James Pethokoukis wants the future back. The 1960s future he was promised as a child. The future of Star Trek: The Original Series, The Jetsons, and Walt Disney’s EPCOT, the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. Walt Disney promised that EPCOT “will never be completed but will always be introducing and testing, and demonstrating new materials and new systems.” The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised urges us to boldly go, in our flying cars, to the world of tomorrow. But why is it, nearly sixty years after the community of tomorrow was imagined, that we are still not there? Pethokoukis offers readers an interesting array of answers and presses throughout, “Faster please!” 

In 2011, the economist Tyler Cowen published a pamphlet titled The Great Stagnation. The format was quaint, but the argument was novel. It presented evidence that economic growth and technological progress had slowed in America since the mid-1970s. The Great Stagnation’s explanation of these phenomena is summarized in its own subtitle, How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better. 

Several years later the computer scientist J. Storrs Hall wrote Where Is My Flying Car?: A Memoir of Future Past which explored the scientific, technical, and cultural roots of the “Great Stagnation”.  

The Conservative Futurist picks up and extends this conversation offering several possible explanations for the “Great Stagnation” and suggestions for how we can get out of it. Uniquely, it outlines an ideological framework for embracing a dynamic and egalitarian future oriented society governed by classical liberal institutions. It presents both a path forward to the world of tomorrow and a program for the American conservative movement today. 

The hermeneutical keys to understanding The Conservative Futurist — its philosophy of history, historical analysis, ideological critique, public policy proposals, and its cultural vision — are the twin concepts “up wing” and “down wing”. Pethokoukis defines them both as general dispositions, attitudes, and vibes: 

Up Wing is my shorthand for a solution-oriented future optimism, for the notion that rapid economic growth driven by technological progress can solve big problems and create a better world of more prosperity, opportunity, and flourishing… Down Wing is about accepting limits, even yearning for them… Down Wing eschews risk, especially from innovation, unless possible threats to everyday life and the environment are well understood. 

Individuals, families, communities, nations, cultures, and epochs can be up wing or down wing. An up-wing cycle began in the 1950s, rose in the 1960s, and dissipated by the mid-1970s. A down-wing cycle gathered steam in the 1970s and then crashed against the technological cliffside of the 1990s tech boom. The World Wide Web-powered up-wing squall of 1995 dissipated by 2000, a brief blip in our otherwise unabated down-wing Great Stagnation. 

Pethokoukis’s chapter on the possible causes of the Great Stagnation is worth the price of admission alone. He resists offering one simple causal mechanism but rather ably summarizes the leading theories — from the destruction of the German language scientific community by Nazi totalitarianism and the Second World War to the beginning of the end of Moore’s Law (an observation that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles about every two years). By following the footnotes of this chapter, a careful reader can be brought fully up to speed on the debates surrounding the causes of the Great Stagnation. 

While avoiding a simplistic monocausal analysis, Pethokoukis highlights two complimentary trends as conscious choices made by Americans which have made outsized contributions to the Great Stagnation. Down-wing vibes have congealed into a formal principle of decision making: the “precautionary principle”. Pethokoukis defines this principle as a rule that “significant activities should not proceed until threats of damage are fully understood.” This principle fails to acknowledge trade-offs and is single-mindedly risk averse. Without risk there can be no innovation, and without innovation we reap stagnation. The widespread operationalization of this principle across society has eroded the funding of research and development across both the public and private sectors. 

If the ideological superstructure of the Great Stagnation is down-wing vibes and the precautionary principle, its intellectual vanguard is the environmental sustainability movement. Pethokoukis is careful to distinguish a concern for the natural world from the nostalgia-driven primitivism of much of the contemporary environmental movement. The movement returns again and again throughout the book as the greatest enemy of a future of economic growth, technological advancement, and material progress. Environmentalists, the book shows, have powered overpopulation panics, dubious peak oil prognostications, anti-nuclear activists, NIMBYism, degrowth advocacy, climate alarmism, and techno-anxiety of all kinds.   

Pethokoukis also alludes to right-wing traditionalists as a potential threat with their heated rhetoric against “big tech” and moral objections to some forms and uses of biotechnology, but most of the public policies criticized in the book are championed by the environmental movement and not social conservatives. The author himself acknowledges this obliquely as he spends chapters defending the industrial revolution, economic growth, and the potential of innovation to address real-world problems and crises, including pandemics.  

To counteract policies that contribute to the Great Stagnation justified by the precautionary principle, Pethokoukis encourages up-wingers to advocate for pro-growth and progress policies informed by the “proactionary principle”. Pethokoukis writes, 

The proactionary principle embraces uncertainty and risk as opportunities for enhancing human welfare and giving us the tools to meet big challenges and problems. The proactionary principle doesn’t deny or dismiss the potential problems that science and innovation can cause. Rather, it encourages us to face them head-on and find solutions that can benefit everyone. 

Propelled forward into the future by up-wing vibes, Pethokoukis applies the proactionary principle to mount a spirited defense of potential innovations which could power us through the Great Stagnation, such as artificial intelligence, biotechnology, emerging energy technologies, and automation. New initiatives in space exploration are suggested, as well as a long list of policy suggestions to build an up-wing-oriented economic future.  

Free marketers will find many of the suggestions familiar, notably deregulation and free trade. Strict libertarians may cringe at suggestions of increased government expenditures on research as well as infrastructure. Conservatives may recoil at the suggestion of increased immigration and urban density, while progressive find themselves pleasantly surprised with recommendations for more affordable housing and investments in education and social safety nets. 

Pethokoukis’s vision for an up-wing future is well reasoned, researched, and presented but doesn’t fit neatly into any existing American political tradition or movement. When the author first introduces the terms, he distinguishes them from more popular conceptions of political possibilities along a left-right spectrum. This earlier conception originates in the French Revolution, precisely where conservatism itself is born as a creative response to it. Conservatism is a repudiation of the excesses of both the Revolution and the reactionary counter-revolution. 

The Conservative Futurist offers convincing explanations for the Great Stagnation, and an interesting set of policy proposals to unleash economic growth, fueling technological progress. It also provides the beginning of an ideological framework centered on those issues. Its most natural audiences are classical liberals and progressives interested in an abundance agenda capable of delivering real material progress at scale. Whether it is a truly conservative vision is a more complicated question. 

The American experiment has produced and sustained the earth’s most enduring classical liberal institutions. In this sense, the book will find a receptive conservative audience as well. Traditionalist and religious conservatives will find it a less natural fit. The first of Russell Kirk’s “Ten Conservative Principles” is that “the conservative believes there is an enduring moral order. The order is made for man, and man is made for it: human nature is a constant, and moral truths are permanent.” The notion of a transcendent moral order and fixed human nature is an integral part of what makes many conservatives, well… conservative. The belief in both was also shared by the American founders, who were followers and then pioneers among giants of the liberal tradition.  

It is indeed the conviction of many that belief in a transcendent moral order and fixed human nature is the foundation of any true liberalism. The great British historian Lord Acton made such an argument. Great twentieth-century conservatives such as Wilhelm Röpke and Frank Meyer made it as well. The more traditionalist conservative Russell Kirk would even acknowledge this truth. James Pethokoukis does not advance such an argument in The Conservative Futurist, but the conservative futurists of the future will have to. 

Faster, please!