The Auron MacIntyre Show - The Fourth Political Theory： Part Three ｜ Guest： Michael Millerman ｜ 4⧸21⧸23

00:00:00.000 We hope you're enjoying your Air Canada flight.

00:00:02.320 Rocky's Vacation, here we come.

00:00:05.060 Whoa, is this economy?

00:00:07.180 Free beer, wine, and snacks.

00:00:09.620 Sweet! 0.95

00:00:10.720 Fast-free Wi-Fi means I can make dinner reservations before we land.

00:00:14.760 And with live TV, I'm not missing the game.

00:00:17.800 It's kind of like, I'm already on vacation.

00:00:20.980 Nice! 0.94

00:00:22.240 On behalf of Air Canada, nice travels.

00:00:25.260 Wi-Fi available to Airplane members on Equipped Flight.

00:00:27.200 Sponsored by Bell. Conditions apply.

00:00:28.720 CRCanada.com.

00:00:30.440 Hey everybody, how's it going?

00:00:32.540 Thanks for joining me this morning.

00:00:34.980 We've got some Philosophy Bright and Early here for you today.

00:00:39.040 So we've been working on a series about Alexander Dugan and his book, The Fourth Political Theory.

00:00:45.460 It's got a lot of very interesting things today.

00:00:47.680 This is part three of that series.

00:00:50.320 And so we're going to be delving in to our next set of chapters.

00:00:53.360 I'm looking about at some concepts where he addresses kind of the changes of the idea of

00:00:58.460 civilization, changes in the idea of liberalism, and all kinds of other stuff.

00:01:02.940 We'll be delving in there real quick.

00:01:04.800 Now, with me is Michael Millerman.

00:01:07.340 He is a Dugan scholar.

00:01:09.140 He helped to translate The Fourth Political Theory, and he himself has written a book

00:01:14.460 on Alexander Dugan and his thought.

00:01:16.620 Michael, thanks for joining me.

00:01:18.120 Good to be with you again.

00:01:20.080 Absolutely.

00:01:20.480 So we're going to jump in right where we left off in part two.

00:01:24.500 But before we do that, guys, let's hear from today's sponsor.

00:01:28.320 This episode is brought to you by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

00:01:31.680 The Intercollegiate Studies Institute is a conservative nonprofit dedicated to educating

00:01:36.040 the next great American.

00:01:38.240 ISI understands that conservative and right-of-center students feel isolated on college campuses

00:01:42.920 and compelled to defend their reputation and dignity while seeking to carve out a brighter

00:01:47.220 future.

00:01:47.660 ISI has a variety of different content, events, internships, and fellowships geared towards

00:01:53.160 helping students and opening up career opportunities.

00:01:56.300 ISI offers graduate students and entry-level journalists the opportunity to receive fellowships

00:02:00.880 and secure internships.

00:02:02.880 Nate Hockman, who's been a guest on this show multiple times, got his start on National

00:02:06.780 Review through ISI, and he's just one of many journalists and academics who were able

00:02:11.140 to start their careers with the help of ISI.

00:02:13.400 This spring, ISI is going to be hosting a debate between Michael Knowles and Deidre McCloskey

00:02:17.800 on the subject of transgenderism that will be live-streamed on YouTube.

00:02:21.740 In the fall, everyone's favorite Fox News host, Tucker Carlson, will be giving the keynote

00:02:25.900 address at ISI's annual gala.

00:02:28.260 On all issues, both economic and cultural, ISI wants their students to know that they're

00:02:32.860 not shying away from the problems facing our country, because letting the left win is a 0.92

00:02:37.440 pathetic way to watch civilization die.

00:02:40.500 To learn more, check out ISI.org. 0.94

00:02:43.180 That's ISI.org.

00:02:45.160 You can follow the link down below in the description of this video.

00:02:49.020 All right, guys.

00:02:49.820 So let's go ahead and jump right in.

00:02:52.300 Now, we've arrived at Chapter 7.

00:02:54.620 If you'd like to catch up with our discussion, all the previous discussions about this book

00:03:00.620 are linked below.

00:03:01.880 There's a playlist there, so you can make sure you're with us here.

00:03:05.300 But on Chapter 7, Dugan starts talking about the concept of civilization.

00:03:10.900 And he says, we need a better definition of civilization, because our very concept of

00:03:16.280 the idea of civilization has been corrupted.

00:03:19.440 The definition has been corrupted and kind of been wrapped around this idea of infinite

00:03:25.140 progress.

00:03:26.200 He says that civilization has kind of become synonymous with the idea of progress and the

00:03:32.480 idea that humanity will always move forward in a very particular way, advance in a very

00:03:37.720 particular way.

00:03:38.640 And because civilization has been redefined in this way, the liberal worldview becomes the

00:03:45.880 only one that is then understood as progress.

00:03:50.520 So, Michael, let's go ahead and break down a little bit of that.

00:03:55.160 So when he's talking about progress and its different meanings, what does the redefinition

00:04:02.580 of civilization do to kind of the mindset when we address different possible ways to look

00:04:07.820 at politics and the way we organize society?

00:04:10.100 Well, you get the sense now, the rhetoric of civilizational identity, like he wrote even

00:04:18.160 then, and we see evidence of that now as well, is rising.

00:04:21.740 So there are a lot of recent articles on the civilization state, for example, or the idea

00:04:25.820 that Russia, China, Iran, they don't just represent savage or barbarian remnants, you know, like

00:04:33.380 they're the developing world and we're the developed world.

00:04:37.260 But rather, they have completely different modes of interpretation.

