What Is Restorationism?

Restorationists come in all shapes, sizes, and flavours. It's an extremely broad and animated tent of reasonable, good faith, pragmatic Englishmen and Englishwomen who may disagree on what to restore, or how, or in what sequence. Reform, reclaim, reset, return, reboot, reverse – but we all agree on one thing: England has taken one damaging turn after another and things must be returned to their proper form for our people and nation to flourish again.

Some of us are more libertarian and wish to return to pre-WWI liberty for a life without the state; others are old school socialists who want the NHS to function as it did in the 1950s, run by doctors and nurses; one would certainly find pro-Tudor absolute monarchists with contempt for Parliament; maybe Thatcherites who despise Blair's post-1997 reforms. There's even room for more passionate and controversial types who season and sharpen the conversation with provocative ideas.

The Antique Table

Let us say before us is a battered old antique table.

• The Conservative wants to preserve it in its present condition and no-one molest it.
• The Traditionalist insists it must be used only as originally intended. 
• The Reactionary yearns for when tables were properly respected. 
• The Monarchist believes it rightfully belongs to the crown. 
• The Theocrat believes its design and use must comply with religious law.
• The Nationalist proudly declares it was made in their country. 
• The Fascist views it as sacred national heritage requiring protection. 
• The National Socialist claims it belongs only to those of pure ancestry. 
• The Populist claims elites have hoarded all the tables like it and things need to change. 
• The Authoritarian demands strict rules about who can use it and sit at it. 
• The Communist declares it property of the state. 
• The Mercantilist wants to keep it.
• The Socialist demands everyone share it equally. 
• The Social Democrat wants it fixed with public money for a private owner.
• The Libertarian Socialist claims everyone should own it .
• The Progressive believes it must be thrown away unless its LGBT history is celebrated.
• The Centrist doesn't care either way. 
• The Syndicalist proposes unions should control its use.
• The Technocrat wants experts to determine how it should be used. 
• The Pragmatist doesn’t believe it's still functional and useful. 
• The Utilitarian asks how many people can efficiently sit at it at once. 
• The Pluralist celebrates that many different people can share it.
• The Libertarian believes its buyer should be able to use it free of any interference.
• The Capitalist calculates profit margin if bought cheaply. 
• The State Capitalist says the government should own it but operate it as a business.
• The Neoliberal explores replication using third-world labour. 
• The Anarcho-Capitalist wants to privatise it and let the market decide.
• The Globalist claims it represents cultural exchange and shared heritage. 
• The Isolationist opposes foreign versions being imported. 
• The Identitarian organises a group of table lovers.
• The Egoist asks what the table can do for them personally. 
• The Anarchist wants to discard it as unnecessary. 
• The Third Way advocate suggests a public-private partnership to maintain it.
• The Primitivist rejects it as a symbol of civilisational corruption. 
• The Accelerationist suggests it is burned to speed up new table construction.
• The Transhumanist wants it AI-enhanced so it can fuse nature with human skill.
• The Environmentalist is outraged about the use of wood.
• The Naturalist sees it as a repurposed tree. 
• The Religious Fundamentalist believes its purpose is divinely ordained. 
• The Atheist doesn't care who made it or why. 
• The Existentialist believes one must create one’s own meaning for it.
• The Nihilist doesn't believe it matters one way or another. 
• The Absurdist laughs at attempts to understand what it does.
• The Postmodernist sees it as a variation of any number of different tables. 
• The Marxist describes it as a product of class relations.
• The Democratic Socialist wants the control of the table factory owned by workers.
• The Isolationist opposes wants it placed in storage and other similar items blocked.
• The Protectionist is concerned about local table makers.
• The Nativist claims foreign tables are corrupting traditional tablemaking.
• The Paleoconservative wants to return to handcrafted tables.

The Restorationist studies it lovingly and sees the ancient wood it is made of; its form and function; its owner and origin; its intricate markings and craftsmanship; its historical context, and the memories it features in. He laments its decay, yet imagines how it might be transformed into a new table he envisions which is even more glorious than before.

