Wie sich die US-amerikanische Rechte der russischen annähert
The alignment with MAGA involves more than geopolitics. The ideas that have emerged to justify the governance of Mr Trump and Mr Putin—neither of whom are renowned philosophers—bear striking resemblances. Within the West, the international coalition of nationalist conservatives, stretching from Trumpism in America to bolsonarismo in Brazil to Orbanism in Hungary, rejects the basic precepts of enlightenment liberalism, like individualism and the universality of human rights.
This critique is shared by Russian justifiers of Mr Putin, who see an alliance against the decadence and depravity of liberalism. They disdain globalism and wokeness, which they see as the logical endpoint of Western liberalism. To prevent global hegemony of any kind, national conservatives in America, France, Hungary and Italy argue that the sovereignty of the nation-state must be supreme. Whereas Mr Dugin once argued that Russia ought to create an axis with Germany and Japan (“dismembering” China in the process) to stand up to American hegemony, he now recognises that such efforts are unnecessary. “Each day it becomes more and more evident that USA and Russia are on the same wave, but EU-globalists are on the opposite one,” he wrote recently on X.
You might think there would be irreconcilable differences between the MAGA and Russian right, since Mr Dugin is straightforward in his advocacy for an authoritarian state unified with the Orthodox Church, even suggesting the restoration of the oprichniki, the tsarist secret police established by Ivan the Terrible. “Should we not recognise autocracy, patriarchy and the authoritarian system not only de facto, but also de jure? Shouldn’t the Church and the institutions of traditional society regain their dominant position in society?” he wrote in 2022. The nationalist conservative movement in America and Europe, however, is couched in majoritarian populism—expressing the democratic will of people while imposing ever-fewer limits on the authority of their elected representatives. In America the goal is to smash the liberal state. “In the Russian case, the state is the embodiment of the nation. It’s not the case in the us. Trump is dismantling the federal state; Putin’s goal is to reinforce the state,” says Marlene Laruelle, a professor at George Washington University.
Steve Bannon, a former adviser to Mr Trump, has also cited Traditionalist thinkers like Julius Evola; he and Mr Dugin spent eight hours speaking to each other in a hotel in Rome in 2018, writes Benjamin Teitelbaum in his book “War for Eternity”.