00:04:41.340 So that's what Dugan's mostly interested in, this idea that there are several different

00:04:46.960 ways of interpreting the character of political life, of political time, of political morality,

00:04:52.840 and so on.

00:04:53.480 So the older view of civilization that he contests is that civilization is the outcome of a kind

00:05:01.080 of maturing process, you know, that you leave behind the stages of savagery and barbarism

00:05:06.440 and that there's one model of being civilized.

00:05:10.220 And because he sees this as a kind of ethnocentric universalization of one group's view of what

00:05:19.380 it means to be civilized, he opposes that and he has this other model.

00:05:24.480 So it's many of the things that he talked about earlier in the book, they recur here in

00:05:28.840 this new context.

00:05:29.920 So civilizations will have their own kind of myth, archaic, their interpretation of

00:05:36.100 the past, the present, and the future.

00:05:37.960 They'll have their own, in some cases, religious traditions that won't necessarily match with

00:05:42.320 everybody else's.

00:05:43.160 And so each civilization, well, let me take one step back.

00:05:48.460 The main contrast is between civilization as a culminating phase or stage and civilizations

00:05:55.120 civilizations as a simultaneously existing plurality of worldview types or of cultural

00:06:01.460 types, something like that.

00:06:03.300 So even as earlier in the book, he said, you know, the fourth political theory is going to

00:06:07.240 reject individualism, class-based analysis, race analysis, and state analysis.

00:06:11.980 And we talked a little bit about how Dasein, this notion from Heidegger's philosophy comes

00:06:16.640 up or the people, the folk comes up.

00:06:19.860 For sure, one of the key contenders for the main agents of the fourth political theory

00:06:25.440 is civilizations.

00:06:28.480 So some of the interesting things that he then kind of mines out of this examination of

00:06:34.040 civilization, one I found particularly interesting was the idea that civilization is the point

00:06:41.460 at which our kind of culture or our social system attempts to transcend the ethnos and tries 0.57

00:06:49.440 to place itself in kind of the faith of systems of men, whereas the institutions become the

00:06:56.120 thing that perpetuates it and it creates a universalization, or at least as he'll address

00:07:00.160 later, the kind of the illusion of a universalization.

00:07:05.360 And I found that very interesting because that dovetails a lot with kind of what Oswald Spangler

00:07:09.720 talks about in A Decline of the West.

00:07:12.520 And he references Spangler in this chapter as well.

00:07:15.100 But he's definitely in very similar waters where Spangler talks about how you have the

00:07:21.140 cultural phase and then you have the civilizational phase.

00:07:23.860 And the cultural phase is animated by the metaphysical spirit of the people, of the group.

00:07:31.080 They're driven forward by this.

00:07:34.100 Basically, everything is done out of habit due to kind of who you are in your identity.

00:07:38.240 And then when you move into the civilizational phase, these things transfer out of the realm

00:07:42.940 of the metaphysical and into systems that are established inside this new civilizational

00:07:48.040 process that needs to expand, that needs to universalize, that needs to apply its kind of

00:07:55.540 what was once propelled forward by the spirit.

00:07:59.000 Now, through systems of men, it kind of materializes everything that was once metaphysical.

00:08:05.440 And he also talks about, well, okay, I guess that, okay, that was everything about that

00:08:11.940 one.

00:08:12.140 But yeah, I just didn't know if you want to comment on that transition between kind of

00:08:15.640 the spiritual, the animating spirit, you know, the cultural phase, and then into the

00:08:20.620 civilizational phase where these things are established through the institutions of the

00:08:25.600 civilization.

00:08:27.180 Yeah.

00:08:27.420 So it's a good point and a good observation.

00:08:29.480 And the idea that you could, let's say, become initiated into a civilizational identity through

00:08:37.400 kind of technical operations at a more or less superficial level.

00:08:41.680 But in order to become initiated into, let's say, a tribal identity or an ethnic identity,

00:08:47.240 or even like a deeply religious identity, the process is much more substantive.

00:08:52.140 It's much deeper.

00:08:52.900 It's much more profound.

00:08:53.740 So yes, when a smaller ethnic community universalizes itself or attempts to, whether it's successful

00:09:01.540 in doing so or not, it allows this easier entry, lowers the bar of entry, the operations

00:09:07.280 become technical.

00:09:08.600 But a key point for Dugan, and this is present in this chapter in an important way, is that

00:09:15.000 the substantive, difficult, profound side of identity, it doesn't just mysteriously disappear

00:09:24.260 when we get into the superficial layer of technical operations that allow us to become

00:09:29.300 members of this or that civilization.

00:09:30.760 It just goes deeper underground, but it's always preserved.

00:09:34.640 So that's why even under the veneer of a universal, technical, operational, civilizational

00:09:40.360 identity, there are these deep undercurrents.

00:09:43.260 And the idea of the undercurrents is important for him.

00:09:46.600 He writes about it in terms of, for example, the collective unconscious, or about these,

00:09:51.200 the underlying Daseins, or the underlying ethno-sociological phenomena.

00:09:57.840 All of the different ways he writes about it are there to remind us not to be fooled

00:10:03.360 by the veneer of universality, because the substantive difference has only become harder

00:10:09.880 to see.

00:10:10.640 It hasn't become less relevant.

00:10:12.060 And the more that it's repressed, or suppressed, or hidden, somehow the more it exerts its effect

00:10:17.840 in mysterious ways.

00:10:19.500 So that's very important for Dugan, even in later chapters where he talks about the, like

00:10:25.340 the remnant of the component of the nation in certain forms of left-wing socialism, partially

00:10:31.140 as we discussed last time too.

