While the EEU fulfills the economic, political, and symbolic goals of Eurasianism, Putin’s agenda can change without seriously affecting Dugin’s mission. He has the diversionary task of filling ideological vacuums created around the world by suspicion and skepticism regarding the United States, the European Union, and other liberal powers. Dugin’s ideology already resonates with both high intellectuals and the conspiratorial fringe. His ideas seem tailor-made to exploit continuing economic stagnation, distrust of EU bureaucracy, anxiety at the continuing influx of immigrants, and, crucially, the anxiety of those immigrants themselves, who fear the assault on their traditions that comes as a part of their resettlement in the West. Dugin is also obviously intent on maximizing the potential of his ideology through various political, intellectual, and social media networks. 

Aleksandr Dugin has come to public attention as “Putin’s Brain,” as Foreign Affairs memorably dubbed him – that is, as the ideological mastermind behind Russia’s moves towards reasserting imperial ambitions, notably with respect to Ukraine. Is this accurate, or is it just media hype? The truth is that it’s extremely difficult to judge with confidence exactly to what extent Vladimir Putin’s more aggressive policies towards, for instance, Ukraine reflect Dugin’s influence (or supposed influence) as an omnipresent publicist and behind-the-curtain advisor to aspiring czars. (The suspicion easily arises that Putin uses Dugin – lets him rant on state TV – without himself buying into the crazy worldview.) But whether Dugin really is influencing Russian policy or is simply the object of excessive hype, either way intellectuals as well as ordinary citizens in the West need to be aware of him, lest they be taken in by his pretensions as a theorist and his claimed interest in civilizational dialogue and pluralism, which functions as a rhetorical cloak. Either way, he’s dangerous.

Along with the more geopolitical aspects, the Fourth Political Theory lies at the heart of Eurasianism, and constitutes its philosophical core. Drawing its roots from France's New Right, the Third Way, the German Conservative Revolution, and thinkers as diverse as Heidegger, Boaz, Evola, and de Benoist, the Fourth Political Theory could be summed up by what Alain Soral calls "la gauche du travail et la droite des valeurs" ("the worker’s left and the moral right"). It is important to note that, just like Alain Soral, Dugin rejects ethnocentrism. The Fourth Political Theory rejects not only liberalism (capitalism), but also communism (socialism) and fascism, preferring a blend of the two non-capitalistic systems in order to prevent each one’s particular shortcomings.

Even though it believes in multipolarity, Russia is central to Eurasianism, as is the goal of creating a "European Space," encompassing both Europe and Russia. The objective is clearly to shift the balance of global power from Washington to Moscow, although Dugin denies this in an interview with Arktos published at the end of the book. 

What struck me on arriving in the US was the interest in and presence of other cultures, especially in relation to spirituality. Spiritual, New Age and occult centers (or at least bookstores) existed and seemed relatively vibrant. Religion was also far more important than in England, whether that was Christianity, Judaism, Tibetan Buddhism, or something else. There was (and of course still is) a big Chinatown, where Chinese was spoken (London’s is tiny). I practiced Kung fu in the early morning at a park in Chinatown and went for tea at a Chinese place afterward; I went to read in a French cafe that was always empty and the owners were actually French; I went to the spiritual and occult bookstores; to the museums, to Japanese events with my Japanese friends; and so on. Moving to the US, my life was steeped much more consciously in the archaic and the “Traditional” than in the much older culture of England.

Capitalism, of course, always seizes on what is different and exciting, and repackages it for the mainstream, often destroying the culture-creating roots as a consequence. But, if we leave aside this aspect, and get back to the people, America’s history is one with as much depth as anywhere else. Indeed, while Britain and Europe ape the most crass aspects of the USA, Americans often look to something more integral.

