Varn Vlog
Abandon all hope ye who subscribe here. Varn Vlog is the pod of C. Derick Varn. We combine the conversation on philosophy, political economy, art, history, culture, anthropology, and geopolitics from a left-wing and culturally informed perspective. We approach the world from a historical lens with an eye for hard truths and structural analysis.
Varn Vlog
Boundless and Bottomless (Special): Jay Rogers on Dugin's Fourth Political Theory
What happens when a Protestant Christian delves into the philosophy of Russia's most controversial thinker? Jay Rogers, a heart transplant survivor and longtime student of Russian culture, takes us on a fascinating journey through his engagement with Alexander Dugan's Fourth Political Theory.
Having traveled extensively throughout Russia and Ukraine during the pivotal post-Soviet years, Rogers brings unique firsthand experience to this conversation. He explains how his observations of Christianity's revival among the Russian intelligentsia and his disillusionment with mainstream Western media narratives led him to explore alternative political perspectives.
Rogers artfully unpacks the connections between Dugan, Samuel Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations," and Alexander Solzhenitsyn's prophetic warnings about Western liberalism. He argues that these thinkers anticipated our current global shift from nation-states to civilization-states—a transformation reshaping international relations before our eyes.
At the heart of this discussion lies a profound critique of liberalism's impact on Christianity. Rogers suggests that the liberal emphasis on individual autonomy fundamentally contradicts the community-centered teachings of scripture. This realization helped him understand why traditional values are making a comeback across political lines, creating unexpected alliances between previously opposed groups.
Perhaps most compelling is Rogers' nuanced view of cultural diversity. Drawing from his experiences as a teacher in Florida, he rejects both xenophobia and liberal multiculturalism, instead advocating for a world where distinct civilizations can coexist and learn from each other while maintaining their unique identities.
Whether you're politically conservative, progressive, or somewhere in between, this conversation challenges conventional categories and offers fresh perspectives on our rapidly changing world. Discover why engaging with challenging thinkers like Dugan might be essential for anyone seeking to understand—and shape—our collective future.
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Host: C. Derick Varn
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Thank you, hello and welcome to of Media House International from a Protestant Christian perspective which, for my show, will be a pretty different viewpoint from what you normally hear, which is a mixture of socialist and socialist Catholics. So how are you doing today, jay?
Speaker 2:Pretty good, pretty good. How are you doing?
Speaker 1:I'm doing well.
Speaker 2:And thank you very much for having me on. I really appreciate it. I've been following your Dugan series for quite a while. I think I've seen all of them. I haven't paid really close attention to everything because they're long and sometimes I drift off, but I have watched all of them all the way through, so they're interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I appreciate that. So I found your take on Dugan particularly interesting, because the majority of critiques I've seen of Dugan from other conservatives have been, frankly, neoconservative driven or even pandering to using him as a figure to demonize Russia or to demonize the Trump administration. To demonize the Trump administration and while I'm pretty critical of both the Trump administration and Russia, I have found that to be a particularly dishonest move in discussing Dugan's influence, which is even hard for me to ascertain what it is in Russia itself, it seems. Yeah, I hear very different things from Russian speakers about whether or not he's of any importance or not. But I was also interested in the theological takes because, for all of his flaws and there's a lot of focus on his early period as a kind of weird esoteric quasi-Satanist he is a theological thinker, even if not a very consistent one, even from an Orthodox Christian perspective, and I'm putting my biases out on the table there. But I wanted to get your take. How did you get interested in Alexander Dugan and why does it matter to you?
Speaker 2:I'm not going to go into a huge amount of detail about my Christian background, but I was raised Catholic and I basically became evangelical, like a lot of young people do, through a born-again experience in college. And it was actually after I graduated from college I started asking a lot of questions about life. You know, I think when you're young life is about pleasure and about just generally, you know, feeling good about yourself and whatever. And then suddenly you hit reality like life hits you hard and you realize life's hard. You know some people might get married and have kids and they realize, oh, am I going to have to suffer through this for 20 years, this sleeplessness and all this kind of stuff? I had some divorces in my family and I just started asking questions about you know, can I actually get married and have a normal life and not have to have heartache and that type of thing? So I ended up kind of searching.
Speaker 2:I was interested in the Bible and theology when I was younger. Actually when I was in college, I read. I didn't. I was not a like. I'm not as well versed in philosophy as you are. I did take a couple of philosophy classes. You know I read things like First Meditations on Philosophy by Descartes and we started off with Plato's Last Days of Socrates. So, like the basics that I've read that little series called you know Philosophers in 90 Minutes I don't know if you've ever seen that. So I'm kind of like I. I have a basic, you know, generic understanding of who they, who the philosophers, are. You know, I grew up watching Monty Python. I memorized the philosopher song, so at least I know all their names. You know that kind of thing. So it's just, you know, I'm very like, kind of a rube when it comes to philosophy. But I kind of a rube when it comes to philosophy, but I kind of come into it through reading people like Thoreau and literature and then moving backwards.
Speaker 2:So after I became a born again Christian, I started going over to Russia and Ukraine quite often. So it was like 1985. And by 1991, I was going to Russia and Ukraine and I got involved with a Christian newspaper which is my. The website that we run today is called the Forerunner that was the name of the newspaper and we had this idea what if we did a Russian version of the Forerunner? Someone told me that you know, you could actually raise money for this and I was very skeptical about it. I said you know, I can see how it would cost me a lot of money. I don't see how I could make money off of it. But then, lo and behold, I was able to do that and we were actually able to do it a lot faster and a lot more efficiently than a lot of like highly well-known ministries, because I just found the right people and I let them do everything. And I said you understand this system. I have no idea what the Soviet system, how it works. I'm completely baffled by it. And they said you know, you don't understand this. You've only been here for a month. We've been here our whole life and we don't understand it, you know. So I, I got to work with very smart kids from Kiev, ukraine. Um, one of the students was actually like one of the top math students in the entire country. He was very brilliant kid, and another guy was very good with business. It was a good combination of a few other people. So we did that for about 10 years and we also did video projects and things like that.
Speaker 2:So I used to go back and forth between Russia and America. I was not there for more than a month at a time, maybe six weeks at a month, but I spent several months out of my life there. When I came back to America I would read the news and I would say this is like a completely different picture in the mainstream media about what's going on in the former Soviet Union than what I've seen. You know, I heard the 1996 election there. That's the one where the United States put a whole bunch of money behind Yeltsin and he won the election and I thought he was going to lose because I knew that there was this other guy named Zhirinovsky which was a nationalist.
Speaker 2:I was also somewhat of a fan of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Although I haven't read all his books, I read one book he did, called From Under the Rubble, which is about Christian dissidents in the Soviet Union predicting the second Christianization of Russia. This is back like in the 70s and they're writing about this, and so I did a few articles on that. I wrote some articles against the dispensationalist view of Russia that they were going to be Gog and Gog in the end times and that type of thing. So I kind of come from things from what you would call like an optimistic, millennial or post-millennial viewpoint, where I do believe that there is such a thing as Christian progress in the world. There is such a thing, as you know, you look at how America was founded and so on. There were certain principles of government, certain very important books, like you look at things like what's the guy's name who wrote Wealth of Nations? And there's Lex Rex and books like that. So I always have been very interested in history and I'm an English teacher, so I was interested in literature as well. So that's my perspective on Russia.
Speaker 2:Some of my best friends are from Russia and Ukraine. Obviously, I was in Ukraine and Russia about an equal amount of time. I was in Ukraine 10 times and in Russia 10 times, a total of 12 trips and what I found was that when they talk about the russian soul, that's a real thing, like if you make a friend of a russian or a ukrainian, they're your friend. This is the kind of person you could call up in the middle of the night. I have a problem. They're going to drop everything. They're going to try to help you out. Um, and it's it's not really easy to connect with people, but once you do connect with them, they take the relationship very seriously. So I just really kind of like fell in love with the culture there when the Russia-Ukraine conflict happened. I'd already written a lot of articles about, you know, christianity and culture. You know Dr Francis Schaeffer is, you know, another favorite author of mine. I'm somewhat into the Reconstructionist authors. I've cooperated with them. Don't agree with every single thing that they say, but I basically have that worldview kind of like an optimistic worldview we're going to move forward, the church is going to be around for a long time and we have to do some good in the world. That's kind of my worldview.
Speaker 2:So when the Russian-Ukraine conflict happened, or about two years before that, a friend of mine from Ukraine came over, one of the guys that we worked with, and he was telling me about how I was saying how is the country going? Is the reforms happening? And he said, no, things are worse than ever. And I said well, what do you mean? He said, well, you know, there's there's a war, a lot of people left the country, the general health of the country is down, the economy is down. I said, really, because what I've heard is that, you know, things are are kind of reforming. And he said, no, no, no, it's worse than ever. He actually mentioned his younger brother was sent to the front lines in Donbass, and so these are guys that are, like you know, half Russian, half Ukrainian. So you can imagine, you know, having your younger brother sent to the front line as a Russian, ukrainian fighting Russians, and so I was like I didn't know that that war was still going on. I thought that they had amends, agreements and it was solved.
Speaker 2:And I heard I was not really paying attention to it that much anymore because I hadn't been for a few years. I, I think the last trip I took was 2007 now this was like 2017 and um, he started telling me a lot of things that sounded like conspiracy theories. You know that, like um, basically that there's a ukraine project that the west has where they want to. So he's coming more from a Russian nationalist viewpoint. But he's in Ukraine, growing up in Kiev, so a lot of people in Kiev speak Russian. Things have changed a lot in the last 10 years, but there's always been like a strong Russian culture in Ukraine, and so we were doing the newspaper in Russian, you know, out of Ukraine and going to all the different republics like Russia, kazakhstan, belarus and places like that. So I, when the Ukraine war happened, he gave me a whole rundown on it and I thought like, well, this isn't like anything like what I'm hearing.
Speaker 2:Then I ran across Tucker Carlson, colonel Douglas McGregor and and another couple of YouTube bloggers. I just started watching. I just at that point I had turned off the mainstream media for watching news. I had. Another thing I should mention about myself is I'm actually a heart transplant patient. I had a heart transplant in 2020. I'm actually doing really well. I'm like one of the you know, outstanding examples of recovery after a heart transplant, but that was a very traumatic experience in my life. So in 2020, I turned off the news. I couldn't stand to watch the election. I couldn't stand to watch everything about January 6th. I couldn't stand to watch everything about COVID. So I just started watching a lot of video bloggers like yourself and other people, and that's where I started getting a lot of my information from.
Speaker 2:So I started getting like this alternative view on ukraine, and one of the writers that came up was samuel p huntington wrote a book called clash of civilizations, and then I was looking for people like samuel p huntington and I found this other author called alexugan on Scribd, which has now become everywhere. I started reading it. Didn't understand it at first. I read another author called Ray Dalio, which comes from an economic viewpoint. All three of these authors had this viewpoint that the world is changing, that we're going through not just a 100-year shift or a 50-year shift but more like a 500-year shift. It's like things are moving away from the nation-state idea of how nations should be from a liberal point of view and kind of back more toward a pre-modern civilizational state. So there's all these writers and authors that write about the rise of civilization states. Bruno Machas is another one, although Bruno Machas hates Alexander Dugan, you know. But they're both civilization status guys and the idea is that there is really this ship going on in the world.