00:10:32.700 So here too, that's there in the civilization side as well.

00:10:35.200 And he always wants to, you know, it's easy to forget in some sense, because it seems like

00:10:39.580 we're a long way away from the realm of rituals of initiation into a closed community.

00:10:46.360 But he wants to remind us that those are still there beneath the surface of things.

00:10:51.060 Yeah, and thanks for bringing up that difficult, that easier entry as opposed to the difficulty

00:10:56.760 of the tribe and joining the tribe, because that was what I was reaching for there.

00:11:00.600 And I think that's a really important point for people to understand, is the ability, that

00:11:05.640 transition to something that would have been more holistic, that would have been more natural,

00:11:10.340 that would have been deeply rooted into something that is kind of a facsimile, but that allows

00:11:15.080 a much wider number of people to join in.

00:11:18.000 But in many ways, it loses than much of what made it, gave it this animating spirit.

00:11:25.060 I also wanted to touch on his, him addressing the idea that myth and savagery do not disappear.

00:11:32.820 As you're saying, these things don't disappear when people become civilized.

00:11:37.660 Civilization relocates them into the realm of the unconscious.

00:11:41.840 And so he says, you know, far, far from thinking that we, you know, many people think, well,

00:11:46.900 civilization means we've escaped the myths, we've escaped the savagery, we've escaped

00:11:50.840 all this backward thinking that once bound the tribe together, and we've advanced beyond

00:11:54.960 it.

00:11:55.120 And he says, no, you haven't advanced beyond it at all.

00:11:58.360 You simply placed it into the unconscious, and it becomes even more dangerous, because now

00:12:03.460 you're not even conscious of these things that are driving you in this direction.

00:12:08.660 You don't understand them.

00:12:09.800 They're operating in a realm that you don't even look at, and all civilization has done

00:12:13.960 is given you more effective tools with which to be savage.

00:12:18.700 Yeah, that's right.

00:12:19.640 Because the growth, obviously, the growth of military technology and other types of technologies,

00:12:23.240 which we associate with civilizational progress, they, you know, that's a double edged sword,

00:12:28.100 obviously, that cuts, cuts both ways for the sake of peace and for the sake of war.

00:12:32.080 But there are other parallels, like Dugan is channeling here or expressing criticisms, as

00:12:38.580 he himself acknowledges, criticisms that have now become not commonplace, but, you know,

00:12:43.580 he's not the only person deconstructing civilization to show that it's not devoid of savagery and

00:12:49.700 barbarism, but sort of re-channels them.

00:12:51.500 I'll give you a simple example.

00:12:53.820 Carl Schmitt's concept of the political, where he says that there's a tendency among those who

00:12:58.380 invoke humanity, they say, we're on this, we're the humanitarians, we're fighting on behalf of

00:13:02.500 humanity, what that does is radically dehumanizes the people who don't share their own perspective.

00:13:08.800 So, normally, you have somebody recognizing that they're facing another human enemy,

00:13:14.220 and they're sort of on the equal plane of, you know, human friends, human enemies,

00:13:18.300 and a nice configuration of the field of the political.

00:13:20.860 But when liberals say that they're fighting on the side of not just their group, but humanity as such,

00:13:26.300 then that means they're automatically opposed not to a human enemy, but to a subhuman or 0.92

00:13:30.880 dehumanized enemy.

00:13:33.100 So, to dehumanize the other is another form of savagery or barbarism, because suddenly they lose

00:13:39.000 all claim to any human decency altogether.

00:13:43.200 So, it's a similar principle here.

00:13:44.600 When you invoke civilization on your side, you automatically, on the flip side of that,

00:13:49.680 have rendered everybody else uncivilized, and therefore, you either have the task of

00:13:55.840 bringing them up in a forceful way, or of destroying them, or of caging them off, or,

00:14:00.900 you know, whatever the case might be.

00:14:02.960 So, there are a lot of different figures.

00:14:06.560 Giorgio Agamben fits in here, I think, to a certain extent.

00:14:09.540 Schmidt, the structuralist, all of which Dugan is concentrating in this way to show, as it were,

00:14:16.740 the lie of a certain interpretation of civilization.

00:14:19.860 Yeah, I really love that.

00:14:22.040 Oh, sorry.

00:14:22.960 I was just going to say, I really love that Schmidt point, because he really makes an excellent

00:14:29.140 examination of the fact that when you try to eliminate all these differences, when you

00:14:34.260 try to say that there are none of these existential conflicts, and you try to unite everybody under

00:14:39.720 liberalism, you're also implying that there is no other way to be human.

00:14:43.760 This is the only way, because this is humanity, because this is the way humanity cooperates,

00:14:49.440 anyone who doesn't fall under the liberal system isn't human, and therefore, the friend-enemy

00:14:54.440 distinction doesn't go away.

00:14:55.880 It doesn't disappear because you've united humanity under liberalism.

00:14:59.660 It simply makes anyone who opposes liberalism an opponent of humanity.

00:15:03.680 Exactly.

00:15:04.300 And similarly here, the savagery and the barbarism, they don't disappear.

00:15:07.860 They just get redirected, de-placed, de-positioned, and there are new acts of savagery and new forms

00:15:15.140 of barbarism, all under the veneer of civilization.

00:15:18.140 That's according to that model, according to the older model.

00:15:22.040 So he then goes on to kind of point out that post-modernism works to shatter this illusion

00:15:27.200 that makes liberalism look at itself and realize that there are these underpinning assumptions,

00:15:33.460 there are these, there is still this suppressed savagery that's existing, that it hasn't escaped

00:15:40.500 any of this stuff.

