BiographyBooksArticlesVKTelegramYouTubeРусская версия

Traditionalism, Liberalism and Neo-Nazism In the Current Political Space

Summary

Aleksandr Shchipkov

The idea of a "reformation period" (perestroika) is no longer a phenomenon of Soviet history. The necessity of radical changes today is common to the entire Western world. The reason is the profound crisis of linear development paradigms associated with liberal discourse and the exhaustion of their interpretive and historical resources.

This crisis is considerably associated with the fact that liberal ideology is no longer able to legitimize the expansion of the global economy and the accompanying tightening of political control methods. The growth of disintegration processes in the liberal model is expressed in the destruction of the international law, in the rejection of Christian and other moral standards, in the dismantling of historical and biological identities, etc. The concept of economic liberalism as the ideological basis of society as well as all of its "humanitarian" projections are shipwrecked. The liberal democracy is in a profound crisis. What will appear in its place?

In order to overcome the crisis, the global system will have to restructure and change the ideological component. However, it is no longer possible to perform this within the framework of classical liberalism and "neoliberalism". The public rejection of the traditional articles of faith comes at a serious social cost and the loss of control in the society. Therefore, managers of the system are forced to move to new and more stringent authoritative scenarios and, as a consequence, to more archaic and authoritarian forms of ideology.

However, the subject of responsibility and the subject of actions may not coincide. For example: "hybrid war". Both the Ukrainian and the Middle-East crises show that in a "hybrid war" a customer (the subject of responsibility) and a performer (the subject of actions) do not coincide in one party.

What does this mean in terms of pure ideology? Something different is going to replace the "Enlightenment projects" (classical scientific rigor, rationalism and universalism).

Researchers are increasingly talking about the "post-secular stage". Moreover, this stage may be deprived of the anchor of Christianity, which once held the medieval society from descending into savagery. One can talk about a fundamentally different "Neopagan Middle Ages" – a long period of archaism, "new barbarism", collective superstitions and secular cults. A lot of evidence supports this scenario. This is the accession to power of fundamentalist movements in the Middle East, the Neo-Nazism that ingrained "Maidan" and the moral terror of "contemporary art" (Femen, etc.) as a form of political self-expression, as well as the feudalization and archaism of traditional social and economic institutions.

Today's society has to make a choice between outright Neo-archaism and a synthesis of Christian and humanistic values. It is not a mere coincidence that the tendencies marked in modern politics cause large-scale ideological and ideological debates as well as ambiguous political practices. The author of this book tried to answer the following question: what are the conditions, prerequisites and prospects of such a choice?

2016 год