Managerialism is Inadequate
Our crisis calls for true leadership, not technocracy
It was such a pleasure to spend the last few days at the ARC conference with the Restoring the West team. You can watch footage from the conference here. I had a great discussion with Konstantin Kisin about the threat Islamism poses in Britain. Very few in the West understand how Islamism works—how its adherents target vulnerable institutions and quietly co-opt them over the course of decades, behind the scenes, out of public view. But it’s exactly what’s been unfolding in the U.K. and across Europe for years.
What I’m Thinking About
Keir Starmer’s resignation as Prime Minister feels like a sign of the times. Starmer rose as a moderate and a technocrat—on the premise that ideology and grand ideas are somehow outdated, he assured us that “there is no such thing as Starmerism.” What people really want, he seemed to think, is competent management and a peaceful society. As PM, he delivered neither. But I believe Starmer’s philosophy of government was doomed from the start. The rise of Reform on the right, and the increasing popularity of socialist ideas on the left, show just how hungry for ambitious ideas people really are. Starmer, like other technocrats, operated on the assumption that history had ended and that the great civilizational arguments had been settled. It’s the core belief of an era that’s over. And the patient, increasingly visible advance of Islamism has exposed that belief as a delusion.
