ExCeL London is a convention center by the Thames in what used to be the London docks. Once the busiest port in the world, it is now called Docklands, a regenerative marketing concept from the 1980s.
The ExCeL could be anywhere, but it had to be here because it had to go somewhere, and nowhere else had the room. Its outsize scale and bland design bestride the tidy shambles of Docklands as though it has landed from an American mothership. You approach the cavernous convention space via a long, concrete mall that resembles the belly of a football stadium. Somewhere behind the parade of lower-upmarket food and drink concessions, a golf buggy awaits in case anyone collapses on the long march to the hall.
It is a perfect location for the second meeting of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, a forum where American and European conservatives contend with what conservatism has wrought. ARC’s mission is “the vital work of restoring and renewing our societies” and “shaping a hope-filled vision for the future.” It is the Docklands Corporation of the Western world. They built it, and we have come, 4,000 of us, to hear a who’s who of the thinking person’s Right, including many speakers who the post-2016 Right think are wrong.
If you had the stamina or a prescription, over three days, you could hear Niall Ferguson, Douglas Murray, Bari Weiss, the environmental skeptic Bjorn Lomborg, a brace of ex-Australian prime ministers whose names no one can remember, the Harvard life coach Arthur Brooks, the mildly unhinged Jordan Peterson, the free speech heroine Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the nihilist monarchist blogger Curtis Yarvin, the classically liberal podcaster Konstantin Kisin, and, shrunken by the wattage of real star power, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Kemi Badenoch, the struggling leader of struggling Britain’s struggling Conservatives.
The last day of ARC overlapped with the first day of the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C. A couple of speakers spoke at both events. Johnson partook in a fireside chat at CPAC after addressing the masses at ARC. Liz Truss, the 45-day Conservative prime minister, tried to storm the barn at both events with her pitch for a Trump-style effort to Make Great Britain Great Again. She was taken seriously at both events, too, despite her record as the Lady Jane Grey of electoral politics.
Otherwise, the ARC and CPAC line-ups did not overlap. The big names at CPAC were President Donald Trump, taking a break from wielding the executive Sharpie; Vice President JD Vance, fresh from slapping the effete Euros into line; and Elon Musk, wielding a golden chainsaw, a gift from Argentina’s bureaucracy-cutting president, Javier Milei. Steve Bannon, the jealous Iago of Trumpworld, stole the headlines and made everyone else look bad by delivering a coy “Roman salute.” The Mexican actor José Eduardo Vérastegui Córdoba — you remember him from Chasing Papi — copied Bannon and copped a little flutter of digital celebrity.
Bannon’s turn led Jordan Bardella of France’s National Rally to cancel his speech. Bardella’s party has spent decades distancing itself from the straight-arm reflex. The same gesture was in evidence for real that week in Beirut, this time as Hezbollah members gathered at the crater that marks the last whereabouts of their leader Hassan Nasrallah, whose bunker was busted by Israeli bombs last September, before his funeral on Feb. 24. So much for the party of Ronald Reagan.
This is the separation of the conservative brain from its body: the intellectuals at ARC versus the clowns at CPAC. It is the separation of the center Right, which does not want to become the opposition, from the populist Right, which cannot stop being oppositional even when it holds power. It is the worldview shaped by the democratization and global markets of the 1990s versus the worldview shaped by 9/11 and the self-inflicted wounds of the war on terrorism, the crash of 2008, and the COVID-19 spending spree. It is the think-tank paper versus the online meme. It is, at least to MAGA’s philosophical wing, “globalists” versus “populists,” the spirit of Pat Buchanan exorcizing the ghosts of Bush II, Mitt Romney, and the neocons.
It is all these things because it is conservatism, a movement that fights the battle of ideas inside the tent because it is held together by common enemies.
Woke Right rising
For a long time, conservatism was an allegiance without an ideology. Conservative programming, as we know it, is an Anglo-American tradition. It was developed in the Cold War and defined by the intellectual labors of Russell Kirk, Michael Oakeshott, and Roger Scruton. But much of its content, especially its faith in rational choices and its theory of markets, came from the liberal tradition and its libertarian extensions: from Adam Smith to Ayn Rand, Robert Nozick, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman.
