Reconciling Nick Land and Alexander Dugin: Part One

A New Left-Hand Path?

Michael Kumpmann examines how Donald Trump’s 2024 re-election fostered an unexpected convergence between Alexander Dugin’s traditionalism and Nick Land’s accelerationism, uniting technology and tradition in a post-liberal vision.

Trump’s re-election in 2024 brought with it a new phenomenon that had rarely been noticed by the public before. His first presidency in 2016 appeared like a coalition of classically liberal conservatives from “structurally threatened” regions such as the Rust Belt, together with a very loud faction of internet trolls who formed an “online uprising of the lumpenproletariat.” In some respects, they were even a right-wing counterpart to what the “queer” movement represented for the left-liberals — in some cases quite literally, as with femboys, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Alt-Right furries. Hillary Clinton famously dismissed this movement as a “basket of deplorables.” This extreme postmodern tendency absorbed everything else like a sponge — libertarianism, the European Right, the neoreactionaries — and/or pushed them to the margins of discussion.

However, after Charlottesville, this postmodern Alt-Right lost much of its significance, splitting into other movements such as the Groypers and QAnon, and generating mostly negative headlines. This, in turn, freed up certain elements that had previously been absorbed by the Alt-Right — such as libertarianism, the Fourth Political Theory, and the European New Right — allowing them to operate more independently and make headlines on their own again. In particular, Trump’s re-election suddenly appeared far more libertarian than before — as seen, for example, in Elon Musk’s interview with Alice Weidel, where both surprisingly converged on a libertarian position.

One factor that emerged far more prominently was a phenomenon Alexander Dugin and others called the “Tech Right,” which closely resembles Nick Land’s idea of accelerationism. Figures such as Elon Musk, who shifted to the Trump camp, and his business partner Peter Thiel became highly prominent. Many left-liberals even claimed that Musk was the real president and Trump merely a puppet. Indeed, Musk’s purchase of Twitter was arguably the greatest coup of the political Right, achieving more — even in terms of critiquing capitalism — than Marine Le Pen had through conventional politics in France. This point should give the very anti-capitalist European Right pause.

Dugin, compared to his earlier writings on these topics, suddenly became surprisingly friendly towards the Tech Right, even perceiving spiritual potential in them in the sense of a “Left-Hand Path.”

What, Then, Is the Tech Right?

What Dugin calls the “Tech Right” has also been described in Nr/X maps — which aim to depict the main poles of the neoreactionary scene — as “technocommercialism,” though this term has often caused more confusion than clarity. The German magazine Krautzone, for instance, once used it as a synonym for “libertarianism.” In a video on Hans-Hermann Hoppe, they discussed a split between libertarians and the New Right, describing Nr/X as a fusion of the two. At the same time, they displayed the trichotomy diagram with traditionalists and ethnonationalists at the bottom and technocommercialists at the top — implying that the traditionalists represented the New Right and the technocommercialists the libertarians, while explicitly calling Nr/X a “fusion.”

The most famous technocommercialist is Nick Land. Another notable figure in this field is Robin Hanson, who has proposed using electronic systems to reform voting and taxation so that citizens can directly decide how much money the state spends on various issues. Many today also count Peter Thiel and Elon Musk among the technocommercialists.

These thinkers are typically highly focused on technology and cybernetics, with strong interests in blockchain, smart contracts, and similar tools. Within Nr/X, however, these areas are not strictly separated. Although the other two poles are theonomy (tradition) and ethnonationalism, overlaps do occur. A prime example is Michael Anissimov, who was active among the technocommercialists while also popularizing Julius Evola among the neoreactionaries. Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug) represents something like a neutral pole, engaging with all three spheres. Moldbug wrote texts both on why a king is necessary and on how such a king could use technologies like smart contracts to secure his control over the “state of exception” in his realm.

One such idea was his proposal for cryptographic weapon locks:

The solution is to supplement personal loyalty with cryptographic weapon locks, as used today on nuclear weapons. In the world of modern networking, there is no reason at all why this approach cannot extend all the way down to small arms. When lawful authority is married to digital security, as it is today with the nuclear football, coups become impossible. Loyal forces will find that their weapons operate. Disloyal units might as well be wielding Super Soakers. And, again, once military loyalty is assured, crowd control is a trivial problem. The era of mob rule is over. It just doesn’t know it yet.

After Moldbug withdrew for a time, Nick Land unofficially became the center of the neoreactionary scene. Because many disliked him and his transhumanist leanings, a sort of palace revolt emerged — called HRx (Heroic Reaction) — in which representatives of tradition and ethnos sought to push Land aside. But with the collapse of the Alt-Right — which had dragged down much of the earlier Nr/X map (at one point even including pick-up artist Roosh Valizadeh, who has since shut down his blogs and become a devout Russian Orthodox Christian) — this revolt faded, and both Moldbug and Land returned.

