the civilizational phase.
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And the cultural phase is animated by the metaphysical spirit of the people, of the group.
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Basically, everything is done out of habit due to kind of who you are in your identity.
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And then when you move into the civilizational phase, these things transfer out of the realm
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of the metaphysical and into systems that are established inside this new civilizational
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process that needs to expand, that needs to universalize, that needs to apply its kind of
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Now, through systems of men, it kind of materializes everything that was once metaphysical.
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And he also talks about, well, okay, I guess that, okay, that was everything about that
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But yeah, I just didn't know if you want to comment on that transition between kind of
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the spiritual, the animating spirit, you know, the cultural phase, and then into the
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civilizational phase where these things are established through the institutions of the
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And the idea that you could, let's say, become initiated into a civilizational identity through
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kind of technical operations at a more or less superficial level.
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But in order to become initiated into, let's say, a tribal identity or an ethnic identity,
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or even like a deeply religious identity, the process is much more substantive.
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So yes, when a smaller ethnic community universalizes itself or attempts to, whether it's successful
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in doing so or not, it allows this easier entry, lowers the bar of entry, the operations
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But a key point for Dugan, and this is present in this chapter in an important way, is that
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the substantive, difficult, profound side of identity, it doesn't just mysteriously disappear
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when we get into the superficial layer of technical operations that allow us to become
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It just goes deeper underground, but it's always preserved.
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So that's why even under the veneer of a universal, technical, operational, civilizational
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And the idea of the undercurrents is important for him.
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He writes about it in terms of, for example, the collective unconscious, or about these,
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the underlying Daseins, or the underlying ethno-sociological phenomena.
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All of the different ways he writes about it are there to remind us not to be fooled
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by the veneer of universality, because the substantive difference has only become harder
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And the more that it's repressed, or suppressed, or hidden, somehow the more it exerts its effect
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So that's very important for Dugan, even in later chapters where he talks about the, like
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the remnant of the component of the nation in certain forms of left-wing socialism, partially
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So here too, that's there in the civilization side as well.
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And he always wants to, you know, it's easy to forget in some sense, because it seems like
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we're a long way away from the realm of rituals of initiation into a closed community.
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But he wants to remind us that those are still there beneath the surface of things.
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Yeah, and thanks for bringing up that difficult, that easier entry as opposed to the difficulty
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of the tribe and joining the tribe, because that was what I was reaching for there.
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And I think that's a really important point for people to understand, is the ability, that
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transition to something that would have been more holistic, that would have been more natural,
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that would have been deeply rooted into something that is kind of a facsimile, but that allows
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But in many ways, it loses than much of what made it, gave it this animating spirit.
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I also wanted to touch on his, him addressing the idea that myth and savagery do not disappear.
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As you're saying, these things don't disappear when people become civilized.
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Civilization relocates them into the realm of the unconscious.
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And so he says, you know, far, far from thinking that we, you know, many people think, well,
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civilization means we've escaped the myths, we've escaped the savagery, we've escaped
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all this backward thinking that once bound the tribe together, and we've advanced beyond
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And he says, no, you haven't advanced beyond it at all.
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You simply placed it into the unconscious, and it becomes even more dangerous, because now
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you're not even conscious of these things that are driving you in this direction.
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They're operating in a realm that you don't even look at, and all civilization has done
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is given you more effective tools with which to be savage.
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Because the growth, obviously, the growth of military technology and other types of technologies,
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which we associate with civilizational progress, they, you know, that's a double edged sword,
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obviously, that cuts, cuts both ways for the sake of peace and for the sake of war.
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But there are other parallels, like Dugan is channeling here or expressing criticisms, as
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he himself acknowledges, criticisms that have now become not commonplace, but, you know,
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he's not the only person deconstructing civilization to show that it's not devoid of savagery and
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Carl Schmitt's concept of the political, where he says that there's a tendency among those who
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invoke humanity, they say, we're on this, we're the humanitarians, we're fighting on behalf of
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humanity, what that does is radically dehumanizes the people who don't share their own perspective.
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So, normally, you have somebody recognizing that they're facing another human enemy,
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and they're sort of on the equal plane of, you know, human friends, human enemies,
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and a nice configuration of the field of the political.
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But when liberals say that they're fighting on the side of not just their group, but humanity as such,
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then that means they're automatically opposed not to a human enemy, but to a subhuman or
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So, to dehumanize the other is another form of savagery or barbarism, because suddenly they lose
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When you invoke civilization on your side, you automatically, on the flip side of that,
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have rendered everybody else uncivilized, and therefore, you either have the task of
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bringing them up in a forceful way, or of destroying them, or of caging them off, or,
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Giorgio Agamben fits in here, I think, to a certain extent.
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Schmidt, the structuralist, all of which Dugan is concentrating in this way to show, as it were,
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the lie of a certain interpretation of civilization.
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I was just going to say, I really love that Schmidt point, because he really makes an excellent
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examination of the fact that when you try to eliminate all these differences, when you
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try to say that there are none of these existential conflicts, and you try to unite everybody under
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liberalism, you're also implying that there is no other way to be human.
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This is the only way, because this is humanity, because this is the way humanity cooperates,
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anyone who doesn't fall under the liberal system isn't human, and therefore, the friend-enemy
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It doesn't disappear because you've united humanity under liberalism.
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It simply makes anyone who opposes liberalism an opponent of humanity.
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And similarly here, the savagery and the barbarism, they don't disappear.
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They just get redirected, de-placed, de-positioned, and there are new acts of savagery and new forms
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of barbarism, all under the veneer of civilization.
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That's according to that model, according to the older model.
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So he then goes on to kind of point out that post-modernism works to shatter this illusion
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that makes liberalism look at itself and realize that there are these underpinning assumptions,
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there are these, there is still this suppressed savagery that's existing, that it hasn't escaped
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And he also talks a little bit about synchronic understandings of civilization.
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First is, synchronic means that, again, civilization is not the final stage of a process leading
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through savagery and barbarism, where we have gone through what other people are currently
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They're somewhere along the, you know, in the midst of the process.
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And because we're at the end of it, that's called being civilized.
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And because they're not, that's called, you know, being underway to civilization or being
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So that's the diachronic, meaning you become civilized through time in a progressive way.
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Synchronic means the stages of savagery, barbarism, and civilization coexist in time.
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And that there are more, there's more than one civilization.
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And so that's the point that he's trying to get to, because against globalism, against
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global liberalism, there has to be a viable alternative.
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Dugan's model of a viable alternative, as he says in this chapter, at least in one perspective,
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Opposed to just a global world, a world of several poles.
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So the only way that you can get to a world that's configured, not by a single ruler, and
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not by just nation states, but rather by civilizations, you have to get to an understanding of civilization
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And so those are the steps that he's taking along the way.
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I did want to say that, yes, he credits postmodern thinkers.
