Excerpts from Alexander Dugin: “The United States Court Against the Ideology of Progress.”

The fact is that there is not just one American state, but two countries and two nations with this name and this is becoming more and more evident. It is not even a question of Republicans and Democrats, whose conflict is becoming increasingly bitter. It is the fact that there is a deeper division in American society.

Half of the US population is an advocate of pragmatism. This means that for them there is only one yardstick: it works or it doesn’t work, it works/it doesn’t work. That is all. And no dogma either about the subject or the object. Everyone can see himself as whatever he wants, including Elvis Presley or Father Christmas, and if it works, no one dares to object. It is the same with the outside world: there are no inviolable laws, do what you want with the outside world, but if it responds harshly, that is your problem. There are no entities, only interactions. This is the basis of Native American identity, it is the way Americans themselves have traditionally understood liberalism: as freedom to think what you want, to believe what you want, and to behave as you want. Of course, if it comes to conflict, the freedom of one is limited by the freedom of the other, but without trying you cannot know where the fine line is. Try it, maybe it will work.

That is how American society has been up to a certain point. Here, banning abortion, allowing abortion, sex change, punishing sex change, gay parades or neo-Nazi parades were all possible, nothing was turned away at the door, the decision could be anything, and the courts, relying on a multitude of unpredictable criteria, precedents and considerations, were the last resort to decide, in problematic cases, what worked/didn’t work. This is the mysterious side of the Americans, completely misunderstood by Europeans, and also the key to their success: they have no boundaries, which means they go where they want until someone stops them, and that is exactly what works.

Dugin is describing traditional American political values based on individualism and personal freedom. But traditional American political values have been in conflict with the values of a new, substantially Jewish elite with strong authoritarian tendencies.

But in the American elite, which is made up of people from a wide variety of backgrounds, at some point a critically large number of non-Americans have accumulated. They are predominantly Europeans, often from Russia. Many are ethnically Jewish but imbued with European or Russian-Soviet principles and cultural codes. They brought a different culture and philosophy to the United States. They did not understand or accept American pragmatism at all, seeing it only as a backdrop for their own advancement. That is, they took advantage of American opportunities, but did not intend to adopt a libertarian logic unrelated to any hint of totalitarianism. In reality, it was these alien elites who hijacked the old American democracy. It was they who took the helm of globalist structures and gradually seized power in the United States.

This is exactly what we have emphasized at TOO. There are people with a variety of backgrounds that make up our new elite, but there is a substantial Jewish core with “alien” values, and in general, this elite speaks with one voice and dissent on important issues is not tolerated. This new elite largely emigrated to the United States in late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and the Marxist commitments of many of them were an important aspect of the enactment of the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution. In subsequent decades Jews became the backbone (p. 68ff) of the American Old Left and New Left. Indeed, as noted in my review of Amy Weingarten’s Jewish Organizations’ Response to Communism and Senator McCarthy, “a major problem that the organized Jewish community was forced to confront—a problem stemming from the long involvement of the mainstream Jewish community in communism and the far left, at least until the end of World War II, and among a substantial number of Jews even after this period. … Weingarten points to a “hard core of Jews” (p. 6) who continued to support the Communist Party into the 1950s and continued to have a “decisive role” in shaping the policies of the American Communist Party (CPUSA) (p. 9). These leftist Jews were welcomed into the Jewish organizations during the early post-war, particularly the American Jewish Congress, the largest American Jewish organization, but they were gradually made unwelcome due to the anti-communist fervor of the period.

Notice that Dugin emphasizes that the new alien elite has exploited American individualism to advance these alien values—they “took advantage of American opportunities, but did not intend to adopt a libertarian logic unrelated to any hint of totalitarianism.” When they achieved power, they rejected the libertarian ethos in favor of top-down, centralized, authoritarian control that is antithetical to traditional American political culture.

