Postcards from London: ARC, Day 2

Further adventures in reconstructing the West

Welcome back to my impressions of ARC 2025! If you enjoyed Day 1, I was just getting warmed up. Today I’ll be digging more deeply into some of the substance of the main speeches and reflecting on what they say about the telos of ARC as a whole. But not to worry, I still have funny stories to break up the thinky analysis. This post will be largely paywalled, because my paying readers have been waiting very patiently for some exclusive content after a dry couple of weeks here, so I’m going to give everyone a nice preview and then reserve the rest for them. A lot more content is coming as I shake off my jetlag and get back into the swing of things, so if you like what you see, consider an upgrade!

After realizing that “breakfast” was going to consist of nothing but coffee and insubstantial pastries, I woke up early enough on Tuesday to eat my own breakfast, then skipped the coffee queue altogether. That was one lesson learned. Another lesson learned was that I would need to be intentional about locating and storing water for myself, as if preparing for a desert quest. I considered bringing a bottle from home, but it was on the large side, so I figured smaller options would suffice. As it turned out, said options were a) Fill a coffee cup and cover with lid that still allows water to dribble out when bounced along in my rucksack pocket, or b) Fill one of those plastic cartons with cap that won’t twist back on properly once twisted off. Still, it was better than Monday.

I arrived at my seat for morning sessions to find a gift bag full of topical research pamphlets, with titles like “Energy for the 21st Century,” “Building Economic Dynamism,” and “Family Matters: Why Our Choices Determine Our Economic Prosperity.” These had been printed up and left for every single attendee to take home (although most of the pages for the softcover book on AI were still uncut, but it was the thought that counted). I didn’t have room in my luggage for everything (and neither did lots of other people, judging by the sea of abandoned gift bags I saw in a pile at conference’s end), but fortunately all these pamphlets and more are available free online here. Glancing through the one on family policy, I particularly appreciated the author’s care to distinguish between policy that’s pro-family and policy that’s merely pro-natalist. Malcolm and Simone Collins could be seen mingling around the floor, but there was a reason they weren’t on stage: They embody precisely the sort of “technocratic” approach to the fertility problem that needs to be rejected. (I might say more on Malcolm in my next post, because he gave a post-conference interview to a friend of mine that was quite revealing.)

Things got off to a running start with back-to-back speeches from Douglas Murray and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Douglas suggested there was reason for optimism even speaking “from the wastelands of East London.” If we’ve been living through an Age of Deconstruction, perhaps this conference can help usher in an Age of Reconstruction (applause, applause). There was some well-placed snark about the UK’s assisted suicide bill and how it typifies current UK stagnation and complacency that the hot debate of the moment is how to kill its elderly people more efficiently. There was also a subtle reference to the need for our society to return to its Christian roots, in the course of mocking Yuval Noah Harari for being unable to come up with a book people should read to understand the future. “If you want a book to guide you,” Douglas suggested, “how about having the book that guided your forebears?”

Douglas also brought up migration, an elephant in the arena that not many speakers poked at, but it couldn’t go unmentioned. Some people in the audience wanted it to be poked much more throughout the conference, and more harshly. I imagine many backstage conversations were had about how far to go there, given the founders’ stated desire to avoid giving the media a hook for accusations of political partisanship. I sympathize with the delicate dance they’re trying to do. I’ve seen how immigration can become an all-consuming obsession for certain pundits, and no doubt people are wary of its consuming the conference. Still, it just does need to be part of any conversation about how to preserve the West, Western values, and Western culture. By way of apt analogy, Douglas borrowed a story Eric Weinstein tells about being a little kid and thinking vanilla was the flavorless baseline for all other flavors. Only gradually did he realize vanilla is very much its own flavor—a flavor worth relishing and preserving.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali then came up and drilled down even more on the goodness of the healthy nation-state, distinguishing “bad nationalism” from “good nationalism.” Machiavelli wrote about two kinds of elite rulers, “foxes” and “lions” — the former characterized by cunning, plurality, and minimal necessary force, the latter by a full-throated enforcement of monoculture and establishment values. Hirsi Ali seemed to be urging a return to “lion culture.” However, she insisted that the lions must be baptized. The West must retain its Christian operating system, or else “the apps don’t work.” These are strong words coming from someone who once embraced the Enlightenment secularist project, a project other ARC speakers still seem to be fond of. Hirsi Ali speaks with the passion of a recovering liberal. Her conclusion, peppered with well-chosen Scripture verses to illustrate how biblical principles are the foundation of a rightly-ordered nation, was especially heartening.

Alongside these points, Hirsi Ali also struck a note of unqualified optimism about the Trump administration. She celebrated the humiliation of the Democrats, the “DOGE-ing” of DEI hires out of our federal agencies, and the fact that the globalists have now been “cast out into the political wilderness.” These are her entirely positive takeaways from the current state of the American landscape. That chimes with analysis I’ve heard from figures like James Orr, a key ARC organizer and a prominent “new right” Christian voice in the UK. This side interview with James is an excellent encapsulation of his sociopolitical vision and how he sees ARC playing into it. For him, it’s out with the old, failed liberal order, in with a new “conservative progressivism,” which may seem like an oxymoron, but he proposes conservatives should get comfortable with it and seize their moment accordingly.

But there’s a problem for conservative Christians right now, which is that all this much-touted “progress” comes with a catch: It involves hitching our wagon to Donald Trump’s star. The good news was that someone was about to get up on stage and make exactly that point. The bad news was that it was David Brooks.