Anglofuturism is Not Conservative or Reactionary. It is 'Progressive'

To call yourself ‘conservative’ is to always be on the losing side.

Conservatives always lose. That’s what we’re told over and over again by the ‘progressive’ left. 

Apparently, resisting any new cultural trend that the cultural left comes up with, any new ‘civil rights struggle’ as they term it, is simply doomed to fail. In a few decades time, people currently resisting the mutilation of children claiming to be ‘trans’, will be seen as no different from Southern US segregationists who refused to serve Black people in restaurants.

But who’s ‘progress’ are we talking about? Is the left-liberal view of progress, that has reigned in the West since 1945, the only possible view of it?

This article will explore the differing conceptions of progress, and why as opposed to ‘conservative’, or even ‘reactionary’, Anglofuturism is, or should be presented as being, a thoroughly ‘progressive’ movement. 

Differing Conceptions of Progress

People like Ubersoy will say that progress is something objective and measurable. This is mostly true when it comes to technology, as ‘progress’, which he defines as the increasing complexity of subjects relative to competitors, has undoubtedly happened. For instance, the increasing sophistication of smartphones.

But what constitutes ‘social progress’, is entirely dependent on one’s own personal values. Each ideology will view ‘progress’ as moving closer to their ideological vision

Marxists strongly believed they were on the ‘right side of history’, and that the triumph of socialism was inevitable. 

But in 1989, that vision fell apart completely, as the people of the socialist world revolted. Despite the initial hopes of Trotskyists and Eurocommunists, the protestors, many of whom were working-class, did not simply desire the replacement of authoritarian socialism with a democratic socialism. In fact, they demanded something that in the Marxist worldview would be simply inconceivable: a return to capitalism. 

The Marxist worldview has never since regained the credibility it once had.

However, whilst for the Marxist-Leninist, the 1989 revolutions represented a huge step backwards, for the liberal they represented a huge step forwards.

Liberalism’s own form of historicism and teleology goes back to the Whig historiography of the 19th century, but gained a new lease of life after WWII and during the Civil Rights Movement, with Martin Luther King’s famous quote: ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice’ personifying it. This ‘right side of history’ discourse was even further emboldened in 1989, with Francis Fukuyama declaring ‘the end of history’, just when the Marxists saw their worldview crumble. 

So, when it comes to society, ‘progress’ is always in the eye of the beholder. However, every successful political movement has had a distinct vision of what ‘progress' means. It is ultimately what separates a ‘positive’ ideology from merely a ‘reactive’ one.

Conservatism vs Alternative Conceptions of Progress

‘Conservatism’ is by definition doomed to lose, as it is oriented towards the status quo, and as the Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus said: ‘the only constant is change’. 

Whilst Edmund Burke did make some valuable insights about the danger of abstract declarations of ‘rights’ when criticising the French Revolution’s ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen’, at the core of Burke’s ‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’ was tradition. 

But the traditions of England that he valorised, like the 1688 Glorious Revolution, were simply the product of 17th century liberals. Burke simply wanted to maintain an earlier tradition of liberalism, but those traditions did not emerge out of thin air; they had largely been created a century prior, which in France they had not been. He therefore is the original ‘speed limit liberal’, taking the liberalism of the past for granted whilst saying that its latest form goes too far, or at the very least must be slowed down. Conservatism has played this role ever since.

Conservatives ‘lost’ every cultural battle because they never put forward an alternative vision of progress to the left-liberal one. They only sought to stop it, slow it down, or filter it, accepting that left-liberals determined the direction of travel, in what Auron MacIntyre terms the ‘ratchet effect’. 

But there have been occasions where the opponents of the cultural left have gone beyond merely conservatism, and sought to establish an ideology based on entirely different values.

The reason why liberals are so afraid of ‘fascism’ is that it did in fact reclaim the mantle of ‘progress’ from their exclusive domain. It did not simply wish to slow down the ever greater march of liberalism, but provided an entirely different worldview and set of values that were both antithetical to liberalism and oriented towards the future. 

Even the Taliban, as primitive and backward as they may seem, are not merely ‘conservatives’. They have a distinct view of ‘progress’ which involves shaping Afghanistan in the image of their God. 

One does not have to like either of these ideologies to understand they instil much more fear into the hearts of the Woke than merely a ‘conservative’ who seeks to preserve the status quo, not realising that it is in fact the Woke that control the status quo, and the conservative is just the Woke from less than a decade ago.

The Framing of Anglofuturism

And what are we ‘conserving’ now anyway? 

Since the 1960s, the Woke left has torn down the traditional Western society, in which virtually nothing substantial remains. The institutions we once venerated have become thoroughly corrupted by Wokeism, dutifully flying the rainbow flag out of deference to the status quo, just like Vaclav Havel’s greengrocer. The status-quo belongs to the Woke, and it is they who want to ‘conserve’ their power. They are therefore the ‘conservatives’. 