This is precisely the thesis of my 2019 book Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition: Evolutionary Origins, History, and Prospects for the Future where I document the rise of the substantially Jewish elite (Ch. 6; see also here) and describe how this new elite is shaping attitudes via domination of the media, the educational system, and political culture. Rejecting the libertarian framework, the new elite favors censoring ideas that conflict with these messages (Ch. 8), and it has established a two-tier justice system in which dissidents from the established orthodoxy are treated far more harshly than those favored by the new elite. In Chapter 9 I argue that traditional Western individualism is under dire threat from this assault. I would add that our new elite is not only alien to traditional Western values, it is also a hostile elite—hostile to the traditional people and culture of America, and that their desired multicultural future in which Whites would be a much-hated minority is very dangerous for Whites.

And I agree entirely that Jews “took advantage of American opportunities.” Because of their intelligence, their ethnic networking, and their long experience as merchants and in financial matters, Jews have certainly shown that they are quite successful in an individualist economic system (capitalism) and they have taken advantage of the relatively low ethnocentrism that is an integral aspect of individualism. As I noted in Chapter 8 of Individualism,

as emphasized throughout this book, White people tend to be more individualistic than other peoples, implying that they are less likely than other peoples to make invidious distinctions between ingroups and outgroups and they are more likely to be open to strangers and people who don’t look like them. Because Whites are low in ethnocentrism and high in conscientiousness, controlling ethnocentrism is easier for them. Their subcortical mechanisms responsible for ethnocentrism are weaker to start with and hence easier to control [via messages from the media and educational system enabled by top-down inhibitory control over the modular processing typical of the lower brain].

As a result, this new elite encountered only minimal resistance from the old American elite which was under intense pressure during the 1950s and capitulated entirely in the 1960s and 70s—the era that resulted in Roe v. Wade (1973), civil rights legislation, affirmative action, replacement-level non-White immigration, etc.

Critically relevant is that Dugin notes parallels of the new elite with Bolshevik attitudes of authoritarian control, including “destruction” of those seen as having the wrong attitudes: “If you are not a progressive, you are a Nazi and “must be destroyed.”

These elites, often left-liberal, sometimes openly Trotskyist, have brought with them a position that is deeply alien to the American spirit: the belief in linear progress [as in Marxism]. …

However, the emigrants from the Old World brought with them very different attitudes. For them, progress was a dogma. All history was seen as continuous improvement, as a continuous process of emancipation, improvement, development and accumulation of knowledge [presumably a reference to Marxism]. Progress was a philosophy and a religion. In the name of progress, which included a continuous increase in individual freedoms, technical development and the abolition of traditions and taboos, everything was possible and necessary, and it no longer mattered whether it worked or not. What mattered was progress.

This, however, represented a completely new interpretation of liberalism for the American tradition. The old liberalism argued: no one can ever impose anything on me. The new liberalism responded: a culture of abolition, shaming, total elimination of old habits, sex change, freedom to dispose of the human foetus (pro-choice), equal rights for women and races is not just a possibility, it is a necessity. The old liberalism said: be what you want, as long as it works. The new one replied: you have no right not to be a liberal. If you are not a progressive, you are a Nazi and must be destroyed. Everything must be sacrificed in the name of freedom, LGBT+, transgender and artificial intelligence.

We often hear the phrase “on the right side of history” from progressives, the idea being that history is going in only one direction and change in that direction is inevitable. At this time, being on the right side of history means believing that you believe in a future in which White “racism” is abolished and all peoples will live together in peace and harmony, ethnic conflicts will be abolished, and all groups—freed from the scourge of White racism—will have the same average level of income and achievement. Such a utopian view flies in the face of the long history of ethnic/racial conflict and the reality of biologically based race differences. But believing it is progressive dogma and, as Dugin would say, “If you are not a progressive, you are a Nazi and must be destroyed.”

