Russian hacking, White House warnings, angry denials by Vladimir Putin’s officials: we are edging towards a digital Cuban crisis. So it is as well to ask what is truly at stake in this e-conflict, and what underpins it.

To which end, meet the most important intellectual you have (probably) never heard of. Alexander Dugin, the Russian political scientist and polemicist, may resemble Santa’s evil younger brother and talk like a villain from an Austin Powers movie. But it is no accident that he has earned the nickname Putin’s Rasputin. His books and posts – often, it must be said impenetrable or plain madcap – are required reading for those who seek to understand the new landscape of Brexit, Donald Trump’s victory and the global surge of the far right.

Born in Moscow in 1962, Dugin is a ferocious champion of Russian imperialism, or what he calls Eurasianism. He supports tradition against liberalism, autocracy against democratic institutions, stern uniformity against Enlightenment pluralism. In The Fourth Political Theory (2009), he claims all this adds up to a new and coherent ideology, supplanting liberal democracy, Marxism and fascism – though he still seems pretty fond of fascism.

The extent of Dugin’s personal access to the Kremlin remains opaque: it has certainly waxed and waned over the decades. What is beyond dispute, however, is the influence his geopolitical vision has enjoyed in the general staff academy and the Russian ministry of defence. Putin’s intervention in Georgia in 2008, his invasion of Ukraine in 2014, and his tightening grip on Syria are all entirely consistent with Dugin’s strategy for Mother Russia.

All of which is alarming enough. But what makes Dugin so suddenly significant is his growing influence in the west. It has long been alleged that he acts as a covert intermediary between Moscow and far-right groups in Europe, many of which are believed to receive funding from the Kremlin.

The purpose of operations like the hacking of the US election has been to destabilise the Atlantic order generally, and America specifically. And on this great struggle, Dugin is positively millenarian: “We must create strategic alliances to overthrow the present order of things, of which the core could be described as human rights, anti-hierarchy, and political correctness – everything that is the face of the Beast, the anti-Christ.”

Stand by for world war three, then? Not just yet, it seems. Dugin was one of the first public figures in Russia to spot that Trump was a potential ally, and that his prospective presidency might unite the previously hostile nations in a joint crusade to eradicate “perversion” and to carve up the planet between them.

In March 2016, he declared that the tweeting tycoon was the voice of “the real rightwing in America … which has found itself caught in the liberal globalist sect’s trap, obsessed with the new world order and focused on the interests of the world financial elite.” He ended his encomium thus: “In Trump we trust!”

So bonkers does all this sound that one is sorely tempted to tune out. But that would be a mistake. I seriously doubt that Trump has ploughed his way through Dugin’s 600-page Foundations of Geopolitics (1997), supposedly a standard textbook for Russian army officers. But the man who will be his chief strategist in the White House, Steve Bannon, is certainly aware of its author, and has spoken with apparent approval of “what I call Eurasianism. We, the Judeo-Christian West, really have to look at what [Putin] is talking about as far as traditionalism goes, particularly the sense of where it supports the underpinnings of nationalism.”

Look further, and it is clear that the virus of Duginism is now fizzing away in the bloodstream of the American “alt-right” and the digital nexus so important to Trump’s victory. Richard B Spencer, the white nationalist president of the National Policy Institute, is notorious for his post-election outburst at a Washington conference last month: “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!” Less well-known are his close links with Dugin, who he invited to a conference on “European identity” in Budapest in 2014 (the Russian was denied a visa), having already published Dugin’s writings online.

Tensions between the US and Russia may be distracting us from a potential convergence – and not the good kind, either

Let me be clear: I do not mean to suggest that this bearded neofascist is heading for a photocall at Trump Tower or the Oval Office. The evidence to date suggests, shall we say, that the president-elect is not much interested in ideas or intellectuals. Asked in July if he had time to read, he replied: “I never have.” Which is candid, if depressing.

My point is that the battle of ideas matters even when those in power pour scorn upon it, or claim themselves to be no more than practitioners of “common sense”. Discourse analysis teaches us that ideas are the magmatic force of public life, rumbling beneath the feet of the mighty, shaping their actions and the popular response. As Isaiah Berlin put it, ideas “are indeed the central complex of relations of a man towards himself and to the external world”.

In Dugin’s case, the “central complex” is a mess of imperialism, bigotry, reactionary religiosity and a loathing of social diversity. To confuse matters further, he has borrowed from postmodernism the idea that “truth is a matter of belief … there is no such thing as facts”. In the year of “post-truth politics”, this contention resonates all too deeply. Worse, Dugin’s ideas help to explain why the present tensions between the US and Russia may be distracting us from a potential convergence between the two mighty powers – and not the good kind, either.

Imagine a world in which the old left-right divide and the east-west conflict of the cold war era were practically irrelevant. The conflict of consequence would be between traditionalists and pluralists, between internationalists and nativists, between autocracy and liberalism. This is Dugin’s world. In it, Trump and Putin, for all their differences, would be on the same side.

The core lesson of 2016 is that there is nothing inevitable in the march of progress. But it is equally true that the ultra right has no providential monopoly on success. Vile as they are, Dugin’s ideas constitute a half-mad manual to what is happening today, and may happen tomorrow. It should be read with care by all those who are planning the counterattack.