The Russian National Socialism of Aleksandr Dugin

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4.8 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 15 September 2025

⏱️ 79 minutes

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Summary

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Ep. 175 Who is Aleksandr Dugin, and why does anyone care about him? This turns out to be an increasingly important question as Dugin's crackpot Fascist philosophy increasingly informs the "New Right" (Woke Right) in America. Dugin is a radical Russian philosopher who has sometimes been referred to as "Putin's philosopher" or "Putin's brain," though it is unclear how invested in his thinking Russian leader Vladimir Putin actually is. In 1997, Dugin wrote a short but unambiguously Fascist essay called "Fascism, Borderless and Red" (https://www.stephenhicks.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/DuginA-Fascism-Borderless-Red.pdf) to call for a new Fascist movement in Russia modeled directly off not only Mussolini (https://newdiscourses.com/2024/01/fascism-idolatry-of-the-state/) but off of Hitler's National Socialism (https://newdiscourses.com/2025/06/the-nazi-experiment-vol-1-the-nazi-racial-worldview/) in Germany. In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, host James Lindsay reads through this short essay to introduce you to "Duginism." Join him to get informed. Latest from New Discourses Press! The Queering of the American Child: https://queeringbook.com/ Support New Discourses: https://newdiscourses.com/support Follow New Discourses on other platforms: https://newdiscourses.com/subscribe Follow James Lindsay: https://linktr.ee/conceptualjames © 2025 New Discourses. All rights reserved. #NewDiscourses #JamesLindsay #Dugin

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everybody, it's James Lindsay and you are listening to the New Discourses podcast where we talk about all things woke all the time.
0:26.8	And today we're going to do something I actually, I don't know if putting it off is the word I want to use.
0:32.3	It's something I just kind of decided I didn't want to do.
0:35.5	We're going to go through a short essay from 1997 by Alexander
0:40.8	Dugan. I've been trying to avoid talking about Dugan except to maybe mention him here and there.
0:46.3	I don't think he should be taken nearly as seriously as he is, but he has taken very
0:51.8	seriously as it turns out by people on what I'm calling the woke right. You can call him the dissident right. You can call him the new right. You can call him the post-liberal right. You can call them whatever you want. I don't care. But I've called them the woke right. And it's kind of funny. Dugan is a weird character. He is sometimes called Putin's brain, I think that that's likely not to be true. He is a Russian philosopher, if we use the word rather generously.
1:18.4	There are strong reasons to believe that he was or still is a Satanist. He's a very peculiar character. He's a weirdo. He's like a Dungeons and Dragons kind of dork.
1:28.7	So it's difficult to imagine Vladimir Putin taking this man seriously,
1:35.6	except in the sense that Putin can use this guy's philosophy
1:40.4	to justify the stuff that Putin wants to do anyway.
1:44.0	So I would not assume that we should ignore completely what Dugin is saying or the claim that he's so-called
1:52.1	Putin's brain.
1:53.0	I would guess that to the degree that that's even true, which I don't think is very high, honestly,
1:59.9	that he is, that Putin is using Dugan's ideas to justify
2:04.8	stuff he wants to do regardless of the rest of Dugan's ideas or character or personality.
2:09.7	But my strongest suspicion with this guy is that he's basically a SIOPS.
2:13.4	He's an export from Russia to America.
2:15.4	And so tying him to Putin with this whole kind of, you know,
2:19.9	frisson on the far right after the Ukraine conflict or Ukraine war that Putin somehow like
2:27.1	the good guy for the American right. How did, what's the logic of that, by the way? Okay, so the
2:31.7	Ukraine war sucks. We can all say that one way or the other.
	...

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