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Last month Tucker Carlson scored another outstanding interview, this time with the Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, who speaks fluent English. Twenty two stimulating minutes.

Two years ago his daughter Darya Dugina was murdered, evidently by a Ukrainian hit squad, almost certainly on USGov orders. She happened to be driving his car, so he was undoubtedly the target. A report is here.

To Carlson, Mr Dugin began by outlining his philosophy, and it's one I'd not heard before - though one comment likened it to that of Malcolm Muggeridge in the 1960s. Dugin sees "liberalism" as a continuum, from the 1500s right up to the present, promoting "individualism" in place of traditional values. Hence, in his view, the Reformation was an attack on traditional religion and democracy an attack on traditional state power, and today's absurd focus on self-identification of gender is just an extension of that individualism that will eventually make optional even the idea of being human. Hmm.

Tucker challenged him on the application of the same term "liberal" to events both before and after about 1900, and Dugin's answer, I thought, was a bit evasive. The two uses are very different; "liberal" is a stolen word. So whatever has been done in its name in the last century-plus is not liberal (free) at all. Even so, the two of them ended up in a similar place: under Putin Russia has turned back towards a society adopting traditional values, while Western rulers are moving headlong into socialism, or "Wokery" as for some reason it's now called.

So Mr Dugin is influentially challenging the whole bias of Western governments and it's little wonder they tried to "cancel" him, permanently. But they hit Darya instead.

I think Dugin's thesis is mistaken on more than one level. It would logically mean that whatever is, is right and ought to be permanent. That would clearly prevent all progress. Nonetheless, he hit one button that well explained a great deal: the radical change in how the USGov regards Russia, dated about 2000 or the time that Putin took over. In the 1990s it had been friendly and "helpful" (a delegation of IRS agents were for example sent to Moscow to teach the RusGov how to extract income taxes!) but the focus on traditional values that Putin began was just unacceptable. Hence the rapid build-up of NATO as an aggressive, not a defensive, organization and hence, the present war.

The "liberal" continuum Dugin perceives began in the 1500s as an individualist rejection of the great "collective" of the Roman Church, then of Empire, then of Nation or state, leaving now only gender as the collective identity (man or woman) and then human-ness itself. He sees the drive to be individualistic as a progressive shedding of values that enable us to relate to one another in society, and regrets it. Even democracy has now, he says, turned itself upside down; rule is now not by the majority but by a select minority; "you have a duty to be progressive" - in the sense that word is used in socialist circles.

This, Dugin sees as a deliberate development in the "West" and when it became clear that Putin intended to reverse it in Russia, Western hostility began. He sees the current world division as a fight between "new liberalism" or Wokery, and traditional values; of the rest of the world vs Russia.

There are, I think, three big mistakes in Mr Dugin's world-view.

First, individual freedom is not a regressive idea, but the highest of values. For example, when the grip of the Roman Church was broken by Luther, Calvin and Zwingli it was not a sad break with tradition but a giant leap forward for liberty; people could then access God (assuming he exists) directly! with no priestly intervention! It rescued the original religion from deep corruption.

Second, the rational way for free individuals to relate to one another is not by identifying as members of a tribe, but as players in a market. Yet in this interview I never heard the word "market" spoken once. Market interactions produced the greatest advance in human prosperity in history, when individual freedom reached its peak in the 1800s.

And third, Mr Dugin did agree that the definition of "liberalism" had changed, but he didn't really acknowledge that it has been stolen and reversed; that socialist collectivists have since the late 19th Century adopted the word and completely inverted its meaning. He very correctly found fault in what they have been doing, but wrongly attributed it to a continuation of human progress towards individual freedom.

And what of the future? - gender manipulation is a fad, which will fade out as its destructive effects become better known; it's a dead end. As for trans-humanism, we shall see. We have had the insights of Orwell, Bradbury and Huxley before us for 70 years; if we heed them, by disposing at once of the malignant influence of government, AI will develop as a useful tool but not as a master.