My takeaways from the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference
I spent three days at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London earlier this week, and I wanted to share with you some of what the very eminent speakers talked about, as well as some of my own observations from interacting with other attendees.
ARC, in case you hadn’t heard of it, is an organisation that “exists to renew the social fabric, develop a pro-human vision of energy, business and government,” and was founded by Jordan Peterson. Most importantly, it aims to ‘tell a better story” — and that was the theme of the conference.
It’s high level, prestige stuff. In addition to Peterson — surely the most famous public intellectual of my lifetime — speakers included Peter Thiel and Vivek Ramaswamy (both joined via Zoom from the US), Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch, and Nigel Farage, among others. In 2024, when ARC held its first conference, I heard it described as an anti-woke answer to the Davos conference. And while I thought that perhaps was meant as a criticism, US Republican House speaker Mike Johnson, who also spoke via Zoom from Washington DC, explicitly endorsed it, saying “ARC is a challenge to WEF hegemony.”
People are free to take issue with that, especially if you have developed an understandable aversion to anything that smacks of the elites, after years of misrule. However, despite my populist bent, I found the speakers to be mostly reassuring. Overall, they projected a sense that clear-eyed, sane, competent, adults were back in charge, reclaiming ground lost to deranged but massively empowered woketards. It’s a bit late, but it’s better than nothing.
If there was a common thread uniting the speeches that I attended, it was that we need to rediscover the connection between material wellbeing and moral good. It was unabashed in its call for an enthusiastic embracing of responsibilities, not just rights. I am a wholehearted supporter of this line of thinking, so I was more than comfortable with the celebration of Judeo-Christian norms.
Thiel in particular was interesting. I was struck by what he said, which was that we have been living in an age not of monumental scientific progress that begat massive social change, but actually “a time of scientific stagnation.” He said that by the late 1980’s, “the only field that had a future was computer science. Chemical, mechanical, nuclear engineering were going nowhere.” Science became “a world of bytes” versus “a world of atoms,” leading to an atrophying of progress in the material world. This, in turn, created our grim reality, wherein “for the first time in centuries, the younger generation is poorer than their parents.” He seems genuinely aggrieved, because it did not have to be this way. He was understanding, not judgemental, of the predicament young people find themselves in. “The youth of the UK is being proletarianised and turned into Communists because they can’t afford to buy houses.” In a very effective piece of narrative framing, he dated the origin of our current woes to August 1969; when, first, man landed on the moon, and then “Woodstock happened and the hippies took over the country, replacing outer space with inner space.” The result? Distraction and narcissism. I was surprised — to put it mildly — to hear things very similar to what I go on about frequently in this very Substack, coming out of the uber-brained Peter Thiel’s mouth.
But I was even more surprised by one Louis Mosley, who is the head of UK operations for Palantir, of all companies. Mosley’s remarks were almost shocking, if, like me, you have come to expect that all titans of politics and industry will speak only in sanitised, banal, platitudes carefully crafted with the express purpose of hiding their true intentions. Mosley’s speech was not that. It was the absolute opposite of woke-washing. It had almost insurrectionist overtones (I mean that as a compliment). He compared our time to the English revolution, in which the king was beheaded and the government seized by rebels who exposed the corruption and hypocrisy of the old regime. He said, “a similar revolution is brewing today,” in which the balance of power is upended. In our time, this is the regime of globalism — a regime that privileges a post-national elite over citizens of nations. “The age of globalism is coming to an end,” he said. “The technology that enabled the [censors], now enables the rebels.”
He was deeply, deeply critical of the global censorship network, which he said is§ more powerful than any regime tool that came before it, giving as an example China’s all-seeing eye of surveillance networks. Because I grew up on the left, I was surrounded by around a lot people who were deeply hostile to the military-industrial complex. To hear a central node of that system speak in such historically informed, borderline revolutionary, terms was…disconcerting. But in a good way.
It’s worth listening to in full, and let me know in the comments if you agree with my take. [Added post-publication: Of course, it is entirely possible that this speech was also carefully crafted to hide a true intention. Being informed as I was by a reader below that Mosley is the grandson of infamous British fascist Oswald Mosley is a remarkable twist to an already fascinating speech. To be very honest, I am quick taken aback and do not yet know what I think about it.]
Ayan Hirsi Ali also gave full-throated support to the nation state. “Modern liberals blamed nationalism for Hitler and the Holocaust, failing to distinguish good and bad nationalism,” she said, as well as failing to recognise the roles that collectivism, socialism, etc played in the Nazi ideology.
“Multiculturalism has failed,” she said. It is time to “stop the post-national experiment.” Going even further, she said that not only is the nation-state the best form of government, it requires a Judeo-Christian moral foundation. She, of all people, has earned the right to say this.
Mary Harrington, Jonathan Pageau, Jordan Peterson, Douglas Murray also presented sanity-inducing and/or fascinating remarks. You can look for them in the ARC YouTube channel.
The only thing I found underwhelming was what seems to be the ‘new’ political leadership of Britain — namely Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage. While I would vote for either of them in a heartbeat, I came away with the feeling that they are still playing a respectability game, which is a game fundamentally on the terms of our common enemies. Instead, they need to reset those terms. What I love about MAGA is that it has learned from its trials in the wilderness, it absorbed all the blows that the global establishment could throw at it, changed the terms of the game, and won. And instead of being gracious in victory and resuming neo-liberal business as usual, MAGA leaders are now up in the grill of those national and global elites that have brought us to the brink of financial, military, and cultural annihilation.
