"Russophilia was once an affliction of the American left, of socialists who made excuses for Stalinism or Soviet totalitarianism. No longer. One month ago, Glenn Greenwald, a heterodox American journalist once lionised by the left and now admired by the conspiratorial right, dropped by Moscow to absorb the wisdom of Alexander Dugin, a prominent, anti-liberal Russian thinker sometimes likened to “Putin’s Rasputin”.
During his trip to Moscow a year ago to film a sympathetic interview with Vladimir Putin, Tucker Carlson, an influential MAGA media personality, visited Mr Dugin, too, and found him irresistible. “We were having a conversation that we were not going to film…but what you said was so interesting that we got a couple of cameras and put this together,” he gushed at the start of their interview, and nodded enthusiastically as Mr Dugin lambasted the failures of liberalism and the excesses of wokeness. This is not just eccentric provocation by MAGA attention-seekers; it is a window into a serious, philosophical concordance that is emerging between parts of the American and Russian right.
The most obvious alignment is over geopolitics, especially the position of Ukraine. The hardline MAGA right objected to Joe Biden’s military aid not just out of partisan instinct but also because they believe Ukraine ought to have been more accommodating of its regional superpower. Just as America gets to dictate terms within its sphere of influence, to Canada over trade or to Panama over its canal, Russia has rights over Ukraine, this thinking goes. Adherents of America First are realists, not idealists like their neoconservative predecessors. They see foreign interventionism as futile adventurism. Their view of the world is multipolar, as is Mr Dugin’s.
But Mr Dugin’s contempt for Ukraine runs deeper. His most famous work published in 1997, “The Foundations of Geopolitics”, advocates for “Eurasianism”—the idea of a restored, great new Russia that straddles both Asia and Europe. He argued that Ukraine was a “huge danger” to this project. He elaborated: “Ukraine as a state has no geopolitical meaning. It has neither a special cultural message of universal significance, nor geographic uniqueness, nor ethnic exclusivity.” During Mr Putin’s reunification with Crimea in 2014, Mr Dugin’s enthusiasm for reunifying with Ukraine reached such excessive heights that he lost his appointment at the prestigious Moscow State University. His Rasputin-like reputation therefore seems overblown, though he still works as a kind of international ambassador to illiberal right-wing movements. An assassination attempt in 2022—via car bomb, believed to be planted by agents of Ukraine, which killed his daughter—has amplified Mr Dugin’s prominence.
The alignment with MAGA involves more than geopolitics. The ideas that have emerged to justify the governance of Mr Trump and Mr Putin—neither of whom are renowned philosophers—bear striking resemblances. Within the West, the international coalition of nationalist conservatives, stretching from Trumpism in America to bolsonarismo in Brazil to Orbanism in Hungary, rejects the basic precepts of enlightenment liberalism, like individualism and the universality of human rights.
This critique is shared by Russian justifiers of Mr Putin, who see an alliance against the decadence and depravity of liberalism. They disdain globalism and wokeness, which they see as the logical endpoint of Western liberalism.
To prevent global hegemony of any kind, national conservatives in America, France, Hungary and Italy argue that the sovereignty of the nation-state must be supreme.
Whereas Mr Dugin once argued that Russia ought to create an axis with Germany and Japan (“dismembering” China in the process) to stand up to American hegemony, he now recognises that such efforts are unnecessary. “Each day it becomes more and more evident that USA and Russia are on the same wave, but EU-globalists are on the opposite one,” he wrote recently on X.
You might think there would be irreconcilable differences between the MAGA and Russian right, since Mr Dugin is straightforward in his advocacy for an state unified with the Orthodox Church, even suggesting the restoration of the oprichniki, the tsarist secret police established by Ivan the Terrible. “Should we not recognise autocracy, patriarchy and the authoritarian system not only de facto, but also de jure? Shouldn’t the Church and the institutions of traditional society regain their dominant position in society?” he wrote in 2022. The nationalist conservative movement in America and Europe, however, is couched in majoritarian populism—expressing the democratic will of people while imposing ever-fewer limits on the authority of their elected representatives. In America the goal is to smash the liberal state. “In the Russian case, the state is the embodiment of the nation. It’s not the case in the USA. Trump is dismantling the federal state; Putin’s goal is to reinforce the state,” says Marlene Laruelle, a professor at George Washington University.
In this respect, the Russian political right does not represent the mainstream of the Trumpist intellectual right. Yet some of its ideas resonate with fringier figures. One strain of right-wing, post-liberal thought in America is integralism. Its adherents argue for the unification of the Catholic church with the state. Some, like Patrick Deneen, a critic of liberalism and professor at Notre Dame University, argue for “aristopopulism”—replacement of rule of the current, decadent elite with a different elite with the right politics.
American thinkers affiliated with the so-called “Dark Enlightenment” or “neo-reactionary movement” are more straightforward in arguing against egalitarianism and democracy. Curtis Yarvin, one such thinker, has called for an American monarchy that would be run by a dictator-president, a figure sometimes referred to more politely as a “national CEO”. Vice-President J.D. Vance has approvingly cited Mr Yarvin’s work, though not the monarchic aspects of his outlook. Recently Mr Vance greeted him at a party by saying, in jest, “Yarvin, you reactionary fascist!”
There are other discordances, too. Western national conservatives aim to defend the nation-state from globalism, whereas the sacred object for Mr Dugin (and Mr Putin) is the Russian civilisation-state, which transcends Westphalian borders. “They describe me as ultranationalist, but I am not nationalist at all!” Mr Dugin told Mr Greenwald in his interview.
Mr Dugin’s works are suffused in the precepts of Traditionalism, an esoteric school that argues that religions are all aspects of one single Tradition. For that reason, he is partial to Sufiism and often admiring of Iranian theocracy, which most on the Western right see as the enemy. Steve Bannon, a former adviser to Mr Trump, has also cited Traditionalist thinkers like Julius Evola; he and Mr Dugin spent eight hours speaking to each other in a hotel in Rome in 2018, writes Benjamin Teitelbaum in his book “War for Eternity”. Mr Bannon “has been arguing that the United States and Russia are both Christian and nationalist in their essence,” says Mr Teitelbaum. He argues this is a prelude to a new Republican conception of American identity based on rootedness and peoplehood rather than personal liberty and free markets. The alignment with Russian thinkers remains possible because, in Mr Dugin’s words, “all that is anti-liberal is good.”
Democrats managed to convince themselves that Mr Trump was an asset of Russian intelligence and that Mr Putin’s election interference secured him a presidential victory in 2016. There has been no convincing evidence presented for either contention. But that gave them an excuse to underestimate the potency of Trumpism—until it triumphed again in 2024, this time with a popular-vote victory. This experience may have brought Mr Trump and Russia closer: “Putin went through a hell of a lot with me. He went through a phony witch hunt,” Mr Trump said in passing during his dressing down of Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office. Having falsely called Russification once before, liberals may be missing something more serious and under way in plain sight.” [1]
1. To Russia with love. The Economist; London Vol. 454, Iss. 9440, (Mar 22, 2025): 29, 30.
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