Talkshow host Tucker Carlson interviewed Aleksandr Dugin, a Russian academic philosopher and confidant to Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday in Moscow.
The 20 minute interview centered around Dugin’s Russian perspective on Western ideology, specifically regarding the current tribulations of Western society.
Ep. 99 Aleksandr Dugin is the most famous political philosopher in Russia. His ideas are considered so dangerous, the Ukrainian government murdered his daughter and Amazon won’t sell his books. We talked to him in Moscow. pic.twitter.com/4LrO0Ufg9P
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) April 29, 2024
“So I think that everything started with individualism…that was a wrong understanding of the human nature, of the nature of man,” Dugin said, responding to Carlson asking about where the destructive nature of the English-speaking countries comes from. “When you identify individualism with the man, with the human nature, you cut all the relations to everything else.”
Dugin went on to talk about how individualism of the Enlightenment Era led to neo-liberalism of today.
“You have a very special idea of the subject, philosophical subject as individual, and everything started in the Anglo-Saxon world with Protestant reform and with nominalism before that, nominalist attitude that there are no ideas, only things, only individual things, so individual, it was the key and still is key concept that was put at the center of liberal ideology,” Dugin said.
The philosopher said that liberalism is a historical and cultural process of liberating the individual of collective identity, transcending the social identity of first the Catholic church (in the West) and later Western empire, then revolt against nation states in favor of civil society and later liberalism against communism.
“And liberalism, that was liberation of these individuals from any kind of collective identity, there were only two collective identities to liberate from — gender identity, because it is collective identity, you are man or woman collectively…so liberation from gender, and that has led to transgenderism,” he said.
Dugin went on to say the last step is liberation from human identity, or transhumanism and posthumanism, where individuals give up their human nature, citing work by Klaus Schwab and Yuval Harari.
Carlson retorted with the idea of individualism he has developed in the United States as being different than from what Dugin described.
“It’s not the definition of liberalism I have in mind when I describe myself, as what we say in the United States as a classical liberal,” Tucker said. “So [we] think of liberalism as individual freedom and choice from slavery.”
Tucker listed tenets of the Western understanding of classical liberalism as following conscience, rebuking statism and tyranny.
Dugin agreed that there is a difference of definitions of liberalism, between classical and neo-liberalism.
“It is not about individual freedom, it is about woke-ism,” Dugin said about neo-liberalism.
The Russian philosopher also said that neo-liberalism has gone from the rule of majority to the rule of minorities, and has become totalitarian in nature.
He also said that you cannot be a classical liberal, as liberalism is essentially a slippery slope where the newest liberals will call older versions of liberals ‘fascists’.