Conservatives loathe the society they’ve created

It's easier to ferment conspiracies than to address the big capitalist elephant in the room

Modern conservatism is rather like a serpent that is constantly trying to consume its own tail. Having had everything their own way for the best part of three decades (at least when it comes to economics) today’s conservatives nevertheless express a remarkable contempt for the society they’ve created.

The ARC (Alliance for Responsible Citizenship) conference that took place in London this week is a case in point. Bankrolled by the uber-rich hedge fund manager Paul Marshall and the Legatum Institute (a Dubai-based investment group) the conference featured a quixotic mix of free marketeers and social conservatives, united in their distain for ‘woke elites’ but divided about more or less everything else. While the libertarians paid homage to the money God and the free market, their socially conservative comrades directed their loathing at the permissive society spawned by this avaricious God.

The cognitive dissonance required to sustain these two positions - slavish support for red in tooth and claw capitalism on the one hand and reactionary wailing about the death of Western civilisation on the other - perhaps explains why conspiracy theories are increasingly part of the ideological fabric of the right. One member of ARC’s advisory board is the Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, a venture capitalist who has called climate change a ‘hoax’. Another of ARC’s founders, the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, has referred to it as ‘the idiot socialist get-out-of-jail-free-card’. Both - apparently - were popular speakers at this week’s conference.*

Conservatives used to stand athwart history yelling ‘stop’, whereas nowadays they stand on stages in packed auditoriums yelling at apparitions. First you create a certain type of society through the ruthless application of economic dogma - “individualism should never be a selfish story”, as one ARC speaker put it - and then you bemoan the fact that the society you have created is quite unpleasant. In this sense the new right brings to mind the old school communists they profess to despise: their utopian schemes in tatters, they flail around in search of someone to blame: George Soros, Cultural Marxists, Greta Thunberg, Woke Capitalism - the list grows ever longer.

The millionaire entrepreneur Paul Marshall encapsulates this sense of ideological schizophrenia well. The hedge fund guru says he wants ‘an elite which believes in integrity not just self-interest’. On paper this is something I think most people would get behind. Yet integrity isn’t a word I would readily associate with any of Marshall’s media ventures. (Nor do I believe that a man worth of £680 million isn’t part of the elite). GB News - in which Marshall has invested £10 million - is a pseudo-news channel where Conservative MPs moonlight as presenters and where purported journalists promote dangerous anti-vax conspiracies and pontificate about letting asylum seekers drown in the English Channel. Marshall’s other project, UnHerd, is led by Freddie Sayers, a man happy to parrot Kremlin propaganda about the war in Ukraine and who regularly uses X (previously Twitter) to lie about Covid-19.*

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Conservative vitriol is frequently directed these days at so-called woke capitalism, the tendency on the part of corporations to throw up politically correct window dressing when it comes to issues like racial equality and gay rights. I remember a Marxist acquaintance telling me around twenty years ago that capitalists would ultimately back a lot of progressive social causes - gay marriage, gender and racial equality etc - because, in a modern and tolerant society, supporting these things wouldn’t damage their bottom line. Moreover, they provided an opportunity for the market to expand into new ideological territory. I distinctly remember him citing the ‘pink pound’ as an example - the discovery by savvy marketers that they could explicitly market products to gay men and lesbians.

I find this all a bit too cynical: I’m willing to believe that people who run businesses occasionally have a social conscience too. But something business theorists call ‘market segmentation’ is very much a real phenomenon. The historian and journalist Thomas Frank wrote about it almost three decades ago in The Conquest of Cool, an examination of the 1960s counter-cultural revolution:

‘[Market segmentation is] the discovery of demographics and the now commonplace insight that targeting slightly different products to specific groups of consumers is significantly more effective than manufacturing one uniform product for everyone…This new species of marketing is concerned with nothing other than the construction of consumer subjectivity, as manufacturers and advertisers attempt to call group identities into existence where before there had been nothing but inchoate feelings.’

Conservatives castigated ‘hip’ capitalism in the sixties, whereas today they deride ‘woke capitalism’. Unfortunately the sixty-year interregnum has added little by way of sophistication to their criticisms. Rather than viewing woke capitalism as something that is downstream from the profit motive - capitalism is a process of endless flux and change and is indifferent to all tradition, as anybody with a passing knowledge of Marx would know - they try to pass it off as some dark impulse to tear down Western civilisation emanating from the Frankfurt School.

In reality, as Frank points out in his book, consumer capitalism has always sought to attach itself to youth and continual transgression (as opposed to homogeneity and conformity). Indeed, the narcissism of small differences - a defining feature of the individualistic society we live in today - is one of the things that has made socialism, which is erroneously equated with sameness, such a hard sell in the modern age. In contrast, big business has fared rather differently precisely because it is able to draw on the ever-multiplying divisions and sub-divisions of identity to make money. (Which also begs a tantalising question: which aspects of our identities are real and which are a simulacrum imposed by marketing executives?)

To be sure, companies do sometimes cave in to fanatical mobs and issue obsequious apologies on social media in order to avoid embarrassment. The Marks & Spencers debacle this week - in which the store offered a grovelling apology because online conspiracy theorists noticed that party hats burning in a fire in their Christmas advertisement were the same colours as the Palestinian flag - is a case in point. You will never appease such people and it’s entirely counterproductive to try. You’ll also notice that it’s always the people who try to meet these social justice ultras halfway who get hounded, not those who flip them off.

Yet I don’t believe this refutes my broader point, which is that decisions taken by companies to pursue a ‘social justice’ agenda are related more to profit and to the expansion of market share than to any ‘long march through the institutions’. In common with politicians, business leaders are forever seeking to bring on board the swing voter, the person who isn’t yet convinced by their products - to expand into unchartered territory. Sometimes this backfires, as in the case of Bud Light, which has seen a large drop in sales since it ran an advert featuring transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney. But it usually doesn’t. Which is why BAE Systems is able to sponsor Pride marches while selling arms to Saudi Arabia, or why Amazon can sponsor the PinkNews Awards while its workers urinate in bottles. Have these companies been taken over by woke neo-Marxists, or are they simply trying to manage their public image while increasing profits by any means necessary?

Most modern conservatives lack a coherent critique of consumer capitalism, and so they whittle away their time shouting at phantasms. They claim that the sole purpose of corporations is to ‘maximise profits’ - and then rail against corporations that try to sell things to the wrong people. They promote self-interest as an unalloyed good - yet are inherently suspicious of other people’s self interest. They decry an ‘elite’ from their newspapers and executive boardrooms and their £6,000 a year private members clubs - all the while pretending to have an affinity with the common man.

The ARC of the capitalist universe bends toward profit. But how much easier it is to take refuge in the very easy parlour game of poking fun at the ‘woke mind virus’ and other silly things.

*Sebastian Milbank has done a good write-up of the ARC conference.

*I have appeared both on GB News and in the pages of UnHerd in the past. In both cases I stopped doing so when it became clear that I was being used as cover for an increasingly right-wing and conspiratorial agenda. My policy when it comes to going on television is quite simple: will my point of view get a fair hearing? In the past I’ve declined invitations to go on Tucker Carlson, Russia Today and Press TV because I didn’t believe it would; and also because I didn’t want to provide left-wing cover to people and institutions that give me the creeps. That said, I do think there is sometimes a case for progressives venturing into right-wing spaces and trying to win over the audience (I have no problem with Bernie Sanders appearing on Fox News for example). But there comes a point when I think one should walk away. In the case of UnHerd, I stopped pitching to them after I was commissioned to review a book about Bellingcat - before suddenly getting dropped at the last minute (having done several days of work on it). I subsequently discovered that the review had been given to a notorious Putin apologist. On another occasion I was pre-emptively asked to 'stick the knife in' to a book by Matthew dAncona which the commissioner hadn’t even read - a book which was rather moist but otherwise quite fair (I reviewed it here for The Times).