The traditionalist religion of Putin and Trump

The two gurus who have most influenced Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin believe in dark and disturbing laws of the spirit on which they base their geopolitics.

Hindu doctrine explains that human time is cyclical and is divided into four ages, or yuga.

This corresponds to what the old western traditions called the golden age, the silver age, the iron age and the darkness.

In the Satya Yuga, the golden age, justice reigns and primordial truths are within the reach of men.

But, as the centuries pass, we inevitably distance ourselves from the original light source and it becomes more and more difficult to see these truths, the human condition worsens and, with it, the universe.

For those who have lived through the Kali Yuga, the dark ages,

The most important thing is to understand that the values ​​of their time have changed and, therefore, they do not have to fight for the world to progress according to the established ideologies, but for everything to collapse and the cycle to start again.

What we would expect to find in the esoteric sections of bookstores, without hurting anyone, is what is read and discussed by two of the ideologues who have done the most to threaten the Western ideal of liberal democracy, both from within and without.

The individuals in question are Steve Bannon and Aleksander Duguin, who define themselves as followers of Traditionalism.

The capital T is important, because we are not talking about right-wing gentlemen, but about something much more extravagant.

The traditionalist school was founded by René Guénon, a French intellectual who, despite not achieving

of his time, in the early 20th century, he developed a body of ideas and amassed a sufficiently consistent following to have lasted until today.

Both Bannon, executive director of the campaign that brought Donald Trump to power and promoter of the "global populist movement" that today works at full speed;

like Dugin, one of the most influential intellectuals within the Kremlin, known by the nickname of Putin's Rasputin, they recognize the influence of Guénon and other traditionalists as central to their worldview.

Bannon and Duguin did not discuss economic interests or balances of power, but rather the spiritual postulates of a half-philosophical, half-occultist school.

When they met for the first time, in 2017, Bannon wanted to convince Duguin that Russia had to embrace Trumpism and flee from the Chinese orbit because China has become the vanguard of modernity, globalism, consumerism and all the forces contrary to tradition.

They did not agree, but the fact is that two of the most influential strategists in current geopolitics did not discuss economic interests or balances of power, but rather the spiritual postulates of a half-philosophical, half-occultist school, which is not taught anywhere. Master of International Relations.

To know Traditionalism is to get inside the head of the man who invented the slogan

and has inspired and advised the extreme European right, from Salvini to Abascal, who, evidently, votes against withdrawing the gold medal from Madrid to Putin.

It is to understand why the day a group of protesters stormed the Capitol, there was one who wore horns and defined himself as a shaman.

It also serves to get closer to what is perhaps the most important Russian public intellectual: after wanderings through the post-Soviet space, in 1997 Dugin rose to fame with the publication of

, a exploding success among KGB elites that is still required reading in Russian military academies today.

Donald Trump with Steve Bannon. MANDEL NGAN (AFP)

Aware of the eccentricity of their beliefs, both Bannon and Putin have camouflaged Traditionalism behind more classical doctrines in order to better digest it.

But it is not that they hide either: it is enough to read and listen to them, as the anthropologist Benjamin Teittlebaum does in his wonderful

, so that they themselves recognize that Traditionalism is the root that explains all the behaviors and apparently erratic ideas that analysts who try to put conventional labels on them bring up ass.

For example, Dugin is known as one of the main promoters of contemporary Eurasianism, a movement that declares that Russian civilization does not belong to Europe or Asia, but constitutes a separate and autonomous entity.

Far fewer people know that the symbol of the Eurasianist party that Duguin founded, a mysterious icon made up of eight arrows that start from a central point and point outwards, comes from studies of black magic practiced in some traditionalist circles.

It is the symbol of chaos.

The tradition

The traditionalists constitute a movement in the loosest sense of the word, with no formal structure and, since the late 1940s, no central command.

What unites the groups and individuals of this current is a common debt with the work of René Guénon.

Born in France in 1886, Guénon published what would become the bibles of Traditionalism in the early 1920s.

and

they present Hinduism as a repository of spiritual truths that have to help save the West from decline.

