DRAIN THE SWAMP

What is the structure of the Swamp?

First of all, the Swamp is an ideology – Liberalism. We need a Nuremberg Trial for Liberalism, the last totalitarian political ideology of Modernity. Let us close this page of history.

Secondly, the Swamp is a special post-modernist culture. It is based on the decomposition of any entity through digitalization, obligatory schizomorphism, and so on. To drain it signifies restoring the Apollonian unity of art. Art should return to holism.

Thirdly, it is transnational global capitalism. This is the material motor of the Swamp. It is loans and the Federal Reserve System printing poisonous green bills. We need to end all of this and return to the real productive sector and mercantilist approach.

Putin and Trump could be on the same side in this troubling new world order

"Let me be clear: I do not mean to suggest that this bearded neofascist is heading for a photocall at Trump Tower or the Oval Office. The evidence to date suggests, shall we say, that the president-elect is not much interested in ideas or intellectuals. Asked in July if he had time to read, he replied: “I never have.” Which is candid, if depressing.

My point is that the battle of ideas matters even when those in power pour scorn upon it, or claim themselves to be no more than practitioners of “common sense”. Discourse analysis teaches us that ideas are the magmatic force of public life, rumbling beneath the feet of the mighty, shaping their actions and the popular response. As Isaiah Berlin put it, ideas “are indeed the central complex of relations of a man towards himself and to the external world”.

In Dugin’s case, the “central complex” is a mess of imperialism, bigotry, reactionary religiosity and a loathing of social diversity. To confuse matters further, he has borrowed from postmodernism the idea that “truth is a matter of belief … there is no such thing as facts”. In the year of “post-truth politics”, this contention resonates all too deeply. Worse, Dugin’s ideas help to explain why the present tensions between the US and Russia may be distracting us from a potential convergence between the two mighty powers – and not the good kind, either.

Imagine a world in which the old left-right divide and the east-west conflict of the cold war era were practically irrelevant. The conflict of consequence would be between traditionalists and pluralists, between internationalists and nativists, between autocracy and liberalism. This is Dugin’s world. In it, Trump and Putin, for all their differences, would be on the same side.

The core lesson of 2016 is that there is nothing inevitable in the march of progress. But it is equally true that the ultra right has no providential monopoly on success. Vile as they are, Dugin’s ideas constitute a half-mad manual to what is happening today, and may happen tomorrow. It should be read with care by all those who are planning the counterattack.