00:15:41.740 And he also talks a little bit about synchronic understandings of civilization.

00:15:46.340 Could you explain that a little more?

00:15:48.120 Sure.

00:15:48.520 Two things I want to say.

00:15:49.520 First is, synchronic means that, again, civilization is not the final stage of a process leading

00:15:54.320 through savagery and barbarism, where we have gone through what other people are currently

00:15:59.560 going through.

00:16:00.200 We stand at the end of the process.

00:16:01.380 They're somewhere along the, you know, in the midst of the process.

00:16:04.860 And because we're at the end of it, that's called being civilized.

00:16:07.720 And because they're not, that's called, you know, being underway to civilization or being

00:16:11.260 second or third world in those terms.

00:16:15.060 So that's the diachronic, meaning you become civilized through time in a progressive way.

00:16:20.180 Synchronic means the stages of savagery, barbarism, and civilization coexist in time. 0.96

00:16:25.940 And that there are more, there's more than one civilization.

00:16:30.580 There are models of civilization coexisting.

00:16:33.260 And so that's the point that he's trying to get to, because against globalism, against

00:16:39.020 global liberalism, there has to be a viable alternative.

00:16:43.400 Dugan's model of a viable alternative, as he says in this chapter, at least in one perspective,

00:16:48.660 is multipolarity.

00:16:49.960 So opposed to unipolarity, multipolarity.

00:16:52.540 Opposed to just a global world, a world of several poles. 0.91

00:16:55.840 And what are those poles? 0.56

00:16:57.980 They are civilizations.

00:16:59.520 So the only way that you can get to a world that's configured, not by a single ruler, and

00:17:05.420 not by just nation states, but rather by civilizations, you have to get to an understanding of civilization

00:17:12.800 as plural.

00:17:13.900 And so those are the steps that he's taking along the way.

00:17:15.860 I did want to say that, yes, he credits postmodern thinkers.

00:17:19.900 Excuse me, sorry.

00:17:20.320 He credits postmodern thinkers with having done the deconstruction of the pretensions of

00:17:24.580 Western European modernity and all of that.

00:17:26.980 But this is an important point because it makes, I think, some conservatives uncomfortable

00:17:31.180 when figures embrace insights from postmodernity.

00:17:35.660 And partially that's because a lot of the postmodern thinkers were on the left.

00:17:39.720 They can be seen as enemies of civilization.

00:17:42.400 They can be seen as enemies of, you know, they're agents of destruction to a certain extent.

00:17:51.400 But Dugan, who doesn't position himself on the left, believes, rightly, I think, that

00:17:56.740 you can still take the insights that were developed by the left postmodern theorists.

00:18:02.300 And you sort of must, unless you're going to be philosophically naive, which is another

00:18:07.200 option.

00:18:07.760 And he does mention that.

00:18:08.620 He says, you know, there are neoconservatives who are just philosophically naive.

00:18:13.040 There are Russian liberals who are philosophically naive. 0.96

00:18:14.960 So that's always an option.

00:18:17.600 And it probably goes a long way.

00:18:18.980 But to the extent to which we want to actually understand these different phase transitions

00:18:23.420 and what it means, you know, what the specific character of our times is, we have to incorporate

00:18:28.600 the insights of these mostly French, not only French, but mostly French postmodern theorists

00:18:33.100 on the left, not in order to go where they went, but in order to do something with what

00:18:36.920 they did.

00:18:37.300 So that's a big part of what he does, what he tries to say in this chapter.

00:18:42.580 You know, the old view of civilization is no longer tenable.

00:18:45.760 It's no longer tenable because of all of these studies that were done.

00:18:48.560 I mean, you know, great acts of philosophical effort that were done by the structuralists,

00:18:51.820 post-structuralists, and so on, cultural anthropologists.

00:18:54.800 And Dugan summarizes, everybody should know, this is an important point in my view about the

00:18:59.740 book The Fourth Political Theory I may have mentioned before.

00:19:01.600 He often will make a small remark or observation that leads into another completely other set

00:19:08.080 of books that he's written or, you know, hundreds of pages he's dedicated to a topic.

00:19:11.980 So in this case, he has a book called Ethno-Sociology.

00:19:15.360 It is available in English in two volumes.

00:19:16.860 I translated it, where you can start to see how he applies the insights in more detail of

00:19:22.300 cultural anthropology to thinking through what it means to be a nation-state, a civilization,

00:19:27.980 an ethnos, a tribe, a people.

00:19:29.660 So it's a big, you know, it's a big topic.

00:19:32.280 But yeah, all of this is to say, you get beyond the first model of civilization.

00:19:36.060 You go to the idea of synchrony, which means, again, each, what we call civilized,

00:19:41.480 contains savagery and barbarism in it.

00:19:43.000 Fine.

00:19:43.680 Then we have the plurality of civilizations.

00:19:45.980 And then you have this very important argument that that plurality of civilizations

00:19:50.120 can serve as the basis for a new ideology, an ideology that must reach the level of global

00:19:56.260 liberalism in its seriousness and in its capacity.

00:19:59.680 Because you can't just have a bunch of, you know, loser contenders to oppose globalism. 0.74

00:20:05.760 There are many of them.

00:20:06.900 But unless they rise to the level of globalism, you won't have a fight.

00:20:10.140 You won't have a prospect of victory.

00:20:11.880 So you need a model that's universal enough and broad enough, as we discussed again in other

00:20:15.920 chapters.

00:20:16.320 And here, the key insight is multipolarity, where the poles are civilizations.

