‘A great awakening of men of action’: What does the ‘right-wing Davos’ represent?

The Financial Times called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship’s 2025 conference the ‘right-wing Davos’. The Alliance involves academics from elite universities, current and former members of government from the UK, Australia, Hungary, and the USA, global media personalities, international capital investors, and CEOs of major companies. Superficially, it appears to represent a motley association of self-described Classical Liberals, evangelists of free-market capitalism, ethnonationalists, atheists and conservative theologians. We need a better understanding of what unites this power elite because through its interventions it is seeking to radically change societies. The dataset is all the publicly available keynote speeches (32) given at ARC 2025. The method is the Discourse-Historical Approach. The analysis reveals a community unified by its opposition to a common enemy that the conference claims is destroying ‘Western Civilisation’ from within. By drawing on its bespoke history and a series of discursive strategies, ARC 2025 becomes a theatre of self-affirming ideological recursion that, despite each speaker’s different origins, converges on an ideology that morally justifies its members’ investments in fossil fuels, their social status, and right to intervene in society. Consequently, ARC’s regressive neoliberalism erases the boundaries between Christian nationalism, neoliberalism, and the far-right.