From our examination thus far, it should be obvious that there are too many misconceptions about Alexander Dugin’s thought being circulated among Right-wingers. These misconceptions are being used to dismiss the value of his work and deceive members of Right-wing groups into believing that Dugin is a subversive intellectual who must be rejected as an enemy. Many other important Right-wing intellectuals have been similarly dismissed among certain circles, due to practices of a kind of in-group gleichschaltung, closing off any thinker who is not seen as readily agreeable. It is important to overcome such tendencies and support an intellectual expansion of the Right, which is the only way to overcome the present liberal-egalitarian hegemony. People need to take a more careful and unbiased look at Dugin’s works and ideas, as with other controversial thinkers. Of course, Dugin is not without flaws and imperfections (nor is any other thinker), but these flaws can be overcome when his thought is balanced with that of other intellectuals, especially the Revolutionary Conservatives and the New Rightists.

Like Dugin, one discovers in Heidegger, whom Dugin routinely calls “the greatest thinker,” a combination of traditional philosophical interests with self-consciously modern concerns. But again, like Dugin, Heidegger was a reactionary modernist, someone who combatted modernity by underlining its defects and shallowness and by trying to prove that the modern enterprise was headed in a very bad direction. Heidegger tried to do this without returning to metaphysical assumptions that he believed belonged to a vanished past. This, too, as in the case of Dugin, is not as simple as it would first appear. There is something backward-looking in both thinkers, as the past is for them a source of creativity. This is totally different from the kind of “cultural conservative” this writer has often encountered: a tedious eccentric who manifests his “conservatism” by making himself the butt of gentle jokes. Such a person may frequent clubs where tea and crumpets are served or may introduce himself as a liturgical traditionalist with an ostentatious interest in Gothic architecture, but he is, above all, an expert at staying out of controversy that could threaten his career or social calendar.

Whatever you think of Dugin, he’s largely beside the point. What’s happening is far greater than Dugin, and it’s far too great for any one man, even a man as ambitious and capable as Dugin, to master. Much the same way that Thomas Edison deserves credit for inventing the light bulb after having laboriously tested hundreds of filaments on his way to the right material, Alexander Dugin deserves credit for inventing the phenomenon of Tradition as a global ideology in opposition to the Western elites. He clouds his works up with hundreds upon hundreds of other ideas, many of which are useless or irrelevant for ourselves, but this one idea of his is the defining idea which will define the geopolitics of the coming century.

Only a rare few in the alternative right knew Alexander Dugin before the publication and translation of his book, The Fourth Political Theory, in 2012. Suddenly, the contents of this book became the subject of lively discussion and he was hailed as “arguably the most prominent New Right thinker in the world.”  With the exception of Michael O’Meara at Counter Currents, most of the reviews were very positive or at least sympathetic.  After reading reviews, interviews, blogs, articles, and listening to some video lectures by Dugin, I decided to read The Fourth Political Theory (FPT).

Through the first pages, I was fairly impressed by Dugin’s laconic treatment of the way liberalism had created the normative conditions for a humanity predisposed toward a world government in its “glorification of total freedom and the independence of the individual from any kind of limits, including reason, identity (social, ethnic, or even gender), discipline, and so on” (18). With the “liberation” of man from any necessary, pre-ordained membership in any community or identity, and the universal morality of human rights widely accepted, few obstacles now stood in the way of a totalitarian global market.

The controlled media at present is alight with features and exposes on the situation between Russia and Ukraine and this week’s newest “new Hitler” Vladimir Putin; besides being derivative and lacking intellectual vigor; this shibboleth should inform you of the motivating forces behind the media and political establishments of the West. Some are aware of the cultural-political, strategic and economic reasons for the reincorporation of Crimea into the Russian fold. Far fewer are aware of the ideological and philosophical underpinnings for the situation.

The question of the hour is; what is Russia doing and why? The Russian strategy is grounded in the geopolitical agenda of Eurasianism. As the name implies, Eurasianism is a projected political alliance between the nations of Europe and Asia (including Russia and the Islamic world) designed to counteract what is termed the “Atlanticism” of American-European Union objectives/agendas.  Eurasianism has a long history stretching back to the 1920’s Russian émigré community, where many of its ideas were formed. However the man most closely associated with the doctrine today as well as responsible for its modern form is Alexander Dugin.