One a personal level, so many Americans asked me, aghast, what the hell was happening to the UK and Ireland. The debasement of all traces of national pride in favour of the elevation of gay race communism on this side of the pond has truly shocked Americans, who up until five minutes ago had huge respect and deep fondness for both British and Irish culture.
But while the demoralisation seems complete in the leadership, what I found among the attendees was a lot of very bright, young-to-middle-aged, very culturally clued in Brits who were bravely swimming against woke and respectability politics. I can see how these people are going to mature into a new right establishment in years to come, to replace our current decrepit shower of mediocrities. They might be this island’s last chance to save its incredibly significant patrimony, which has shaped every single one of us through language, law, and culture.
Back in October, I riffed a bit about rights and responsibility.
The Domain of Manners
With freedom comes responsibility, a responsibility that can only be met by the individual.
— Ronald Reagan
The Culture Wars have made it much more difficult for the Public to accurately understand almost any fast-breaking event. Ideology snakes itself into almost everything. Take the news coverage of Hurricane Helene. During the scenes of devastation, we heard one side blaming it all on climate change. On the other, we heard that FEMA would be compounding the tragedies through its emphasis on DEI (All the while, so many of us were focused on the lives lost and devastation, especially in western North Carolina. Very personally, the destruction of our beloved Biltmore Village hit us hard. The Boss and I were there just two weeks before Helene arrived.).
These ideological snakes are so intertwined that they have become a Gordian knot strangling our access to accurate information. I try to cut through this by getting information from many sides and then using each to filter the others, to get the nuggets of reality. In doing this, I’ve found some unusual sources, particularly on Substack. One of these is a neat little space called “Jotting in Purple” by Celia M Paddock.
One day last week, she reprised the text of an impromptu address given over 100 years ago to the Authors Club of London. It was given by Lord Moulton (UK) who was Minister of Munitions at the beginning of World War I. Called Law and Manners, its relevance to Present problems is startling (or at least to me – but maybe I’m easily startled!).
Lord Moulton’s focus is on people’s behavior. He divides what controls our behavior into three domains:
Positive Law – laws and regulations codified by government at some level;
Free Choice – uncontrolled except by our own self-interest;
Obedience to the Unenforceable – controlled by our duty to our community and our society.
The main thrust of his talk (from the 19-teens!) was that the domains of Positive Law and Free Choice were expanding to the detriment of that third domain, which he shorthanded as the Domain of Manners. A key phrase from his talk: the Public has “not yet learned that power [the ability to act] has its duties as well as its rights.”
For him, these were somewhat wry observations about his own time. For me, they were like looking at the picture on a jigsaw puzzle’s box. Suddenly a lot of pieces fell into place.
The Domain of Positive Law is definitely expanding. We have governments throughout the Western World imposing laws and regulations limiting what we can say and do. One of the first – and arguably one of the worst – of these laws was the Patriot Act. Passed in response to 9/11, it gave the federal government unprecedented power to listen in on our conversations. Perhaps the worst of these laws, though, are the numerous “Hate Crime” laws at the state and federal levels. They have tipped the scales of justice far to the side of the Prosecutors, with few checks to protect defendants’ rights.
While the Domain of Positive Law is expanding, so is the Domain of Free Choice, or at least it seems to be. To me, it’s more like the multi-culturism – "anything goes" – spawned in the 60s has become an Un-culture, one without fixed stars to help us navigate our lives. A culture has norms which act as those fixed stars. A culture sets expectations of behavior and responsibility. A culture helps us “find a reason to believe.” Thus, our current Un-culture with its kaleidoscopically changing “do’s and don’t’s” creates a sort of vacuum that Free Choice fills.
But in the Domain of Free Choice there is little Responsibility. We see this in many things. Take “my body, my choice” for example. Women took the power to make their reproductive decisions. Too many forgot that that also meant they took the responsibility for those decisions. And as Tim Carney has pointed out:
“Before the sexual revolution, women had less freedom, but men were expected to assume responsibility for their welfare. Today women are more free to choose, but men have afforded themselves the comparable option. If she is not willing to have an abortion or use contraception, the man can reason, why should I sacrifice myself to get married?”
The intellectual rot that’s set in at many of our colleges and universities provides another example. At one time, academic freedom meant that one could espouse any view as long as others in the community of scholars could do the same. Over time, that responsibility to protect others' right to express themselves was lost. Just as Freedom without Responsibility descends into License, so too academic freedom without responsibility became licentious. We have the sad spectacle of climate scientists trying to silence those with contrary views. We have the sad spectacle of faculty and students in the so-called liberal arts preventing those with views contrary to theirs from even speaking. Even sadder is the spectacular anti-semitism of faculty and students.
Thus, Moulton’s Domain of Manners is actually the Domain of Responsibility. Its shrinking can drastically impact our communities. For a community’s success – whether civic or a community of scholars – ultimately depends on people who feel a responsibility to help make their community successful. They have an innate sense of duty that impels them to go beyond their personal interests for the greater good. Sadly, in too many communities, we’ve seen their number dwindling.
Oddly, I’m guardedly optimistic that the tide is starting to turn. Surely, the often-enforced isolation of the pandemic turned the attention of many inward and away from their communities. As memories of the pandemic are fading, many are rediscovering their own communities. We see so-called “classical schools” introducing a million students to those classics that were the basis for our own Culture of Responsibility. In the time of Hurricanes Helene and Milton we see so many working in their communities to clear the debris and restore normal living. So far to go, but small signs of hope.
I am glad you are bringing back news from the conference. It is interesting but I am not quite sure why I don’t have a good feeling about any of it.