Preporuke za čitanje i gledanje

Dugin reworks Heidegger’s elitism to make it serve the purposes of his own Eurasian nationalism. Megalomania may convince far-right thinkers that they soar high above the rest of us, but that’s only because falling feels a lot like flying until you hit the ground. Much of Dugin’s political philosophy is directed against liberalism and liberal society, but he rarely bothers to discuss liberal political philosophy on its own terms. Search his books for knowledgeable discussions of Mill, Rawls, or Korsgaard and you’ll usually come up empty. At most you’ll find a few summary clichés and rote references, often accompanied by rapid-fire denunciation. While Dugin is willing to take some communist ideas seriously, all he is willing to take from liberal philosophy is its endorsement of “freedom,” which he reconceptualizes beyond recognition. But liberalism itself, he insists, must be “defeated and destroyed,” along with everything else that comes from the West.

Liberalism in Europe, today, is something like “libertarianism”—it is a right-wing ideology. There used to be a left libertarianism, which is probably better called anarchism, and that persists in various sectarian versions, but it isn’t much in the public eye. And then in the United States, liberalism generally means “New Deal liberalism.” It’s our very modest version of social democracy, and it isn’t a very strong doctrine, since many of its practitioners became neoliberals much too easily. So, the -ism is not a strong or coherent doctrine. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t liberals. But liberals are people who are best defined morally or psychologically; they’re what Lauren Bacall, my favorite actress, called “people who don’t have small minds.” A liberal is someone who’s tolerant of ambiguity, who can join arguments that he doesn’t have to win, who can live with people who disagree, who have different religions or different ideologies. That’s a liberal. But those liberal qualities don’t imply any social or economic doctrine. So, there are liberals in the world, and I can recognize them, but liberalism does not describe their actual political commitment. The word is better used to qualify the kinds of commitments that I write about: democracy, socialism, nationalism, et cetera.