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He credits postmodern thinkers with having done the deconstruction of the pretensions of
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But this is an important point because it makes, I think, some conservatives uncomfortable
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when figures embrace insights from postmodernity.
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And partially that's because a lot of the postmodern thinkers were on the left.
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They can be seen as enemies of, you know, they're agents of destruction to a certain extent.
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But Dugan, who doesn't position himself on the left, believes, rightly, I think, that
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you can still take the insights that were developed by the left postmodern theorists.
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And you sort of must, unless you're going to be philosophically naive, which is another
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He says, you know, there are neoconservatives who are just philosophically naive.
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There are Russian liberals who are philosophically naive.
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But to the extent to which we want to actually understand these different phase transitions
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and what it means, you know, what the specific character of our times is, we have to incorporate
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the insights of these mostly French, not only French, but mostly French postmodern theorists
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on the left, not in order to go where they went, but in order to do something with what
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So that's a big part of what he does, what he tries to say in this chapter.
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You know, the old view of civilization is no longer tenable.
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It's no longer tenable because of all of these studies that were done.
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I mean, you know, great acts of philosophical effort that were done by the structuralists,
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post-structuralists, and so on, cultural anthropologists.
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And Dugan summarizes, everybody should know, this is an important point in my view about the
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book The Fourth Political Theory I may have mentioned before.
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He often will make a small remark or observation that leads into another completely other set
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of books that he's written or, you know, hundreds of pages he's dedicated to a topic.
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So in this case, he has a book called Ethno-Sociology.
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I translated it, where you can start to see how he applies the insights in more detail of
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cultural anthropology to thinking through what it means to be a nation-state, a civilization,
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But yeah, all of this is to say, you get beyond the first model of civilization.
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You go to the idea of synchrony, which means, again, each, what we call civilized,
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And then you have this very important argument that that plurality of civilizations
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can serve as the basis for a new ideology, an ideology that must reach the level of global
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liberalism in its seriousness and in its capacity.
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Because you can't just have a bunch of, you know, loser contenders to oppose globalism.
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But unless they rise to the level of globalism, you won't have a fight.
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So you need a model that's universal enough and broad enough, as we discussed again in other
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And here, the key insight is multipolarity, where the poles are civilizations.
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That's going to form the basis that allows us to have opposition, global opposition to
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Yeah, I think it's really important for people to take to onboard that point about postmodernism
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as well, because Dugan does, and we'll talk about it in the next chapter here, he does
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explicitly say there are many evils of postmodernism.
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So he's not championing postmodern left thought in its conclusions, but he is taking those
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And for those who are understandably and probably rightly wary of Dugan's intentions in certain
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areas, remember, we're doing the same thing here, right?
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This is not, we are trying to better understand his thought, take the points that I think are
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good, are essential, and then leave the things that we might not find useful or might find
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So I just want everyone to remember that is the general thrust of what we're doing.
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And it is specifically what Dugan kind of advocates for when it comes to understanding certain parts
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of what have happened through the postmodern lens.
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It's not a general endorsement of postmodernism.
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In fact, he explicitly refutes parts of it here, as we'll see moving forward.
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Yeah, one of the first lectures I ever watched of Dugan's when I was an undergraduate student,
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I was taking a class on international relations taught by a postmodernist.
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And there was a Dugan lecture on YouTube, I think it's been pulled because he had his channel
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It was like a nice five minute exposition of postmodernism as Satanism.
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It made perfect sense of the phenomenon of postmodernism.
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My professor wasn't very happy when I shared it with the class and when I talked to him
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about it, himself identifying as a postmodernist.
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But you gain, you know, one of the things that he does, and you see it in this book and elsewhere,
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he is never averse to what we might learn, even from a school of thought that as a whole
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And what we might learn from experimental cross interpretations that don't,
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necessarily follow the Orthodox reading, but that can always open up new possibilities
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If we can get some new insights or we can get some new conceptual perspectives or some
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new combinations and questions to think about, then we see that it was worth the effort.
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So just to wrap up this chapter here, he talks about kind of the difference between Samuel
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Huntington's model of kind of the clash of civilizations versus Francis Fukuyama's assertion
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He finds, of course, Huntington far more compelling than Fukuyama.
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In fact, he points out that Fukuyama had to, in many ways, go back and revise his project
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So he had to add new stages of the end of history where we kind of go into these nation
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building sessions, kind of a pit stop on our way to the end of history.
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And he also then addresses what you've hinted at multiple times, which is that civilizations
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can serve as kind of a way to fill the ideological gap between these different opposing small
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It can create a larger force that can actually successfully oppose globalism as opposed to
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all of these smaller efforts, these internal efforts inside a particular nation or or
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About the Huntington and Fukuyama, a quick point on that.
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So Dugan shows us that you can have compatible globalism and nationalism.
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When your nationalism is not ethnic nationalism or national populism or national conservatism,
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but rather when you're building a nation in order to overcome it.
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Trudeau once called Canada the first post-national state or something like that.
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But you can only become post-national once you've been national.
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So the idea is that in order to get to a post-national global order, you first have to build up nation
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states through the state development so that then they can overcome their state, their statehood.
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So that's how you can combine globalism and nationalism in one perspective.
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Obviously, nationalism is also opposed to globalism, but that's when it's ethno-national or populist
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national or right national or something like that.
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And then one other thing just for people who are trying to follow every thread here in
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case anybody is like that, you know, wants to chase down these arguments wherever else
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So Dugan used to be a professor at Moscow State University where he taught international
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And in one of his textbooks that he wrote, he has a chapter on theory of a multipolar world,
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namely on his own theory of international relations alluded to in this chapter.
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It's available in English, theory of a multipolar world.
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And he gives there several different ways to understand the study of civilizations, like
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in terms of their cultural codes, in terms of their education, in terms of the internal
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Like he goes through here, you know, here are 10 different ways, 10 different approaches
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And if we take all of the civilizations mentioned in this chapter and all of these methods of
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study, we'll produce a rich like encyclopedia of civilizational studies.
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So that's the book theory of a multipolar world worth looking at for the multipolar side
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Yeah, it is very interesting that approach of building up the nation state to create globalism
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as long as it's the right kind of nation state.
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You know, we need to go further into capitalism before we can get to the revolution, something
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that he'll address again here later on as we move through these chapters.
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But is there anything else you want to talk about the great spaces or his multipolar approach
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So I just say briefly, you know, questions, there are secondary questions about a multipolar
00:26:32.940
Well, he refers to Carl Schmitt's gross realm, order of large spaces.
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So there's sort of regional universalisms or regional blocks larger than a nation state,
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but smaller than the, you know, smaller than the world.
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He mentions European Union as one example, Eurasian Union as another one.
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Bricks probably is one that they're, he's engaged in at the moment, you know, building
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So you have regional blocks, you have civilizations, you have their organization in regional blocks
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in these gross realm, and then you have the specific legal set of relationships among all
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of the players, like, you know, whatever kind of customs union it is.
