Until recently, Aleksandr Dugin was a name most Americans had little reason to know. The Russian political philosopher has spent decades arguing against the liberal West and for a new world order built around competing civilizations rather than shared political values. His actual influence inside the Kremlin gets exaggerated more often than not, but that hardly matters, Dugin’s importance stems from the fact that he has given a coherent philosophical language to anti-Western regimes such as Russia, China, and Iran.
Dugin’s rhetoric is appealing to Western conservatives because he talks about the collapse of the family. He talks about a national sovereignty he thinks the West has thrown away, a spiritual emptiness sitting underneath its consumer comfort, and a liberal culture too embarrassed by its own Christian inheritance to defend it. But in reality Dugin does not want the West to recover the religious and moral foundations it has abandoned. He wants the whole era of Western universalism to end.