Guénon's motivation is not academic (his thesis is rejected at the university for lack of rigor), but mystical.

With Edward Said, we could qualify the proposal as a "reverse orientalism".

If the sin of Orientalism is to essentialize cultural differences in order to present the Far East as something inferior to the West, Guénon falls into the same caricature, but in reverse, "discovering" in Hinduism all the religiosity and respect for tradition that he misses. least in the France of his time.

Guénon died in 1951 in Cairo, having converted to Islam and wearing a turban and jalabiya, the traditional Egyptian clothing that was already considered archaic at the time.

According to Guénon and his followers, in a remote past there was a single common religion that was gradually lost, and its values ​​and concepts survive today fragmented into different faiths.

Although two aspects come out of Hinduism that are so central to Traditionalism, such as the cyclical vision of time and the certainty that we live in the Kali Yuga, or that Guénon converted to Islam, any religion would do, because spiritual practice is a means to an end. subsequent.

According to Guénon and his followers, in a remote past there was a single common religion that was lost, and its values ​​and concepts survive today fragmented into different faiths.

This syncretism has been key to the international success of the doctrine.

For example, the Brazilian Olavo de Carvalho, a traditionalist philosopher who was described as "the ideologue of Jair Bolsonaro", defended that today the maximum expression of Traditionalism can be found in the Christianity of Latin Americans.

Conversely,

Duguin has devoted entire books to trying to show how orthodox Christianity is a legitimate source of traditional values ​​less corrupted by modernity than Western Catholicism.

Everyone would have satisfied Guénon, because, for him, the key to religious practice is not any specific dogma, but to educate the traditionalist in the most opposed to modernity, which is the great enemy.

Dugin, one of the most influential intellectuals in the Kremlin, known as 'Putin's Rasputin'. Francesca Ebel (AP)

The crisis of the modern world

It is Guénon's most popular and most translated work, the typical gateway to Traditionalism.

In that book, Guénon declares that modern society is meaningless, because our forms of association are increasingly based on economics and bureaucratic formalities, and not on culture or spirit.

The difference between a conventional conservative and a traditionalist is that instead of a moderate critic who accepts most modern values ​​and gains, the traditionalist makes amends to the whole.

Duguin is worth quoting at length: “The traditionalist is one who criticizes not only various aspects of modernity and postmodernity, but who rejects the fundamental vector of historical development.

[...] In the contemporary world, everything is bad.

The idea of ​​progress is bad, the idea of ​​technological development is bad,

Descartes's philosophy of subject and object is bad, Newton's metaphor of the watchmaker is bad, contemporary positive science and the education and pedagogy that are based on it are bad.

[...] I only like what existed before modernity and we have to criticize all the trends that made it appear, going back to the idea of ​​linear time”.

Hasten the end of time

If all traditionalists share a diagnosis, not all share a solution.

For Guénon, in fact, Traditionalism is condemned to anti-politics.

In a world polluted by modern investments, taking action is always a trap.

The initiate has to limit himself to dissembling in public, while, behind closed doors, he studies the spiritual truths of the tradition and prepares for the end of the Kali Yuga, like a moral Noah's ark.

On the other hand, the great successor of Guénon and another great referent of the school inspired much action: Julius Evola, born in Rome in 1898, believed that if Traditionalism was involved in a revolt against modernity, the cycle of time could be accelerated and bring about the end of the dark ages.

Artillery officer, avant-garde painter, philosopher, poet and magician, Evola was a prolific author who took Guénon's ideas to the extreme European right.

Evola was tried in Italy in 1951 for “conspiring to restore fascism” and he was acquitted, but, as historian Mark Sedwigk explains, “it was a ridiculous charge: fascism had always been too tame for Evola.

It is true that he had worked with Mussolini on the racial laws of Italy, but the fascists had finally brought him home from Berlin and had withdrawn his passport.

His views were simply too extreme for them.

Evola was to Mussolini what Trotsky was to Stalin.