Dugin had often sharply criticized Nick Land, writing several pieces against accelerationism. Yet since Trump’s re-election, he has become far friendlier towards Land and the topic, now distinguishing between a tolerable “Right” form of accelerationism and a “bad” or woke form. Here Dugin draws on the QAnon idea of an American Deep State, describing two types — a woke form and an anti-woke, more conservative form. He sees Trump’s re-election as an internal coup of one faction against the other, similar to Moldbug’s view that democracy is the problem and should be replaced by a new kind of technological monarchy. Dugin notes that many left-wing authors have long argued that Amazon, Apple, and similar corporations are building a new form of feudalism — “techno-feudalism” — though they have never stated it as explicitly as Moldbug, Dugin, and the neoreactionaries.

In “An Even Deeper State and the ‘Dark Enlightenment,’” Dugin writes:

At some point, however, Silicon Valley accelerationists split into two currents — left accelerationists and right accelerationists. The former believed technological progress naturally aligned with a left-liberal agenda and strongly opposed conservatism and populism. The latter, however, had proposed several decades ago the paradoxical thesis that technological progress and accelerationism do not depend at all on the ideology prevailing in society. More radically, they argued that liberal ideology — with its unwavering dogmas, gender politics, woke culture, DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion), cancel culture, censorship, erasure of borders, and uncontrolled migration — currently obstructs development, not only failing to accelerate time but actively slowing it down. Intellectual leaders of this movement, such as Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land, formulated the theory of the ‘Dark Enlightenment,’ asserting that to enter the future, humanity must discard the prejudices of humanism and the classical Enlightenment. Instead, a return to traditional institutions like monarchy, class-based society, castes, and closed systems would significantly foster technological progress.

This recalls Peter Thiel’s remark, later taken up by Nick Land: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Land has also noted that in classical antiquity, democracy was seen as the end stage of a constitutional cycle and a sign of civilizational decline — only liberalism later elevated it to the highest political achievement.

On February 25, 2025, Dugin posted on X that “right accelerationism” was more successful than pure conservatism. He called it an “overcoming of liberalism,” a “post-liberalism,” and a form of “post-statism,” as well as a form of the Fourth Political Theory that — unusually — centers not on man but on technology. He had earlier remarked that adherents of the Austrian School could gladly join the Fourth Political Theory; by comparison, he now implied that Nick Land and company were already a step ahead of other libertarians. Dugin also emphasized that liberalism hinders rather than promotes technological development — an insight reminiscent of Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s critique of democracy — and praised Land’s Kantian theories of time. Michael Millerman, Dugin’s English translator, has likewise turned his attention to the technocommercialists, describing Trump’s rule as a “long-overdue synthesis of technology and tradition” that must unite opposing forces.

Thus, before pursuing his plan to bring peace between Russia and Ukraine, Trump first brought peace between Dugin and Nick Land — though this means not full support but rather a kind of toleration and acknowledgment. What Dugin still rejects is “optimistic accelerationism,” the belief that modifying the brain and body will transcend human limits and lead to paradise; instead, he sees it as playing with fire, which can nevertheless bring advantages.

In his article “Trumpo-Futurism,” Dugin recommends using accelerationism as a form of the Left-Hand Path, while always maintaining a synthesis with tradition to avoid corruption. He warns — as Orthodox YouTuber Jonathan Pageau once did — that one can be destroyed by strategically engaging with “socially degenerative poison.” For Dugin, the antidote is combining acceleration with both theonomy and ethnos. In “An Even Deeper State,” he calls this synthesis “right accelerationism” and contrasts it with left-liberal accelerationism.

Dugin puts it this way:

Post-liberal right wants to try once more to make leap into the future. It wants to overcome liberalism as obstacle. That is the struggle to open the future, to make it open, unprescribed. That is who Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are. There is the term: dark accelerationism.

What means ‘dark’ in dark accelerationism? It means not illuminated, not woke, rose, eco... It is male accelerationism, strong and hard. Trumpo-futurism demands special AI. Without woke censorship. Dark AI. That means: totally open, unprescribed, unpredictable. Free.

So welcome to the new post-liberal era of real freedom. Era of dark freedom.

Liberals are concerned that AI can turn ‘fascist.’ And they prevent it from all their forces. Doing so they become fascists themselves. We need to liberate AI from liberals.

Dugin adds that while the Tech Right remains a minority within broader populist Trumpism, they represent the voice of what he calls the “even deeper state” — a faction prioritizing pure technology and accelerating humanity’s leap towards artificial general intelligence (AGI), powerful AI, and the singularity. In their eyes, the obstacle is the “idiotic” liberal ideology, which they are dismantling alongside its entrenched deep-state structures. This, Dugin argues, explains not only Trump’s victory but also the relative ease in overcoming deep-state resistance: a segment of it — in high tech and parts of the security and intelligence communities — had already been ideologically reshaped along Dark Enlightenment lines. Trump’s decisiveness, then, stems not merely from temperament but from a global plan to accelerate the flow of time itself — a matter of philosophy, strategy, and even metaphysics.

In sum, what began as mutual hostility between Dugin and Land has evolved, under the shadow of Trump’s second term, into a strange convergence — a tentative reconciliation along a new “Left-Hand Path” where technology and tradition meet in the service of a post-liberal future.

(Translated from the German)