Reactionary as I am, it gives me no pleasure to report that conservatism is finished. As Britain struggles with the exhausted death-spasms of liberal Toryism, the only subset of Right-wing thought in the West today that doesn’t feel moribund is actively anti-conservative. The liveliest corner of the Anglophone Right is scornful of cultural conservatism and nostalgia, instead combining an optimistic view of technology with a qualified embrace of global migration and an uncompromising approach to public order.

And in much the same way as the Western Left seized on Venezuela under Chávez as a totemic worked example of this vision, so too the radical Right today has its template for the future: El Salvador under Nayib Bukele. Most recently, we can see this in the adulatory response from the online Right to Bukele’s offer of 5,000 free visas to “highly skilled scientists, engineers, doctors, artists, and philosophers”.

These visas, accompanied by tax breaks and help-with-moving costs, aim to tempt the cream of what the modern world likes to call “human capital” to make their homes in El Salvador. But if you build it, will they come? In recent years, El Salvador has made headlines for adopting an approach to law and order that, while effective, is viewed with alarm by Western liberals as encroaching unacceptably on human rights. Since coming to power in 2019, Bukele has declared a still-to-be-rescinded state of exception, suspended the Salvadorean constitution, and locked up some 70,000 alleged gang members without due process.

These moves have drastically reduced the murder rate in a previously notoriously dangerous country. Western critics, though, point to allegations that he has corrupted institutions by packing them with allies, not to mention, according to Amnesty International, “concealed and distorted public information, backed actions to undermine civic space, militarised public security, and used mass arrests and imprisonment as the sole strategies for counteracting violence in the country”.

And yet, Bukele’s strongman tactics have made him wildly popular with Salvadoreans, who doubtless enjoy a reported 70% reduction in the country’s previously extremely high murder rate. They have also made Bukele a rock star for the online Right. This group, fond of complaining about spineless leaders, fraying Western law and order, and the bleeding-away of political agency into international institutions and NGOs, regards the spectacle of a strongman leader with good social media game as something like a fantasy made flesh.

Arguably, it’s as much his embrace of technology that accords Bukele the mantle of poster-boy for a futuristic Right. Whether in his extremely online presence, his (admittedly not completely successful) embrace of Bitcoin as legal tender, or the high-tech, recently rebuilt National Library, funded by Beijing and serving more as showcase for futuristic technologies than as reading-room, Bukele’s offer to the people of El Salvador seems as energetically futurist as it does authoritarian on public safety. As Geoff Schullenberger recently reported, this is part of his appeal to Salvadorean voters: a sense of going somewhere, of there being a future to feel hopeful about.

This trait also makes him a touchstone for the Right-wing movement that I predict will replace “conservatism” in the 21st century. This outlook owes more to the Italian Futurist Filippo Marinetti than conservatives of the G.K. Chesterton variety, let alone any current mainstream Tory. It has as yet no party-political or institutional representation in Britain, and is perhaps most visibly embodied in American technologists such as Elon Musk, Mark Andreessen or Peter Thiel. As a worldview, it is broadly pro-capitalist, enthusiastically pro-technology and unabashedly hierarchical, as well as sometimes also scornful of Christian-inflected concern for the weak.

We might call it, rudely, “space fascism”, though N.S. Lyons’s formulation “Right-wing progressivism” is probably more accurate. Among its adherents, high-tech authoritarianism is a feature, not a bug, and egalitarianism is for fools. Thinkers such as Curtis Yarvin propose an explicitly neo-monarchical model for governance; Thiel has declared that: “I no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible.” And it’s not hard to see the appeal of Bukele as a poster-boy for such movements: while China is arguably a far larger and more successful instance of high-tech authoritarianism, it’s both (by Western standards) off-puttingly collectivist, and also a little too powerful for comfort. By contrast, El Salvador offers a worked example of what it might look like to roll out Right-wing progressivism in a previously dysfunctional polity: a project that both has underdog appeal, and also poses no direct material threat to American geopolitical interests.

“El Salvador offers a worked example of what it might look like to roll out Right-wing progressivism in a previously dysfunctional polity.”

For Anglophone Rightists, then, El Salvador is thus the most legible real-world instance of something like a Right-wing progressive programme in practice. And along with the tech enthusiasm and public-order toughness, the third distinctive feature of this programme can be gleaned: a desire not to end international migration, but to restrict it to elites.

For Right-wing progressives, polities are not necessarily premised on ethnic or cultural homogeneity — at least not for elites. Rather, this is a vision of statehood less based on affinity, history or even ethnicity, and more on a kind of opt-in, utility-maximisation model. It’s a far cry from the kind of can’t-we-all-just-get-along liberalism that characterises our current crop of hapless Tories. As for those still wedded to the 20th-century idea that being Right-wing necessarily means ethnicity-based nationalism, they are likely to find this outlook bewildering.

But Right-wing progressives generally accord greater political value to gifted, high-productivity foreigners than any slow-witted, unproductive coethnic: those within Right-wing progressive circles propose, and in some cases are already working on, opt-in startup cities and “network states” that would be, by definition, highly selective about membership. As a worldview, it’s jarring to cultural conservatives, who generally value thick ties of shared history and affinity. Yet it’s still more heretical to egalitarian progressives, for whom making migration and belonging an elite privilege offends every premise of inclusion and social justice.

It’s clear in Bukele’s visa announcement that he sees global mobility in these terms, as desirable only at small scale and for elites. El Salvador’s population is smaller than that of London; these 5,000 visas represent, he declares, “less than 0.1% of our population, so granting them full citizen status, including voting rights, poses no issue”. Though he doesn’t elaborate on what kind of “issue” large-scale immigration might “pose”, we might perhaps point to the undertone of ethnic lobbying that increasingly characterises politics in very “diverse” parts of the UK, as minority voting blocs grow large enough to sway the political process.

Right-wing progressives, by contrast, propose to learn from the immigration policies of polities such as Singapore and the Gulf states, and avert the political challenges posed by ethnic voting blocs by imposing tiered citizenship for low-skilled migrants, while courting the wealth and productivity of international elites. It’s a far cry from 20th-century conservatism, which until relatively recently assumed a measure of cultural continuity between national elites and the masses. Instead, Bukele’s proposal suggests a pragmatic two-tier Right-wing progressive migration policy that courts rich, productive, geographically rootless international “Anywheres” of the kind long understood to have more affinity with one another than with less wealthy and more rooted “Somewheres” — but to do so while explicitly protecting cultural homogeneity on behalf of the less-mobile masses.

READ MORE