The “fusionist” conservatism of the Cold War rested on a three-legged stool: traditional loyalties to faith and family (social conservatism), a forward-looking trust in rational choice and the free market (the liberal inheritance), and an assertive anti-communist foreign policy. That last leg came off after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and its debris still trips up the United States’s foreign dealings. The free-market leg cracked in the Great Recession, the lean years after the subprime crash of 2007, and can no longer support the Western middle classes or command their loyalty.
That leaves the leg of tradition — and even that is warped by identity politics. Trump is many things to many people. In the 2024 election, his broad appeal won him gains on his 2020 figures in 49 states, a feat unmatched by any candidate since Bill Clinton in 1992. Trump won a bigger share of the nonwhite vote than any Republican since Richard Nixon in 1960. Yet some of Trump’s greatest admirers see him as his greatest enemies do, as the revenge of identity politics. Not just as that most un-American of politicians, a successful class warrior, the tribune of the left-behind working class, but also as that most American of politicians: a race warrior for the white masses.
This is absurd, but we live in an absurd age. Political process is outpaced by social media. Political language no longer describes the world around us. If psychology were to describe honestly the experience of online life, it would be as a form of psychosis, the splitting of personality in the company of imaginary friends. The media, which purport to describe the facts of social life, have largely become what Bud Tribble, a co-founder of Apple, called a “reality distortion field,” a charismatic fraud.
The Left’s exploitation of the institutions — wokeness, as it became called — justified itself by faith in racial essences and the medicalized subversion of physical reality. The Right, assigned the villain’s role by the institutions and the algorithm, has acquired a complimentary set of values. Spend any time on social media, and you see that the Right has a big racism problem, especially toward Jews, black people, and, keeping up to date, Indians. The younger, digital cohort has gone through the screen darkly and become the woke Right.
The rise of the authoritarian Left has driven moderates, centrists, and the vestigially sane rightward. The classical liberal who turns to Trump because he fears for free speech is like the Reagan Democrat who turned to the Republicans because the Democrats made the streets unsafe and the mortgage too expensive. As in the 1980s, this is forcing a redefinition of conservatism through renewed combat between traditional conservatives and right-leaning liberals.
This time, however, there is a third force, forged in reaction to the fusion of the Left’s control of old institutions with new forms of technology. The young men of the woke Right reject classical liberalism because they see it as a market doctrine, not a moral foundation. This threatens the fusionist alliance and its electoral appeal, too.
In our time of crisis and reconstruction, the conservatives are ever more “paleo,” and the liberals are ever more futuristic. You could see their struggle playing out at ARC. The big stage at ARC belonged to right-leaning liberals who were talking about how to create the future, but the floor outside the hall belonged to grassroots conservative revivalists talking about Christianity, primary education, and preserving Britain’s country houses. When Curtis Yarvin mingled with his subjects, the middle-aged monarchist in a leather jacket was surrounded by young male admirers wearing suits and ties from the House of George Will. There was more tweed at ARC than at a country fox hunt, but also a minyan of Orthodox Jews.
“You may not be interested in the dialectic, but the dialectic is interested in you,” Leon Trotsky said. Hegel’s history-chomping machine reconciles ostensible opposites by discarding the husks of the surplus and boosting the synthesis we call the future. No one wants to be the waste product. Everyone thinks that tomorrow belongs to them.
If only Hegel could be here, I thought. Then I ran into James Lindsay.
Hegel flexes
In the before times, Lindsay took a Ph.D. in math (doctoral thesis, “Combinatorial Unification of Binomial-like Arrays”). After “woke” broke, he became an online star. In 2017, Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose exposed the falsity of the academy by slipping fake social science papers with titles such as “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct” past the peer review process and into publication. Since then, Lindsay has warned against identity politics, rung the alarm about the rise of the woke Right, and analyzed left-wing thought as a political religion.
