The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship is the brainchild of Canadian writer and commentator Jordan Peterson, Australian former deputy prime minister John Anderson and Baroness Philippa Stroud, who formerly ran the Legatum think tank.
The alliance will hold its first international conference in London next week with 1500 delegates and a long waiting list, at a conference fee of £1500 ($2870) each. About 300 people are coming from Europe, with the bulk of delegates from the Britain and the US.
It all began with a phone call from Peterson to Anderson. The Canadian was distressed at the way climate change policies were making energy unaffordable in the developed world and threatening to cut food production and push people back into poverty.
“Very few people realise that since World War II the world now feeds an extra five billion people,” Anderson says.
“This has come about because of Western scientific know-how, the rules-based system overseen by the Americans which is now breaking down, and the availability of affordable energy and fertiliser. Jordan Peterson rang me and said if we get this energy transition wrong now we’ll reverse this process and push people back into poverty. Then he said, why don’t we have a conference on this?”
This phone call happened barely a year ago and the organisation has moved at warp speed to produce next week’s giant conference.
It will have five main strands: family and population, business and ethics, energy and the environment, the promotion of Western civilisation, and geopolitical issues.
Apart from the three former Australian prime ministers – John Howard, Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison – a host of high-profile speakers are scheduled to deliver their wisdom.
Among them are Niall Ferguson, new US Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson, former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, US senator Mike Lee, US Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy, and British ministers Michael Gove and Kemi Badenoch. There are also a range of writers, commentators, social critics and international affairs analysts attending, among them writers Os Guinness, and Arthur Brooks.
Australian opposition frontbenchers Angus Taylor, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, Andrew Hastie, Ted O’Brien and James Paterson will also be there. Former Coalition minister Julian Leeser and former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce will also attend, as well as former One Nation leader in NSW Mark Latham. Former senator Amanda Stoker, like Howard, Abbott and Hastie, is on the alliance’s advisory panel and will speak.
In an odd way, the whole initiative arises from Anderson’s remarkable video and podcast series. The webcast and podcast enterprise has more than 400,000 subscribers and nearly 100 million separate YouTube downloads. Anderson first met Peterson through interviewing him for this series.
“Citizens in the West feel marginalised, treated with contempt by the elites,” Anderson tells me.
“A classic example of how citizens push back when they get a chance is the vote on the voice in Australia. The expertocracy should realise their patronising attitudes are damaging to democracy. Societies have to have elites, but they need the right elites, and the elites need to respect the common sense view of the people.
“Out of all this I hope we can say three things: one, we need a return of realism and clear thinking; two, we need the re-engagement of our citizens; and three, we need heroes in our time.”
Anderson and the other leaders of the alliance hope to make the event an annual conference. In time it could emerge as an infinitely more constructive and realistic version of the Davos man movement.
Davos man became a caricature of itself, almost the platonic ideal definition of elites out of touch with ordinary people and common sense.
As a foreign editor, it has for a long time been the case that whenever a Southeast Asian politician tells you how frequently they attend Davos, and what a star they are at the conference, you know you’re meeting someone with no significant traction in their own society.
The alliance has some significant business backers, among them British investor Sir Paul Marshall. To turn ARC into an annual conference, a global, or at least Western, gathering of centrist to centre-right figures and thinkers, with a unifying and positive vision, will nonetheless be an enormous undertaking.
Still, at a time of global crisis and challenge, it’s surely a constructive effort.
Greg Sheridan will attend the conference as a guest of the ARC.
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More than 150 Australian politicians, business figures, commentators and journalists – including three former prime ministers – are flocking to London to be part of the creation of a conservative answer to the World Economic Forum held annually at Davos.