Dugin is quite aware of the opposition of our hostile elite to Donald Trump:

The conflict between the two societies — the old libertarian, pragmatic one and the new neoliberal, progressive one — has steadily escalated over the past decades and culminated in the Trump presidency. Trump has embodied one America and his globalist democratic opponents the other. The civil war of philosophies has reached a critical point.

As I have written before, Trump made many mistakes and often fumbled the ball on his appointments (although the pool of mainstream Republicans from which he chose was completely corrupt, and he saddled himself with Jared and Ivanka as central players). However, his campaign pronouncements were clearly anti-globalist—opposing immigration (not just illegal), building the wall, wanting better relations with Russia, removing U.S. troops from the Middle East, complaining about the effects of immigration (“Paris isn’t Paris any more”), etc. These pronouncements engendered an unprecedented uproar from our hostile elite (now being reenacted as a result of the recent SCOTUS rulings—blamed on Trump because of his choices in SCOTUS nominations) and the Washington bureaucracy—the deep state (including the FBI). Media articles during the 2016 campaign were replete with messages that Trump was the reincarnation of Hitler, etc. This hostility continued throughout Trump’s presidency resulting in two impeachments by the Democrat-controlled House (with the help of some Republicans). For the entire four years, there was an atmosphere of crisis surrounding Trump’s presidency, and this has continued now with the January 6 Committee hearings (which are mainly aimed at preventing Trump from running again).

Dugin repeats his emphasis on the totalitarian and violent tendencies of the new elite:

New America … insists that freedom requires violence against those who do not understand it well enough. Which means that freedom must have a normative interpretation and it is up to the neo-liberals themselves to determine how and to whom they use it and how they interpret it. The old liberalism is libertarian. The new is blatantly totalitarian. The Supreme Court is now overturning the totalitarian dictatorial strategy of the neo-liberal globalist elites, who act — a bit like the Bolsheviks in Russia — in the name of the future.

Yes, but I’d say it’s more than “a bit like the Bolsheviks.” Moreover, it’s tempting to think that Dugin is here linking Bolshevik-type authoritarian attitudes to the Jewish overrepresentation in the new American elite, given that he noted the role of Jews in the new globalist elite dominating America, and his likely awareness of the well known outsized Jewish role in the murderous, intensely authoritarian early decades of the USSR with its utopian promises of creating the New Soviet Man. This very large role of Jews in the early decades of the USSR has also been noted by Putin and is presumably common knowledge among Russian intellectuals.

And the almost desperate old Americans, pragmatists and libertarians rejoice [at overturning Roe v. Wade]: the freedom to do what you want, not what the progressives and technocrats say, to go in any direction, not just where the globalists are forcibly sending us, has triumphed again, and Missouri’s brave attorney general has already shown what can be done. Bravo! It is a pragmatic revolution, an American-style conservative revolution.
Of course, all the globalist progressive crap is about to go down the drain. The old America has in a way counter-attacked the new America. “If the kingdom of law is divided in itself, it will surely become desolate”. Matthew 12:25 Better sooner than later…

“Better sooner than later.” I couldn’t agree more. While the White population still has political and demographic clout.

Dugin’s comments on the alien American elite and his strong support for the Ukrainian war make clear the dominant Russian perspective on this conflict. They see it correctly as a conflict between Russian sovereignty and neoliberal globalist elites based in the West that are aiming for a unipolar world with themselves dominating a subservient, relatively powerless Russia. It is the world dreamed of during the 1990s during the Yeltsin administration and abruptly snuffed out by the rise of Putin. Neoconservatives have targeted Russia ever since.

Make no mistake. It is critical for Russia to win this war. But it’s quite clear that the neoconservatives (Blinken, Nuland, Sherman) dominating the Biden administration’s foreign policy also see this as a critically important struggle, and they have continued to increase the U.S. commitment—willing to fight to the last Ukrainian. And, I suspect that ultimately they will be willing to use U.S. troops in the conflict to prevent a Russian victory.