Alexander Dugin discusses the nuances of political terms and their different interpretations between Russia and the United States, highlighting the challenges of concepts like ‘woke’ and ‘liberal’.
The interview with Tucker Carlson has been hastily and somewhat inaccurately translated into Russian. Overall, it is understandable. However, there are a few nuances. I am speaking to an American and primarily addressing an American audience. Judging by the thousands of comments, they understood me perfectly.
So, in the political language of contemporary America, there are common terms — such as ‘woke’ and ‘wokeism’ — that we do not use. This is a call to all liberals to immediately report on those who deviate from the LGBT (banned in Russia) agenda or from critical race theory (which also requires explanation, but that is for another time) and those who question internationalism and globalism as well as doubt the necessity of protecting illegal and any migration. It is also about defaming all patriots and conservatives (both current and historical), accusing them of ‘fascism’. Apparently, wokeism is now being actively adopted by the young generation of the Russian conservative movement, but I am not addressing them.
The process unfolds like this: a woke individual (an awakened left-liberal) identifies a target (a conservative), writes a series of complaints, creates a video on YouTube (banned in Russia) or Instagram, organises a flash mob, and so forth. This escalates to cancelling actions such as workplace investigations, biased interviews reminiscent of interrogations, and commissioned articles, followed by dismissal, social ostracism, deliberate downranking in social media searches, financial audits, credit denials, account deactivation, and in extreme cases, murder (of the target or their relative). This is the complete cycle of left-liberal terror. The same tactics are applied to historical figures and their legacies: books (along with paintings and films) are censored or banned, their visibility in search engine rankings drastically declines, and a defamatory section is added to Wikipedia that cannot be removed. This could impact figures like Dante, Dostoevsky, Rowling, and even the Sacred Scriptures if they are deemed not politically correct enough.
Therefore, when I say ‘woke’, people in the USA immediately understand me. In Russia, it would have required a whole article with explanations and examples, after which many of our domestic left and left-liberals would be ashamed (if they have a conscience, which is yet to be proven).
Furthermore, there is another term that is familiar in the USA: ‘progressive’. This is a self-designation of left-liberals, the deadly enemies of Trump, Tucker Carlson, conservatism, religion, family, and traditional values. In Russia, the term ‘progressive’ is also not used in this sense.
In the USA, there is a real war between ‘progressives’ and ‘conservatives’. However, it is unequal: conservatives believe that progressives, although mistaken, have the right to exist, while progressives brand all conservatives as ‘fascists’ and insist that they have no right to life and their ideas have no right to exist. They are the ‘enemies of the open society’ (Popper) who must be destroyed preemptively — before they can destroy the open society. Thus, progressives are about woke and cancelling. The core of progressives are Trotskyists — both direct (the left wing of the Democratic Party) and those who have become neocons (such as Robert Kagan, William Kristol, Victoria Nuland, etc.). Essentially, progressives are proponents of the liberal and globalist World Revolution and Jacobin terror.
Finally, the most difficult term is ‘liberals’. It signifies several things at once in modern American political language:
The entire American political system as a whole, that is, the recognition of the legitimacy and supremacy of capitalism, can be called liberalism. In this sense, liberals in the USA are everyone: left-liberals of the Democratic Party and right-liberals of the Republican Party (GOP). The former are more for freedom of migration, perversions, and wokeism, the latter for flat tax and big capital.
In a narrower sense, and in a two-party discussion, usually ‘liberals’ specifically refers to ‘left-liberals’, i.e., those who are for wokeism, cancel culture, and who are ‘progressive’. Sometimes they — being real fascists — appear as ‘anti-fascists’. Their logic is as follows: ‘If you do not send a suspected ‘fascist’ to a concentration camp in advance, he will send us there.’ Such liberals believe that Republicans, and especially Trumpists, i.e., their conservative flank, should be imprisoned or even exterminated. Again — before they themselves are exterminated (see the new movie Civil War — it is exactly about this and accurately portrays the mindset of American left-liberals).
In a completely different context, ‘liberals’ (although this is happening less and less often) can refer to ‘old liberals’ — such as Tucker Carlson himself. Sometimes, the term ‘libertarians’ is used to distinguish them. They are most similar to anarchists, only not left-wing but right-wing. Progressives often identify them with fascists because libertarians interpret liberalism very differently from the left-liberals. Anyone who is not a left-liberal is a fascist and must be cancelled. Libertarians advocate a flat income tax or even its absence and are against government involvement in the economy. They also support the right to bear arms (the Second Amendment) and the unrestricted freedom to do what you want, say what you want, and be who you want. Such ‘old liberals’ believe that ‘new liberals’ (woke, LGBT, progressive, internationalists) have seized power in the federal government and want to build ‘Stalinism’, ‘communism’ or a ‘corporate state’ in the USA.
Therefore, when speaking with Tucker Carlson about liberalism, I had to consider all three meanings of the term, and as evidenced by the comments, the American audience understood me perfectly. If I had to explain all this in more detail, Tucker Carlson would have indeed aged and greyed as in the memes. For the Russian audience, I would have had to organise a whole course on liberalism, its history, its origins, its mutations (from the right-wing Hayek to the left-wing Soros — just at the very last stage), and the contemporary political semantics in the USA. And then another course, showing that all this has nothing to do with us — then why was the first course needed, those who understand the second might ask? Actually, this is what I have done repeatedly — in the Centre for Conservative Studies at Moscow State University, in the Tsargrad Institute, in the Higher Political School named after I. Ilyin, in countless lectures, courses, videos (short and long), textbooks, and monographs.
Meanwhile, the American audience is somewhat prepared for my ideas. There was a wild campaign by globalists and left-liberals for my total defamation. Sometimes, I was even called ‘Trump’s advisor’ to make it easier to destroy him. So, for the progressives, wokeists, and liberals, I am the ‘most dangerous philosopher in the world’ and ‘Doctor Evil’ on a global scale. Meanwhile, Dimitri Simes Junior, son of the outstanding political expert, thinker, and analyst Dimitri Simes Senior, who grew up in the USA, told me that he was introduced to my books (in English, naturally — at least a dozen of them were translated and published in the USA) in school. His classmates showed him Geopolitics or The Theory of a Multipolar World from under their coats, boasting about their access to dissident literature — until a woke African-American lesbian noticed and reported them, leading to their inevitable expulsion.
I have never had such a format of communication with Americans as in the case of the interview with Tucker Carlson, especially after the historic, phenomenal interview of our President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin with this world’s number one journalist. Globalist media only show what is beneficial to them, and everything I say is definitely not beneficial to them. Therefore, they say all sorts of made-up and absurd things in my name. Alternative American media, where I appear from time to time, do not have broad coverage and are themselves in a semi-legal position — like the outspoken freedom-loving journalists Alex Jones and Larry C. Johnson. Tucker Carlson is an exception. He and his programme are still American mainstream, while his views are in complete contradiction with the totalitarian dominant ruling elite of the ‘progressives’, ‘woke’, ‘liberals’, and ‘anti-fascists’.
(translated by Constantin von Hoffmeister)
Tucker Carlson's interview with Alexander Dugin is s must watch
https://tuckercarlson.com/the-tucker-carlson-encounter-aleksandr-dugin/
Very interesting that he manages to understand the nuanced semantics of American politics. I’d love to get an outside perspective and listen to his course of the history of Liberalism.