Speaker 2:I've always been interested in that from a Christian perspective, just because there's an opportunity in that, because people are moving back toward, you know, not so much conservatism but more like traditional culture, traditional values, family religion, that type of thing as a basis for politics. I just found dugan very compelling. I don't agree with everything he says. I don't understand everything he says, but I found a lot of it just really resonated with me and even things I thought that I disagree with him on. I've kind of either come around on, or I've developed an understanding of it, that he doesn't actually mean exactly that, but it's something slightly different. I think the first time I heard him he was talking about how he felt Calvinism was evil and the United States Protestant not that that were evil, but he doesn't see that. But then he's kind of in recent months, even in the last year or two, he's come around and said that if the United States is going to have a civilizational logos, it has to be Protestant Christianity. I just find it very interesting to be Protestant Christianity. I just find it very interesting.
Speaker 2:And then recently, you know, he did interviews with Tucker Carlson and a couple of other people that people might know. Judge Napolitano did an interview with him and so on. So he's really been coming up there and, like you said, there are people who really see him as dangerous, you know, like Glenn Beck, for instance, and so on. I listened to glenn beck talk about dugan and I said, well, he doesn't sound like he's read anything by alexander dugan. You know, that's that's. So I wanted to put something together to try to explain it to people and I just ended up with this very massive book that that I put out, and uh, so that's what I'm here to talk about.
Speaker 1:Hmm, I think one of the interesting things that your departure signals to me, your departure from like a kind of, I would say, semi-apolitical conservative Christianity semi is doing a lot of work there, admittedly, christianity Semai is doing a lot of work there, admittedly is that, you know, the kind of tacit assumptions of Reagan fusionism really is over, like you know, and I also, you know, while I don't necessarily have the same optimistic look about the rise of civilizational States, I actually have also thought that the nation state has become an increasingly unviable project for a variety of reasons which I would say and I come from the from the left-wing point of view, as you know. But I would say I would even agree with one presumption of, like someone like Patrick Deneen about this that the contradictions of liberalism today made obvious in the nation state, both you know, exclusion and inclusion, constantly reinventing yourself while trying to maintain some kind of consistent political tradition. Republicanism that is increasingly removed from any civic engagement, and I mean republicanism with a small r and really is kind of a quasi-democratic way of administering just a quasi-democratic state, just a quasi-democratic state. And one of the things that I find so fascinating right now is and I think Dugan's complaints about the West actually speak to. This is that I think all sides of American political life right now think they're losing somehow, think they're losing somehow and there really isn't a coherent civilizational message that you can derive out of liberalism other than enlightened self-interest.
Speaker 1:And when I was reading Dugan's Fourth Political Theory, I reject a lot more of it than you do, having skimmed your book. But I was struck by how true that base presumption of his politics feels even to me that the liberal tradition as we've understood it has nullified itself to the point that all that is really left is as atomized self-interest, and sometimes that's expressed in individual self-interest and sometimes is expressed in community AKA usually identitarian and racial self-interest. But it is just. Those are the two forms really left to you, and nationalism as it's been traditionally understood will have an appeal because of the alienation that that brings up. But also it's going to be too limited, because what's your racial basis for a state? And the other thing that Dugan speaks to, that I would agree with. You know we can talk about what I disagree with, but that American racialism has a Christianity shaped hole in it and some people will use that to blame Christianity. I think it's a lot more complicated than that to blame Christianity. I think it's a lot more complicated than that.
Speaker 1:But as you know and I trace this on a very long history, I go back all the way to like the fall of Constantinople. But as Christendom's identity was subsumed in the end of the 15th century, the 15th century Europeanness and then whiteness was brought up as a way to hold it, to hold that civilization together. And I think Dugan's right, it doesn't really work, like it's not something that's viable. Dugan has different, probably different reasons for me, from thinking it's not viable, but I think he is correct that that you know that racialism is not going to be anything can hold a society together. So, and I think you even see this in the way that liberals both characterize sometimes accurate, sometimes misac, sometimes unfairly the MAGA movement, as you know, just alt right right Nationalists Cause I was like well, even a lot of them know that white nationalism is not a viable project in North America.
Speaker 1:Like you know, sam Francis, you know from my perspective an uber reactionary, but nonetheless he admitted that in like the 90s. So it does seem that this has an interesting perspective. Now I'm interested in your particular theological slant here. For those of my listeners who don't know Protestant Christian background at all. You do kind of know, you do need to kind of know, the difference between premillennialism, which is what most of us were exposed to in media in the 90s and early aughts. Post-millennialism, uh, which has its own many forms of it, but I think was often used by liberals like jeff charlotte to scare people into thinking that there was a common theocracy in america, right?
Speaker 2:um.
Speaker 1:I'm familiar with jeff charlotte very well so yeah, uh, yeah, I am, I am there's a whole thing about.
Speaker 2:If you throw a rock into a pack of dogs, you know which one you hit by what. Who yelps the loudest? That's really interesting that, like the, the post-millennial reconstruction is a very small group, like very, very small group, but there are people that are terrified and that's always interested me. You know like what? What are they? What do they know? You know, it's kind of a funny thing. So you want me to to give you my background. Could I ask your background first, because I've heard you allude to it a couple of times and, if I'm not mistaken, I think that you said that you came out of somewhat of a fundamentalist background. Or am I confused by that?
Speaker 1:no, actually not at all. I come out of a catholic background, um, and a jewish background, so I'm ethnically Jewish. My mom was a Jewish convert and my but she was raised Catholic. She reverted back to Catholicism, so I grew up in a Catholic, mostly Catholic family with some with some very strict Orthodox Jews in my family.
Speaker 2:Well, it must've been interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I have nephews that are Jewish, so anyway, go on. Sorry.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so, but I have. But I grew up in the deep South and you can't not, you can't. You know, if you're in Georgia and you don't understand Protestant Christianity, you don't understand your neighbors.
Speaker 2:I grew up in Framinghamachusetts um italian catholic, irish catholic neighborhood. I'm half portuguese, half irish, swedish, you know, um, so you know the next door neighbors had nine kids. Five kids across the street. Six kids, five kids the johnson's next door were protestant. They had to. We all went to catholic ccD classes together, um group with that and I.
Speaker 2:So I would say that my parents were not strict Catholics, but they weren't liberal either. They were kind of like in the middle Um, they didn't take the Bible literally. I did, for some reason, I don't know why. I just felt like if it's just the word of God, then I just felt like, if it's just the word of God, then I just kind of reasoned things through and I became interested in Christian books.
Speaker 2:When I was in high school kind of had the typical, you know, 1970s, rebellious years. And when I was older, like I said, I started asking questions and wound up in assemblies of God Church. First I'd read a book called the Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey when I was 13 years old and I became a mini prophecy expert. And then I actually heard the seminar 10 years later as an adult at age 23, and said this makes absolutely no sense at all. This is crazy. And then I just went on a search to discover what theological basis there was, and I knew that there were other. Let me give you a real quick rundown. If you look at the book of Revelation, the one thing that people always want to know is who's the Antichrist, who's 666. If you go to a Catholic Bible, like one I have, they'll give you a footnote and they'll say that some people say that this was Nero, other people say it's a symbolic number that you know. Six is imperfection, seven is perfection. It's man who's imperfect, trying to become like the Trinity. You know that type of thing. So I knew that there are other ways of interpreting and so I just started reading a lot on it and the view that I came to is like partial, preterist, post-millennialism.
Speaker 2:I think that when John wrote Revelation, he was writing about situations going on in the Roman Empire at that time, either under Nero, which is the early date view, or under Domitian, which is the late date view I take the early date view and that he was writing about this persecution that he witnessed and also about the war on Jerusalem. And then there's applications of the book of Revelation that Christians can get comfort from, like people in persecution and whatever. But basically it's not a book about the end times per se. I mean it does refer to that in the later chapters, but it's a book about contemporary politics in Rome, but in very figurative language because they were under persecution and it's part of a whole genre of apocalyptic, which is all you know. There's a whole. If you understand it, you can start to interpret the book. So that's my theological background on that.
Speaker 2:As far as other things, I attended a church in Sanford, florida. I'm in Kissimmee. Rc Sproul is a fairly well-known theologian. He's a Calvinist, really into the Puritans and Jonathan Edwards and things like that. I went to school at UMass, amherst, right next to Northampton, where Jonathan Edwards was from, and I'm interested in the Puritans and that whole era and realizing that they were very imperfect but they also are a lot more influential than people realize that they were and that there's a lot of things that we should reclaim, like especially their whole sense of community.
Speaker 2:You're a communist or a neo-marxist, I guess, and if you go back and read a book like um, uh, you know john winthrop's a model of christian charity. He talks all about this communitarian not a communist world, but a communitarian world where they're rich, there are people who are rich and there are people that are poor but they care for each other, and that no one will lack that type of a thing. So I think that that's missing from the political christianity of today. There's a tendency of christians to say, well, there's no political solutions, but then when they go to try to reform the society, it's you know, politics is the answer and the Republican Party is our vehicle. So I stopped voting Republican for president, like in 1992.
Speaker 2:I got to know a guy named Howard Phillips who was the founder of the Constitution Party, very similar to libertarians but with a kind of a Calvinist Christian twist to it, although they include everybody, and I've always supported their candidates, and anytime there's a third candidate running that's better than the main two parties, I go with them.
Speaker 2:So that's where I am politically and theologically I would say that I haven't been all over the map, but I've kind of like seen. I've been in different types of churches and I tend more towards, you know, protestant, reformed, kind of like more like the tradition of the Reformation. I was involved with the Pentecostal charismatic church movement for a while, so I'm kind of open to that as well, and I'm Catholic in my heart, you know, because I grew up catholic. So I I I saw my wife is catholic, by the way, she's from venezuela and um, so I'm I'm not ecumenical like a liberal ecumenical, but I believe that you know in the basics of christianity that there's a lot more similarity than there are differences, so we all agree on things, a lot more than people realize that we do. That's kind of like where I'm coming from.
Speaker 1:Yeah, one of the things I think is very interesting about your book other than Dugan himself, who's talked about Samuel Huntington? You actually zoom in on that connection. I have in my discussions too, but I think when I hear people talk about Dugan they I don't know. I mean there's all this like he's Putin's Rasputin, whatever weird thing. And I'm like one of the fascinating things about Dugan is, while he's very informed and in an almost 19th century Russian worldview, he is also very aware of American political science, including political realism. I mean he seems very versed in Morgenthau and those people, and he's also pretty well versed in Huntington. And why do you think so many people miss the connection between Samuel Huntington and Dugan? Because I do not hear it commented on enough and I think that does make Dugan make more sense.
