At the yearly meeting of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (Arc) in Kensington Olympia, everything was white: the walls, the furniture, the signs, the flat white coffees and the bright white lanyards. From the sweltering heat of the queue outside, through the security gates, the Arc delegates emerged into the intense white light of Olympia’s National Hall like souls being released into the afterlife. They had come to experience one man’s idea of heaven.
This annual three-day conference, which began in 2023, has become known as “the anti-woke Davos”. It was co-founded by Jordan Peterson but it is funded largely by Paul Marshall, the centimillionaire investor who owns the Spectator, UnHerd and part of GB News, who is also one of the speakers. It is a festival of the values of the established social order: property, family, religion, order. It is a party for The West, not as a geographical region or an economy, but as a Judaeo-Christian culture, based on marriage, and faith, and buildings with pedimented columns, and fossil fuels, and Bitcoin, and allowing men to be men (and not allowing men to be women), and having lots of children, and making sure those children don’t turn into communists.
Speaking of whom: Karl Marx wrote that the dominant ideas, at any time in history, are always the ideas of the ruling class. He (let’s face it, it’s basically always a He) who controls the means of material production, controls also the means of mental production. Marx would see Arc as a gathering of the economic elite to reaffirm the ideas they are imposing on the world. The economic elite don’t see it that way, though. In their narrative, The West is being destroyed by the godless cynicism of the cultural elite, the disciples of Foucault and Derrida, the wokerati. The pedimented columns of the academy are chipped and scrawled with graffiti. The young people are porn-addicted social media zombies, incapable of work, who value nothing but their made-up identities and their spurious mental health diagnoses. The edifice must be rebuilt!
In the middle of the National Hall there hung a huge white rectangle, emblazoned with the Arc logo: serifed gold capitals supporting a golden curve. Beneath it an art gallery had been created. On one wall there was a plan for a literal edifice – “An Arch for The West” – created by the contemporary artist JG Fox. It shows an honorific arch, of the kind Roman emperors once had built to honour themselves, ornamented with the achievements of Western culture. Like the 16th-century woodcut on which it is modelled, it is a plan for a building that will never go up. On another wall, a homage to Hogarth’s Gin Lane, reworked for the modern era as Hashtag Alley, depicted a society drunk on screentime and titillation.
The day begins with prayer, if you arrive early enough, or an invigorating blast of Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man. And then, at tables beneath the arched roof of Olympia’s Great Hall, thousands of people sit down with their coffees and their complimentary white-and-gold notebooks to hear about how their civilisation is being destroyed.
On the first day, Marshall delivers a 15-minute history of the woke revolution and its deleterious effects, from post-structuralism to DEI (“division, entitlement, indoctrination”) and net zero (“an ideology of fear and destruction”). It certainly makes a change to see a media baron speak for himself; you’d never have caught Rupert Murdoch putting his mouth where his money is, in front of thousands of people.
Among the other speakers was Kemi Badenoch, who looked up from her X account for long enough to claim that culture just isn’t talked about enough in politics. This may come as a surprise to anyone who has read a newspaper or used the internet in the last 15 years. She also identified what she believes is the single most important reason for the UK’s economic stagnation since 2008: Ed Miliband, whom she described as a “villain”. Of her party, she added: “We are the vehicle for common sense”. Nigel Farage arrived the following day to eulogise the culturally homogenous village in which he grew up, “the church and the shop and the pub”. It seems possible he visited one of these more than the others.
Who goes to a gig like this? Many of the attendees had that Patrick Bateman look – very well-dressed, very well-fed, very well-exercised – that is only achieved with significant wealth and a commitment to salon-quality hair products. Equine teenagers in brand new shirts accompanied their fathers as they took a day off from the markets. There were quite a few babies, who were nodded at approvingly by the natalists (assuming they showed no signs of communism, to which infants are susceptible). There were also a lot of Americans, and a number of men for whom the conference was an opportunity to show off their special hat. Of these there are two main species: the Business Libertarian Trilby, for the Bitcoin bore, and the Podcast Libertarian Stetson, for the man who pretends to enjoy a cigar while reading Hillbilly Elegy and fantasising about owning a crossbow.
A branch of Hatchards bookshop had been set up, and the ARC delegates browsed books with titles like Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All while the air conditioning inside Olympia struggled against the hottest June day ever recorded. With grim fascination I watched an online map showing the temperature in north-western France moving above 44°C, as an Australian journalist told the crowd that policies to combat climate change were “luxury beliefs”. The fans above him chuntered; thick beads of sweat escaped from his hairline and rolled towards his damp collar.
What do these people want? For all the Free Speech on stage, the Arc crowd did not, I think, want to have their minds changed. They were more like the Victorian industrialists who, having enriched themselves on the labour of the children who worked in their factories, built schools, libraries and hospitals, as their civic penance. Today the Arc people – the tech bros, the hedge-fund billionaires – sit in their darkened corporate cathedrals and listen to angry contrarians talk about how they’ve allowed the borders to dissolve and the universities to go mad and the machines to enfeeble the minds of the young. The speakers castigated them for allowing it all to happen, and then they nodded and clapped and lined up for a buffet lunch. They had come to receive absolution.
Not that they’re all that sorry. Every speaker, including Marshall, warned of horrifying changes to come due to AI, but a glance at the Marshall Wace portfolio – which contained, at time of writing, billions of dollars’ worth of securities in Nvidia, Amazon, Tesla and Palantir – suggests that dystopia is still considered eminently investable. The delegates listened and nodded as they were told about the young people locked out of the housing market by a historically exceptional period of mass immigration, then headed to drinks and dinner with the architect of that change, Boris Johnson (one lady said she’d paid £450 for this honour). Speakers railed against the rising tide of cheap workers from outside the EU, and in the stairwells and corridors, agency workers from those less-welcome countries picked up the delegates’ smeared plates and coffee cups and emptied the bins.
On my journey away from Olympia I boarded a train, packed and sauna-hot (services had been reduced due to an issue with drivers needing to watch the football from their paddling pools). In one carriage, three different people were playing videos at full volume. After getting off I was almost run over, apparently deliberately, by a speeding SUV driver. I walked past the nice new bike shelter and the nice old post-box, both of which had been daubed with the same meaningless words by the same consequence-free moron. And I thought Ahh, Responsible Citizenship! As Ghandi is claimed to have said of Western civilisation: I think it would be a good idea.
[Further reading: The Mecca of the lanyard class]