00:27:12.480
So there are those three levels and you can work your way up through the, from the legal
00:27:16.540
to the political, to the philosophical, or you can work your way down.
00:27:20.060
But he says that's going to be the new model for the construction of, you know, of the
00:27:27.820
So our next chapter is about the left being in crisis, kind of the crisis of philosophy
00:27:34.280
Now, very interestingly, I think a lot of people on the right would just assume that globalism
00:27:46.540
He sees the left as also in opposition to globalism, but he's talking about the, in many ways, the
00:27:56.240
Now, there are still many, there are still many of these remnants.
00:27:58.620
I myself have talked with a number of classical Marxists who are very angry at wokeness, who
00:28:03.300
hate, you know, modern progressivism, that kind of thing.
00:28:06.080
But these people are very small in number at this point, at least, especially in the
00:28:10.460
There's very few, you know, the vast, vast, vast majority of the left has happily followed
00:28:15.560
along with kind of progressivism and liberalism, triumphant, I guess, neoliberalism, whatever
00:28:23.620
And so when I refer to the left, I am usually referring to globalist forces.
00:28:29.940
But it is worth pointing out here that there is a mostly defeated school of leftist thought
00:28:36.420
that is in opposition to globalism in many ways.
00:28:43.140
So he talks about the old left and he kind of breaks it down into a couple of groups.
00:28:47.420
Your orthodox Marxists, your social democrats, your post-social democrats, and your European
00:28:57.060
Is there any part of that you want to go ahead and touch on kind of the old left's relationship
00:29:03.400
I think you're right that they're less relevant socially.
00:29:07.220
He says they haven't really taken into account the intellectual developments or the political
00:29:11.160
developments transition from industrial age to information age.
00:29:14.900
They're still sort of like the old stodgy defenders of compromises that they don't really have
00:29:24.420
But it is important to be able to identify them and to be able to distinguish them as
00:29:29.900
But I think for him, they're the least interesting group.
00:29:35.380
So then we'll go ahead and move beyond them there.
00:29:37.800
The next group that he talks about is, of course, the new left.
00:29:41.460
And the new left is made up of many of our postmodern thinkers, right?
00:29:47.980
It's made up of a lot of the people that we've been talking about there.
00:29:53.780
Do you want to address some of his thoughts on the new left?
00:29:57.860
So he does say that's the he says, if any of the leftist groups have a claim to be the
00:30:04.680
leftist project, like an actual political vision, like a series of goals and aims and plans and
00:30:10.300
taking over institutions and rewriting our moral codes and infiltrating here, there and
00:30:19.180
But before we get to the new left, I think it's worth mentioning and passing this other
00:30:23.300
group that some people who know about Dugan know about with whatever degree of seriousness,
00:30:27.920
which is the national Bush, not national Bolsheviks or national gaucheists or the nationalized
00:30:34.320
So this is different from the old left because this group, the national gaucheists or the national
00:30:39.820
Bolsheviks, they we mentioned it before, but it's worth saying again, I think they combine
00:30:44.060
a kind of social justice, anti-globalist, in some cases, anti-American, anti-capitalist type
00:30:51.520
perspective with deep ethnic energies, deep national and archaic energies.
00:30:58.140
And so, first of all, this is important because Dugan himself was involved with a project of
00:31:03.640
national Bolshevism in Russia, where he tried to say, OK, on one hand, you've got the Soviet,
00:31:12.040
But on the other hand, he's trying to put an emphasis on what's distinctly Russian.
00:31:15.000
And there was a possible ideological path forward through the idea of national Bolshevism.
00:31:18.720
He mentions that, you know, that national Bolshevik project turned, it didn't go the
00:31:23.480
direction he wanted it to, so he abandoned it, but it's still important to know.
00:31:26.260
And then when we look around today in our cultural and political context and social context,
00:31:32.220
I think there can sometimes still be the confusing observation when leftists who seem like they
00:31:39.440
want to get away from all national identities or ethnic identities at the same time are doubling
00:31:44.740
down on their non-European identities, you know.
00:31:48.140
So, like, it's almost like the European, to talk about your European identity is off the table,
00:31:52.960
but to talk about your non-European identity is very much on the table in some of these circles.
00:31:57.660
So, that can be confusing, I think, because the, as Dugan puts it, the national element of those
00:32:03.860
social, of those national Bolshevists is under-theorized.
00:32:12.440
They're on the left, they're against, they seemingly are against identities, and yet,
00:32:16.300
at the same time, they're invoking ethnic, tribal, archaic, or non-European, non-Western
00:32:22.540
So, he says that represents a specific kind of movement, a specific, with its own, with a
00:32:35.100
It has some prospects, he says, like, some prospects for what?
00:32:39.940
For continuing to be relevant, because people's, in his view, ethnic, national, tribal identities
00:32:50.980
So, if you combine that dynamism with the basic theses of the left, then you're going to have
00:32:55.380
the continued relevance of this particular movement, which, but he says, as I say, it's
00:33:01.000
So, with that aside, national Bolshevism aside, and by the way, an interesting piece by Dugan
00:33:06.300
on this topic is called The Metaphysics of National Bolshevism, where you see he opposes
00:33:09.820
the open society in Karl Popper, and he said, he defines national Bolshevism as basically
00:33:14.020
everybody who's against the open society gets categorized as a supporter of national Bolshevism.
00:33:21.540
But yes, the new left, that's the big deal for him.
00:33:24.160
That's where the action is, politically, intellectually, culturally, that's what matters.
00:33:28.920
And the new left, the postmodern left, as everybody, I think, now knows, I'm sure your
00:33:33.800
listeners are more than most, the new left, the postmodern left, they're rewriting the
00:33:39.880
You know, they're rewriting the nature of identity.
00:33:42.620
They're all in on a kind of virtual, virtuality of the world instead of reality of the world.
00:33:47.700
And he, he goes through that in a way that I think is helpful for people who aren't used
00:33:56.640
The Marxist left is not the same as the national Bolshevist left is certainly not the same as
00:34:01.040
Yeah, the one that we see in kind of America and the forefront of the cultural revolution
00:34:07.060
in much of the West does tend to come from the new left.
00:34:10.820
So, I think that's the one that everyone kind of focuses on.
00:34:13.860
But it is worth, especially as a guy who is attempting to pull together a new political
00:34:18.740
theory and is attempting to kind of get a comprehensive look at the options available
00:34:23.200
to recognize that there are, you know, there are still other aspects of the left out there.
00:34:29.340
So, for the new left, he lists a number of kind of projects that they have underway.
00:34:35.420
I'm just going to go to read those out because they'll set the frame for what we're talking
00:34:44.840
And then the renunciation of man as the measure of all things, overcoming sexual taboos, of
00:34:51.360
course, this is one most people will easily recognize, legalization of narcotics, a move
00:34:57.960
to new forms of spontaneous and sporadic being, and the destruction of structural society and
00:35:04.560
government in the service of new and free and anarchical communities.