There are some people who like to play up the notion of an intimate bond between the United States and the former British Empire.  This should not be so.  Think of the rhetoric surrounding World War II — “We had to intervene and stop Nazi Germany from taking over the world and committing genocide.”  The truth to these statements is irrefutable.  Hitler was an evil maniac who enslaved an entire continent and needed to be stopped.  However, when it comes to genocide and imperial ambition, the British beat the Nazis to it. The Union Jack is stained with blood: the blood of genocide, that is — the genocide of Irishmen, Scotsmen, Boers, Indians, Australians, and Native Canadians.

Historical events we cannot explain only by conscious intention of their protagonists. Also, not even solely with their personal characteristics and traits, although, of course, is not insignificant psychological structure of important historical actors, and their ideological or philosophical disposition.
Apart from factors which are purely quantitative and quantifiable (economic, social, etc..), the events of history have always been influenced by far more subtle, delicate modes of reality, which are no less real in regard to quality, not a quantity, regardless they are out of physical observation. (All this, by the way, fully applies to the many other spheres of human activity, which are more ordinary than is sphere of politics.) Not once, some “abstract” idea, a concept or a myth sealed the fate of entire nations or civilizations (eg the Incas, which in the Spanish conquistadors “recognized” White gods). And the political ideology, after all, belong to quite distinctive reality, which is largely independent of any individual. (Indeed, ideology is often able to fully subjugate in themselves person, able to “absorb” any concrete individual.)

The Eurasian movement, which seeks to restore Russian power and prestige, is a form of National Bolshevism based on the geopolitical theory that Moscow, Berlin, and Paris form a natural political axis and potential power center. Alexander Dugin, the founder of the Eurasian Party, writes: The new Eurasian empire will be constructed on the basic principle of opposition to the common enemy: Atlanticism and the American New World Order. A multipolar world must replace the current unipolar world currently dominated by the United States.

Much has been written over the past several years about the Russian university professor, Alexander Dugin, who has become a prominent Putin advisor although he has no official government position, nor in fact does he have the academic credentials to head the Sociology Department at Moscow State University. His advisory role as resident intellectual without portfolio appears to be based on his expertise in matters dealing with political philosophies and forms of government. Although the Russian Federation has a Constitution, the Government is quite new and untested in many regards. An intellect like Alexander Dugin could certainly be helpful in advising the President on the fundamental laws and principles that prescribe the nature, function, and limits of both the Russian and foreign governments.

Europeans have frequently criticized the United States as a materialist society, but is not every society materialist? Is it not part of human nature to always to want more?

You are right. In that sense I would say that today we are all Americans. And it is true that the desire to have more is part of human nature. The difference is that much of European religion and philosophy are based on values that are more important, on the belief that for moral or religious or philosophical reasons, we must not submit to greed and to the appetite for wealth. This was different in America because of the protestant Calvinist idea of the elect—God shows his approval by giving wealth. You know Max Weber’s theory of the link between Protestantism and the rise of capitalism. I think these things make a big difference.

In Catholic countries money is always suspect—even though everyone wants more of it rather than less. You can see that in the fact that in France it would be impossible for a wealthy man to be elected head of state. No one would vote for a millionaire. The idea would be repulsive. But in America if a candidate is a millionaire it shows he is a success and has ability.

So in Europe people hide what they have. They don’t say how much they earn. In America there is a passion for numbers, and everything is a calculable quantity. Americans know how much they paid for everything. When American tourists go to the Eiffel Tower they ask, “How many steps to the top?” They do not understand the difference between quantity and quality.

Although it is common for New Right thinkers to extend the search for examples of anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian thoughts and practices to the Greeks, those still confined to the corridors of State academia tend to begin their search for such odious refutations of truth and justice with reactions to the Enlightenment and French Revolution. It is this latter tendency that has given us an intellectual tradition called the Counter-Enlightenment. While there are serious consequences for choosing to begin with the Enlightenment itself – the most obvious of which are the normalization of the Enlightenment principles of reason, humanity, and equality; and subsequent denial of the ontological power and legitimacy of anti-democratic thought – one may still use Counter-Enlightenment as a valid designation of the vast current in Western thought that overruns the ramparts of the “city upon a hill.”