00:20:21.400 That's going to form the basis that allows us to have opposition, global opposition to

00:20:26.240 global liberalism.

00:20:27.880 Yeah, I think it's really important for people to take to onboard that point about postmodernism

00:20:33.240 as well, because Dugan does, and we'll talk about it in the next chapter here, he does

00:20:37.840 explicitly say there are many evils of postmodernism.

00:20:40.820 So he's not championing postmodern left thought in its conclusions, but he is taking those

00:20:47.560 important insights.

00:20:48.540 And for those who are understandably and probably rightly wary of Dugan's intentions in certain

00:20:55.060 areas, remember, we're doing the same thing here, right?

00:20:57.520 This is not an endorsement of Dugan.

00:20:59.260 This is not, we are trying to better understand his thought, take the points that I think are

00:21:04.160 good, are essential, and then leave the things that we might not find useful or might find

00:21:10.300 politically motivated and whatnot.

00:21:12.420 So I just want everyone to remember that is the general thrust of what we're doing.

00:21:17.360 And it is specifically what Dugan kind of advocates for when it comes to understanding certain parts

00:21:23.320 of what have happened through the postmodern lens.

00:21:25.280 It's not a general endorsement of postmodernism.

00:21:29.640 In fact, he explicitly refutes parts of it here, as we'll see moving forward.

00:21:35.200 Yeah, one of the first lectures I ever watched of Dugan's when I was an undergraduate student,

00:21:38.560 I was taking a class on international relations taught by a postmodernist.

00:21:42.060 And there was a Dugan lecture on YouTube, I think it's been pulled because he had his channel

00:21:45.340 pulled and had a lot of content pulled.

00:21:47.220 But it was called Postmodernism is Satanism.

00:21:49.600 It was like a nice five minute exposition of postmodernism as Satanism.

00:21:53.720 It made perfect sense of the phenomenon of postmodernism.

00:21:57.040 My professor wasn't very happy when I shared it with the class and when I talked to him

00:22:00.740 about it, himself identifying as a postmodernist.

00:22:03.320 But yeah, Dugan's not a postmodernist.

00:22:05.320 But you gain, you know, one of the things that he does, and you see it in this book and elsewhere,

00:22:09.980 he is never averse to what we might learn, even from a school of thought that as a whole

00:22:17.340 we reject.

00:22:18.660 And what we might learn from experimental cross interpretations that don't,

00:22:23.720 necessarily follow the Orthodox reading, but that can always open up new possibilities

00:22:29.160 for thinking and foreseeing.

00:22:30.580 So he's always down for that kind of thing.

00:22:32.520 Not everybody is.

00:22:33.700 And the proof is in the pudding in a way.

00:22:35.920 If we can get some new insights or we can get some new conceptual perspectives or some

00:22:41.520 new combinations and questions to think about, then we see that it was worth the effort.

00:22:46.020 But yeah.

00:22:48.080 Yeah.

00:22:48.520 So just to wrap up this chapter here, he talks about kind of the difference between Samuel

00:22:55.540 Huntington's model of kind of the clash of civilizations versus Francis Fukuyama's assertion

00:23:03.020 of the end of history.

00:23:04.180 He finds, of course, Huntington far more compelling than Fukuyama.

00:23:08.240 In fact, he points out that Fukuyama had to, in many ways, go back and revise his project

00:23:14.480 because it turns out history wasn't over.

00:23:17.960 So he had to add new stages of the end of history where we kind of go into these nation

00:23:22.620 building sessions, kind of a pit stop on our way to the end of history.

00:23:27.000 And he also then addresses what you've hinted at multiple times, which is that civilizations

00:23:33.440 can serve as kind of a way to fill the ideological gap between these different opposing small

00:23:41.980 movements against globalism.

00:23:43.640 It can create a larger force that can actually successfully oppose globalism as opposed to

00:23:51.300 all of these smaller efforts, these internal efforts inside a particular nation or or

00:23:56.980 region that is not working right now.

00:24:00.820 About the Huntington and Fukuyama, a quick point on that.

00:24:05.360 So Dugan shows us that you can have compatible globalism and nationalism.

00:24:12.640 How?

00:24:13.560 When your nationalism is not ethnic nationalism or national populism or national conservatism,

00:24:19.240 but rather when you're building a nation in order to overcome it.

00:24:24.520 Trudeau once called Canada the first post-national state or something like that.

00:24:28.080 But you can only become post-national once you've been national.

00:24:31.140 So the idea is that in order to get to a post-national global order, you first have to build up nation

00:24:37.300 states through the state development so that then they can overcome their state, their statehood.

00:24:42.340 So that's how you can combine globalism and nationalism in one perspective.

00:24:46.020 Obviously, nationalism is also opposed to globalism, but that's when it's ethno-national or populist

00:24:50.960 national or right national or something like that.

00:24:52.800 So that's an important point.

00:24:54.080 And then one other thing just for people who are trying to follow every thread here in

00:24:58.480 case anybody is like that, you know, wants to chase down these arguments wherever else

00:25:04.300 they occur.

00:25:05.220 So Dugan used to be a professor at Moscow State University where he taught international

00:25:08.780 relations theory.

00:25:10.100 And in one of his textbooks that he wrote, he has a chapter on theory of a multipolar world,

00:25:15.300 namely on his own theory of international relations alluded to in this chapter.

00:25:19.160 I translated that as well.

00:25:20.140 It's available in English, theory of a multipolar world.

00:25:22.660 And he gives there several different ways to understand the study of civilizations, like

00:25:30.060 in terms of their cultural codes, in terms of their education, in terms of the internal

00:25:35.900 structures.