00:35:10.100
So, those are kind of the goals that he says are the projects of the new left.
00:35:16.020
I mean, that captures a lot of it, I think, in a way that we see the rejection of reason.
00:35:24.280
The older model is that man is a vertically oriented being, that we have a nature.
00:35:29.440
And at the top of our nature is our ability to reason.
00:35:34.400
And at the top of even our reason is our theoretical capacity.
00:35:37.640
So, that man reaches his perfection in morality, practical reason, and in science or philosophy,
00:35:46.700
And virtue is that, practical and theoretical excellence.
00:35:50.760
Okay, but the problem is, if you're against vertical hierarchies, then you have to displace
00:35:58.680
You have to say that, no, your instinct is as legitimate as your reason.
00:36:02.380
Your deepest, darkest desires are as legitimate as your reason.
00:36:05.780
In fact, they may be more legitimate than your reason.
00:36:08.720
Your idea of the authority of reason may be a kind of false consciousness or a suppression
00:36:16.020
So, this rejection of reason, embrace of, as he puts it, a conscious adoption of schizophrenia,
00:36:22.940
So, it's anything that represents stability, order, hierarchy, naturalness, excellence, definition,
00:36:34.100
In exchange for these, like, schizophrenia, craziness, randomness, disorder, free, sporadic,
00:36:44.560
I do think that captures the gist of a lot of it.
00:36:50.080
If you're against hierarchical communities, man himself is a hierarchical community.
00:36:53.720
Therefore, you have to attack the nature of man, turn the arrows in on our reason.
00:36:59.640
For sure, sexual liberation, for sure, the legalization of all kinds of narcotics, I think,
00:37:08.080
And it's important, I would say, to note that these tendencies for him, we mentioned
00:37:12.100
before, his views on postmodernism not being altogether positive.
00:37:15.420
These tendencies lead to the destruction of the human essence.
00:37:18.060
They lead to the destruction of the human being.
00:37:19.960
They also have everything that people are concerned about today, the social costs, you
00:37:24.440
know, destroying families, destroying schools, degeneration of higher education, and things
00:37:30.520
But ultimately, they're dedicated to the destruction of the human essence, because human essence
00:37:39.160
Essentialism is exclusionary, hierarchical, fascistic, oppressive, and so on.
00:37:43.500
So this all culminates in a war on the human being.
00:37:46.520
And for sure, that makes a great divide, those who are against the human being and those
00:37:53.300
Which is very interesting, because obviously, this is where Dugan, of course, attacks, you
00:37:59.400
know, this new left, these aspects of postmodernism.
00:38:07.740
I find it interesting, you know, he references Deleuze multiple times in this.
00:38:12.740
And, you know, Anti-Odipus, I think, is not taken as part of the postmodern canon by most
00:38:21.820
Like, a lot of people who study postmodernism don't focus on this, but I think he rightly
00:38:26.260
understands kind of the consequences of some of that thought and how much of an impact
00:38:32.440
it has on kind of the goals of the new left, even if others don't focus on it as much.
00:38:38.240
But I also think it's interesting about the abandonment of reason, because in many ways,
00:38:43.660
of course, this is what scares conservatives the most about postmodernism, and understandably
00:38:48.200
so, is just the complete abandonment of reason.
00:38:50.740
But I think in many ways, Dugan and others who are critical liberalism, they're not advocating
00:38:57.840
the abandonment of reason, but the reordering of the understanding of humanity to put reason
00:39:05.240
And so in ways, he is also asking, and many of us on the right who are exploring this are
00:39:12.860
asking that reason be understood better as a part of human existence rather than the ultimate
00:39:24.460
And so he would, I think, push back against their complete rejection, but would not be
00:39:29.960
against perhaps a reordering or prioritizing of it.
00:39:39.860
I think the next best point of reference is Leo Strauss.
00:39:46.680
So if modern rationality is only a specific form of reason, then when you reject modern
00:39:54.340
rationality, if you do, it doesn't mean rejecting reason as such.
00:39:57.920
It means rejecting whatever was specific about modern rationality that left it sort of deprived
00:40:05.300
of direction and vision and depth and left it just doing the sort of superficial calculation
00:40:13.000
Well, if that's the case, let's say here's one way you can configure it.
00:40:17.580
Reason has led us into alienation from ourselves and from the deepest wellsprings of our meaningful
00:40:27.040
But Dugan and Strauss do not accept that model.
00:40:29.760
Second one is in response to the failure of modern reason, we find an alternative that is
00:40:37.200
Dugan's alternative is, as you said, there's more to the human being than even than his
00:40:42.360
thinking, although it gets kind of complicated here because I think at the end of the day,
00:40:49.460
But even so, there are other parts of our nature.
00:40:53.340
That's in part, that's all implied by his recourse to Dasein and to Heidegger.
00:40:59.720
And it's one of the reasons I also categorize him somewhat as a mystical thinker, okay?
00:41:03.460
Because mysticism or the Dionysian or however you want to conceive of that, that would be
00:41:07.620
also part of the deeper understanding of a human being.
00:41:11.440
Strauss, an alternative that is well worth knowing.
00:41:13.800
I don't know whether your listeners have read much Leo Strauss, but I have to put him on
00:41:18.140
He says, you know, you go from modern rationality to pre-modern reason.
00:41:23.680
But we don't know what pre-modern reason is unless we learn to study the pre-modern philosophers
00:41:28.040
adequately, Plato and Aristotle first and foremost.
00:41:30.300
So both of these guys, Dugan for sure, is thinking about how do you get away from the
00:41:36.400
degenerate character of modern rationality without just running into the hands of schizophrenia
00:41:41.500
and insanity and, you know, deliberate stupidity.
00:41:45.620
And it's a big task because there's something worth taking seriously in the criticism of modern
00:41:54.780
But to run from that into the, from the frying pan into the fire would be a total mistake.
00:42:00.740
What we need, and this is always part of Dugan's like topography, Strauss's as well, we need
00:42:05.380
to go not just away, but deeper, deeper to where did things go wrong?
00:42:12.380
What was man before he got parceled out into these superficial elements, you know?
00:42:18.780
And when we have a more authentic, more integrated, deeper, and accurate understanding of the human
00:42:26.460
being, we can preserve both our rational and intellectual tendencies and our spontaneous,
00:42:33.900
sporadic, free, dynamic, chaotic tendencies without the cheap version of either one of them.
00:42:41.440
You know, you get their actual, true, genuine relationship, but only if you go deep.
00:42:45.720
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00:43:18.080
And the last part of this, I don't know if you want to touch on it, is specifically about
00:43:24.360
I don't know if there's anything you want to, that's very specific, but.