Speaker 2:They just don't, they're just not literate. Basically, I think is what it is. I mean, I listened to you guys and I was blown away because you're talking about Dugan and you're throwing around a lot of the jargon. I have to look all these words up, you know, like you talk about atomization or dividuation rather than individuation, and I was, I was having to. You know, in Millerman's translation of it, I'm looking up the philosophers, like who is this guy? You know, I've never heard of him before and so I'm listening to you guys talk about, I'm going like, well know, you actually are throwing around these words and taking this quite seriously.
Speaker 2:You have to understand that Huntington was a professor at Harvard in the 60s and 70s, all the way through the 90s, and there was a speaker at Harvard in 1978 called Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and so Huntington would have heard this speech and I've read this speech. It's called A World Split Apart. It was a commencement address he gave at Harvard and he says there's a concept of the third world. Thus we already have three worlds, talking about how the world needs to understand each other. He's saying you know, the world constitutes a self-contained world full of riddles and surprises to Western thinking. As a minimum, we must include in this China, india, the Muslim world, africa, if we indeed accept the approximation of viewing the latter two as uniform. For 1,000 years Russia belonged to such a category. And then he mentions Japan. And the eighth civilization he mentions is Israel. So those are identical to Huntington civilizations, with the exception of Israel. And Huntington sees Latin America as being separate from the Western world, and maybe a Russian like Solzhenitsyn wouldn't get that distinction. So I really believe that Huntington, if he didn't get that from Solzhenitsyn, he got it from other thinkers like Solzhenitsyn, and he may have been sparked by that, because 10 years later he comes out with his own thesis on civilization states. So that's number one. And I've heard people talk to Dugan and they think that he's this fascist and he's a communist fascist. And he mentions his great admiration for Solzhenitsyn and Huntington. Solzhenitsyn, in fact, was much more of a nationalist than Dugan was, and that's another thing people don't get. Solzhenitsyn was lionized by the West until people actually understood what he was talking about. And then they kind of like pushed him off to the corner because he was so conservative I was. They kind of like pushed him off to the corner because he was so conservative.
Speaker 2:I was in a flat in Moscow in 1995, I think it was and this program came on TV and it was Solzhenitsyn. He had like a daily talk show and he was talking to people about rebuilding Russia and everything like that. And I talked to the family I was staying with and I said, do you know who this guy is? Because I was, like, you know, a big admirer of Solzhenitsyn. And they're like, yeah, he likes he's an old man that likes to tell us how we should be, because Solzhenitsyn really was not that popular in Russia because he was banned. So people didn't know about him and people people who are educated did, but not everybody. He wasn't like educated did, but not everybody. He wasn't like. He wasn't like this figure, like he is here. So I think that's part of it.
Speaker 2:People don't get what the russian culture is all about.
Speaker 2:They don't understand that.
Speaker 2:You know, dugan was actually arrested. He didn't spend jail time like so it's nation, but he was arrested for having anti-communist books. You know, um, you know and um, you know, and his parents, I guess, were um and you know, got implicated with that. His parents were fairly important in academia, so that was like a big deal and then, um, he went through a period of time in which he did try to blend fascism with communism, but it wasn't like the third Reich fascism. He was saying well, the fascists have this good point where they believe in patriotism and they believe in deep culture, like going back to the German. You know the roots of the German culture. That's very good. And that communism, even though he felt that economically it was a failure, he felt that communism had a great deal of worth because it was against racism and it was also against, it was also for the oppressed, that we should help the oppressed people in the world.
Speaker 2:So I listened to that. As a Christian, I go well, that's how I should be. I should be, you know, in favor of the oppressed, against racism. I should have a love for my culture, my family and so on. So that was how I was attracted to him. But I post a lot of things online about Dugan and one of the common things I often get is yeah, you should read him to understand him, but you have to understand this man's very dangerous. But why is he dangerous? Well, because he's a Satanist, he's an occultist, he's a fascist, and I try to show how that's not true, but when people accept a certain narrative, it's very hard to talk them out of it I mean the, the um.
Speaker 1:the interesting thing about dugan's thinking is I don't think many people have dealt with the split between his early national bolshevik stuff, where he was messing around with a cultism like explicitly Um, and this conversion experience that he has, partly because I don't think we think of Eastern Orthodox Christians as having conversion experiences, so um.
Speaker 2:I, I saw. I saw I was there when that was going on. I'm the same age as Dugan is, by the way. We're both 63 years old. I've got some touch-up on the video. I listened to him and it sounds like he was converted in the late 1980s, but then he kind of had. He went through this dark night of the soul type of thing that the Orthodox and Catholics are into, and he didn't really. One of the geopolitics books that he wrote is called what's it called? Geopolitics, and it's the earliest book that he wrote.
Speaker 1:Oh, what's that called in English?
Speaker 2:Yeah, Anyway, he wrote a book that's not available through his publisher.
Speaker 1:Foundations of Geopolitics.
Speaker 2:Foundations of Geopolitics and basically, from what I understand, it's very pro-Russian, nationalist and it's very hard to get. You can't. You can find it as a PDF file, but the group, arctos, that publishes his book now doesn't carry that book, so he's kind of renounced that. So Dugan as of 1996, I think, when he wrote Foundations in Geopolitics is different from the Dugan of 2009, which is when he wrote Fourth Political Theory. And, as you know, as a philosopher, it's unusual for a lot of philosophers to completely flip on some things, you know. So he flipped and he's renounced nationalism.
Speaker 2:I don't think he was ever a racist, but he thinks that. He thinks that that project, the national Bolshevik project I know that from being involved with the constitution party. You start a splinter party and it attracts a lot of weird people. He was really fed up with the people that it was attracting and they were actually saying the opposite things that they started off with. So he broke with the National Bolshevik Party and he started to really look more deeper into the whole idea of civilizational logos and so very mystical, but not like he was before like more of like a lighter kind of a mysticism rather than a dark mysticism.
Speaker 1:Right. Well, I mean, when you read Dugan now, if you read him closely and you take him at face value which, I admit, very few people, even some of his fans in the west, uh don't. Um uh, it is interesting to compare him with uh, the other major figure out of the national bullshit party that is known in the west and that is edward liminoff, and liminoff is, you know, all kinds of interesting in that he was in literary exile in the west for a long time and he was promoted racism, but he also promoted a bunch of people that we associate with liberals today. Um, uh, you know, I think you know he, he was a funder of the exiled, which is where, like Matt Taibbi and um uh, mark Ames and John Dolan, uh and those kinds of people come from, um Taibbi being by far the most famous, and it's, it's been interesting, you know, uh Liminov died in 2000, just before, I think, just before COVID. I mean he didn't die of COVID, it was a complication of surgery, but and that has been interesting compared to the reemergence of Dugan.
Speaker 1:Now, one thing I wanted to ask you, since you go back and forth. I've talked to people who lived in Russia and I have some people who tell me adamantly that Dugan's not important. I have some people who've even told me he is important, but not for Russians. He's important for outreach to other parts of the world, so to the Islamic world and the American world. And I have some people like, oh, actually he does have an influence on United Russia, although maybe a minor one, I don't know. Uh, you've gone back and forth. What is your experience with with, uh, russians and ukrainians?
Speaker 2:responding to dugan I have a lot of russian friends and ukrainian friends. They've all heard of them. If you're to ask the average america on the street who's alexander dugan, they have no idea. 99 of the people, don't you and I do? People that run in our circles do People who listen to Glenn Beck do, because they've been warned about him. I'm sorry. In fact, I look at Dugan's YouTube channel, since he was unbanned and he gets 100 views on his videos, so it's not like he's even well known in the west. Everyone in russia that I've talked to has heard about him. Now let me explain too.
Speaker 2:When I was in russia, I met a lot of very smart young people and I kind of asked the question is everybody this smart like? Why is it that every church I go into, people are so smart and so talented? They're artists and they're computer science majors and they're musicians and they, you know, just like this incredible talent. And it was explained to me that the revival, the Christian revival that happened in Russia in the late 1980s and early 1990s, really hit the intelligentsia. It was actually a class of people in Russia who were, you know, children of university professors and things like that. Because they were thinkers, they were considered to be dissidents. So they formed their own class and Christianity was particularly attractive to them on a philosophical level. But then, when Perestroika and Glasnost hit, there was. You know, as a Christian, I believe that this is the Holy Spirit. I believe that this is something that God did and he raised up these leaders. There are these leaders in Russia. There's one group. I actually know them. They had the number one song in Belarus. It's like this pop song and they're a Christian group. It's not like in America, where we have Christian contemporary music, but they're actually a Christian group that had a number one song on the charts, just because they're incredibly talented people. So I just saw a lot of that.
Speaker 2:So that's the world that Dugan comes out of. He's part of the intelligentsia and I think that among the intelligentsia you're going to have a lot of people that hate Dugan. In Russia there are a lot of people that are ambivalent about him and a lot of people that like him, and there's also different versions of Dugan. There's Dugan the blogger. There's Dugan the university professor. There's Dugan the political scientist. He has different persona that he inhabits. From time to time I'll read something by him and I'll go. That's kind of cringy. You know like he'll do like a tweet or something and I'll go. This is not what I would want to present to people, but then if you read his book, it's actually very, very deep. So I wanted to mention that about the intelligentsia up front because I think that that's important to understand. One of my best friends I mentioned him to her and she said that, yeah, I understand, he's very brilliant and he's written a lot of good things on politics and philosophy, and that's all she knew about him.
Speaker 1:You know, I think that the reason why Dugan is considered important in Russia is not because he's influential, but because he's in tune with the zeitgeist. Yeah, I've actually wondered that too, because some people in the West, when we hear certain phrases that are translated from Russian into English, we're like, oh, that's Dugan.
Speaker 2:And I've always been like maybe that's more Dugan picking up common talking points in Russia, that we just don't get the scary thing is when you listen to prune, or even now g and people in latin america, and they're talking about multi-polarism and they could have gotten that from huntington, they could have gotten it from masha, so they could have gotten it from a lot of different people, but I, I hear it, I go whoa. You know, even like I heard marco rubio talking about you know the unipolar world is dead now. We can't expect that to go on forever. The world for most of history has been multipolar. I've never heard a us senator say that. So I'm wondering are this is? It's filtering, and it's not just dugan, it's part of this civilizational shift that we're seeing, and so you picked up on it earlier than most people did. And he read Huntington and he synthesized a lot of philosophy, heidegger especially, and he was able to, like get some traction on it. I think is what it is.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean the civilizational stuff is quite interesting to me because I think if you read the political realist right now, of both the conservative and the liberal variety, so whether or not you're reading Peter Zion and that's Z-E-I-H-A-N even though, just so, people who want to look it up are John Mersheimer for the more traditionally kind of robust but conservative realist they both agree that the expansionist phase of american empire is over and, unlike in the 90s and aughts, there's no denying that we were an empire right like um um, one of the, the great weirdnesses of of like my background is I.
