Apocalyptic Reaganism

Can a centre right, Reaganite politics be elevated to a crusade for righteousness against the apocalyptic menace of the centre left? This was the question posed on the first day of ARC, not least by the current Conservative leader, who presented her agenda as a battle to save western civilisation. It’s a bold strategy, one that continues from the previous ARC conference. 

Certainly the ranks of the faithful had swelled, with four thousand attendees packing the vast aerodrome-like space of the ExCel conference centre. People had been flooding in since the doors opened at 7:30, and packed out the vast auditorium. 

Clearly ARC was tapping into something. There is an energy in British politics, dissident and angry, spread online and increasingly penetrating mainstream media. American populism has acted as electroshock therapy for British political culture, paralysing and galvanizing in turn. The scolding Europe got from the Vice President in Munich was once unimaginable, as was the ferocious intervention of Elon Musk into Britain’s grooming gang scandal. Gender critical feminists and dissident right threw in together and within hours the “grooming gangs” were correctly renamed “rape gangs”. The Conservative Party soon followed suit, and Conservative and Reform MPs in parliament now regularly adopt the harsher language, and hound the Labour government on the issue.

A dissident populist movement of left and right now sets the tone of debate, pushes conventional politicians where it wants them to go, and gives headaches to Britain’s liberal establishment. The half excited, half angry electricity crackles whenever gatherings like ARC or the NatCon conference take place. A generational gulf has opened up between a young right, impatient with the failures of liberalism, and an older generation of conservatives stuck in the 1980s. Trump and Reform attract young, especially male fans, and are hits on TikTok. Across Europe, young people are as or more likely to vote for populist parties of right and left compared to older voters.

But there is more to bottling populist lightning than climbing the nearest tree in a thunderstorm. But that doesn’t stop centre right leaders thinking that they can pull it off. Which brings us back to Badenoch, clambering along a shaking branch, the thunder rumbling around her, the wind threatening to sweep her into the void. Her shaking hand gestured towards populist talking points — migration was “far too high”, some cultures are “better than others”, Britons had been victimised by “rape gangs”. Kemi was wrestling with nothing less than a “civilisational crisis” in which “British values” and “western civilisation” are at stake. 

Badenoch had picked up on two elements beloved of the dissident right — concern over multiculturalism, and combative, even apocalyptic language that touches on questions of fundamental identity. But style had been confused with substance. Apart from the obvious question of credibility from a party that let in unprecedented numbers of migrants, whilst promising to bring numbers down, Badenoch had no specifics, no plan, no policy. This tendency to fling herself into the culture war emptyhanded has already seen Badenoch humiliated in PMQs, and it served her little better here.

Figures like Badenoch can use as strong rhetoric as they wish — language strong enough to draw immediate accusations that she had chosen to “parrot Trump’s dangerous rhetoric” — but it cannot change who she is and what she believes. In her 15 minute speech, Badenoch mentioned conservatism not at all, whilst continually referring to and defending liberalism. Her definition of “British values” contained nothing specific to our shores — not our history, literature, traditions or religion — but instead consisted of “free markets, free speech, free enterprise, freedom of religion, the presumption of innocence, the rule of law, and equality under it”. Whatever its relative merits, this was a definition of “British values” that could be applied to any liberal democracy, and would not trouble Keir Starmer. 

Another missing C word was Christianity. The one mention of religion was in regards to Islam, with educator Katherine Burbalsingh praised for restricting Islamic prayer in her “secular” state school. 

Yet for all the apparent secularism of the content, this was a message delivered with an air of almost religious zeal. Britain is in danger. The West is in peril. We need to “get off our knees”, we need to “fight”. 

Adding to this impression was Jordan Peterson, who strode onto the stage to rapturous applause from his many fans in the audience. Even amongst those who have moved beyond Peterson’s quixotic politics, he has acted as a John the Baptist who brought many young men into the dissident right. He paced up and down on the stage, his eyes screwed up as if in pain, forcing his words out, his shoulders hunched — a tortured revivalist preacher trying to lead his flock into the promised land. The Bible was cited, but as one of a number of “foundational texts”, its significance relegated to its symbolic lessons, a piece of civilisational software, rather than a source of divine illumination. 

Throughout the day, we were treated to sermons on the importance of shrinking the state, defending freedom of speech, and the centrality of “free enterprise”. These concepts were comfortable for many, if not all, at the conference, but the attempt to morally and spiritually freight them as “civilisational values” felt a colossal overreach. John Mackey’s boilerplate defence of capitalism was not rendered more convincing by his call for capitalism to become a vehicle for love. Nor was Niall Ferguson’s call for balanced budgets enhanced by invoking the fall of the Roman Empire. 

… this energy remains pent up behind a right wing establishment determined to tame and neuter it

It simply isn’t tenable to present the defence of the economic consensus of the past thirty years, as an eschatological battle for the soul of the west. It awaited till the end of the day, and a blurry zoom call with Peter Thiel for someone to point to the economic plight of young people, locked out of ownership and opportunity. Yet again it took a vilified member of the American Right to say something that a British politician had failed to. 

So far ARC is a paradoxical event. On the one hand it is a tremendous show of conservative strength — a 4000 strong conference where the leaders of the two major parties of the Right are speaking, the conference floor fizzing with ambitious, curious young people. No less in evidence were representatives of the dissident right wing media, like GB News, cheerfully saying the unsayable. But at another level, this energy remains pent up behind a right wing establishment determined to tame and neuter it, directing dissident rhetoric to serve the tired agenda of small state, free market liberalism. But things may be changing, even by the dawning of the next day. Tomorrow, Farage takes the stage, a reflection of the fast changing balance of power, with Reform now leading the polls, and threatening to forever displace Britain’s exhausted Tories.