00:43:28.400
No, I'll just say that in all of the questions that he raises throughout the fourth political
00:43:32.900
theory, he's always going back and forth in a way from the general statement, which
00:43:37.700
could apply to anybody anywhere, which is why we're able to talk about it, you with the
00:43:41.300
U.S., me and Canada, and try to understand what it means for the Western world and for
00:43:45.220
And then he'll also sometimes go back and comment, what is this like specifically in the case
00:43:52.040
Where it is important for him that the Russian question is not merely local or particular or
00:44:01.420
He does think globally or generally that the prospects for a multipolar world depend in a
00:44:08.340
fundamental way on whether Russia can assert itself.
00:44:10.780
So he has a local particular interest in Russia, but he also has a sort of universal general
00:44:16.200
interest in Russia because without Russia's revival or rebirth, there can't be multipolarity.
00:44:26.040
But in that chapter, he doesn't go into those details.
00:44:28.760
He just says, you know, he just does this little overview about how postmodernism is starting
00:44:32.740
to affect Russia through art and through apps, you know, people, it's kind of like, this
00:44:40.060
is kind of an important point that when people are browsing their phones on TikTok or they're
00:44:43.960
doing whatever they're, you know, they watch some show, this is kind of like a Spy Kids
00:44:46.840
2 thing from earlier, together with the media that they're consuming, they're imbibing postmodern
00:44:54.320
moral codes, not because they're reading postmodern tracts, but because the postmodern morality is
00:45:00.780
built into the education and the entertainment and the medium.
00:45:10.400
So his next chapter here is liberalism and its metamorphosis.
00:45:16.000
So he's talking about kind of that shifts, the shifts within liberalism from one of competing
00:45:23.440
philosophies to one of dominant philosophies and kind of what that means over time.
00:45:29.500
He lays out here, liberalism is a summary of Western civilization and its definition.
00:45:34.180
And we can just go ahead and read off again, a few of these here.
00:45:38.800
He says, uh, it's a political and economic philosophy, ideology embodying itself in the
00:45:44.460
most important, uh, force lines of the modern age and epoch of modernity.
00:45:48.940
And he lines out some of its tenants, uh, the understanding of the individual as the measure
00:45:53.400
of all things, belief in the sacred character of private property, the assertion of equality
00:45:58.300
of opportunity as the moral law of society, belief in the contractual basis of all sociopolitical
00:46:05.220
institutions, including government, abolition of any government, religious, or social authority
00:46:09.640
that lays claim to the common truth, separation of powers and the making all social systems
00:46:15.180
of control over any government institution whatsoever, the creation of a civil society
00:46:20.320
without race, peoples, and religion in place of traditional government, the dominance of
00:46:25.080
market relations over any other form of politics, and kind of lays those out as the basic
00:46:33.960
Uh, do you want to respond to their kind of his definition of liberalism or modern liberalism?
00:46:39.820
No, I think it's, I think it should be familiar to people as a kind of classical as what we
00:46:45.280
So when people today say liberalism and they mean woke ism, and then they try to oppose woke
00:46:51.560
ism on the basis of something else they call liberalism.
00:46:56.400
If I'm not mistaken, I don't know his thought well enough to really say, but I think roughly,
00:47:00.540
you know, this is like, uh, when people like James Lindsay oppose woke ism, they're not
00:47:05.600
talking about going to Evola and Gwen on and Schmidt.
00:47:08.800
They're talking about going to, you know, civil society without races, peoples, and religions,
00:47:12.880
separation of powers, dominance of market relations, right?
00:47:16.560
So this represents your good old fashioned classical liberalism, uh, more or less.
00:47:22.380
And then he talks about, uh, freedom from as kind of the defining dogma of liberalism.
00:47:29.480
And he has a very powerful, uh, uh, passage here a little later about freedom from, which
00:47:36.540
But he kind of talks about how, uh, increasingly liberalism needs to free everyone from, uh, from
00:47:45.140
ideas of like church, class, race, you know, any ethnic attachments, any kind of collective
00:47:52.480
And, uh, this is something that I've talked about a lot.
00:48:00.000
But I also think it's interesting and he doesn't do this here.
00:48:02.860
Cause I don't know if he's interacted with, uh, the thought of Bertrand de Juvenal.
00:48:08.460
Uh, I don't know if he references to juvenile, juvenile anywhere else, but de juvenile actually
00:48:12.920
identifies these actions as the actions of the centralization of power.
00:48:17.260
He says that in order for power to centralize, it must take the, um, it must take the responsibilities
00:48:24.080
because duty and responsibility, uh, dependency is what builds sovereignty.
00:48:28.360
And so because, uh, people have duties to their, their religions, their ethnic communities,
00:48:34.300
their families, uh, their, their neighborhoods, they therefore cannot be completely dependent
00:48:40.100
on the social, uh, the government, that these, these, uh, intermediate social spheres, uh,
00:48:45.860
keep the government's power from growing and becoming total.
00:48:49.720
And he says that basically for power to become total for the government to take total control,
00:48:57.100
It must remove those spheres of responsibility.
00:48:59.820
And so it's very interesting because I often see people identify liberalism or capitalism as
00:49:07.440
a particular, uh, ideology that demands these things.
00:49:11.620
But I think it's also interesting to remember that these things show up in other ideologies
00:49:16.940
that wish to centralize control through state power.
00:49:20.460
And so he, he does identify these as liberalism here, but I think it's also interesting to remember
00:49:25.840
that liberalism is not alone in its need to collapse these spheres.
00:49:32.040
And one of the reasons, reasons liberalism has reigned triumphant is not just that it's
00:49:38.060
the most compelling thing on the market, but that it's the best thing for states to use
00:49:43.440
It's the most resilient thing for them to use to centralize power.
00:49:47.920
The very important, uh, big picture points there, uh, other ones that come to mind for me
00:49:53.160
that may be related, you know, um, Strauss, he called Hobbes the first liberal because
00:49:58.500
Hobbes was the first person to put an emphasis on, uh, rights and on the idea that we need
00:50:05.980
Society is based on what we need to get away from what we need to be free from to a certain
00:50:13.040
So the classical political philosophies, they organized their understanding of political life
00:50:20.180
Whereas Hobbes organized this political teaching as we're getting.
00:50:24.600
We're getting away from a state of scarcity, getting away from a state of violence.
00:50:27.960
Nature becomes something that we get away from, not something that we fulfill for Strauss.
00:50:31.860
That was important as a characterization of the first liberal teaching.
00:50:37.380
So a combination of great state power on one hand and of, uh, rights-based teaching on the
00:50:43.620
So you're probably right that there are other instances where these two things go together,
00:50:47.300
but still, whether we put the emphasis on the centralized, uh, centralization and totalization,
00:50:53.840
or whether we put it like he does here on the liberation from various attachments and things
00:51:00.240
Uh, I think that, um, for Dugan, one thing that's important to see freedom from freedom
00:51:06.900
from external, this freedom from external, that it transforms.
