Ivan Ilyin was a fascist philosopher of the '20s, '30s, and '40s, but he’s probably
the most important example of how old ideas can be brought back in the 21st century or
in a postmodern context.
Ilyin had three very important ideas.
The first was that social advancement was impossible because the political system, the
social system, is like a body.
So you’re a cell, you’re an embryo, you’re an organ, you have a place in this larger
body, and freedom means knowing your place.
That’s what freedom means.
A second idea that he had is that democracy is a ritual.
So we can vote, but we only vote in order to affirm our collective support for a leader.
The leader is not legitimated by our votes or chosen by our votes, the voting is just
a ritual by which we collectively, every couple of years, endorse a leader who has emerged
from some other place, from some—in fascism, a leader is some kind of hero who emerges
from fiction, who emerges from myth.
The third idea Ilyin had, which is very useful, is that the factual world doesn’t count.
It’s not real.
Ilyin says that God created the world, but that was a mistake.
The world was a kind of aborted process.
The world is a horrifying thing because it’s full of this and that and the other thing,
what we call facts, and those facts can’t be unified into some kind of larger whole
so the world is actually horrifying, and those facts are disgusting and of no value whatsoever.
So, if you were Vladimir Putin and you’re governing as the head of an oligarchical clan
it’s very comfortable to be able to say, “Well, look, freedom consists in knowing
your place in society.
There’s no possibility for social advance.”
If you’re Vladimir Putin and you don’t have serious democracy or you don’t want
to have it, it’s very comfortable to do, as he, in fact, has done, it’s very comfortable
to transform elections into a kind of ritual.
And, likewise, if you can’t have the rule of law and if Russians are basically stuck
in a certain place economically and politically, the idea that the world is not factual, that
the world is just subjective, that it’s just a matter of this opinion, that opinion
and the other opinion, is very comfortable.
And Ilyin adds the even more comfortable conclusion that the only true thing is Russian nationalism.
The only hope to bring the whole world together is that somehow Russia—which is an innocent
victim of the rest of the world—will somehow restore itself in some totalitarian form and
then bring order back to the world.
So interestingly—it’s not the only thing which is going on—but interestingly these
kinds of ideas help Mr. Putin as he consolidates a certain kind of authoritarianism by spectacle
at home and also help him as he broadcasts it abroad.
The fundamental way that Russia works in American politics is by transmitting the idea that’s
nothing is real.
So it’s true that the Russians did support Trump.
It’s true that there were all kinds of very specific interventions in the election of
2016.
But the fundamental idea is to take new technology and transmit this old idea that we can’t
really trust ourselves, that there aren’t really facts out there in the world, that
the only thing that really matters is our preferences, or really our biases, or really
our hatreds.
And this was so manifest in 2016 because it’s important that the Russians persuaded us in
various things that weren’t true, but what’s more important is that we never thought that
this could be happening as a result of action by some other country.
We were entirely caught in our own little subjective American reality of “us and them”,
where the friends and the enemies were all Americans; we couldn’t break out into any
kind of larger world of factuality.
The Russians precisely helped hem us in to a little, national, emotional world to the
point where we couldn’t even see what was happening—and a lot of us are still having
a lot of trouble seeing what was happening.
The interesting marriage, for me, is old ideas—fascist ideas, in fact—in a new world, a new world
where it’s not that Mr. Putin or for that matter Mr. Trump wants us all to wear uniforms
and march in the streets or even to have large-scale wars for territory, that’s not what’s
going on.
But what the fascist ideas do with the new technology is they drive us into a situation
where we think the real stakes of politics are all emotional and all about enemies, usually
enemies at home, where we get ourselves all worked up about things, whether we like the
government or not, but somehow we never leave our couch while we’re doing it, where we
leave all of our energy right in front of the screen, basically, and don’t actually
get out and vote or organize or think creatively about what policy might look like.
And the result is that we end up consolidating this kind of oligarchy with some racial overtones,
which is what America and Russia currently have in common.