This current is comprised of an array of concepts – among them aristocracy, warrior-caste, tradition, particularity, reverence, and honor – and thinkers – such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Joseph de Maistre, Johann Herder, Georges Sorel, and Julius Evola.

According to Professor Dugin, there have been three distinct ideologies since the dawn of the modern age – Liberalism, Marxism, and Fascism – and we are now moving into the era of the Fourth Ideology. Dugin clearly hopes that he can influence how this turns out, but this is a paradoxical belief because underlying Dugin’s ideas is the notion of a kind of natural progression of ideologies.

This deterministic pattern is apparent if we consider the subjects of the three ideologies, which are, in ascending order, the individual, the class, and the nation. Dugin’s hope is that the subject of the Fourth Ideology will be Heidegger’s concept of Dasein, which, in its essence, is almost a kind of animism in that it is a rejection of the hyper-connectivity and hyper-standardization of modernity.

Alexander Dugin’s book is a very timely work; by which I mean it is almost exclusively a response to the twentieth century—“the century of ideology” (p. 15) — from the twenty-first. It is a right-wing critique of modernity that has learned its lessons from left-wing post-modernity. It joins a flurry of works in a similar genre of post-war “alternative politics,” spanning from Julius Evola’sFascism Viewed from the Right of 1964 to Guillaume Faye’s Archeofuturism of 2010. Authors can be Christian, neo-pagan, or atheist; they can be reformed fascists, “paleo”-conservatives, or Traditionalists. They all, however, seem to send the same message and understand the same thing about the present state of the Western world: everything that is wrong with the way we act is rooted in something desperately wrong with the way we think. It is, in many ways, set apart from the radical right-wing not only in conclusions but the quality of the authors. While some are certainly pamphleteers in spirit, there is a distinctly intellectual strain running through it all—exemplified by the Nouvelle Droitphenomenon in France. It should come as no surprise, then, that Dugin is Professor of Sociology at Moscow State University (as well as Chair of that department’s Centre for Conservative Studies).

Beneath liberalism’s appeals to individualism and social contracts, nationhood remained synonymous with tribe and community. This is not surprising because modern nation-states did not arise out of thin air or at the end of the nose of some 17th-century philosopher. They are are built upon the base of organic societies that have preceded them. 

China, for example, had existed as a nation, civilization, and empire long before the PRC was even established; just as Europe as a civilization and as a historical subject had existed long before the birth of the EU and its member states. So in addressing the issue of Nationalism, it is important to separate the Nation-State from the organic communities upon which it is based. These are H.G. Well’s “natural borders.” They are “the necessary political map of the world which transcends artificial states.”

There are different tendencies in the new generation of revolutionary, non-conformist movements in Europe (on the Right as well as the Left), and some of them have been successful in attaining high political positions in their respective countries. The crisis of the West will grow broader and deeper every day, so we should expect an increase in the power and influence of our own Eurasianist resistance movement against the present global order, which is a dictatorship by the worst elements of the Western societies.

Those from either the Right or the Left who refuse American hegemony, ultra-liberalism, strategic Atlanticism, the domination of oligarchic and cosmopolitan financial elites, individualistic anthropology and the ideology of human rights, as well as typically Western racism in all spheres – economic, cultural, ethical, moral, biological and so on – and who are ready to cooperate with Eurasian forces in defending multipolarity, socio-economic pluralism, and a dialogue among civilizations, we consider to be allies and friends.

America is being overwhelmed with social meltdown, uncontrolled poverty and unemployment.  This has been combined with the constant media bombardment of an entertainment complex meant to cause intellectual and emotional retardation, combined with a security culture on overdrive.  The USA is being eaten out from the inside by a cancer of its own creation.  American Revolutionaries on ‘both sides’ of the so-called political spectrum were right, have been right all along, and are right today.  This is a twofold phenomenon, a meltdown occurring on both the cultural and economic front.

These two are connected and inseparable, creating a ‘chicken or egg’ paradox when one tries to untangle them. Today’s revolutionary Political Soldiers need to have a basic grasp of the present situation beyond being a percipient witness to their daily lives.  From this, a more coherent analysis of what is now and ‘What is to be Done?’ will be possible.  That will lead the best of them to the conclusion that the groundbreaking thesis of Alexander Dugin provides them with the most coherent set of usable tools for the coming American revolution.