00:51:13.400
It transforms into freedom from internal constraints as well.
00:51:20.980
Let's say to a certain extent, what we know today as wokeism, he's able to trace it not
00:51:25.020
only to its leftist postmodern roots, but also, and importantly to its liberal roots, because
00:51:32.320
transgenderism, let's say this is his presentation in a book called the great awakening versus the
00:51:36.400
great reset liberation from gender identity is just the next phase of freedom from, and it will
00:51:45.120
be followed by liberation from human identity because to be free from means to be free from
00:51:51.760
any collective identity, including gender identity and including human identity.
00:51:56.400
So there was a debate recently, you know, should we trace wokeism to Marxism or to liberalism?
00:52:00.820
Should we trace it to, you know, which of those, uh, two sources?
00:52:04.440
And here in these last two chapters, we see Dugan giving a mutual account, it rise, it will
00:52:09.660
rise from liberalism and it also rose from the left critique of liberalism.
00:52:14.520
So the next, uh, thing that he addresses is the universalization of the definition of nation
00:52:22.260
through liberalism in order for liberalism to properly interact with other, uh, with other
00:52:29.240
political entities, it needed to standardize kind of the definition of what a nation would
00:52:37.040
And so it imposes its understanding of collectivism or lack thereof, or, uh, it's understanding
00:52:46.280
of political organizations across kind of the globe so that it can, uh, so that it can properly
00:52:52.460
interact with, uh, with those different, uh, uh, those entities.
00:52:57.180
He also then talks about the challenge of Marxism.
00:52:59.740
Well, before we go to the challenge of Marxism, do you have anything, uh, about just kind of
00:53:03.720
how, uh, the liberal, the liberal definition of nationalism?
00:53:08.820
Yeah, it's worth, it's a concept worth, uh, being familiar with and understanding, you
00:53:13.020
know, liberal nation states are contractual agreements among individuals that constitute
00:53:19.860
So there's no, there's nothing there about like a natural identity or an essential identity
00:53:24.940
or again, tribal, ethnic, uh, archaic or religious identity.
00:53:28.240
It's individuals, contracts, and juridical notions.
00:53:32.740
You know, the, the, it's citizenship as a juridical notion, which is already abstracted.
00:53:38.060
You know, if we start with, uh, ethno sociological model, by the time you get to the national state,
00:53:43.120
the liberal national state, the civic national state, you've really pushed to the ethnic identity,
00:53:47.700
tribal, religious, archaic, uh, unconscious down, and you're in the realm of total conscious
00:53:54.400
Citizenship as a juridical category is a conscious construction designed to basically abstract
00:53:59.540
from everything that's not individual about us in order to build these, um, new identity
00:54:10.360
And so for him, that's a logical step in the development of liberalism.
00:54:14.000
As you said, liberalism had to accomplish that.
00:54:15.700
And then after, after the national states would be, you know, civil society, global civil
00:54:21.320
society, where basically the whole world becomes, uh, uh, you know, you become a citizen of the
00:54:26.400
world, but your identity is still this sort of juridical abstract category of citizenship.
00:54:32.300
Um, I add, not that there's anything wrong with that, but from Dugan's point of view, we
00:54:36.340
have to distinguish that from the other, uh, forms of nationalism and the other forms of,
00:54:41.640
Yeah, if you want to look into this and other sources too, people like Joseph de Maestra,
00:54:47.260
uh, uh, approach this and, and talk about kind of this, this silly notion of this, even
00:54:53.100
Schmidt, uh, talks about how you can't get a man to die for an economic zone, which is
00:54:57.540
always one of the ones I, I thought was a very poignant, uh, point from him.
00:55:01.420
But just this, this shift of national identity from something that is inborn, that is something
00:55:05.700
that is key to one's understanding of, of your place in the world to being something
00:55:10.100
that you contractually enter for, for some kind of benefit, uh, that could be, that could
00:55:15.140
be added or lost with a stroke of a pen is a, is a, is a relatively new notion and something
00:55:19.920
we should keep in mind when we're understanding kind of these concepts.
00:55:22.880
Uh, but the challenge of Marxism here, so he kind of just brings in, uh, you know, in some
00:55:29.900
ways that Marxism is an extension of liberalism, that it's, it's, it's, it's critiques are mainly
00:55:36.440
that liberalism does not provide many of its promised benefits or promised, uh, outcomes.
00:55:42.660
And so it needs to, uh, kind of remake liberalism in order to bring about kind of, uh, a more
00:55:50.560
fulfilled, uh, version of its, uh, of its promise here.
00:55:54.920
I don't know if you want to comment on that with the points they have there.
00:55:59.680
Uh, just that he has this nice, again, bullet point summary of the differences from liberalism.
00:56:04.400
So you get away from a con you get away from a contract type agreement.
00:56:10.280
I think it's just a nice people will be familiar enough, I think with the idea of a Marxist
00:56:14.080
criticism of bourgeois liberalism, but it's a nice short summary of what that was point
00:56:20.100
by point and, uh, how neoliberals responded to the Marxist challenge with the reassertion
00:56:25.520
that liberalism is not just a stage on the way to, um, communism, but that it's its own
00:56:33.520
So here he's really, he's not, I mean, there are books and books and books written, you know,
00:56:40.260
What he's doing is providing a short, concise summary of these movements so that he can
00:56:46.700
help us to understand where we are now, how we got here and what the prospects are ahead
00:56:51.500
So nobody should expect this to be, um, you know, more than that, but it captures it.
00:56:56.740
I think the important point here is that if you read a book, let's say you read a very
00:57:00.940
brilliant thousand page book on some movement of Marxism, you'll see that, but you won't
00:57:06.260
see where it fits in with all of the other transformations before and after, and it won't
00:57:10.400
get you to the relevant point that we're at now.
00:57:13.860
Even though he shrinks his account of Marxism down, he lets us see it in the, in the context
00:57:18.980
And, uh, that's what he does here quite effectively, I think.
00:57:22.780
And like you said there, I think it's important that he stops and points out the kind of these,
00:57:27.160
these new liberals, uh, and here he specifically, uh, you know, cites people like Mises and Hayek
00:57:32.540
people that many, you know, paleo libertarians will be big fans of and talks about how they
00:57:37.720
again, reassert, uh, this idea that actually, um, Marxism isn't a progress.
00:57:43.260
It is, it isn't a step after liberalism or capitalism, but it's instead a regress.
00:57:48.320
And they redefine Marxism as a return to feudalism, as opposed to a, uh, step towards, uh, kind
00:57:54.500
of the promise of liberalism or, or the inevitable, uh, action after liberalism.
00:57:59.760
I just want to say one thing about that, which is that it reminds us that the meaning of
00:58:10.300
You know, so back when Dugan talked about the different notions of time and later in the
00:58:15.220
book where he's going to revisit that from another perspective.