Speaker 1:You know I am a, a far leftist now but I do come from a, from a kind of brief flirtation with paleo conservatism because of particularly this one thing, and that was they were also talking about like the, the kind of peak imperialism in denial after the Cold War, kind of peak imperialism in denial after the Cold War, and so many of them I think about Pat Buchanan, couldn't justify it anymore after the Cold War was over. It's like, why are we still doing this? You know, the great enemy of Russian communism and specifically, is gone now. Why is this maintained? And yet you're expanding this? And that was an interesting time for someone like Huntington.
Speaker 1:I bring this up because Huntington is a figure kind of like earlier right wing figures like James Burnham, who was important to both the paleo conservative and neoconservative movements.
Speaker 1:For the neoconservative movement he was a rationalization for the war on terror, but you know, and the West versus, you know, uh, islamofascism or whatever. But for the paleo conservative movement it was the, it was, he was a a, a kind of problematic but rationalization of the return to something like a Christendom, um, which they very much liked, um, although one of the things I'll say about my experience in paleo-conservatism is it was not. There weren't that many Protestants in it. It was a very Catholic affair with a few um, I would say Rushdunite, uh, and you would know who that is. But Rushduni I hold out, it's like Gary North, but in general that was not a political theology or a political movement that had a very large sway with Protestants until relatively recently. If you think Trump is kind of a synthesis of Reagan fusionism and paleo-conservatism which I do, but I know that's kind of a controversial position even on the right.
Speaker 2:The way that I see it is that the shift is not so much like, I would say, everything you described according to Dugan this is something new for me is that it's all liberal. Liberal with a capital L, meaning like a libertarian is a liberal, but they're on the right. A classical liberal like a libertarian is a liberal, but they're on the right. A classical liberal like a Thomas Jefferson is a liberal. A federalist like Hamilton is a liberal. Because they believe in individual rights. Right, that's the most important thing. That's, the political subject of liberalism is individualism and individual rights, and what I realized was that for many years, I was trying to synthesize that with Christianity, and what I realized was that for many years, I was trying to synthesize that with Christianity, and one of the things that Dugan made me realize is that they're antithetical. You know, actually, if you look at the teachings of the Bible, the Bible does not teach you to be an individual. It teaches you to be part of a community and to deny yourself and to love others as much as you love yourself, that type of thing. So individualism, I think, in the form of liberalism, is something that's infected Christianity, and I think that a lot of people are starting to wake up to that. So what you see now is not so much like the spectrum from the right versus the left on a horizontal plane, but you see something vertical where it's more like populism versus elitism, and that's the reason why Trump has people in his cabinet like RFK Jr and Tulsi Gabbard and Elon Musk, who are leftists, but they're classical leftists. You see, they're not these. You know they're not these neoliberal or postmodern classical leftists. You see, they're not these. You know they're not these neoliberal or postmodernist leftists, but they're not woke leftists, in other words. And so that's the shift that's happening. Like I think that, like you and I could probably agree on a lot of things. You know someone who's a Christian reconstructionist and a Marxist. You know we could actually go like this is bad over here. Here are some things that we can agree on that are not good and we're going to agree on. We're going to disagree on a lot of things, but there's going to be other things that you know we're going to agree on too. That's the shit that's happening, and I always thought that that right versus left divide was kind of artificial. Anyway, I thought that you know people used to say it's a uniparty. There's not a dime's worth of difference between Republicans and Democrats. You know, republicans want abortion after 15 weeks and Democrats want it all the way to birth. Republicans want a deficit of, you know, $2 trillion a year and Democrats will push it to $3 trillion or maybe sometimes reverse, reverse, you know, maybe the republicans want more of a deficit than the democrats. When you look at actually what they do in real reality, you realize that they're not doing what they say on paper. And so people that's the populist movement, people are waking up to it that it's all a big lie. You know that basically most of what we read in the media is a lie.
Speaker 2:I was talking to a guy in Melbourne, florida. He spent his whole life in the military, in the Navy, and he came to this Christian event that was covered by a newspaper and he read about it in the newspaper and he said this doesn't sound anything like the event I went to. They're slamming it, they're saying all these negative things. It wasn't the event I went to. It're slamming it, they're saying all these negative things. It wasn't what I. That wasn't the event I went to, it was just a very leftist slant toward it. And so he said not long after that he talked to an admiral and he said that you know how much of what we read in the media about foreign affairs and warfare? Is that's true? Is half of it true? And the guy said no. He says well, well, how much is? There's less than that. It's like 60, because it's probably 95 of those made up stuff you know, and that's I really. I really think that that is is correct.
Speaker 2:People follow a narrative and even the facts that they use are forced fit to the narrative and in what we see in media. So a lot of people are waking up to that. People aren't turning on Fox News anymore, although our politicians do. Unfortunately, trump watches Fox News all day. If you can't tell that half his cabinet are Fox News contributors or anchor people from Fox. It seems like I haven't counted them, but there's a lot of them in there, them in there. So it's like there's a disconnect from reality to what's presented to us. So that's the populist movement and that's where, again, I think that you know Dugan is going to continue to be interesting to people. He's starting to write. He wrote some more recent books. He has one called the Trump Revolution recently that he wrote there was the Great Awakening versus the Great Reset, which was targeted toward an American audience.
Speaker 2:And it's very light reading. There's another one that just came out. It's called I'm trying to remember the name of it, but it's very good. It just came out recently, but it has to do with American populism and things like that, and I think that he misses what a lot of American populism is about because he hasn't been here.
Speaker 1:But a lot of the stuff that he does say is going to resonate with people the book I found that a lot of his his portrayals of the American public were actually based on liberal media consensus Cause I was like. I was like, yeah, that's what liberals say. That's not really. I mean, even at me, you know the dirty, rotten Marxist notes. That's not really how Americans actually are. These are what you know, educated people who are relatively isolated from the vast majority of the population and live in high urban, inexpensive urban areas, even when they're downwardly mobile, don't really know what it's like to be in Alabama or Florida or here in Utah.
Speaker 1:And I think one of the things I'll say about the last election is I was unpopular with a lot of my liberal friends for saying, for example, that yeah, the economies during the Biden administration is doing OK if you're a billionaire and it'll do OK, and Trump if you're a billionaire too, um, but the reason why people are mad isn't just ideological. You are just so removed from people having to buy, you know, groceries that have gone up over the course of five years 20, 30%, even though you're talking about it in in brief chunks, where it's experience, where you're statistically describing it as a three to 9% increase, um, and aren't going down while they're you know, while their uh pay went up, uh, ten percent, particularly if they were younger and actually in the lower end of the fields, that the middle actually didn't get that much gain. Um, so of course people are angry and it's weird to pretend that it's all about just like individual racism or even systemic racism, and most liberals can't tell the difference. Um, that's why this is happening. You know, like and and a lot of my, you know I have conservative friends.
Speaker 1:This is one thing I try to tell people on the far left is, if you only know far leftist, you really can't talk to other people. And I, you know that's also true, for, like, evangelicals is all you know is evangelicals. You can't do an outsider test. You have no idea how you sound to people who don't share your worldview. And, um, and I make a big deal out of that because you know, I mean I've been accused of being elitist and a lot of stuff, cause they use a lot of big words and that's fine.
Speaker 2:But you know, I mean I've been accused of being elitist and a lot of stuff, because I use a lot of big words and that's fine. But so you're, you're, you're. Just I'm sorry for your profession right now is why you're a teacher, or I'm a high school teacher. I'm not a college teacher too, so it's like you know, I thought you had some community college or something like that. I do.
Speaker 1:I actually do teach at a community college as well, but it's like a side gig. It's a concurrent enrollment gig. It's not my main job.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I was going to say I'm a teacher and my wife's a waitress, and we're both in our 60s. My wife came here 20 years ago from Venezuela, and so we're not for college-educated people, we're not high earners, but for Florida we are, because we've been doing this for a while. So we have a house and we have some savings. But I understand exactly what you're talking about. I mean, I taught at a Title X school gangs and things like that. So I teach in now is more of a conservative area because I prefer not to teach in that kind of a school anymore. But I know exactly what you're talking about. We're the richest country in the world, but we have people living in poverty. I mean, you can go to a ghetto in Moscow and it's like a lot of other areas of the city and people go yeah, this is the ghetto, I go. I don't. It doesn't look that much different to me. I'll take you to a ghetto in my town, in Orlando. You can see a ghetto if you want ghetto if you want, you know?
Speaker 1:um, yeah, I, I have to. I I have to remind people that and I also have to remind that actually a lot of leftists are very far removed from that. So, like when I'm like, you know, even if you go to like, say you go to atlanta, I'm like, no, go to macon, go to ronald robbins, go down even to the bad side of savannah, that's not the tourist district. Um, go down to close somewhere closer to you jacksonville, florida um, I mean, you'll still see people living in buildings made out of cinder blocks and we're the richest country in the world. And when you're in new york, that does not exist. Um, there's poverty in new york, there's poverty in california. I'm not here to belittle that. In fact, now cal, now California, really is only the super rich and the impoverished because they can't leave.
Speaker 1:But in general, I find that worldview is, on one hand, like people were talking about I'll give you an example of this, and this is where I'm sympathetic to someone like to a lot of right-wingers complaining about left-wingers. We talk about educational equity, but what do they focus on? Universal college education. I'm like, well, universal college education is okay, but I can tell you I've lived in countries that had it. It still favors the rich, honestly, because they can get into the universities. Unless you have infinite money, you can get into the universities and there's, and unless you have infinite money, you can't provision infinite universities for everybody. So and why would you want to either? Um, you know, why aren't you focusing on better high school education with more practical outcomes, like? Why aren't we teaching people multiple skill sets and including things like how to fix their car? You know, like things that were harder and harder to do, and, admittedly, we live in a more specialized world.
Speaker 1:But I think people realize that there's like a fundamental contradiction in liberalism, one of the things that again, I don't want to sound like people who listen to my show. I disagree with agreement Dugan on a ton, but I agree with him that most of the modern world, particularly the American world, is liberal. So when I talk about right and left, I'm really just talking about the right and left of liberalism, not even of capitalism, like of liberalism post the 14th century. There are some political developments in Europe that are not that Demestra, but even I mean, you know people, will you read something like Julius Savola weird guy, I don't. I don't want to sound like an I like him, but, like you know, he's critiquing fascism for being too liberal, um, for being too, you know, for being too mechanistic and too interracial, like biological race and and all this stuff. Um, and you know, a lot of leftists make fun of that, are they like, oh, he doesn't mean it, and I'm like, no, I think he does.
Speaker 2:I think he's very sincere do you think it was the socialist aspect of fascism that he didn't like, or was it?
Speaker 1:it was the socialism, but I think even more it was the racialism, particularly the biological racialism he had. He had, like, this idea of spiritual race, but he kind of believed that like you know, like, for example, I would say, you know from a jewish perspective, that avola was anti-jewishish and that he did not like the Jewish religion. But if you converted to his weird syncretic perennialism he would probably accept you. There's nothing about your biology that was really of concern to him.