But this is not the only time in history that the political left have represented the elite power structure and preservation of the status quo. During the opening up of China under Deng Xiaoping, this dynamic was also present, though on economics rather than culture. The ‘conservatives’ were those that supported the maintenance of state socialism, whereas the ‘reformers’ were those that embraced market reforms.

We also should not be ‘reactionaries’, those that simply demand the restoration of the status-quo ante. History never repeats itself exactly, and it is impossible to completely restore an old order. 

To give a historical example, despite the defeat of Napoleon and the Bourbon Restoration in 1815, the Bourbons and their reactionary Legitimist supporters were never able to completely reverse the impact of the French Revolution. When Charles X pushed too far, he upset the fragile balance his older brother Louis XVIII had set up, and he was deposed. 

By dogmatically sticking to an idealised version of the past, the early 19th century reactionaries, personified by groups like the Legitimists, abandoned the pursuit of ‘progress’, resulting in liberal nationalists and socialists taking it up instead.

‘Progressivism’ is simply a semantic and aesthetic style, and is defined by the winners. Whilst technological progress can be objectively measured, social progress cannot be. 

Although in a previous article I mentioned how the romanticist artistic movement, that greatly influenced the middle-classes in the 19th century, had reactionary themes, it still represented something ‘new’. It was far detached from the reactionarism of tendencies like the Legitimists, relying less on monarchism and traditional Christianity and more on nationalism and folklore. 

The Romanticist movement, despite its sentimental attachment to the ‘Age of Heroes’, did not try to stop the progression of society, but rather tried to synthesise the ancient and the modern into something distinctly new.

Overton Window, Public Opinion, and ‘Sensible Centrism’

As N.S Lyons points out in his essay about Right-Wing Progressivism, the most fundamental difference between the ‘left’ and the ‘right’ is that the left believes in equality (however hypocritically) and the right believes in (formalised) hierarchy. 

However, whilst Anglofuturism has many similarities to ‘Right-Wing Progressivism’, and definitely considers itself a form of ‘progressivism’, it would not use the ‘right-wing’ label. Instead, it considers itself to be Sensible Centrist.

One may point out that its sentiments are currently very far away from the ‘centre’, but this is all relative to the window of discourse. The best political figures are those that define the centre-ground for themselves instead of following what political opponents deem the centre-ground. For instance, there is nothing inherently ‘centrist’ about neoliberal globalism, but Tony Blair made the supposed ‘centrism’ of such a political stance a key part of his personal brand.

If we admit we are ‘right-wing’, even forgetting its pejorative use, we are letting our opponents determine the window of discourse. Instead, we should do what Tony Blair did, invent our own Overton Window that we are at the centre of and project it outwards in our rhetoric.

It is what constitutes the ‘centre’ at any given moment that determines the overall trajectory that society is ‘progressing’ towards. The ‘left’ and the ‘right’, with the exception of periods of extreme polarisation such as Weimar Germany, are simply sped up or slowed down versions of where the ‘centre-ground’ ultimately wants to go.

The Anglofuturist View of Progress

Anglofuturist ‘progress’ does not need to be Marc Andreessen’s blind and uncritical ‘techno-optimism’. It can instead be a more sustainable, human-centric vision that valorises activities like space exploration whilst also promoting human flourishing, and sees ‘progress’ as the advancement of that human flourishing through technology.

Being progressive does not mean tearing down the vestiges of the past, but simply understanding that a successful society must be oriented towards advancement and the future.

A good form of progressivism preserves old buildings and the environment instead of destroying them. But it also creates new forms of architecture and aesthetics which will define its new age, inspired by the past but not imprisoned by it. 

Art Deco architecture was a prime example of past-inspired futurism, taking the best of Western traditional architecture but with a distinct modernist spin.

One also does not need to have Andreessen’s focus on technological innovation as a good in and of itself. A positive variety of progressivism would believe technology could be a means of improving humanity, but only if channelled correctly

If technology falls into the wrong hands, it can be a facilitator of tyranny. Mass surveillance technology being utilised by the Woke regime is a terrifying prospect, as we saw during the Covid lockdowns. 

We must instead create a technological ecosystem which weakens the overreach of the state in our personal lives, which is possible with technologies like cryptocurrency, P2P networks, and open source software.  Technology needs to be reoriented to prevent what the internet turned into in the 2010s, a surveillance censorship hell, from happening again.

Conclusion

Anglofuturism maintains the importance of a future-oriented, positive vision that is not conservative or reactionary, but something distinctly new. Something which can take the essential spirit that defined Britain in its golden age, yet does not seek to completely restore the past or its values, but synthesise traditional British values and an alternative, anti-Woke conception of modernity. 

To call oneself a ‘conservative’ is to call oneself bland, stale, and an upholder of the status quo, which in 2024 has very little worth defending. To call oneself a reactionary is to be a resentful loser who is in practice powerless to do anything other than ‘cope and seethe’. 

A winning movement always describes itself as progressive; what that ‘progress’ means in the social realm is highly subjective, but it is always there, and it always wishes to progress towards it through changing the status quo.