This brought Lindsay to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the combinatorial unifier of thesis and antithesis whose theory of history saw secular politics as an extension of Christianity. If Hegel (1770-1831) had heard Trump say, “I am the storm,” he would have referred you to his theory of the zeitgeist, or perhaps Henry Kissinger’s uber-Hegelian remark that Trump is “one of those figures in history who appear from time to time to mark the end of an era and force it to give up its old pretenses.”
How, I ask, would Hegel understand a conference in which tech-loving economic libertarians talk about saving the West with tech-phobic cultural conservatives?
“Obviously, Hegel would say that it’s advancing the dialectic,” Lindsay begins as if talking to a slow child. “You have a contradiction between these two political poles” — the traditional conservatives and the classical liberals — “that have now come to find themselves in a synthesis position. Where can they get along? What can they jettison? What can they keep and lift up to a higher level of understanding?”
Well into the 1990s, the Left was the party of free speech and local traditions. Today, it’s the Right that defends free speech and is getting back to the land. What happened?
“The simple way is to say the Left lost its mind. But a more honest reading is that the Left never had a mind to begin with, and leftism actually came back to its roots. A very deliberate communist program has been creeping and growing and metastasizing through the entirety of what we’ve considered to be the left side of politics,” he says.
The classical liberals at ARC, he says, are “live-and-let-live” types who have realized that the Left will not leave them alone. “They’ve realized they have more common cause with traditional conservatives than they have with these leftist lunatics.”
The academy became the New Left’s asylum, and the lunatics used it to launch a long march through the institutions. They trashed the institutions as they conquered them, but they still rule the rubble. The Left also monopolizes our cultural life. If, as Andrew Breitbart said, “Culture is upstream from politics,” how does the Right of the future regain control?
“I don’t know that you can maintain continuity in a civilization without maintaining and thus recovering at least some of its institutions,” Lindsay says. “I think a lot about whether politics is truly downstream from culture. I think there’s a bit of a circle there. Policy directs culture as well, but what seems to be upstream from both is education.”
Down on the floor, Katharine Birbalsingh, “Britain’s strictest headteacher,” advocates getting back to the future with an old-school syllabus and school uniforms, and no tablets or phones in the classroom — at a conference whose attendees ping each other with the custom ARC app.
“That’s a fundamental contradiction of our time,” Lindsay says. “Restoring social cohesion and giving people the ability to affect their own lives seems to mean acquiring real-world skills, while all the means we have for generating profit on paper and organizing people seem to be the opposite: high technology, AI, digital education, and so on.”
CPAC had Musk wielding the golden chainsaw of vengeance. ARC had Peter Thiel on a video link, calling for the management of AI for human flourishing. Hegel, Lindsay says, would have seen the “alchemy” of ARC’s mingling of futurists and paleos.
“I don’t think it’s that our ideas have become stale. It’s that our technological circumstance has moved beyond the institutional implementation of our ideals. We have an open question about how we’re going to continue with the grand ideals of Western civilization.”
No one’s ARC
It is better to live in hope than in Docklands. It is better to contemplate the future than the present. When the present is ugly, it is better still to escape into the past. But the medieval cosplay, tweeting about “RETVRN,” and ironic racism of the woke Right cannot reverse the contraction of the middle class. Nor will spicy memes save Western civilization. Their digital comedy is a Hegelian harbinger of tragedy, a harnessing of the human to the machine.
The tensions at ARC are those of the times, writ small. Technology, the economic elixir of the futurists, threatens not just the survival of the paleos but the survival of everything human, too. The traditional conservatives distrust the tech-minded liberals who see a world of opportunity in the great leap forward into AI but prefer not to consider the historical precedents. The liberal futurists despise the paleo foot-draggers for their recidivist passion for the historical and the local.
This dialectic of paleo-futurism is the Trump voter coalition. Its factional rivalries will now redefine conservatism. The result may be a hi-tech revamp of fusionism or a dystopian identity politics of surveillance, social credit, and DNA swabs. Hegel would say the conflict of conservatism and liberalism must reconcile one way or another because the dialectic cannot be resisted. He would also say that the future always beats the past.
Dominic Green is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Find him on X @drdominicgreen.