Speaker 2:I think too, that a lot of people don't understand that a large part of anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany was political, that they felt that they were enemies of the state. Like Heidegger, as you probably know, had German mistresses, I mean had Jewish mistresses, and they were protected.
Speaker 2:Well, they're safe, because he wasn't a very good Nazi. So he had Jewish mistresses, and so they were protected by him because they figured, well, he's there with him. So you know how bad can they be? Um, so so they're, and they were. There were jewish fascists too. Yeah, I'm not. I'm not defending fascism by any stretch of the imagination, but I'm saying that people have this idea that it was all about race and it was a little bit more complicated than that. There was a mystical element in fascism too, where, like people like Ebola, people like Ebola and Himmler probably would have liked it to go in that direction more. You know, we're really talking about what the Aryan spirit is and that type of thing.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Now I do. I mean I do think from a Christian worldview that would be a problem. But I mean Now I do think from a Christian worldview that would be a problem. But Ebola was not a Christian by any stretch of the imagination. I want to be clear on that to people. Emerges as out of liberalism actually as, as he says, fascism does too.
Speaker 2:Um, as a response to it um, which is my own thing, that's so. So I got one more time because I think that's important say it one more time marxism emerges out of liberalism as a response to liberalism.
Speaker 1:So right, I've got a lot of a lot of the um.
Speaker 2:You know the the right wing, anti-modernist philosophers say that too.
Speaker 1:Right, and I find it maddening when I listen to people like James Lindsay like blame stuff that I think capitalist modernity does on me. He does on me and I'm just like, one, we're not that powerful guy. And two, you're really mad about liberalism but you can't admit that because you're also a liberal and if you have to deal with that, that's going to lead to a crisis. So blame every problem that has emerged out of liberalism on cultural marxism or whatever.
Speaker 2:Um, you know paul god Gottfried is going to ask a question about this because I wanted to kind of explore this fascist angle a little bit more. But what do you think about Dugan's critique of the modernist theories in general? Like he would say that there's really no such thing as a Marxist today, there are neo-Marxists and that the whole idea of you know class warfare and that dialectic has been gutted from Marxism. So what we have now is more of like what they call a simulacra. It's a simulation of Marxism, like what you said in Gromsky's cultural Marxism and social justice and the whole woke type of a thing. So I hear my friends talking about you know, these people are communists. I'm saying no, they're not communists, they're just liberals. And you say they're communists because you don't know what else to call them. You know it's like they're actually more like you than you think that they are. So what do you think about that critique? Do you think that there are still Marxists?
Speaker 1:today. Honestly, my critique would be slightly different than Dugan, in that Dugan would make it about ideology, because he thinks ideology is a major driver, and I would say there is no real Marxist movement, in so much as there is no workers' movement of which Marxists are cleanly in dialogue with. Marxists were never in charge. In dialogue with you know, marxists were never in charge. I mean, like, as much as I would love to tell you historically that Marxists were, you know, emerged from the workers movement, that's not really true. They were part of it, um, but they emerged separately, um, but today there's not. There's no such movement for them to merge with. They keep on trying to create one Um, they being like jack of a magazine and whatever, but a lot of times they're being self-dishonest about it.
Speaker 1:For example, all the talk of union renewal, um has just ignored the bald face stats on, while unions are very much more popular and even conservatives like them a lot more than they used to, no, no one is in them.
Speaker 1:Like, not no one, but like, I think something like what? 11 to 15% of the population is in them, like it's very low, and so when you talk about that, it's just just false to pretend that that, like we're in this moment of this big socialist heyday, I would also say, for example, similar to you, I think, a lot of Marxist Marxist today who were like I like socialism. But when you ask them what socialism is, it's basically progressivism from the 1930s. They think it's the same thing the fdr did. And it's weird to me because, like I'm like, so you believe, what the react, what you know, the reactionaries actually don't think it's fair. I should just say traditional fusionist reagan conservatives say that social goods and socialism are the same thing. You've just flipped it and decided that that that's good, because we do need social goods. Everyone, I think even most, most conservatives now, are admitting that, um, they don't want to necessarily give it.
Speaker 2:we don't they don't see it in front of their face is what it is. Where we are in. We're in a liberal socialist world and they don't realize that this is the air that we breathe. It's kind of like being on the dune planet. You know, you don't realize that you is the air that we breathe. It's kind of like being on the dune planet. You don't realize that you're breathing the spice until your eyes turn blue. One of the things that Dugan has done for me is he's enabled me to see it and I see that I am a liberal modernist because that's what I grew up with and I go. It's incompatible with my faith and I need to really examine it and critique it a lot more than I do you know. That's the reason why I asked you about Marxism is that you know Dugan goes on from there and he says that you know fascism was a critique of liberalism and communism from the right, do you?
Speaker 1:agree with that? I do agree with that. In fact I've gone to the point, because a lot of leftists will say, oh well, fascism is liberalism in crisis. And I have gone on to say it's also socialism in crisis, which pisses pretty much everybody off.
Speaker 2:You can be a socialist and be a liberal, a communist or a fascist. Socialism is an economic system. It's not an ideology necessarily.
Speaker 1:Right and I would agree with that. In fact, I sometimes mock gently because I'm not generally a hater of people's religions my Mormon friends who talk about the good, rugged individualism I'm like your symbol is literally a beehive and you believed in common property until brigham young reforms in the 1890s. I just want to point that out to you from your own history. This is not me picking up anti-mormon stuff. This is just, uh, what you guys believed and you know it tells you how. One of the the critiques I would have, like I would.
Speaker 1:I have a very close friend who I talk to all the time. He's Russian Orthodox, he's American and grew up in an evangelical background, kind of like almost the mirror inverse view in some ways. But you know we live in is so pervaded by by liberalism and then the responses to it that when people see things that are older than that, are more communitarian than that which is most of human history, frankly they don't really know how to respond to it other than calling it communist or fascist, because those are the two things that emerge from from liberalism, particularly after liberalism develops in the full-blown capitalism, and that's this mode of production, blah, blah, blah. I have my marxist way to explain it. I know that dugan would explain it in terms of like ideological essences and stuff. Um, one of the things I realized reading dugan's uh, fourth political theory that I didn't realize the first time I read them, read him is how much I needed to understand Aristotle. Even though you know he's an Eastern Orthodox thinker, he's kind of skeptical of what he would call Western Christian rationalism and their and their, you know, love of Aristotle going back to the Thomas, that he probably disagree with the Western McIntyre.
Speaker 1:Love of aristotle going back to the thomas, that he probably disagree with the western mcintyre. But you do really need to understand aristotelian political categories and stuff, as well as all this post-modernism that he deals with, to get what he's talking about. And I and I've really had to I mean, it's been a challenge to me, um to go back and make sure I understand the greek categories in aristotle in a better way than just to kind of water down liberal form. I got to that, you know, from going to college because I will tell you, you know you said there's no Marxism today. I've actually said I've even gone further than this, like I meet Platonist, platonist and I'm like you're not a Platonist, you, you. You can't exist in that episteme. It's not yours. Like um you. You can pull from platonism you can learn from platonism.
Speaker 1:You can be a neoplatonist although that also is different from what that term historically meant but um, you can't be. You can't put yourself in the mind of plato, similarly with aristotelians. This is actually one of my minor critiques of Lester McIntyre, the kind of Catholic Christian ethic theorist you can't make yourself a Thomist again. That world is not really our world. Even if it reemerges, neo-thomism will have to emerge in response to the liberal world in which you grow. I'm not sure McIntyre would have disagreed with that, but it makes someone like McIntyre, who started off as a Marxist who actually is, really incomprehensible to it.
Speaker 2:I'm going to help out some of your viewers here who are like me. You mentioned McIntyre. Explain who McIntyre is.
Speaker 1:All right.
Speaker 2:One thing that I want when I watch your program you guys throw around. You guys have masters of grand philosophy and if you want to reach people that don't, you should explain who some of these people are, because I currently name.
Speaker 1:That's it so yeah, lester McIntyre is a former Marxist who converted to Catholicism, I believe in the late 60s or early 70s. Who converted to Catholicism, I believe in the late 60s or early 70s. He's from Britain, although he lived most of the last half of his life in the United States. He died at almost 100 years old, I believe a few weeks ago, maybe a month ago. There's been a lot going on this summer so maybe I've dropped some time.
Speaker 1:But he was part of the movement of the return to virtue ethics and he considered himself he was called a communitarian and he didn't really like that. He thought it was too vague. But he was a virtue ethicist and a neo-Thomist who also thought that we had to reckon with the fact that things like human rights he was good on human rights. He would point out that human rights is justified in a mixture of Catholic natural law. And then it's Protestantization slash liberalization in John Locke, slash liberalization in John Locke but that today no one believes in, that. There's no liberal who really believes in even John Locke's form of natural law.
Speaker 2:So how are you justifying?
Speaker 1:all the rights talk Like. You can't justify it theologically. You can't justify it theologically, you can't justify it materialistically. It doesn't logically flow from either Conti and deontology for you know I've used the big words but Kant's ethical system, or utilitarianism, which is what most liberals today really are selectively, which is, you know, the greatest good for the you do, the greatest good for the greatest number who counts as part of the greatest number? And some people, if you like, read Peter Singer, that includes everything, including flies. So how do you make any decision about that? Mcintyre says you don't, you can't, there's no way. The best you can do is pick up the virtues of your culture, see the model and work that out. Once you do that you can actually act fairly objectively. But there's no singular rule from an issue can possibly deduce an ethical norm, and I agree with him on that.
Speaker 1:What I find interesting is he's his project was basically to try to bring back Thomistic philosophy and I'm going to split now I got to explain this to my non-leftist thing. So that is the. You know, that is Aquinas' ethical philosophy of the early modern period that kind of mixes Islamic natural law, traditional Catholic theology and Aristotle together and is the basis of Christian rationalism going back to the end of the medieval period. So my critique of McIntyre was that you can't really bring Thomism back, you can't really bring the world of of Thomas Aquinas back to us. We don't live in that world and there's not really a way to get back to that. And I think I think what's interesting about this, when I deal with someone like Dugan, is I don't know how much, and I and I say this, I I probably not read as much Dugan as you.
Speaker 2:I've read about five books, including I've read just a few books by him. I mean I have a bunch of words I haven't cracked yet. I've looked through them. But Fourth Political Theory is a short one which is called Great Reckoning versus Great Reset. And I've looked a little bit at his ethno. You know this whole thing about. There's two different books on what are they called, anyway, ethno-sociology, which I think that's the whole basis of. And then he has a very long series I'd like to read. That's not in English yet. That's his new Immacchio series, which I find fascinating. So I mainly know a lot about Dugan through Michael Millerman who is his translator. I watch a lot of his stuff.
Speaker 1:So so I can tell you what I've read by Dugan real fast. While I look this up. Let's see, I've read Putin versus Putin, the fourth political theory and the rise of fourth political theory and the Eurasian mission, and I read them oppositionally. I'll also admit that I did not come out to. I was not interested in resuscitating Dugan, Although I do think I've gone back and forth about whether or not I have another conservative friend who tells me Not because he thinks Dugan is dangerous. He says that you know I'm wasting too much time on this. This is not what most American conservatives think and I'm like. Well, but it is speaking to a certain group of people and I want to understand why.
