When Three Nationalisms Become One
Zhirinovsky, Trump, and Le Pen, and the ideology they share without knowing it
Dear readers and subscribers,
This is Part 1 of a four-part IS IT PROPAGANDA?® series. Part 0, the intro’s project, is already published. Start there if you haven’t. It’s free, it’s short, and it explains why this series exists. Read below: “The Party Nobody Dared to Build.”
They never shared a stage. They spoke different languages, served different electorates, and operated in radically different political systems. Vladimir Zhirinovsky thundered about restoring Russian imperial greatness from the Duma floor. Jean-Marie Le Pen spent four decades building ethnic nationalism into a French electoral force, which significantly influenced the political landscape in France and contributed to the rise of far-right movements across Europe. Donald Trump turned “America First” from a slogan into a governing doctrine that reshaped the Republican Party and, briefly, the Western world order.
Three men. Three countries. Three distinct political brands.
And yet. Strip away the flags, the accents, and the showmanship, and you discover something that does not feel like coincidence.
The same enemies: globalist elites, supranational institutions, cosmopolitan media.
The same solutions: sovereign borders, strong executives, national economies closed to predatory foreign capital.
The same emotional register: a people betrayed, a nation to be reclaimed, an establishment to be destroyed.
What is being constructed, for whom, and toward what end? Applied to these three careers simultaneously, the answer is unexpectedly coherent. What Zhirinovsky, Trump, and Le Pen built—separately, across decades—amounts to a single political doctrine that no party has yet formally assembled.
This article maps that doctrine. A subsequent piece will propose what the party built on it would look like.
I. The Common Grammar of National Populism
Political scientists Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Kaltwasser define populism as a “thin ideology,” one that divides society into two homogeneous and antagonistic camps, “the pure people” and “the corrupt elite,” and argues that politics should be an expression of the general will of the former.1
Thin ideologies do not exist in isolation. They attach to host ideologies that provide them content. In the cases of Zhirinovsky, Trump, and Le Pen, the host ideology is nationalism, specifically, what Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin call “national populism”: the combination of popular sovereignty, cultural protectionism, and civilizational identity politics.2
What distinguishes these three from generic right-wing nationalism is the consistency of their structural targeting. All three consistently identified the same three antagonists:
supranational institutions (NATO, EU, UN, and WTO);
internal cosmopolitan elites (media, finance, and academia); and
demographic transformation (immigration as a civilizational threat).
The targets are not coincidental. They support the same ideological framework.
II. Sovereigntism as the Organizing Principle
The most durable thread connecting all three is what French political theorist Pierre Manent describes as the “refusal of empire” or the insistence that the nation-state is the only legitimate unit of political organization and that any authority above it is either illegitimate or predatory.3
Zhirinovsky’s sovereigntism was imperial in character. Russia must dominate its near-abroad because great civilizations do not submit to foreign-designed orders. His 1993 manifesto, The Last Thrust to the South, reads less like a policy document than a declaration that Russia’s geopolitical identity cannot be contained by Western institutional frameworks.
Le Pen’s sovereigntism represented a civilizational stance. France is not merely a state; it is the carrier of a specific ethnos, culture, and historical memory that supranational governance, particularly the European Union, actively erodes. His opposition to Maastricht in 1992 was framed not in economic terms but in terms of national survival.
Trump’s sovereigntism was transactional and economic in its initial framing but civilizational in its emotional register. “America First” was always simultaneously about trade deficits and about a culture war, the sense that the United States had been managed by elites who owed nothing to the people who made it. The withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and the rhetorical assault on NATO burden-sharing all operate from the same premise: external commitments are betrayals of domestic obligations.
III. Where They Diverge, and Why It Doesn’t Break the Synthesis
The divergences are real. Zhirinovsky was an expansionist; neither Trump nor Le Pen operated in an imperial register. Le Pen’s welfare chauvinism, generous social protection for nationals and exclusion for non-nationals, is more conservative than Trump’s market-adjacent conservatism. Trump’s anti-institutionalism carries a libertarian-adjacent streak absent in both European figures.
But these are differences of emphasis within a shared framework, not contradictions of it.
A synthetic political program would resolve them through a simple hierarchy:
national sovereignty first,
cultural identity second, and
economic model third
with the third left deliberately flexible to accommodate different national contexts.
What is non-negotiable in all three traditions, and therefore what would be non-negotiable in any synthesis, is the following:
The nation is real, the people are sovereign, the establishment has betrayed both, and the party exists to restore the former two against the latter.
IV. Why This Matters Now
These three men are either dead (Zhirinovsky and Le Pen) or in a second term that will define the next decade of international politics (Trump). Their political traditions, however, are not only alive but ascendant.
Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National is polling as France’s largest party.
LDPR survives Zhirinovsky, institutionally transformed but ideologically continuous, maintaining its influence in Russian politics and appealing to nationalist sentiments among voters.
Trumpism demonstrably outlived Trump’s first presidency, shaping Republican politics even during the Biden period.
The doctrine these three articulated separately is now the dominant alternative to liberal democratic consensus across the Western political space. It has not yet been formally synthesized into a single transnational program.
That is not because the synthesis is impossible. It is because no one has yet attempted it openly.
This article is my opening of that attempt.
The follow-up piece will propose the full architecture: party name, founding doctrine, seven-plank program, and the internal ideology document that would underpin it.
The question is not whether such a party is possible.
History has already answered that. The question is what it would look like if built with full self-awareness of its own ideological genealogy.
NEXT: Part 2: The Men Behind the Doctrine
Three figures, one comparative portrait. How Zhirinovsky, Le Pen, and Trump performed the same ideology in three radically different national contexts and what that performance reveals about the doctrine underneath it.
Mudde & Kaltwasser, Populism: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2017).
Eatwell & Goodwin, National Populism (Pelican, 2018)
Pierre Manent, Democracy Without Nations? (ISI Books, 2007)