00:25:36.420 Like he goes through here, you know, here are 10 different ways, 10 different approaches

00:25:40.580 to the study of civilization.

00:25:42.100 They're all viable.

00:25:43.120 And if we take all of the civilizations mentioned in this chapter and all of these methods of

00:25:47.880 study, we'll produce a rich like encyclopedia of civilizational studies.

00:25:51.920 So that's the book theory of a multipolar world worth looking at for the multipolar side

00:25:56.260 of things.

00:25:56.960 Yeah, it is very interesting that approach of building up the nation state to create globalism

00:26:02.760 as long as it's the right kind of nation state.

00:26:04.760 It has the echoes, of course, of Marxism.

00:26:06.660 You know, we need to go further into capitalism before we can get to the revolution, something

00:26:12.140 that he'll address again here later on as we move through these chapters.

00:26:17.760 But is there anything else you want to talk about the great spaces or his multipolar approach

00:26:23.300 before we move on to the next chapter?

00:26:24.700 So I just say briefly, you know, questions, there are secondary questions about a multipolar

00:26:30.480 world of civilizations.

00:26:31.340 How are they organized?

00:26:32.940 Well, he refers to Carl Schmitt's gross realm, order of large spaces.

00:26:37.460 So there's sort of regional universalisms or regional blocks larger than a nation state,

00:26:42.140 but smaller than the, you know, smaller than the world.

00:26:44.700 They're miniature worlds.

00:26:46.120 He mentions European Union as one example, Eurasian Union as another one.

00:26:50.060 Bricks probably is one that they're, he's engaged in at the moment, you know, building

00:26:55.200 that up as a civilizational type of block.

00:26:57.680 So you have regional blocks, you have civilizations, you have their organization in regional blocks

00:27:02.880 in these gross realm, and then you have the specific legal set of relationships among all

00:27:09.260 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

00:27:24.900 world after liberalism.

00:27:27.240 Excellent.

00:27:27.820 So our next chapter is about the left being in crisis, kind of the crisis of philosophy

00:27:33.520 on the left.

00:27:34.280 Now, very interestingly, I think a lot of people on the right would just assume that globalism

00:27:39.620 and leftist ideology is the same thing.

00:27:44.760 He does not see it that way.

00:27:46.540 He sees the left as also in opposition to globalism, but he's talking about the, in many ways, the

00:27:53.580 old left, which we'll get to here in a second.

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 1.00

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

00:28:10.060 West.

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

00:28:21.440 you would like to call it, post-liberalism.

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.

00:28:41.000 And that's the first one he addresses here.

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

00:28:54.640 orthodox Marxists.

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

00:29:00.780 with where we are now?

00:29:03.400 I think you're right that they're less relevant socially.

00:29:06.040 And he recognizes that.

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

00:29:22.500 the greatest relevance or significance.

00:29:24.420 But it is important to be able to identify them and to be able to distinguish them as

00:29:29.140 a category.

00:29:29.900 But I think for him, they're the least interesting group.

00:29:34.700 All right.

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?

00:29:56.080 Before we go to 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

00:30:15.600 everywhere.

00:30:16.140 That's the new left.

00:30:17.100 OK, the old Marxists aren't doing that.

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

00:30:32.920 left, the national left.

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,

00:31:08.260 you know, the remnant of Soviet ideology.

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 1.00

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.

00:32:09.300 So, like, you know what I mean?

00:32:10.740 It becomes a confusing situation.

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

00:32:21.480 type identities.

00:32:22.540 So, he says that represents a specific kind of movement, a specific, with its own, with a

00:32:29.240 specific way of thinking it through.

00:32:30.720 But it remains under-theorized.

00:32:33.000 It's not the most serious movement.

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

00:32:47.120 still exert some dynamism.

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

00:32:59.520 unorganized and it's under-theorized.

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.

00:33:19.420 So, that's a nice essay to read.

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

00:33:38.560 meaning of being human.

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

00:33:51.600 to seeing these things brought together.

00:33:53.500 Like, it's not just one left.

00:33:56.640 The Marxist left is not the same as the national Bolshevist left is certainly not the same as

00:33:59.820 the postmodern left.

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

00:34:39.040 about here.

00:34:39.980 He talks about the rejection of reason.

00:34:42.620 He references Deleuze and Guattari here.

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.

00:35:20.640 You know, that why a rejection of reason?

00:35:22.740 Because what's the older model?

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.

00:35:32.280 Our reason can be practical or theoretical.

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,

00:35:43.480 theoretical reason.

00:35:44.840 That's like an old model of man.

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

00:35:56.860 the authority of reason.

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

00:36:13.000 of your true, authentic, non-rational self.

00:36:16.020 So, this rejection of reason, embrace of, as he puts it, a conscious adoption of schizophrenia,

00:36:22.720 right?

00:36:22.940 So, it's anything that represents stability, order, hierarchy, naturalness, excellence, definition,

00:36:31.200 form, ideal.

00:36:32.380 All of that is out the window.

00:36:34.100 In exchange for these, like, schizophrenia, craziness, randomness, disorder, free, sporadic,

00:36:43.240 spontaneous existence.

00:36:44.560 I do think that captures the gist of a lot of it.

00:36:48.360 And we see the explanation for 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, 0.54

00:37:03.820 is captured.

00:37:04.400 Something of the zeitgeist, doesn't it?

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

00:37:29.760 like that.

00:37:30.520 But ultimately, they're dedicated to the destruction of the human essence, because human essence

00:37:37.860 is essentialism.

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

00:37:52.020 who are for him.

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.