Speaker 2:Okay, I'll tell you one thing there's certain things that scare people about Dugan, like I was. Like we mentioned earlier, I had one Facebook friend that I was going back and forth with and he said you really shouldn't be pushing Dugan on people, he's dangerous. I said why? And so he mentioned the geopolitics book and he gave me all these quotes from geopolitics and I said to him you know that he doesn't actually follow that anymore. So that's number one. The other thing that I found scary about Dugan is he's always, it seems, like he's anti individual rights, and what I realize is that it's not so much that he's against individual rights, he thinks that individual rights don't actually exist.
Speaker 2:You know where individual rights are a construct from the Enlightenment, where people decided that people were born into. You know, people were born as a tabula rasa, we were born like a noble savage, and then we join into a community and we do contract, social theory and all that type of stuff, and then the state exists in order to protect our natural rights. That's not what Christianity teaches. I mean, it might be some of Thomas Aquinas in there, but what I believe that you know biblical law teaches is that we're human beings made in the image of God and therefore human beings have dignity and value. So therefore you can't kill a person and you get your right to life from that. You can't steal a person's property because God gave it to you, that's you shall not steal. You can't violate the sanctity of marriage because it symbolizes God's relationship with the church, and so on, and so our rights are all based on community. Rights don't make any sense unless you come into a community. How can someone violate your rights unless you're in a relationship with people? So individual rights aren't something that you possess. What they are is liberties.
Speaker 2:So Dugan goes through this long thing where he critiques liberalism and tells us all about it At the very end of it is there anything good that we can get from liberalism? Yes, there's one very important thing freedom. And then you go like okay, but he's talking about a different kind of freedom than what people think about when they talk about my rights. He's not talking about the type of rights that are continually broken down. We need to have rights for trans rights and gay rights and animal rights and all the way down the line.
Speaker 2:And so he says that you have that type of a world and other anti-modernist philosophers have said this too. The state ends up becoming your God that has to protect your rights. It creates your rights, it gives you your rights. Therefore it can take them away. So you have to serve the state and then you create what Sartre called a prison without walls. So I found that very compelling. That's the part of Dugan that I like, and that's if you read Alexander Alexander Solzhenitsyn's from under the rubble, he has christian dissonance writing on that about how the idea of rights divorced from christianity becomes this parody right and something that's very impressive towards, you know, the very people that that champion it.
Speaker 2:So so I like that's. That's one of the things that really appealed to me when I was reading it.
Speaker 1:So well, I would actually agree with's one of the things that really appealed to me when I was reading it. Well, I would actually agree with that. One of the funniest things is I have some leftists who've called me a reactionary specifically on this point, because I've been like well, we don't really believe in the justification of human rights as was understood by the framers of the Declaration of Independence. We don't. We just don't believe in that. We don't have a consensus on that, and I want to know how else you're justifying this. And the other thing that I you know I talk about this part of Marx and Engels a little bit that people miss both conservatives and modern Marxists is they actually say in multiple places, rights also entail responsibilities, because you have rights as part of a political community, but you also have responsibilities as part of that political community. That might be unalienable, but it also means you can't get out of the responsibilities either.
Speaker 2:And so you're not completely free, You're bound to something right, you're bound to something You're bound to.
Speaker 1:I mean they would say, you know your class, community and all that. And you know the goal is to the goal in Marxism, at least classically. And again, this is why I'm so much sympathetic, because I don't think this is the goal of modern Marxists, but is to undo class. It isn't just to get revenge on the rich or anything like that. It's so that there is no class and a lot of Christians would be like, well, that's utopian, and I'd be like, well, okay, fine, but that was the goal, whereas today it's often like, well, there should be no billionaires. And I'm just like you know.
Speaker 1:But it is weird. I mean, I live in a world where, on certain things, cultural things, for example, I can listen to Tucker Carlson and get sick to my stomach. And then there's other things he'll talk about, about like stuff like people being able to have houses, and even when he says, like you know, we don't necessarily need to to punish the rich, and I might slightly disagree with him, but he'll say stuff like you know, the fact that there's so much accumulation is obscene, and and I mean, how can I, how can I reject that? Like even from my perspective. I have to admit that, like well, you know I might not share your class, collaboration, as you know, means of how you'd achieve that, but it's not that different from the world I want, and that also entails us having to be in community with each other, and so that's one of the things that has gotten me at like, and not about how to respond to contemporary left-wing politics, because, on one hand, I do think we have to admit that, like when we're talking to conservatives, I don't necessarily share a worldview and I shouldn't pretend to. I think it is when people are like oh, we should like find out what the conservative wants and just appease them to do that, and I'm like well, why would they trust you? Because that feels like a dishonest move. But I do think we have to know where these different groups of people are coming from and where you can and cannot make compromises with people about, and I don't. I think one of the things about the liberal worldview today, in its current instantiation, is that that's impossible for them, because one they don't view, because you're so atomized.
Speaker 1:There's no distinction between personal and political ethics, and thus there there's no distinction between personal and political ethics, and thus there's also no distinction between personal and political motivations. So people say, oh, my politics is my ethics, is my morality, and I'm like that doesn't make sense to me, like those things can't really be the same thing, because your morality is about you, your ethics is about your relations to other people and your politics emerges from the way you, in my mind, have to deal with force in a society and manage that. Those are different things and you have collapsed them into one thing. Um, that is also very you centric. It's very about your individual um, rights, beliefs and manifestations, and ignores that all those exist in a social context. Even though you talk about systems all the time, you don't look at who those systems are made up of and what they are. They aren't just abstractions that you fall into and you know, I think, a lot of people have a very difficult time dealing with that.
Speaker 2:Right? Well, I mean, I mentioned earlier about how I grew up in this neighborhood, where there were nine kids next door and five kids across this little cul-de-sac, and you know what we did as kids was we played kickball and games until it got dark in the summertime, and so everybody knew each other. I can still name all the names of all the kids I grew up with in my neighborhood, whereas today I don't know who my next door neighbor is. I mean, I know their names, I see them once in a while, and so on, so people don't realize how much things have actually changed in the last 50 years or so in this country. So if you're, like, of a certain age, you basically were born into that. You know what you call the atomized world, where everything is so individualistic that your friends are not people next door, they're people online, for instance, you know, and so that's like one of the things.
Speaker 2:When you read Dugan, like one of the things I really liked about him was he talked about the. He has these really odd ideas, but you think that he's completely crazy, and then you realize that there's a lot of wisdom in it, like when he talks about the metaphysics of the washing machine. Do you know that he's completely crazy? And then you realize that there's a lot of wisdom in it, like when he talks about the metaphysics of the washing machine. Do you know?
Speaker 2:that one in russia when I was in russia, um, there were a lot of people living in, you know, one room flats, two room flats, except you're very well off and your parents were a member of the communist party. You might have a three-room flat, you know, and um, they a lot of people didn't have a three room flat, you know, and um, they, a lot of people didn't have a washing machine and they washed their their um clothes in the tub and then they hung them out on the balcony. And then, um, later on, people did get washing machines. So Dugan has this whole thing where he was writing during the time when a lot of people were buying washing machines for the first time and he was saying that you know, you could put your money into a washing machine or you can refuse to do that, but people would say that you're crazy to do that. Why would you not want the convenience of a washing machine? And so he uses that as a metaphor, saying that there's a lot of technological things it's not just technological, it's ideological things that people say are mandatory you have to have this, you have to believe in this or whatever. But we become tied to them. And if so, if someone says no to having a washing machine, people think that you're crazy, like why would you be so backwards as to not want that? And so the application of that comes into when we start to get into like really high tech, the high tech world. You know, when we start to get into like really high tech, the high tech world, you know, when we start to get into AI and to buy, you know biological engineering and things like that that there might come a group of people that can suddenly say no, and so he says that's when you start to get into.
Speaker 2:The fourth political theory is when you start to say like, well, we could actually if we wanted to. There's no reason why we couldn't have a cul-de-sac where all the kids play with each other again, where the parents just said, no, you're not going to play video games, you're not going to have this device, you're going to go outside and you're going to do this. It would be very difficult to do, but people could still do that if they wanted to. Everyone misses it, but no one actually wants to go back to it, which was kind of interesting. So I think that when you talk about things you like, about Tucker Carlson, those are like the everyday common day sense kind of things that he says he likes fly fishing and things like that. You need to get back to kind of an agrarian, localist society. And then there are other things he says that are just conspiracy theories and sound crazy. But that's Tucker Carlson. That's who he is.
Speaker 1:I mean, this is the thing that I really think people have to approximate, and I know that one of the contradictions that I would point out to Marxists is they tend to like capitalist production, capitalist modernity, because it enables you to do things in massive ways. Ironically, what they hate about that is class, but they also kind of admit that social class is necessary for maintaining it. There's no way to run a capitalist society without social class.
Speaker 1:And I know that most Christians wouldn't. They would not say that social class itself is a problem. It's the treatment between social classes that is the problem and that's the difference between the Marxist and Christian worldview. But I do find it interesting I mentioned this you mentioned one thing maybe that you thought about me, my father, towards the end of his life. We were kind of estranged and he was one of those 70s spiritual jumpers. So he was, I think he was raised Methodist. He discovered he was Jewish, so he became very seriously Jewish for a large part of his life. Then he became a Buddhist, as was often the case in the 70s and early 80s, but he died a Joel Osteen Christian. But he died a Joel Osteen Christian. And my response to that was like man, you pick the most self-flattering form of Christianity. And while I'm not a Christian, so who am I to adjudicate what is heretical or not? But as I said to people, both that and also this Jordan Peterson stuff feels like heresy to me, even from a Protestant perspective he's basically a Jungian if John.
Speaker 2:Young was a good Catholic Christian, then you could say Jordan Peterson is too. But I mean, I was really into Jung. I was a psychology major before I was an English major. I was a double major. I was really into Jung at one point and I came to a point where I was saying it's real interesting as a construct. But if you believe that you're, you know, um, I mean I, one of my college professors, knew carl jung's daughter, I mean his niece, excuse me and um, basically, she introduced him to mescaline, said oh yeah, my, my uncle used to do mescaline. All the time. I was like I'm hearing this for the first time. I'm going like it doesn't really surprise me, because if you read Jung, he has these ideas that we have race memories and nobody believes that. That we have race memories, right, but Jordan Peterson does, apparently.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, my favorite thing is Jordan Peters talk about Christianity, but if you ask him just point blank does he believe in no Christian God? He will not answer it positively or negatively.
Speaker 2:Just like a television camera. I went back to Judea in 8030. Could you see Jesus rise from the dead? And he can't answer that question. I can tell you all kinds of things that are wrong with the question. But you know I would. But I would not be a person to say no, it's just a matter of faith. I would.