During the lead years in Italy (the 1970s and 1980s), far-right terrorist groups met in Evola reading and study groups,

For Bannon, the subject that will overthrow the modern world will be the working class of each nation, which he sees as the repository of traditional values ​​due to their distance from the elites and globalist discourses.

The two protagonists of this article, avid readers of Evola, have been the ones who have done the most to translate Traditionalism into a concrete political program, surely because they are the traditionalists who have had the most contact with real power.

The great concern of Bannon and Duguin is to find a traditionalist political subject that surpasses that of the three great modern ideologies of the 20th century.

Liberalism chose the individual;

communism, to class, and fascism, to the state or race.

Well, Duguin, who for years has promoted the Fourth Political Theory, defends an obscure alternative that he sometimes calls

, in reference to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, and other

, a stamp of its own, and that represents "the greatest value of the Fourth Political Theory as a cultural phenomenon, as a community of language, religious beliefs, daily life and sharing of resources and objectives, an organic entity inscribed in a welcoming landscape".

For Bannon, much less inclined to philosophical pretensions, the subject that will overthrow the modern world will be the working class of each nation, which he sees as the repository of traditional values ​​due to their distance from the elites and globalist discourses.

Duguin ends up sounding more like a classic fascist who claims that the homogeneous people surrender to the state and the tsar, and Bannon as an

for whom class is much more important than ethnicity;

but both reject outright any form of internationalism.

It is what we hear so much lately about “protecting our lifestyle”.

Rene Guenon.

Traditionalism is so esoteric and eclectic that it is not easy to say what world it imagines.

Even so, things can be said from what it rejects.

The traditionalist's ideal world would be much smaller in scale than ours, made up of political spheres separated by robust borders and cultures incommensurable with each other.

Multipolarity would be total, without an empire that dominates or interferes in the affairs of others, without multinational companies that sell the same objects, or newspapers explaining the same news, or universities promoting the same theories.

No organization should be able to escape the sovereignty of the respective nation.

Or, even better, "civilization", because, for Traditionalism, political communities do not have to be united by bureaucratic interests,

but to protect the spiritual and cultural essence that differentiates them.

Are they just fascists?

Although some are close and the overlaps and collusion with all the other extreme rights are evident and constant, traditionalists prefer to speak of peoples rather than races, and of plurality rather than supremacy.

United by nostalgia for a lost pre-modern communitarianism, the traditionalists want to end globalization in order to re-enchant the world.

A spiritual geopolitics

Traditionalism has been a marginal movement throughout the 20th century, ignored both by the

intellectual and cultural

But at the beginning of the 21st century, very influential intellectuals claim it, radical movements make it their own, and strolling through social networks you can already find explicitly traditionalist TikTok memes and videos, even in Catalan.

What is to be done, then, with this relative and strange boom?

Is it a simple chain of coincidences, or the sign that his time has come?

Is a new ideology being forged?

With the war in Ukraine we have found a very clear example of how the Western mental framework is having trouble interpreting the logic of Putin's actions.

On the one hand, the traditionalist doctrine could be a bluff with which cynical elites varnish their will to power with high theory and mysticism.

On the other hand, both Trumpism and the more Duginist aspects of Putin's politics are better understood in the light of Traditionalism.

With the war in Ukraine we have found a very clear example of how the Western mental framework is having trouble interpreting the logic of Putin's actions, which recall what happened and still happens with the confusion in the face of Trumpism, or Vox.

As with Trump, many resort to psychological explanations, filling in the gaps by calling Putin stupid or crazy.

Let's look at the penalties.

With the war, Russia has disengaged from the flow of global finance, closed Facebook and Instagram, and McDonalds has left Moscow.

Dugin is pleased, and even if the invasion failed militarily, the less globalized world that would emerge might seem like the greatest of victories for Traditionalism.

Every time that history moves for reasons other than the economy and material interests, those of us educated in liberal modernity usually see a slight and undesirable setback in the long upward path of universal progress.

Instead, the traditionalist smiles, convinced that the past awaits us in the future and the end of the Kali Yuga is closer.

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