In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Camelia Raghinaru talks with Michael Millerman about his article “The Ethnosociological and Existential Dimensions of Alexander Dugin’s Populism,” from Telos 193 (Winter 2020). An excerpt of the article appears below. To learn how your university can subscribe to Telos, visit our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 193 are available for purchase in our store.
The Ethnosociological and Existential Dimensions of Alexander Dugin’s Populism
Michael Millerman
If in 2004 Margaret Canovan could write that “few political theorists believe that populism deserves their attention,” by 2017, as Jonathan White and Lea Ypi observe, “contemporary political theory has made the question of the ‘people’ a topic of sustained analysis.”[1] Even so, “what a people is . . . is a matter of enduring dispute.”[2] One of the disputed definitions of what a people is comes from the domain of right-wing populism.[3] While the political relevance of right-wing populist challenges to liberal democracy is widely recognized, the theoretical bases of right-wing populism are rarely the targets of sustained analysis. Yet what Alberto Spektorowski writes about the New Right perhaps applies also to right-wing populisms more generally: their importance “lies . . . in [their] theoretical innovation.”[4] This paper is meant to be a contribution to the general study of the theoretical innovations of right-wing populism. Specifically, it focuses on Alexander Dugin’s populism. First, I briefly introduce the place of the “people” in Dugin’s fourth political theory. Second and third, comprising the bulk of the essay, I provide an overview of the ethnosociological and existential dimensions of Dugin’s populism. Fourth, I outline an additional, “noological” aspect before concluding.
Scholars critical of populism tend to collapse right-wing populism into a species of fascism or racism and lambaste it for failing to meet a number of criteria of ethical legitimacy, such as openness to otherness and pluralism. But since theorists of right-wing populism are not usually studied adequately on their own terms as theorists, criticisms against them often read like superficial screeds, rote operations consisting in the mere imposition of liberal or social democratic principles onto phenomena worth studying in their own right.[5] Yet the common equation “anti-liberal = fascist = nationalist = racist = Nazi” might distort the phenomena, thereby preventing an adequate understanding.[6] James Gregor, for instance, argues that fascists were neither nationalists nor racists, calling the common equation of fascism and nationalism “part of the folk wisdom of political science.”[7] Gregor argues that we gain a better understanding by attending to the actual political theory of fascism, according to which the nation is a product of the state. On that view, fascism is better called statism than nationalism. Such adjustments, based on distinctions drawn from the actual theoreticians of fascism, provide a sounder starting point for understanding than does the folk wisdom of the field. In trying to understand right-wing populism, we should move away from folk wisdom toward conceptual precision.
There are three reasons why theorizing about right-wing populism should include the effort to take right-wing theorists themselves seriously on their own terms: (1) if these theorists are regarded as enemies of a given political position, the injunction to “know thy enemy” justifies a more thorough exercise in comprehension than hasty subsumption under the labels of fascism or racism offers; (2) if an analyst champions an ethic of openness to otherness, the challenge posed by right-wing anti-liberal populist theory can be seen as an invitation to extend the ethic of openness not just to the good others (whoever they may be) but to those assumed to be bad others, too, as a matter of fidelity to the ethic of openness, or to probe the limits of that ethic; (3) without maintaining either a position of frank enmity or a political ethic of openness, i.e., one that is by default open to a certain notion of “the good other” and closed to that of “the bad other,” an analyst may simply want to access the broadest spectrum of relevant theoretical alternatives from a desire to understand, as a sort of exercise in the liberal arts, meant to liberate thought to the extent possible under the circumstances from the strict confines of a worldview or ideology, whether liberal, social democratic, or anything else.
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1. Margaret Canovan, “Populism for Political Theorists?,” Journal of Political Ideologies 9, no. 3 (2004): 241; Jonathan White and Lea Ypi, “The Politics of Peoplehood,” Political Theory 45, no. 4 (2017): 439.
2. White and Ypi, “The Politics of Peoplehood,” p. 439.
3. Not all populisms are right-wing populisms. See Yannis Stavrakakis et al., “Extreme Right-Wing Populism in Europe: Revisiting a Reified Association,” Critical Discourse Studies 14, no. 4 (2017): 420–39.
4. Alberto Spektorowski, “The Intellectual New Right, the European Radical Right and the Ideological Challenge to Liberal Democracy,” International Studies 39, no. 2 (2002): 169.
5. See, for instance, Andreas Umland, “Pathological Tendencies in Russian Neo-Eurasianism: The Significance of the Rise of Aleksandr Dugin for the Interpretation of Public Life in Contemporary Russia,” Russian Politics and Law 47, no. 1 (2009): 81. Umland includes himself among a group of scholars who study Dugin and others with a hermeneutic that is “critical or even sarcastic from the start,” an attitude that might prohibit understanding or make it more difficult.
6. James Gregor, “Fascism and the New Russian Nationalism,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 31, no. 1 (2008): 2: “there has been a tendency among political commentators on the Russian scene to move artlessly from ‘extreme right wing,’ to ‘fascism,’ to ‘nazism,’ to describe what has been happening since the eclipse of Marxism-Leninism in what was once the Soviet Union. . . . All these terms are employed as though they all referred to one omnibus political phenomenon, or that the descent from the ‘extreme right’ to ‘nazism’ was inevitable.”
7. Ibid., p. 6.