Speaker 2:I would be a person that would say, historically, I believe that without, without equivocation, that I believe that if I didn't, I would not be a Christian. You know, I had a heart transplant. I had a heart transplant and I did not believe that I was going to come out of it. And I came out of that thinking, you know, if I can trust my doctors to take a heart from a person, put it inside of me, keep me alive and get me into recovery, and if I believe in God, can he raise my body from the dead? I haven't got a big problem with that. It's all your perspective. It is a matter of faith, because you have faith in people and you have faith in God. But it's not like a blind faith where I know it seems impossible but I just believe it. It's more like, yeah, I think God can do that because he's very big and he can do it. That's how I look at these kind of questions, and I don't think someone like a Jordan Peterson should have a problem answering that question in that manner.
Speaker 1:I was going to ask you this One thing I have denoted and maybe this is an unpopular I know it's an unpopular opinion on the left, but I have actually said that I would rather deal with religious conservatives if they're sincere and actually religiously literate at all, than secular ones, in so much that I know what their community basis is, I know what the things we can share and not share are like, like I. I know where the points of compromise are if they are consistent, and you know and I get nobody's consistent. I also will admit that, including all the leftists that I know. But at least there's a common ground of both conflict and also compromise that can be had, whereas with secular rightists I have no idea what we could possibly compromise on.
Speaker 2:Or secular right writers who used Christianity to try to endure themselves to their constituency. There's a lot of that. We all know there is. I actually knew a good friend of mine for a while. This guy named Colonel V Donner. He was not a colonel in the army, his parents just had a sense of humor, but his first name was actually Colonel and he was the founder of act, which was the uh american christian traditional values coalition, and uh, that was the forerunner to the moral majority. As a matter of fact, colonel donor was in. He's also not a very good donor either, even though he does raise a lot of money, but he, um, he was in the original meeting with paul wyrick and jerry falwell when they founded the Moral Majority, and Paul Weyrich had his own group for Catholics and one of the things that they came up with was that they should not talk about Christian values or biblical values or biblical law, even though they all agreed with that. What they should talk about is family values and traditional values. Instead, they actually catered the language to appeal to a broader base rather than what they actually believed. And so Donar came to a certain point in his life where he rejected that. He said you know, he was basically playing games and he became a little bit more serious and then since that time he's kind of gone off into a different direction too.
Speaker 2:But I thought that was very interesting. You know that even like the people that founded these movements that people think are so ferocious, they actually they tailor them in such a way that they will be palatable. You know, there used to be the bumper sticker the moral majority is neither, and that's actually true. It's like there aren't really that many moral Christians that want to uphold biblical law in this society. There's not a majority, and the ones that say they're the majority aren't really that moral.
Speaker 2:And so Colonel Donner actually admitted that later he was not really living a very pious Christian life, and people who know him well, that's the first thing that they mention about him, so I'm not going to tell you the different things but he was not living a life that's that pious. He would admit that himself. So he would joke about it, and I found that very strange at the time because I was sincere and I wanted to believe in this, and so a lot of people would get vision and flake off. I actually wrote a series of articles back and forth with them. We talked about all this stuff, which I thought was very healthy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's a good point. I like your point about the people who cynically use religion, who are secular. I remember realizing that about Leo Strauss. Leo Strauss, major contributor to neoconservatism, basically was like, well, you take religious, but you you use the religious belief as a maintenance of liberal society, not because you think it's real, in fact you don't. It's better if you don't think it's real and you're just doing it for the, for the, you know, non-modern dupes, which is most of the population, which which, again, I find fascinating as an enlightenment philosophy because I'm like well, that does go against the universalism of the enlightenment, right there.
Speaker 1:But also it's interesting that that was a major influence on American conservative thought, including religious American conservative thought, from like the seventies, I'd say till about probably the the end of the Bush administration, and I don't see people having really reckoned with how fundamentally dishonest that is, like you know, because it treats your constituency as dupes, it treats the religion as dupes. I mean I would you know again, if I was religious I would view it as not just heresy but probably idolatry flat out. Again, if I was religious I would view it as not just heresy but probably idolatry flat out. So I am very fascinated with the fact that that was tolerated by so many political religious thinkers for so long and I guess, maybe why do you think that is? I mean, in that sense I get why Dugan had contempt for American Christianity, because he would just see it as a sham.
Speaker 2:Well, he has contempt for the Calvinist foundation, which I don't really understand because I think he just doesn't understand Calvinism that well. Personally. That's kind of a cop-out sort of. But he says that he likes John Wycliffe, however. But he says that he likes John Wycliffe, however. But if you understand what Wycliffe taught, almost everybody who's Protestant sees him as being this forerunner of the Reformation. As far as his doctrines go, everything from Salvation by Faith Alone, sola Scriptura, the whole thing that Protestants teach. That's all on Wycliffe and I'm working on a book right now on that. That kind of brings all that out.
Speaker 2:Um, he also likes, um, he, he doesn't like. He mentions in the book um, briefly, he mentions his disdain for the Methodists and the Dispensationalists and he kind of almost puts them together and the Methodists were like completely different. Like you know, john Wesley was slightly, maybe a generation before the dispensationalists came along, right, and they're completely different groups. So I think part of it's due to ignorance. And then he says that he um, likes, um, like emerson and throw. I like emerson and throw too. I think that they were heretics. But I can kind of see the. You know the influence of like the great awakening. You know jonathan kind of Eckhart's idea that there's an inner light, the more pietistic strain of Christianity. So I think that American Christianity is actually a hybrid of Puritan thought but also this real experiential revivalism that came out of the Great Awakenings. And I think the Puritans were that. Actually, I don't think that they were like these dour, strict Calvinists. I think that they were people that were really sincerely seeking after this inner peace, the ability to worship God on their own, that type of thing. And there are different types of Puritans too. They didn't call themselves Puritans either. That's the interesting thing about them too. They didn't call themselves Puritans either. That's the interesting thing about them. So I think that he probably needs to understand American Christianity a lot more.
Speaker 2:He has said recently, more recently, that if America is going to become a civilization state, that's what it needs to be based on. It's not going to be Orthodox, it's probably not going to be Roman Catholic, unless we get a lot of Latin immigrants or something like that, which is another possibility. So America has always been a hybrid of different strains of Christianity. We're not really that much like Europe. Europe is very culturally religious, but not pietistically religious. In America, we're very pious and very spiritually religious, but Christians don't want to have that much to do with the culture, necessarily, and then when we do, it's a mess.
Speaker 2:Like you said, people get very confused as to what the role of politics is and that type of thing. This is one of my roles, this is one of my passions is to try to teach that to people, and so that's where I find Dugan very useful is that we do need to move out of liberalism into a fourth political theory. We can't go back to what the Puritans were. It's not going to work, but we can look at some of the foundations that they had and embrace those and then invent something new. You know, one of the things I mentioned to people is that if you were to go back to the time of the founding of America and you try to describe what the capitalist system was to them, they wouldn't know what you were talking about. And yet that's what we get from American Christians. Oh yeah, you know the Puritans were capitalists. Well, they weren't actually, and what we have today isn't really capitalism. What we have is kind of like this corporate capitalism where the government basically it's basically the elite business class and the permanent political class get together and they give lots of money towards big corporation. That's not capitalism, you know. They call it corporate capitalism. You can also call it corporate socialism too. So I think that there are a lot of Christians that are waking up to that now. So this is one of the reasons why Dugan might be relevant is to say that we can break out of that model and into something else that goes beyond that. If you were to talk to people in the late Middle Ages like around you know, the time of the Puritans or William Shakespeare about Western democracy, they wouldn't know what that is either. Like.
Speaker 2:One of my favorite things to do in Boston I'm from Framingham is to go and look at the historical sites, and I remember one time I was talking to a tour guide in Boston and Faneuil Hall. You know, faneuil Hall was founded by the Puritans and so on and this tour guide always asked people you know, what are the Puritans known for? And she says the most common answer to that question is democracy. You know, and she has to explain to them no, they weren't. The Puritans were not a democratic society. They were actually very feudalistic, you know, in the way that they, the way that they looked at things. So we we we really like um, have a lot of anachronistic kind of ideas when we look at our own past, and so I think that that's, and the thing is is that not all of those things were bad. You know like there might be out.
Speaker 2:So Dugan would go into something like that Well, there might be aspects of feudalism that were good that we want to recover. You know there might be aspects of, you know, these different other systems that we want to go back into and assemble them. He calls it the metaphysics of debris you know where you go in and things that were discarded. And then, very interestingly, he says he goes what was discarded was the chief cornerstone. He quotes from Isaiah, which is also quoted in the New Testament, where Christ was the stone that was rejected by the builders, the Pharisees, and that he was made into the chief cornerstone of the new temple, which is the church.
Speaker 2:And so he has that way of you know, relating his own, you know metaphysics, his own mystical ideas back to the Bible. He does that consistently over and over again. So that's one of the things that I find compelling about it. He doesn't do it the way the liberals do it either. It's not like they're just patronizing people that believe in the Bible. He actually, I think, actually does believe this, so I think that's does believe this, right. So I think that's one of the questions that you did have is how much of an Orthodox Christian is Alexander Dugan actually right, and that's one of the things I've heard you talking about.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, and I've told you I'm not completely sure, but you might have convinced me in like reading over your book that there's probably a lot more to the theological element of it that even some of his fans in america don't understand. Um, so I think that's an important thing to point out. I you've mentioned two of your uh critiques of dugan. Um, I won't ask if there's any more, I'll just recap them. You, you agree with him on the ending of liberalism. You agree with him on the rise of civilizational states. You agree with him on, yeah, I agree with him.
Speaker 2:I don't know that. We know what it's going to look like. I think that we're filtering it through our modernist view of what a civilization state is Like. A lot of people look at that and say, well, that's empire. But I don't think that he even. He uses the word empire sometimes, but he's anti-imperialist, so he doesn't mean it, the same way that you know that we think of it. So anyway, go on, sorry no, yeah, no.
Speaker 1:there's a whole debate right now about what is meant by colonial, imperial and and some of these new right thinkers. But I want to ask you so you agree with him on those things and you disagree with him? You think he seems historically ignorant of Protestantism and Calvinism in specific?
Speaker 2:I am a Calvinist, by the way, too. I didn't know if that was clear, but I was in a church for 10 years. One of the leading spokesmen for Calvinism, marcy Sproul. I was that's kind of.
Speaker 1:I kind of learned a lot from that, and so yeah, so, and and I think the other thing you said is some of his critiques of and not that he disagrees with individualized, but some of his critique of individual lights is not obvious to people. What are the any other things you disagree with him on?
Speaker 2:I think. I think that he it's not so much disagreement, but I don't. Either I feel like I don't understand what he's trying to say or that he has an overly simple, like you pointed out, he has an overly simplistic view of um the way that American politics are like. I think the same way we look at Russia, like you know how is you can you know? You're in Russia and I have to explain to people Russia is 140 million people, maybe more now that they've exceeded some territories that people don't want to mention, and that only about 78% of the population is actually Russian. There's 10% of the population is Muslim and there's 180 different ethnic groups. They're all Russian nationality, but not all of them are Russian ethnicity, and that's another thing that you know. When people it's not so much that I would disagree with Dugan on this, it was that I realized that when people read him, they don't understand that what he's talking about, when he's talking about ethnicity, is not nationalism. What he's talking about, when he's talking about ethnicity is not nationalism. It's not ethnic nationalism he's talking about.
