“Traditional values” in Russia, the rise of Traditionalism, and homophobia

• Putin and Russian Traditionalism
• Traditionalism: a global phenomenon
• Christian fundamentalist Traditionalism in the United States
• A summary of what Traditionalism is and the reasons for its global rise
• Traditionalism, the patriarchal nuclear family and homophobia
• Traditionalism: the philosophy of 21st century fascism

In November of 2022, the Christian Network of Europe (CNE) reported on Vladimir Putin signing into law a decree for “traditional values”. According to CNE the decree says “Russian traditional values are “moral guidelines that form the worldview of Russian citizens, transmitted from generation to generation, underlying the all-Russian civic identity and the country’s unified cultural space”. The document also names several of these values: a strong family, service to the Fatherland, collectivism and the priority of the spiritual over the material.” The document also lists Islam, Buddhism, Judaism and other religions as playing the same positive role. (It is curious that they didn’t specifically mention Hinduism, which is at the heart of the thinking of most Traditionalists.)

Now, the current issue of the left dissident Russian journal Posle Media has an important article about this same decree and the history of such thinking in Russia. It mentions one of Putin’s favorite writers, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Posle writes: “As Solzhenitsyn put it in a speech Putin is so fond of, ‘After the suffering decades of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today’s Western mass existence.’”

The US equivalent to “traditional values” is the culture wars and “family values”. We see how serious the QAnon Republicans really are about this when we consider the fact that they favor for president a convicted rapist who bragged about sexually molesting women and also flagrantly violated his marriage vows.

If we needed any more evidence how serious the cultural warriors are, one need look no further than the extremely credible claims that the couple which heads the Florida Republican Party, Christian and Bridget Ziegler, having been engaged in a long standing threesome with a third woman whom Christian also allegedly raped. A central part of this threesome was a sexual relationship between this third woman and Bridget Ziegler, who is one of the founders of the “family values” oriented group “Moms for Liberty.” 

We are not condemning people for having any sort of non-traditional relationship between consenting adults. The point is that these people campaign for a homophobic return to “family values”. Not only that, but as Putin’s decree of 2022 shows, this is part of a global trend towards “Traditionalism”, which is a whole school of fascist thought that goes back to Rene Guenon and Julius Evola, from whom Dugin drew his philosophy. (See Aleksandr Dugin: Alchemist of Traditionalism, mysticism and fascism for this important history.) In fact, Russian traditionalism is part of a global tendency. Steve Bannon is a traditionalist as are minor figures like the former leader of the former (fascist) Traditionalist Workers Party, Matt Heimbach. So is Narendra Modi. All Zionism but particularly the hard right Zionists are traditionalists as is Hamas. I wrote about the rise of traditionalism in relation to Dugin in the article mentioned above, but the foremost expert on this important phenomenon is Benjamin Teitelbaum. Here is an article of his as well as an interview with him here. I also highly recommend his book War for Eternity, which is based on extensive interviews with Dugin, Bannon and Bolsonaro advisor Carvalho.

What is Traditionalism?
Basically, Traditionalism posits that there are eternally valid values that reside in ancient, traditional societies, by which they really mean ancient feudal societies. These allegedly are the values that held those societies together. Through a process similar to entropy in physics, these values gradually broke down as the world evolved into chaos. At some point, a new global extreme crisis – something like the second coming of Christ as seen by Christian fundamentalists – will arise and the world will return to its original and natural order. Fundamental to this view is the issue of the nation state. Traditionalists do not envision the empowering of the current nation states, which are defined by their current legal borders. Rather, they look at the “traditional” ancient so-called peoples and advocate for new states centered around them. Thus, for example, according to Putin there is no Ukraine, there is only the ancient Rus people and their nation, which includes what is now Ukraine. It is similar for the Zionists, some of whom envision the Jewish people’s state (as promised by god) to be not only “from the river to the sea” by also including parts of Jordan and Syria, and who knows where else. The Islamic fundamentalists – first and foremost the Islamic State but also Hamas and, in fact, in its own way the Iranian theocracy (and others) see an all-encompassing Islamic state that consumes the borders established by the Sykes-Picot Accord. Modi’s Hindutva has a similar vision.

The rise of Traditionalism is a product of a world cut adrift in which all the old certainties are crumbling. That includes the very existence of the nation state as we know it. National borders mean less and less as capital flies around the world with the click of a computer keyboard key. With the unceasing global crisis, tens of millions of refugees flee from one part of the world to another, shaking up “traditional” cultures. And rather than seeing this as a tremendous learning opportunity, tens of millions see it as a threat since they are already economically threatened by the crisis of capitalism. So, national borders don’t matter anymore; what matters is the “traditional peoples” of any region and their “traditional values”, which in truth are more or less the moral codes of the ancient feudal ruling class, to whose rigid hierarchical rule the Traditionalists aspire. (This is why many Traditionalists really look to Hinduism with its rigid caste system. It has the most clearly defined rigid social order.)

It is no accident that both Putin and the Christian fundamentalists in the US focus their attacks on LGBTQ+ people. As both Trump and the Zieglers show, these traditionalists don’t really have anything against non-traditional sexual relationships. What they really object to is having such relationships openly, to openly saying that such relationships are just as “normal” as straight up, male-to-female relationships around which the patriarchal nuclear family gravitates. And it is the patriarchal nuclear family that composes capitalist culture at the cellular level. It is why the nuclear family is featured in the holy trinity of right wing US politics – “family, god, country”.

In sum, one could say that Traditionalism is the core philosophy of 21st century fascism and homophobia is central to that core.