27.02.2025
Rebels without a clue
It’s all well and good being a dangerous, dissident rightist - but what if you win? Paul Demarty looks at the strange goings-on at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship
I have visited the Excel Centre in London exactly once - not even deliberately, just on a wander around Docklands to kill a Saturday afternoon. A huge, flat thing - like a datacentre overdesigned by Santiago Calatrava. One could not enter, because there was some big trade show going on, gathering all the people in the world - one assumes - involved in the manufacture of (if memory serves) some crucial material involved in abdominal surgery.
That is what it’s for: trade fairs, comic conventions, and the like. It’s an upgrade - size-wize - from Earl’s Court. So it is, on the face of it, a strange place to hold a gathering of people who consider themselves brave dissidents, bearing uncomfortable truths that the “elite” don’t want you to hear. It is as if Solidarnosc had booked out the whole ground floor of the Warsaw Palace of Culture in 1983. Something does not quite add up.
Thus the conference of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship - a peculiar international NGO set up by, among others, the weepy Canadian charlatan Jordan Peterson and Paul Marshall, hedge-fund manager, former Liberal Democrat and now the proprietor of several right-wing media outlets, notably the Spectator, GB News and Unherd. Speakers at the event included Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage both - what exactly divides them politically at this point is hard to tell.
Beyond them, there was Douglas Murray, indefatigable peddler of culture war gibberish and dubious ‘free speech’ warrior; Niall Ferguson, the neo-conservative historian, interviewed on stage in bizarre fashion by Peterson; and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, anti-Islam activist and wife of Ferguson, who recently converted from ‘New Atheism’ to Christianity without obviously changing her mind on the existence of god. Liz Truss was floating around, promoting her own absurd book and continuing her improbable attempts at a political comeback.
No scandal
Not long ago, the presence of the Tory leader on such a platform might have occasioned some kind of scandal. Yet there was really very little, though the event was widely reported in the bourgeois press. As far as I can tell, only Socialist Worker was terribly offended, and I’m sure she feels she can survive opprobrium from that quarter.1
It is not really surprising. Though Britain is governed by a huge Labour majority, the global direction of travel is plain enough to the chauvinist, nationalist right, and polls currently predict - for what it’s worth - a three way tie between Labour, the Tories and Reform, with some kind of lash-up between the latter two increasingly mooted. Donald Trump is a month into what is shaping up to be a bracing second term; his consiglieri, Elon Musk, spends the time he has spare from retweeting internet Nazis and hacking away at the administrative state like a meth-addled Javier Milei, indiscreetly funnelling money to hard-right outfits like Alternative für Deutschland.
Semi-coherent ranting about the dauntless power of the woke mob and the blob would seem, then, not to be the order of the day; but that really does seem to be all they have in their locker. If Stonewall did not exist, Paul Marshall would probably have to invent it, to give his various media thralls something to complain about.
This peculiarity has, indeed, been noted within this general milieu. Sebastian Milbank, writing in The Critic - perhaps the only dissident-right publication not funded by Marshall at this point - asks:
What is it all for? At the height of the great awokening, it could feel like a victory to even be able to gather, to tell the truth about gender, migration, or policing. So censorious was the climate, and so absurd the lines being held, the bar for resistance and defiance could be ridiculously low … Unlikely coalitions between dissidents of left and right emerged under this same extreme pressure, and libertarians, conservatives, post-liberals, rationalists, classical liberals and reactionaries all found themselves improbably cast adrift on the same raft.
He enumerates some of the problems faced by this movement in its current state: a “shallow intellectual bench”, a “lack of ideas and positive policy”. Thus, he concludes, “those who rightly despised progressive authoritarianism must now find shared loves around which to gather, rather than shared hates.”2
On the face of it, as I noted in relation to the similar National Conservatism conference in London a couple of years ago, this seems all but impossible.3 Niall Ferguson, for instance, was only a moment ago engaged in frothing arguments with JD Vance about America’s abandonment of Ukraine. Very large numbers of those in attendance at the Excel will have agreed with Vance; and many others with Ferguson. Ultra-Thatcherites rub shoulders with reactionary socialists of the Blue Labour type (Milbank, so far as I can tell, is one of these). There is nothing that unites all these people except their enemies.
