Daria Dugina Is Killed in Russia: Alexander Dugin and the Illiberal Traditionalism Behind the Ukraine War

On Saturday, Daria Dugina, 29, was killed by a car bomb outside of Moscow.  Her father Alexander Dugin was riding in a car behind her.  Vladimir Putin immediately praised her and identified her as a "patriot of Russia."  The Russian government has accused the Ukrainian government of organizing her assassination.  The Ukrainians have denied this.

She had been a fervent media commentator supporting her father's illiberal Russian nationalism as the justification for the Russian invasion of Ukraine to establish a Russian Eurasian Empire of Traditionalism to challenge the Lockean liberalism of the United States and the West.

I have written a series of posts on the intellectual lineage of illiberal Traditionalism and the Counter-Enlightenment that stretches form Joseph de Maistre to Nietzsche to Heidegger to Nazism, and finally to the American Reactionary Right to the European New Right and to the Russian Eurasianism of Dugin and others.  In February, I wrote a post on how Dugin's influence on Putin might explain the invasion of Ukraine.

This is a reminder that the war in Ukraine is part of a global battle between Lockean liberalism and Nietzschean illiberalism.

Oddly enough, the best answer to Nietzschean illiberalism, I have argued, is the Nietzschean Aristocratic Liberalism of Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human.  So, in a way, the war between Ukraine and Russia is a war between the two sides of Nietzsche.