Speaker 2:You can have a culture, you can have a civilization that's monocultural, right Like America. You know Americans, I would argue America's culture is Anglo-Saxon, protestant or was, and that you can't really have a multicultural civilization. Um, what will end up happening when you have multiculturalism? It will be a transition from one monoculture to another. One will win out. If the civilization is going to remain strong, one of them has to win out and that culture is going to unify people. But there also has to be um room for diversity of ethnicities. You know like you have to allow people to cut like russia is a lot different than america, where of ethnicities, you know, like you have to allow people to come like Russia is a lot different than America, where these ethnicities have been there forever. They preceded the Russian culture. The Russian culture absorbed them, but didn't completely absorb them and even like during the time of the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union Russified the people, but they also celebrated these cultures, more so than the Tsars did, by the way, and they wanted people to do their traditional dress, do your festivals, speak your language, teach it in the schools, if you want to, that type of a thing. So I was in Tatarstan on two of my trips and half the population there is Tatar, and I was like, well, who are these people? I was in one town where half, almost, I wouldn't say half, but a good portion of the city was gypsies or Romani people, and there are these little pockets. It's not the majority of the country, but there are these little pockets, little countries within Russia. So he, he, so people.
Speaker 2:I will say I disagree with Dugan on this, but people think that what he wants is this like homogenized world where, like Russia, is going to just take over, and he actually doesn't. What he wants is for Russia to be a very strong culture based on Russian Orthodox Christianity, but he wants the Muslim ethnicity to be there, and so, as a Christian, I kind of, like a lot of my Christian friends and myself, we kind of cringe at that, where, you know, we don't want Muslims to go on forever. We want them to accept Jesus Christ, you know. But one of the things I came to realize, though, is that these people aren't necessarily our enemies, but they could be allies in fighting liberalism. You know, like I have, I'm a school teacher in Orlando, I have Muslim students, and so some of my conservative Christian friends think that, you know, all Muslims are jihadists, and once they get to a certain percentage of the population, they're going to declare Sharia law and take over and start killing us all. And I'm going. No, you don't understand who these people are. They're from all over the world. They're from Morocco, they're from Egypt. They're from all over the world. They're from Morocco, they're from Egypt, they're from Africa, different countries, and they came here because they wanted to get out of the country they were in. They wanted to work for a living, make money and have some freedom. And, yes, they might be religious Muslims, but every so often one of them converts to Christianity too.
Speaker 2:That I run into and I've met the parents before and I've gone. Like you know, this is the kind of mother that we ought to have in America that really cares about our daughter's education. You know, she's from Morocco and they like there weren't. You know, they wear the headdress, they wear the head coverings and all of that, but it's like I wish all my students had mothers like that, you know, because we've become so liberal.
Speaker 2:But it's like I wish all my students had mothers like that, you know, because we've become so liberal. And it's like, well, you know, the parents are not, like that, in charge of their kids anymore. Kids have rights, you know, and in these ways it's like, no, you know, I have asian kids complain about that too. You don't understand, mr archer. I can't get a senior class. I have an asian parent. You know that's good, that's good. I wish you know we all had asian parents. You know, so, that's so. I think that that's one of the one of the keys to that. This every these traditional cultures bring strengths with them that are compatible with a christian conservative worldview, even if they're not.
Speaker 1:That you know so yeah, I think I think that's important. I mean, from the standpoint of a lot of my audience, it's important that people hear this, for example, that you're not like a flaming xenophobe.
Speaker 2:And no, my, my, my, my wife's from venezuela. So, as a matter of fact, I did enough missions trips where I decided I got married fairly late, like when I was in my late 30s, and so I was, like, you know, one one wife one time and I decided like I have a very high chance of getting divorced because, you know, divorce is in my family. I'm going to marry the right person. Who do I want to marry?
Speaker 2:And the first thought that came to my mind was not an American, not an American Christian evangelical, but a religious person from another country, and she might even have to be Catholic, which my wife is, and so we don't have the same theological beliefs and we disagree on a lot of stuff, but we have the same values and so having the same values is cohesive. So that's very much duganism right there. You know that's. You know you have the same values and we can exist in a multi-polar world like that with other civilizations with other values, but we're going to be separate from them because of religion and ideology and culture and language and things like that, because of religion and ideology and culture and language and things like that. But so we can admire them and learn from them, so Huntington would argue that too, although Huntington was less optimistic than Dugan is about it.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, Huntington thought that the civilizational states mean that there's basically constant civilizational war. But but yeah.
Speaker 2:In the back of his book. As a matter of fact, I have it somewhere over here. He said that civilization. I'm going to paraphrase. He said civilizational states pose one of the greatest dangers but also one of the greatest potentials for having a stable world too Like it's dangerous when they clash, but if you can build them and keep them apart, then it can become more stable in the long run. So a lot of people misunderstand huntington too. I think that way.
Speaker 1:So it wasn't well, I do think huntington was also like, read very specifically in a very specific time period, um, in the aughts and you know, in a way that actually is very different than like. If you were to read huntington's book and remove it from the context of like, when I was coming up in the 90s and aughts and read it when it was actually written in the 86, he thought the major civilizational conflict was going to be against a culture that he respected actually, but he thought was dangerous, and that was Chinese culture. That was his big concern. Funnily enough, we seem to have gone back full circle, but now people don't read it. Well, I think I've read that the Class of Civilizations is the most assigned book in college.
Speaker 2:Yes, at one time it was yes, yeah, it was like a few of the syllabus that would be up there with, like machiavelli and plato and the reason why it?
Speaker 1:was a harvard professor right, but I also feel like it's one of those books, like francis fukuyama's uh uh, the end of History and the Last man, that everyone references but no one's actually read.
Speaker 2:They don't understand that it's actually negative toward the end.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:You straightened me out on that, by the way. I thought that he was all in favor of it and I realized he was saying this is the way it is. But if you listen to Fukuyama now, he's still alive. He's a raving neocon Yep. So he's still alive. He's a raving neocon Yep. So she does believe that.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's interesting.
Speaker 2:Charles Crowham has said. When he first wrote about this in the 1989 essay he said the beautiful world shall be brief. And there was like, well, I'll give it another 20 years. And then he was advocating for continuing it and it did last another 20 years. He was right, but we do see it's breaking down too. So I mean, huntington was wrong on his specifics, but I think his general thesis is correct. There has never really been a unipolar world. You know, um?
Speaker 2:if you go back not very long, no, if you went back before the 1500s, it was impossible because we didn't know what the other side of the world looked like. People didn't know japan, for instance. In 1500 we knew china, but not that many people you know. Now you can go online and talk to Chinese people, so that's interesting too. So I think that's one of the things that people are going to say like, well, we could all become this homogenized global village. We have a choice to go in that direction, but I think increasingly people are going. No culture is important to me. My language is important to me. We're not just going to all. I was in Holland, the Netherlands, in 1997, and then again in 2017.
Speaker 2:Right 20 years apart, and I went to a friend's wedding and when I got there I could get along because most people spoke English and I speak some German, so I was able to go on.
Speaker 2:Now everybody speaks English, so I asked my friend's kids, who were born after she got married, were teenagers. I said why is that? You have to know English to be on computers? That's one of the things that Vladimir Putin and Chairman Xi and other people said. We need to separate ourselves from Google. We need to separate us from.
Speaker 2:In Russia, no one's on Facebook. They have their own version. We need to separate ourselves from Google. We need to separate us, like in Russia, no one's on Facebook. They have their own version of Facebook. It's called VK.
Speaker 2:I forget what it stands for, but basically it's based around people that you went to high school with. That's how you get started, and then it's circles like that. Now I'm on it just because I have Russian friends that are on it and I don't understand. It doesn't have an auto-translate on it, so I don't understand half of what they're saying, but it's interesting. So that's part of that idea.
Speaker 2:You can have different worlds and still be connected technologically, but as we go forward, people are going to want to preserve something, and you see that a lot, and one of of the things I read about my book was the different movies that have come out. Like there was a indian movie called I try to remember what it was called, but it's a movie about indian nationalism, the most popular movie in india. It was the like number one movie on netflix for a while and basically it's about these two indian nationalists they overthrow the colonialists and the animals fight for basically it's about these two Indian nationalists they overthrow the colonialists and the animals fight for them. It's like this epic, really well done movie. There was a movie done in Russia. It was the second most expensive movie ever made in Russia.
Speaker 2:It was called Viking and it's about 988 and about the Novgorod princes and how Kiev was converted and all of that. And you don't know, the movie is going to be about Christianity until the very end, when you know Vladimir, he converts and they get baptized and everything. So there are these different movements where people are. You know, I think that, like you know, the popularity of Mel Gibson in the nineties and two thousands is a good example of that too. You know where he had, like you know, braveheart and the Patriot, people are kind of drawn to their, their roots. So that is definitely happening and you see it a lot in the arts and in churches and places like that, and politics not so much. But you know, culturally, you see it.
Speaker 1:Well, Jay, thank you so much for your time. Where can people find your work?
Speaker 2:Basically just go to Amazon and type in Jay Rogers. I have a book called the Fourth Political Theory and Biblical Perspective, and then I have a lot of other books on post-millennial eschatology and things like that. I have a book on Nero which is kind of interesting if people want to read about that, why Nero is the Beast of Revelation. But the book specifically on the Fourth Political Theory and Biblical Perspective, you can go on Amazon and what I'm going to do is I am going to, in the coming months, break it down into three separate books one on Dugan, one on Huntington and one on Ray Dalio, which we did not get to talk about, but he's interesting too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I would tell you that I would suggest you break it down. I liked your. I actually did find your book fascinating and pretty well written and even though, like I said, we're probably not going to agree on a whole lot of base things, I thought it was a pretty good book, but it is long.
Speaker 2:I did one book on Daniel that was 700 pages, too Okay and making like a post-millennial view on it, and I people told me make it shorter. So I made a shorter version. But people still want to buy the long book, you know, and so the one that this one is like it's not, you know, it's not. You know about publishing books, it's not, it's not that easy. Um, my daniel book has done the best out of all of them. I'm kind of shocked at it. It's not like a runaway bestseller or anything, but I'm shocked that people buy it frequently. The Dugan book I mean the fourth political theory and biblical perspective book is probably like number four or five. Out of the ones I've done, I like 10, 10 books total, depending on what you call a book. So, all right, so you can just go to Amazon, jay Rogers, and type in my name and you'll see who I am very easily.
Speaker 1:All right. Well, thank you so much, and I hope my audience gets some insight into why an American conservative Protestant Christian might be interested in Dugan. Have a great rest of your day.
Speaker 2:Thank you, all right, and have a great rest of your day. Thank you, bye.
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