00:38:04.780 He's not for the destruction of the human.

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

00:38:20.120 right-wingers as much.

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

00:39:03.360 in its proper place.

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

00:39:20.600 and only defining characteristic of humans.

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.

00:39:34.600 But maybe you can expand on that.

00:39:37.420 No, I think you're right.

00:39:38.680 Dugan is not alone here.

00:39:39.860 I think the next best point of reference is Leo Strauss.

00:39:42.880 So the problem is this.

00:39:44.340 You have modern rationality.

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

00:40:11.740 of life.

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

00:40:23.820 existence.

00:40:24.720 Therefore, we reject reason.

00:40:26.200 That's one model.

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

00:40:34.820 not pure irrationalism.

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,

00:40:47.000 Dugan does privilege intellectual activity.

00:40:49.460 But even so, there are other parts of our nature.

00:40:51.840 There's more to being human.

00:40:53.340 That's in part, that's all implied by his recourse to Dasein and to Heidegger.

00:40:57.920 And all of us talk about myth and archaics.

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

00:41:17.260 the record here.

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 1.00

00:41:41.500 and insanity and, you know, deliberate stupidity. 0.98

00:41:45.620 And it's a big task because there's something worth taking seriously in the criticism of modern 1.00

00:41:54.160 rationality.

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 What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue?

00:42:50.000 A well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart

00:42:54.680 shopper and delivered to your door.

00:42:56.700 A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool.

00:43:01.160 Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered.

00:43:05.320 Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders.

00:43:10.200 Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply.

00:43:12.980 Instacart.

00:43:13.820 Groceries that over-deliver.

00:43:15.720 Absolutely.

00:43:18.080 And the last part of this, I don't know if you want to touch on it, is specifically about

00:43:21.640 leftism in contemporary Russia.

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

00:43:44.560 ourselves.

00:43:45.220 And then he'll also sometimes go back and comment, what is this like specifically in the case

00:43:49.840 of Russia?

00:43:50.420 And he does that here, he does it elsewhere.

00:43:52.040 Where it is important for him that the Russian question is not merely local or particular or

00:43:59.620 of interest, private interest.

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.

00:45:08.280 Yeah.

00:45:08.380 Excellent.

00:45:10.000 All right.

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.

00:45:36.680 It's very helpful to kind of set the frame.

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

00:46:31.260 tenets of liberalism.

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

00:46:43.880 call classical liberalism.

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.

00:46:54.220 It's, you know, this is classical 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?

00:47:15.260 And individuals, a measure of all things.

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

00:47:35.020 I'll, I'll read out when we get there.

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

00:47:51.060 identity whatsoever.

00:47:52.480 And, uh, this is something that I've talked about a lot.

00:47:57.160 Um, this is liberalism.

00:47:59.640 Yes.

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,

00:48:54.980 it must collapse these spheres.

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.

00:49:30.160 If the state wants to accrue more power.

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

00:49:42.140 to centralize their power.

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

00:50:04.180 to get away.

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

00:50:10.520 extent and not what we're going towards.

00:50:13.040 So the classical political philosophies, they organized their understanding of political life

00:50:17.320 as culminating in man's perfection.

00:50:20.180 Whereas Hobbes organized this political teaching as we're getting.

00:50:23.160 Away from a state of nature.

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.

00:50:34.760 And on, in Hobbes, we have the Leviathan.

00:50:37.380 So a combination of great state power on one hand and of, uh, rights-based teaching on the

00:50:43.400 other.

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

00:50:59.420 like that.

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.

00:51:10.920 This is a key point.

00:51:12.220 That's why I'm mentioning it again.

00:51:13.400 It transforms into freedom from internal constraints as well.

00:51:17.160 And that's why he's able to trace wokeism.

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 0.72

00:51:36.400 great reset liberation from gender identity is just the next phase of freedom from, and it will 0.91

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

00:52:36.580 be.

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

00:53:19.020 them as citizens.

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

00:53:53.160 construction.

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

00:54:05.800 neutral, as it were, um, nation states.

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,

00:54:40.700 uh, state identity.

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.

00:56:08.020 You get away from the private property.

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

00:56:31.440 proper stopping point and all of that.

00:56:33.520 So here he's really, he's not, I mean, there are books and books and books written, you know,

00:56:38.560 about each of these points in great detail.

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

00:56:51.080 of us.

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.

00:57:12.600 So that's the benefit.

00:57:13.860 Even though he shrinks his account of Marxism down, he lets us see it in the, in the context

00:57:18.200 of the bigger picture.

00:57:18.980 And, uh, that's what he does here quite effectively, I think.

00:57:21.780 Yeah.

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.

00:57:59.320 Right.

00:57:59.760 I just want to say one thing about that, which is that it reminds us that the meaning of

00:58:05.340 a process is open to dispute.

00:58:07.920 Is it a step forward or is it a step backward?

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

00:58:38.220 of these processes is.

00:58:40.820 Right.

00:58:41.300 So then he moves on.

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

00:59:16.880 than most.

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.

01:00:12.340 Yeah, you're exactly right.

01:00:13.700 It's still the case, isn't it?

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

01:00:24.760 back to the democratic party.

01:00:26.660 Um, I think you're right.

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.

01:00:39.840 Yes.

01:00:40.540 Dugan doesn't agree with the position that they're taking, but somehow they're the most

01:00:43.660 consistent position.

01:00:45.400 Liberalism won.

01:00:46.200 It inherited the right to modernity.

01:00:48.680 It now has to universalize itself, expand itself, extend itself, normalize itself and

01:00:53.340 do all of those kinds of things.