00:58:17.340
And the question of reversibility of time, it's another example, you know, is liberalism
00:58:22.540
what, which is more progress, which is more advanced is, is communism a step back like
00:58:29.080
the neoliberal suggests, or is it a step forward like the communists suggest?
00:58:32.280
So we always have the key dispute here over what the trend, what the genuine and true direction
00:58:42.300
He talks about kind of with the fall of the USSR, of course, uh, the liberalism is ascendant
00:58:49.300
in the 1990s and we start to see kind of the implications of the end of history, the end
00:58:57.100
of political struggle that there is only one dominant, uh, uh, you know, unipolar, uh, power
00:59:04.800
and, uh, and political, uh, uh, organization in, in kind of acceptable in the globe.
00:59:10.780
Uh, very interestingly, he talks about neocons understanding the implications of this better
00:59:18.140
And he attaches this back to kind of the American tradition of manifest destiny that, uh, you
00:59:24.760
know, basically this is the global ascension of America and, uh, in manifest destiny well
00:59:30.820
beyond its own borders and achieving kind of an American century, you know, of course was
00:59:35.540
the, was the terminology of the time, uh, kind of the American way as a global order.
00:59:40.900
But he also takes time to point out that people like Pat Buchanan pushed back against this and
00:59:47.160
said that America will have won the world, but will have lost itself.
00:59:51.400
And so he's recognizing that while many inside kind of, uh, the Western order understood this
00:59:57.940
as an American empire and the chance for America to have basically global domination, there were
01:00:02.920
still many inside America who understood the consequences of what that would mean.
01:00:07.820
And that would mean the loss of American identity itself.
01:00:15.300
That you have people like, uh, Pat Buchanan and his followers and neoconservatives, whether
01:00:21.200
now they're in the Republican party or democratic party, a lot of them have moved as it were
01:00:27.900
It is not worthy that he credits the neoconservatives, which you wouldn't necessarily expect given
01:00:32.040
everything else that, you know, we've learned about Dugan throughout the book, but it's
01:00:35.580
very important because he says, they understand what's at stake ideologically.
01:00:40.540
Dugan doesn't agree with the position that they're taking, but somehow they're the most
01:00:48.680
It now has to universalize itself, expand itself, extend itself, normalize itself and
01:00:59.160
Those people in the American context who understand what's happening ideologically, they get called
01:01:04.160
out, uh, positively in that, uh, in that case, Will Crystal, William, Bill Crystal, William
01:01:09.260
Crystal mentioned by name, uh, you know, the, again, the people never, but basically never
01:01:14.220
Trump, uh, Republicans who moved to the democratic party.
01:01:16.840
Not that, not that there's anything wrong with that.
01:01:18.360
Again, we're just trying to identify the, identify the relevant groups.
01:01:22.160
So yes, uh, all of that is there in this chapter and, uh, American neoconservative circles
01:01:28.740
most adequately perceive the significance of the large scale changes happening in the world.
01:01:32.600
Uh, for them, ideology remains the most important subject of attention.
01:01:37.860
Uh, I wonder, I guess we'd have to think about it, whether that's still, uh, still the case,
01:01:41.800
you know, whether there are now other groups who are paying more attention to, you know,
01:01:46.880
I think that we could no longer say the neoconservatives are the only ones who are aware of what's
01:01:52.600
Um, because there's a growing interest, especially in the last couple of years of, uh, right-wing
01:01:56.980
anti-liberalism and other alternatives to the global American empire and to the great reset.
01:02:01.900
So the situation has changed a bit, but, uh, but yeah, that was a fascinating point of
01:02:10.900
So the next part that he talks about is kind of a liberalism's interaction with postmodernism.
01:02:15.820
And he points out what I think most people at this point understand now, uh, that liberalism
01:02:22.540
looks at kind of what postmodern, postmodernism asserts, and they start running away from it
01:02:29.080
because the, the implications, he describes them as grotesque, which I think is, is kind
01:02:34.340
And actually he's got some handy bullet points, so I'll just run down them real quick.
01:02:38.340
Once again, uh, thus arises the panorama of post-liberal grotesqueries, uh, the measure
01:02:44.320
of things becomes not the individual, but the post-individual, uh, the D of individual,
01:02:49.460
uh, accidentally playing as an ironic combination of parts of people.
01:02:54.080
Uh, and then here he kind of brings in a little bit of Deleuze with, uh, with kind of the body
01:02:59.560
And, and, uh, the way cyborgs and mutants that can arise from this, uh, private property
01:03:04.380
is ideal idealized and, uh, uh, transcendent, uh, transcendentalized, uh, and transforms from
01:03:13.200
that, which a man owned to that, which owns him, a quality opportunity turns into a quality
01:03:21.120
So this is the, the big debate going on today with so many conservatives and classical liberals,
01:03:26.360
but we meant quality of opportunity, not, uh, quality of outcome or equity, uh, belief
01:03:32.060
in the, uh, uh, contractual character of all political and social institutions grows into
01:03:37.800
a qualization, uh, uh, of the real and the virtual and the world becomes a technical model.
01:03:44.240
All forms of non-individual authorities disappear altogether.
01:03:47.680
And any individual is free to think about the world.
01:03:50.260
However, they see fit principles of separation of powers, transcend forms, transforms into the
01:03:58.820
Uh, again, we kind of see, uh, this transformation of the voting system and input here, uh, civil
01:04:04.120
society completely displaces government and converts into a global cosmopolitan melting pot.
01:04:09.500
Again, if you want to see some more thought on that from the right, you can look at, uh,
01:04:21.540
That is destiny so far as work, money in the market and production and consumption,
01:04:28.500
Uh, and so it's very interesting that he kind of talks about, uh, and again, this was written
01:04:37.000
I think the original Russian version is 2009, but yeah, some time ago.
01:04:41.220
So in many ways, this is, um, this is a little prophetic because, uh, the, the kind of the
01:04:46.920
postmodern revolution, uh, you know, the, the, the wokeness explosion hadn't quite hit
01:04:53.240
It was, it was still in kind of its incubation period in much of the, uh, American academia
01:04:59.200
And so, uh, he's describing kind of the reaction that classical liberals, again, like James Lindsay
01:05:05.500
and maybe Sam Harris and others who are very uncomfortable with the right, but want to police
01:05:12.160
And this is kind of why we can see this tension, uh, kind of between the opponents of postmodernism
01:05:21.340
Uh, some understand their deeper problems of liberalism and that the, these are in many ways
01:05:29.120
Others just want to freeze liberalism in the place where, uh, it was, and don't want to
01:05:34.880
look at what's, I want to see what's happening here is only as a Marxist subversion of what
01:05:40.780
But, uh, but Dugan here kind of lays out that here's all the things that are going to happen
01:05:45.120
once liberalism really sees what postmodernism is transforming liberalism into.
