Conservatism and the Decline of the West

For the last couple of days, London has hosted Jordan Peterson's ARC jamboree. Standing for the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, it was touted as and proved to be a conservative wingefest. From moaners peddling the thinly disguised cultural Marxism conspiracy theory to decriers of the imagined progressive authoritarianism, not a single scintilla of original thought was on show. Instead, we got a catwalk show of ignorance, stupidity, and bigotry. Not that this prevents them from getting recycled and amplified by the billionaire owned and aligned media, or responded to by "sensible" governments bent on adapting to them.

It says everything about the wretched state of the Conservative Party that Kemi Badenoch not only spoke, but a long conversation with Peterson himself. To save you the bother of listening, it was the usual gubbins. The evils of multiculturalism, the destruction wrought by immigration, the perils of net zero. Yawn, yawn, yawn. Her actual speech was little different, but tried striking an urgent tone. Western culture is "under threat". She goes on, "This is not a crisis of values. It’s a crisis of confidence that has set in at exactly the same time that we face existential threats on the left." Assuming Badenoch hasn't crossed the floor, I guess she meant "from". She also said everything good comes from the right. But what's destroying the West now is a lack of "self-belief", when the moment requires assertiveness and confidence. Just like our friend Donald Trump who, for the Tory leader, is setting about "fixing" America's problems. We need to "get off our knees" and fight for our values, which inevitably means "tough decisions and bravery".

I think that's quite enough of Badenoch's drivel.

Lurching further right and puckering up to Trump are not the politics that are going to get the Conservatives back into the game. But this is more than just another rhetorical move to win back Reform voters. The declinist sentiment is common among (right wing) bourgeois circles because it speaks of something that is true. The West is declining.

In population terms, Western Europe, North America, and Australasia are in long-term decline. The story is the same in economics, with China, India, and sub-Saharan Africa increasingly becoming the engines of global growth with each passing year. This is well known and remarked upon. Attracting less attention, until recently, is the long-term decline of conservatism and therefore the political pull of an important section of the Western ruling class. The process of value change has long been tracked by political science, which tends to attribute the growth of social liberalism to growing affluence, mass education, and demographic turnover. There comes a point when the disproportionate advantage among older people turns into its reverse. The right can change to adapt to the rising and broadly liberal-left generations, or decline. We're at that moment now, so goes the argument, and the diminishing mass base of the right has unleashed a backlash against the values of the increasing majority of Western populations. This "postmaterialist" argument is partly true - it doesn't tell the whole story. The rise of social liberalism is inseparable from the recomposition of the working class and the restructuring of how strategic sectors of capital exploit our labour power. The problem is that as the "new" primary force of production are our brains, personalities, and sociability, the hold that workplace discipline has over us is also in long-term decline. Hence the panics about working from home and the constant refrain of returning to the office, and the ridiculous amount of boosterism around artificial intelligence.

The right do not openly say what they're about, so like Badenoch they go after stand-ins and substitutes - tropes they've come to recognise as symptoms of their declinist predicament. The Tory leader's railing against how "universities ... poison minds" is a recognition that cultural trends are against her party, and that she'd rather adopt Canute-like obstinance instead of adapting to new circumstances, which previous Tory leaders have managed to do. We see the same with the Trumpist approach to global power politics, with the bearing of American teeth the chosen strategy - among several - to mitigate the effects of decline. But if the extreme right get their way, at best all they succeed in doing is consolidating the power of their class for a little longer before something new has to be tried to arrest the demographic and cultural erosion eating away at them.

And at worst? It's obvious that if Western capitalism is to thrive in the new world of immaterial labour and growing Eastern dominance, it is by investing in its work force, throwing money at renewable energy, advanced biotech, computing, and space technologies, building up the capacity of regional and national governments as industrial activists, and ensuring the proceeds of growth are better distributed across classes and between regions. A renewed social democratic road map, in other words. But it is utopian precisely because none of the capitalist parties in Western polities, including actually-existing labour and social democratic parties are interested. They're happy to manage the decline, whereas the bleed of the extreme right into the mainstream right means their "solutions" can only accelerate the West's decline. What the Tories did to Britain during their 14 years in office made the country poorer, less productive, and weakened in the face of international competition. But the primacy of commercial and financial capital, and of capital over labour was asserted in the face of a new left and new demands placed on the state following a global pandemic - and that's what matters most. Across the sea, we see Trump dismantling the federal state. It might strengthen the American oligarchy domestically for a few years but it's only going to accelerate their decline as the world's economic and military leader over the long-term.

Badenoch talks piffle like the rest of them, but her politics are anchored in a class strategy and a class on a declinist trajectory. It's up to us - the left - to get our collective acts together and help the Tories and their ilk along the happy road to irrelevance.

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