The ARC Conference: Reinventing liberalism

A couple of weeks ago, a small delegation of Forum for Democracy travelled to London for the second global conference of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. We were joined by 4000 other people from all over the world to discuss the politics of the future of our Civilisation.

ARC’s mission statement reads: “The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship is an international movement with a vision for a better world where empowered citizens take responsibility and work together to bring flourishing and prosperity to their families, communities, and nations. We are inviting you to join us in developing a better narrative in response to life's most fundamental social, economic, philosophical and cultural questions. We reject the inevitability of decline and instead are seeking solutions which draw on humanity's highest virtues and extraordinary capacity for innovation and ingenuity.” 

This statement matches the exact way of FVD’s thinking. Where other political parties are only interested in controlling symptoms of civilisational decline (if they even understand them), FVD goes back to the root causes of our current societal problems. Decline is a choice and we would be able to find our way back to the top of the best civilisation that has ever been created.

The conference lasted three days and had a day and evening programme. Throughout the day many different speakers spoke about big issues facing the West. The speaker’s list included people as: Jordan Peterson, Nigel Farage, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Niall Ferguson, Douglas Murray, Kemi Badenoch, Mike Johnson, Konstantin Kisin and Tony Abbott. Between the main programme, there was plenty of time to network with other attendees. At the end of each day there was an evening program where speakers joined the visitors and there was of course enough time there to meet some other attendants there too.

Many of those people who we spoke with were looking for something new. Everyone was confronted in their own way with the current declining state of the West and was interested in connecting with other people just like them and also learn from the main speakers about new ways to look at politics in order to promote change. They wanted to learn something that would help the West to rise from its own ashes. 

Conversations with other attendants seemed very hopeful. A broad range of people joined the convention, from politicians to journalists, from activists to civil servants and from teachers to think tank members. Even psychologists joined in to talk about the current broken state of psychology. Everybody agreed with one thing: society has to change in a fundamental way.

Old ideas, new jacket
Unfortunately, the general answers the people on the main stage provided were not sufficient enough to answer the fundamental questions regarding our civilisational decline and what to do differently in order to solve this crisis. This was obvious from the start with the first speech by current leader of the Conservative Party in the UK Kemi Badenoch. She stated that when we are looking at the problems of our decline we have to watch out that we will not be too extreme in our solutions. The most important thing for her was that we should keep liberalism around. Of course it is ridiculous that the biggest ruling party of the UK of the past 80 years, and is responsible for the decline of the UK, is going to lecture the attendants that want something new on why we should keep the old order. That is the reason in the first place that we are in this mess! She also talked about tolerance. In a time where tolerance and diversity are two of the main causes that are destroying our societies, talking about the importance of the two values should not be your priority. Self-doubt was for her the main reason the West is failing. Of course the conservative party (that has conserved nothing in the UK) is the biggest example on how self-doubt in their own ideology has led to the left implementing their policies (even though the Conservative Party themselves). Badenoch warned us of the temptation to choose for strong leaders, repeating the liberal myth that strong leadership would lead to a new Hitler. Two sentences after this remark, she praised American president Donald Trump for his “strong leadership”. Consistency was clearly not her thing.

Another example was the speech given by Vivek Ramaswamy. He suggested that “peak woke” is behind us. The removal of DEI programs in the USA was the nail in the coffin for the left, but in a world where the root cause of ‘woke’, famously called ‘cultural Marxism’, is intertwined with American culture (not only in DEI programs) and is certainly not defeated at the moment. Cultural Marxism is even one of the most important foundations of the post WOII order in the West (the current “woke hype” is just the latest incarnation of this thinking). We call it, progressive-liberalism. While there is the opportunity to change this whole thinking, we need a more fundamental addressing of the question than ‘woke has gone too far’.

Jordan Peterson gave an interesting speech about the problem with hedonism and the importance of sacrifice in our civilisation. Sacrifice is according to Peterson the most important thing in civilisation. Men sacrifice their youth for their community in order to protect the women and children. Christianity and the sacrifice of Christ has had such a fundamental impact on our culture. If nobody is willing to give up their life for the greater of society you have no society. The problem with current society is that people do not feel that they have a stake in the bigger picture. While this is a very good point from Peterson, the cause of this individualisation of society is again liberalism. A couple speeches after, other speakers were greatly positive about the role hyper-individualistic capitalism plays in our society and why we need more of that.

Russia, Russia, Russia!!!
This very true story of Peterson was also nullified by the speech of Douglas Murray. Douglas Murray stated that the culture war is being waged, but that the real war (supposed with Russia) should be much more concerning and that we should shift focus to that. We had to protect our norms and values like ‘individual freedom’ (wait, was individualism not the problem?) against the ‘bad dictator’ Putin. Do not focus on the problems from within, but unite to fight an ‘enemy’ from outside. A tactic commonly used by leaders in the past to shift the attention away from the bigger problems on the inside. While the problems still remained.

Also the role of technology in our future societies played an important role in the conference. For example British actress Sophie Winkleman spoke about the dangers of digitizing the school system and the role Ipads play in the declining school results of young children. Billionaire Peter Thiel spoke about the future of AI and the important philosophical positions regarding life and consciousness. Blackwater founder Erik Prince talked on future AI applications in warfare.

The elephant in the room: Immigration
It also stood out that the problems with immigration were not mentioned. Maybe because of that the event was hosted in the police-state UK, where it currently might be illegal to discuss immigration under the Starmer regime.

If people just adopt ‘western values’ everything will come out alright in the end. Where in the same breath people do not agree with each other what ‘western values’ are. According to progressives, conservatives are not integrated in current western values where tolerance, LGBTQ++++, globalism and rampant degeneracy are the norms. Should conservatives be deported? Are these values worth dying for? Conservatives should also want to conserve their own people. Nation states are derivatives of peoples and peoples are not interchangeable. This is why when we look at the core issue with immigration, we do not talk about a little less illegal and more legal immigration, we talk about remigration. 

The event was great as a catch-all conference for all flavours of the right. This is probably why they wanted to play it relatively safe regarding the ideological positions the chosen speakers chose. I understand from an organisational position that you do not want to become too extreme, because you will alienate a lot of potential allies. This could of course be a good thing if you want to create a broad umbrella of the whole right-wing.

At the same time it was a missed opportunity to redpill the attendants about political positions that lay outside of the overton window. This is needed if we want to stop the decline. A convention that is filled with old, safe ideas, the problem could arise that you block everybody again in the overton window that is dominant in our society, and that was the problem in the first place. In what is considered right-wing today, the different flavours are so different from each other that the differences are as big of a gap as the left-right. Many people that call themselves right-wing hold positions that were considered extreme left-wing positions a couple of years ago. What do they have in common? Does every flavour of the supposed right-wing really want to save our civilisation at all costs? 

The main question was missing: What is civilisation?
Is a civilisation just some norms and values that now came under pressure of hostile elements or is it more than that? Is civilisation based only on the nation state, where bureaucracies run rampant and the state does everything possible to make policies that are negative for its own people, like today? 

While some concepts were talked about in the convention (like the importance of Christianity), those concepts are meaningless in a world where subjectivism of moral values are dominant and Christianity is being used to promote leftism. How do we restore the eternal order? How do we win the war of the mind?

The bigger picture was missing. Maybe next year, the organisation could focus on a more completed narrative with clear ideological foundations. Let’s hope it will not be liberalism! 

The new Trump Administration in the White House offers us new opportunities to change the course of world history. History is BACK, and we will be the ones to lead it. We will only need a better narrative!