Dugin and Kabbalah

The sacred roots liberalism chose to forget

Constantin von Hoffmeister examines how a misquoted debate shows Alexander Dugin invoking Kabbalah to confront liberal modernity’s rejection of the sacred.

Few contemporary thinkers have been so persistently misrepresented as Alexander Dugin. His detractors rarely engage with his actual words. Instead, they rely on fragments torn from longer exchanges, presented in isolation to produce the illusion of irrationality or fanaticism. One recent example concerns his supposed “praise of Kabbalah.” In reality, this line comes from a 2017 debate between Dugin and the liberal American Jewish intellectual Leon Wieseltier, and when viewed in full, the meaning is entirely different.

Here is the video:

The discussion took place before an audience of Western academics, including several liberal Jewish thinkers, among them future U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Dugin’s task in this setting was formidable: to defend the idea of Tradition, metaphysical order, and the spiritual dignity of peoples before an audience deeply invested in Enlightenment universalism.

Wieseltier begins by declaring the obsolescence of all traditional wisdom:

There’s nothing whatsoever new about populism, and there is nothing whatsoever new about the mystical faith and the wisdom of the people. These are very old ideas and, in my view, very old mistakes, because one of the things that history shows…

In this opening, Wieseltier dismisses both populism and mystical tradition as outdated errors, relics of a pre-rational age. His argument implies that all appeals to “the wisdom of the people” or to sacred inheritance must ultimately lead to tyranny or delusion. It is the standard liberal thesis: that freedom is safeguarded by skepticism, by procedural reason, and by the deliberate neutralization of the collective soul.

Dugin interrupts him with a provocative statement, one that strikes at the roots of his opponent’s own civilization:

The Kabbalah tradition is the greatest achievement of human spirit.

The line, so often cited against him, was not a sermon but a challenge. Dugin invoked the Kabbalistic tradition—so deeply embedded in Jewish metaphysics—as an example of a living spiritual inheritance. In doing so, he was forcing Wieseltier to confront a paradox: how can one deny the value of Tradition while belonging to a people whose mystical system has inspired centuries of intellectual and religious life?

Wieseltier responds by doubling down, speaking with the calm authority of a liberal rationalist:

My friend, I have studied the Kabbalah my whole life in the Hebrew language, and I have to tell you that it has absolutely nothing to do with the wisdom of the people. What history shows is that the wisdom of the people frequently becomes justifications for terrible crimes. And that what passes as the wisdom of the people can lead directly to evil. And the American system, certainly, when the Founders wrote our Constitution, they considered populism. They called it direct democracy. And they ruled it out in favor of representative democracy, precisely so as to make possible deliberation and rational consideration of the issues facing the country.

This response is revealing. Wieseltier explicitly rejects any association between Kabbalistic wisdom and the collective spirit of a people. He warns that what is called “the wisdom of the people” can become “justifications for terrible crimes.” To him, the democratic Founders were right to suppress direct participation in favor of a mediated, technocratic order: an order of reason over soul, deliberation over passion, and universalism over identity.

Dugin’s brief intervention, when restored to its context, acquires its full philosophical weight. He was not “promoting Kabbalah” to Orthodox Russians or praising Jewish mysticism. He was confronting his opponent with the latter’s own sacred heritage, using it as a lens to reveal what modern liberalism has lost. Dugin’s remark, “The Kabbalah tradition is the greatest achievement of human spirit,” is an ironic yet serious appeal to the reality of transcendence—an appeal to the idea that humanity once aspired to comprehend the divine structure of being, and that such aspiration is higher than the managerial pragmatism of modernity.

Yet, in isolation, that single line has been weaponized to paint Dugin as a crypto-mystic preaching esoteric doctrines to the masses. The full video refutes this. It shows a rigorous philosopher using rhetoric strategically, pressing his adversary to acknowledge that even within the Jewish tradition, there once existed a hierarchy of meaning and a conception of cosmic order entirely alien to liberal egalitarianism.

This was the essence of Dugin’s confrontation with Western thought: the defense of Tradition against the reduction of all values to procedural neutrality. In the same discussion, he speaks of Trump, of the return of history, of the need for civilizational plurality, and one can sense the unease of the audience. The liberal intellectuals, accustomed to speaking from the moral summit of “progress,” suddenly encounter a man who rejects their framework altogether.

The 2017 debate remains one of the most illustrative encounters between two visions of the world: one that venerates the sacred, and another that worships reason’s self-sufficiency. When Dugin speaks of Kabbalah, he is not abandoning Orthodoxy or Russia. Instead, he is reminding his listeners and critics that even their own faith traditions once reached upward towards the Absolute. That gesture—philosophical, rhetorical, and civilizational—remains entirely faithful to his broader project: to resurrect a world in which spirit, not abstraction, defines the destiny of peoples.

Populism, in its deepest sense, transcends the conventional divide of left and right. It is the pulse of the collective will: the cry of a people yearning for meaning against corporate sterility. Whether clothed in socialist or nationalist colors, populism affirms that politics is not mere administration but destiny, the reawakening of spirit in history.

Kabbalah is an ancient Jewish way of seeing the world as a living chain between God and man. Fragments fall, letters rearrange, and light cracks open the code. Kabbalah teaches that all creation flows through ten stages of divine energy, linking the heavens and the earth. Scribblings in the margins, circuits of breath, the divine current rewired. Each part of life reflects this pattern, from the movement of stars to the thoughts of a person. A name folds into another, sparks fall through the alphabet. To study Kabbalah is to search for how the spirit moves through the world and through oneself, giving order, meaning, and direction to existence. Everything connects, disperses, and returns, rewritten in light.