Shallow
It does not matter too much because many of the positive attachments of this crowd are so shallow. Religion is perhaps the most instructive example. For all the endless evocations by the ARCists of the “Judeo-Christian tradition” and the threats arrayed against it, this is a remarkably un-pious milieu for the most part. We mentioned Hirsi Ali’s conversion, seemingly on the basis that it is a more robust defence against Islam than atheism. Peterson rabbits on endlessly about Christianity, and has even recently produced a very prolix and very bad book on the Book of Genesis; yet he notoriously refuses to say whether he is in fact a believer, from which we may safely deduce that he is not.
You could compare these people to the Pope, hated by them as a progressive, even a communist, and currently gravely ill in hospital. Whatever the truth of his ‘progressive’ credentials, however, there is no serious doubt that Francis believes that, if he doesn’t make it through this illness, he is to meet his maker. His preaching makes it clear, furthermore, that he has a terrifyingly literal belief in the devil (which often makes his liberal fans uncomfortable). The same might be said of Rowan Williams, the famously liberal former Archbishop of Canterbury, who recently delivered a gently scathing review of Peterson’s book.
Much the same might be said of ‘free speech’ - for so long now a rallying cry of the right, but mysteriously silenced when the ‘free speaker’ is a communist denouncing imperialism, or a fiery imam preaching jihad, or a blue-haired woman on a trans rights demonstration unloading on Terfs through a megaphone. Then, suddenly, it is a matter for the police, or immigration officers, or whatever the case may be. The rote arguments for free speech are memorised, and wheeled out when convenient; but there is no culture of free speech on the right (though it is sadly true enough that there is no such culture on the left either).
What strong commitments there are vary from person to person. We suppose that Marshall and the other hedge-fund guys (always hedge-fund guys …) that litter the place have a strong commitment to their bank balances and the success of their investments. For the rest, there is - given their shared hatreds - their adulation for the great men, and occasionally women, who dare to fight back against their enemies. Trump and Farage, and for some, also Viktor Orbán and even Vladimir Putin, assume the kind of importance that Napoleon did for many continental intellectuals in the early 1800s, or Frederick the Great did for Nietzsche.
The weakness of the substantive claims is, in this perspective, actually a strength of the movement, which can thus be overdetermined by the charisma of the man on horseback. Campaigning, Trump promised both to destroy the administrative state and to reindustrialise America. He thus hoovered up support from intellectuals who favoured each of these things. These are flatly contradictory aims, on the evidence of the history of capitalism, but it need not matter. Now he is in power, he can pick his favoured course, and not even fear the loss of the support of the other faction. Where else are they to go? What leverage do they have?
Though Farage has nothing like the unstoppable charisma of Trump, he can equally set himself up as a totem in Britain, an apparently willing instrument for all manner of agendas. In reality, he remains the true-blue Thatcherite he always was, and a hypothetical reunited Tory-Reform ticket under his leadership, victorious at the next election, would likely govern accordingly. So long as enough cruelty was directed against migrants, however, he would likely retain the preference of the Red Tories and Blue Labour defectors. What are they going to do - vote Liberal Democrat?
Tradition
That is the tragedy of the modern right-wing intellectual: their projects are only incidentally connected to the real contest over power in society, between classes and fractions of classes. They are traditionalists without traditions: only the abstract concept of a tradition. You could imagine them looking with some envy at, say, Joseph de Maistre. In his defence of the French ancien régime against Jacobinism and Bonapartism, he could at least in full intellectual honesty advocate his true programme - the restoration of the House of Bourbon to the throne and Catholicism as the supreme religion - because these were actual possibilities before him, which indeed transpired towards the end of his life, however briefly.
Compare that with attempting to make a Trump presidency into a new dawn of conservative social democracy, as some have; or Brexit into a revival of Britain as a great power, as others have. Advocates for such projects - sometimes very acute minds, unlike the clowns at the ARC conference - have had to rely on the hope that, given the chaos such persons and events unleash, things will somehow fall out perfectly: as if a road collision between lorries full of eggs, flour and milk should spontaneously produce a feast of pancakes.
The frustration of such wishes can have two results. One is a real reckoning with intellectual failure, which may in turn result in changing sides or withdrawal and quietism. The other is projection: blaming the failure of their impossible projects on the treachery of their enemies, and thus a positive choice of obedience to the great man (or the great cause, like Brexit) regardless of one’s substantive aims. That, in the end, explains the paranoid and irritable goings-on at the Excel Centre - anyone who had outgrown such pantomime would not have bothered to attend.
paul.demarty@weeklyworker.co.uk
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sEditorial, February 19.↩︎
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s ‘Heirs of Edmund Burke’, Weekly Worker May 25 2023 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1444/heirs-of-edmund-burke).↩︎