01:05:53.300
I, I think it's, it's probably going to be a relevant debate going forward, whether or not
01:05:57.340
it is inherent to liberalism to lead to these grotesque post-liberal, uh, um, woke type
01:06:06.660
Obviously a lot of people have a stake in defending classical liberalism as they see it, or, you
01:06:11.460
know, and seeing Marxism as the only source of the contemporary perversions.
01:06:16.180
But, uh, there's a case to be made and Dugan is making it as best as he can in this and other
01:06:20.060
works that it's inherent to liberalism to transform itself in its desire to liberate from these external
01:06:29.320
And then you get, again, liberation from reality as such total virtuality, you know, liberation
01:06:35.360
from, um, from all of these things leading to the crazy state of affairs that we're seeing
01:06:43.720
That's why wherever we land, I would say on that question, this is kind of my, uh, editorializing
01:06:48.240
here, wherever we land on the question of whether liberalism itself is to blame or not, for
01:06:52.540
sure we would benefit in number one, considering the claim that it is, and number two, uh, relatedly
01:06:58.680
considering therefore that the solution lies outside of the realm of liberalism.
01:07:02.880
And this is where he has a great quote on freedom from, he says, freedom from is the
01:07:07.040
most disgusting formula of slavery as much as it attempts man to, uh, an insurrection against
01:07:13.220
God, against traditional values and against the moral and spiritual foundations of his people
01:07:20.180
Uh, so kind of strong words there, uh, against, uh, this, this idea of freedom from, uh, he
01:07:26.440
talks a little bit here, of course, again, about liberalism in contemporary Russia.
01:07:30.700
Uh, but then the last section here of this chapter is going to be the most controversial
01:07:34.900
Uh, so we want to hit this before we kind of, uh, run too long here, uh, the crusade against
01:07:40.540
Uh, and here he specifically calls for a crusade against the West, a crusade against America.
01:07:46.720
Um, many people will, uh, read this as just his opposition against kind of the American
01:07:55.760
empire or the wider Western empire and, uh, and, and kind of liberalism and the liberal
01:08:02.300
idea or the, the idea of, uh, Western liberal democracy.
01:08:05.940
Others will read this as an explicit call to attack, uh, America itself or to displace America,
01:08:13.680
uh, in, in its current geopolitical position, obviously that is part of Dugan's, uh, goal
01:08:20.100
Uh, and so this will be something that, uh, again, understandably, uh, is, is met with
01:08:24.300
a lot of controversy, but I wonder if you want to talk a little bit about crusade against
01:08:32.260
Well, for him, it's the fact that liberal unipolarity is located spatially and geopolitically.
01:08:40.640
It's, it's the, it's, you know, it's the Western world and it's first and foremost, America.
01:08:45.800
That is where, now it doesn't mean destroy America because one of the things people may
01:08:50.260
or may not remember is that, um, Dugan supported Trump and in great awakening versus the great
01:08:56.460
reset, he says that the war against the great reset has to happen in America among Americans.
01:09:02.140
You know, it's going to be America's own liberation from the, from its takeover from
01:09:09.040
So you have to, everyone will have to judge for themselves, whether he speaks out of both
01:09:14.720
My view is it's pretty clear for him that unless you throw down the gauntlet to American
01:09:20.980
century, to American unipolarity, to the global American empire, you can't get any of this
01:09:28.240
It doesn't mean the destruction of America, but it does mean no globalist America at a
01:09:37.340
And, um, I write about this in some of the, some of the essays that I have on Dugan.
01:09:41.920
He says somewhere for sure in the great awakening book and elsewhere in one of his Heidegger books
01:09:48.320
I'm against the modern political West, which is doing this egregious universalization.
01:09:57.660
He studied all the French thinkers and German thinkers and his book on civilizational studies
01:10:02.900
He has several volumes on all of the countries of the West and he considers Heidegger the
01:10:09.000
You know, he's writing all the time about Western thinkers.
01:10:11.280
So all of this is to say, he doesn't hate the West as such, you know, for him, the two
01:10:16.960
greatest thinkers, Plato and Heidegger, you know, we both consider them part of the Western
01:10:21.960
But unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on where you stand on the issue, unipolarity,
01:10:27.680
hegemony, global American empire, woke America, the Biden regime for him is the representative
01:10:32.680
of all of these forces of evil in a very serious way.
01:10:38.540
That is all a huge, that is all a huge problem.
01:10:41.740
And I think it is, you know, it's fair to consider, could there be opposition to the ideology
01:10:50.080
that Dugan has been criticizing without there being the elevation of a other force in the
01:10:58.000
So if this, if all of these ideological changes happen within America, maybe they will already
01:11:07.880
Or maybe these changes will happen outside of America.
01:11:12.480
But for sure, he, not to sugarcoat it, you know, the West in its contemporary form is
01:11:21.500
Opposition to the West in its current form is therefore largely positive for him.
01:11:25.960
And the only question is, the only, the two main questions, on what grounds can you gain
01:11:31.680
support for ideological, political, and so on, opposition?
01:11:37.960
Okay, so it can't be a narrow Islamic nationalism or something.
01:11:42.800
It has to be something big enough, like multipolarity.
01:11:50.760
So, yeah, people, people may not like, people who are all in on the West.
01:11:58.300
Here's the ever-present ambiguity with American readers of Dugan.
01:12:01.660
Everybody, I think, who's opposed to woke liberalism, finds something that rings true in Dugan's
01:12:10.740
Something helpful, something true, and something profound, something funny at times.
01:12:22.440
And do you take Dugan as being just thoroughly anti-Western, thoroughly anti-liberty, thoroughly
01:12:28.560
anti-American, like, or can you combine the noble, decent, well-established, and world-historical
01:12:37.760
American love of rights and freedoms with the criticism of degenerate woke liberalism
01:12:43.000
with the help of theorists outside the West like Dugan?
01:12:49.280
Well, we're going to go ahead and wrap it up here.
01:12:52.260
We will go ahead and I think we've only got one super chat here.
01:13:04.500
I think there's a joke there that I don't have the reference for.
01:13:12.600
Let's go ahead and hear from Mr. Millerman all the different places we can find his excellent work.
01:13:23.680
I'm on Twitter, M underscore Millerman, or just look up Michael Millerman on Twitter.
01:13:28.580
And I have a YouTube channel where I put out a lot of free lectures on Heidegger, Dugan, Strauss, Plato, and other authors I read and study and teach.
01:13:38.820
Otherwise, just search me up online and you'll find everything I'm doing.
01:13:42.960
And like I said, guys, of course, we have two talks before this.
01:13:46.240
So if you want to make sure you have the context for this conversation, the links below to those are down in the description.
01:13:52.260
Of course, as of your first time here, please make sure to go ahead and subscribe to the channel.
01:13:55.940
And if you want to listen to these broadcasts as podcasts, you can go ahead and subscribe to The Oren McIntyre Show on all your favorite podcast platforms.
01:14:03.600
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01:14:06.780
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