Michael O’Meara is the author of the definitive English-language overview of the French Nouvelle Droite’s ideas, New Culture, New Right. Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe. An acute and perceptive writer himself, O’Meara is also the author, as Michael Torigian, of Every Factory a Fortress. The French Labor Movement in the Age of Ford and Hitler. For all those who gravitate towards the ideas of the Groupement de recherche et d’études pour la civilisation européenne (GRECE) and are serious about seeing them come to fruition in the real world, they could do worse than read the latter book and its account of what a militant labor movement can accomplish (That’s right, the working class also plays a role in a revolutionary struggle. Metapolitics alone and publishing articles on “Implicit Whiteness in the Second Season of Veronica Mars” are not going to cut it, no matter how many footnotes they have.)

America is not just a continent which, more or less randomly, takes place in the far West on the maps of the world, but at the same time is, according to the logic of things, and the West in terms of metageography. We can even say: America is the West in absolute, metaphysical sense of the term. America is absolute West. It is the undisputed leader and center of the Western world (Western civilization) and compared with it, all other Western countries are only second-rate units, subsidiaries, including its European provinces (European Union), in a tightly integrated "Trans-Atlantic structures" (NATO). Still more, America is likely to become a paradigm, a universal model, obligatory to all mankind. Thus, like a raised torch in the hand of the Statue of Liberty, yet mysterious essence of this country really shines all over the planet, over Earth, illuminating different nations and continents, as well as a new and unknown radiation. Indeed, America" offer the hand to the whole of humanity", and offered him its eschatology, a messianic revelation, its "Annunciation".

I would have to say I rediscovered the Forth Political Theroy over the past few years with my return to Political Activism. For those who do not know me before the inception of New Resistance, in the 1990’s I was a highly active member of the American Front. Our brand of Third Position was unlike any Third Position at the time or any currently being espoused today. We truly were looking for an alternative beyond facisim, communism, and liberalism. We had early influences from Christian Bouchet and Alexander Dugin so it was natural that we looked to Europe and Russia for inspiration. The promotion of such ideologies breaking away from reationary norms along with symbolism and tactics from the classical Left  sped up the progress of us fighting a war on “two fronts” here at home, being called “commies” from the racial right and “nazi” from the liberalized left. So with that being said what I have seen happen since my departure in 2001 is beyond encouraging. What I have found in Professor Dugin’s work on the Forth Political Theroy, being optimistic, can see it taking foothold as an ideology to be taken seriously. As far as the U.S. is concerned nothing short of complete disaster would shake the foundation of liberal democracy.  

Since Vladimir Putin's assumption of the Russian presidency in December of 1999, Moscow's foreign policy has changed course. The norm is no longer President Yel'tsin's sometimes halting embrace of Europe and the West, which persisted in spite of pressures both from hard-liners within his own government (such as Foreign Minister -- and later Prime Minister -- Yevgeny Primakov) and from the secret police and intelligence organs. Instead, under Putin's direction, Russia's manipulation of foreign affairs -- despite fluctuations in tone -- generally appears to be more aggressive and "geopolitical," raising worries about renewed imperial aspirations on the part of the Kremlin.
The post-1999 foreign policy approach is based on an ideological infrastructure. Long relegated to ultranationalists and a handful of "new right" thinkers, the previously obscure doctrine of Eurasianism has emerged as a major force in Russian politics. It is noteworthy not only for its appeal as the basis for a renewed quest for national greatness, but also for the degree to which its tenets appear to have begun to animate many of President Putin's international maneuvers.

Alexander Dugin is a popular, well-connected, and academically respected professor at Moscow State University. Unlike his North American and Western European counterparts, his ideas are not censored by Russia’s mainstream media, and he more or less enjoys the favor of Putin’s Russian government. While he’s indubitably the most prominent New Right thinker in Russia, his domestic influence and his ambitious efforts to build international partnerships and relationships have made him arguably the most prominent New Right thinker in the world.