01:00:54.800 And, uh, they see that and they understand it.

01:00:57.240 So credit where it's due.

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.

01:01:36.680 Very important.

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

01:01:50.980 at stake ideologically.

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

01:02:06.500 his, for sure.

01:02:07.200 I was surprised to have read it.

01:02:10.280 Absolutely.

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

01:02:33.740 of good here.

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

01:02:58.700 without organs there.

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

01:03:18.960 of contemplation of opportunity.

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

01:03:55.280 idea of electronic referendum.

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,

01:04:12.980 Sam Francis and Leviathan and its enemies.

01:04:15.720 And from this economy, uh, economy is destiny.

01:04:18.340 It takes up the thesis of the numerical code.

01:04:21.540 That is destiny so far as work, money in the market and production and consumption,

01:04:25.920 everything becomes virtual.

01:04:28.500 Uh, and so it's very interesting that he kind of talks about, uh, and again, this was written

01:04:33.380 in 2012, right?

01:04:35.020 Or around there.

01:04:35.760 The translation is 2012.

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

01:04:52.260 its peaks yet.

01:04:53.240 It was, it was still in kind of its incubation period in much of the, uh, American academia

01:04:58.080 and American culture.

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

01:05:10.980 what the left has become.

01:05:12.160 And this is kind of why we can see this tension, uh, kind of between the opponents of postmodernism

01:05:20.540 and wokeness.

01:05:21.340 Uh, some understand their deeper problems of liberalism and that the, these are in many ways

01:05:27.540 consequences of liberal thought.

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

01:05:39.620 liberalism was.

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.

01:05:51.960 Yeah, absolutely.

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

01:06:04.600 theses and ideas or not.

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

01:06:27.080 authorities.

01:06:27.580 It liberates from internal ones.

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

01:06:41.540 more and more now.

01:06:42.280 So that's a question.

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

01:07:18.500 and his culture.

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

01:07:34.440 one.

01:07:34.900 Uh, so we want to hit this before we kind of, uh, run too long here, uh, the crusade against

01:07:40.000 the West.

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

01:08:18.960 to be sure.

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

01:08:28.540 the West here or what he means by that.

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

01:09:08.140 the perversion of America.

01:09:09.040 So you have to, everyone will have to judge for themselves, whether he speaks out of both

01:09:13.160 sides of his mouth on this point or not.

01:09:14.720 My view is it's pretty clear for him that unless you throw down the gauntlet to American 0.99

01:09:20.980 century, to American unipolarity, to the global American empire, you can't get any of this

01:09:26.220 off the ground.

01:09:27.120 That's the first step.

01:09:28.240 It doesn't mean the destruction of America, but it does mean no globalist America at a

01:09:35.080 minimum, he writes elsewhere.

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

01:09:45.840 says, I'm not against the West as such.

01:09:48.320 I'm against the modern political West, which is doing this egregious universalization.

01:09:54.740 He says he loves the West.

01:09:56.240 He loves the authors of the West.

01:09:57.660 He studied all the French thinkers and German thinkers and his book on civilizational studies

01:10:01.940 called No Omachia.

01:10:02.900 He has several volumes on all of the countries of the West and he considers Heidegger the

01:10:08.000 greatest philosopher.

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

01:10:20.540 tradition in that sense.

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.

01:10:36.960 They're the forces of the Great Reset.

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

01:10:57.120 world?

01:10:58.000 So if this, if all of these ideological changes happen within America, maybe they will already

01:11:03.760 prepare the global scene for multipolarity.

01:11:07.880 Or maybe these changes will happen outside of America.

01:11:10.760 You know, it's not such an easy question.

01:11:12.480 But for sure, he, not to sugarcoat it, you know, the West in its contemporary form is

01:11:19.380 largely evil for him.

01:11:21.500 Opposition to the West in its current form is therefore largely positive for him. 0.90

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?

01:11:35.520 You need something universal enough to appeal.

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.

01:11:46.200 And, you know, how do you, how do you do that?

01:11:49.280 And how do you do it effectively?

01:11:50.760 So, yeah, people, people may not like, people who are all in on the West.

01:11:55.940 But here's the, here's the ambiguity.

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

01:12:09.540 criticisms.

01:12:10.740 Something helpful, something true, and something profound, something funny at times.

01:12:15.380 Okay, there's a lot there to like.

01:12:17.500 And there are things there not to like.

01:12:20.480 How do you square the circle?

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?

01:12:47.800 Absolutely.

01:12:48.560 All right, guys.

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.

01:12:56.300 So I'll just read that out real quick.

01:12:57.500 Glow in the dark here for $2.

01:12:59.060 We use the info of Unit 731.

01:13:01.840 We can post modern info.

01:13:04.500 I think there's a joke there that I don't have the reference for.

01:13:08.840 Sorry, man.

01:13:09.380 But I appreciate the super chat there.

01:13:12.600 Let's go ahead and hear from Mr. Millerman all the different places we can find his excellent work.

01:13:21.260 I teach at Millermanschool.com.

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.

01:13:36.200 So main place is Millermanschool.com.

01:13:38.820 Otherwise, just search me up online and you'll find everything I'm doing.

01:13:41.680 Excellent.

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 When you do, make sure you go ahead and leave a rating or review.

01:14:06.780 That really helps with all the algorithm stuff.

01:14:09.580 Thanks for coming by, guys.

01:14:10.940 And as always, we'll talk to you next time.

The Auron MacIntyre Show - April 21, 2023

The Fourth Political Theory： Part Three ｜ Guest： Michael Millerman ｜ 4⧸21⧸23

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript