Is There More to Conservatism Than Mocking ‘Wokeness’ on YouTube?

During the 1980s, the area of southeast London known as Canary Wharf was transformed from a shabby industrial wasteland into a peninsula of silver towers, tall enough to reach the clouds. This was the promise of Margaret Thatcher–era conservatism, written in glass and concrete: tearing up the old to liberate the new, unleashing the free market to increase prosperity and productivity.

Today, Canary Wharf is still gleaming, still rich. But it’s also soulless. Wide, empty streets run between the towers, with none of the haphazard, organic exuberance of London’s old neighborhoods. Appropriately enough, this was the view that greeted delegates to the inaugural ARC Forum, held last week at Magazine London, a convention center on the opposite bank of the Thames. The acronym stands for Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, an international group of politicians, thinkers, and influencers who “do not believe that humanity is necessarily and inevitably teetering on the brink of apocalyptic disaster.” That statement could reflect a gathering devoted to finding an uplifting vision of the future—or it could be code for climate-change denialism. Hold on to that ambiguity.