First Principles

At the height of the First Empire, England transformed from a free country to a nation orientated towards the will of the government. But it never returned.

Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home.All this was changed by the impact of the Great War. The mass of the people became, for the first time, active citizens. Their lives were shaped by orders from above; they were required to serve the state instead of pursuing exclusively their own affairs.

— A.J.P. Taylor

The Restorationist is someone who believes there is a way England should be. In the words of one her greatest men:

We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.

C.S Lewis

A Doctrine Of Reckless Hope

Perceptiveness

The Restorationist sees more than present value or decay; he sees future glory and what something will be worth upon medicament. He sees through what is, to what can and will be. When he is confronted with doom, he sees the victory parade; when it is winter, he sees spring.

Sentimentality

The Restorationist is driven by love: a love for God, love for one’s country; love for one’s people; love for one’s traditions. Love for what was and what is, coupled with grief over what has been lost. His is a Burkeian world of a shared covenant between those who are dead, those who are alive, and those who are yet to be born.

Stoic Optimism

At his very core, under his cynicism and mischief, the Restorationist is a cautious optimist. His resolve and stubborn-minded will to renew what has decayed is self-evidently his choice to embrace hope over apathy or despair. He is convicted, resolved, and decided. His mind is made up.

Pragmatism

The Restorationist is not nostalgic because he aims to bring into being something new from something old. He is not an idealist; a bleeding heart; nor is he naive or magical in his thinking. Renewal requires diligent planning and costing, being fraught with opposition.

Savoir Faire

Being an Englishman, the Restorationist has a polished sureness to his cause. As a man of the world, he knows when to brandish a dagger, plant a kiss, or trigger an eruption of language. Most of all, he understands the importance of dress and aesthetics.

Are you A Restorationist?

Sense Of Loss

At his core, the Restorationist has a visceral understanding something intangible and valuable has been lost. From his people and their quality of life; his culture and the esteem of its traditions; in the integrity and practices of those he has agreed may govern; and the future his children will inherit. Unlike the conservative, he is not passively conserving or preserving what already exists as he looks back; he must recover; repair; renew; regenerate; begin anew. He must work actively as a matter of honour and wisdom, in adverse conditions, to transform what is broken or decayed, for the future.

Political Homelessness

Having lived through the digital printing press reformation of the personal computer and the Internet, the sclerotic ideologies of the last century are anachronistic and to the Restorationist. He is not of the Right, because he seeks transformation; not of the Left, because he values tradition. He is not authoritarian, as he demands non-interference; not libertarian, as he understands the necessity command. Neither is he a centrist, as he favours action. He is not a futurist, as he venerates the past; nor is there something to conserve or smash down. Ironically, the one thing he can not, and will not, restore is the dead-end ideologies of the past.

Distrust of Bureaucratic internationalism

Whether it is open society globalism, multinational corporation outsourcing, mass immigration, ideological oligarchy, NGO lobbying, the harmful disenfranchising effects of unaccountable governance by faceless bureaucrats are too self-evident for the Restorationist to deny. The nation is the widest plausible form of the third person plural (“we”), the national civil service bureaucracy, and the supranational rulemaking body are all an intolerable violation of a people’s sovereignty over their own destiny and the individual’s right to live without interference from those who are provided consent to govern.

Rejection of post-WWII excesses

The Restorationist has come to despise the destructive landslide of moral permissiveness, and no longer wishes to live in a repeating mythological storyline of grieving Nazism and magical equality. To him, the so-called endless tolerance of “liberation” slew such as postmodern nihilism philosophy, brutalist architecture, foeticide, euthanasia, race taboos, marriage cynicism, open promiscuity and prostitution, migrant violence, homosexuality veneration, racial favouritism, mass child rape, mass sexual abuse, antisemitic violence, atheist humanism, next-day divorce, cross-dressing, Nixon inflation, censorship arrests, surveillance cameras, abstract euphemisms, epidemic narcissism, and every other socio-cultural ill are the inevitable by-product of liberalism itself. He recognises and values the differences between the sexes; the beauty of marriage; the moral bankruptcy of hedonism; and the social cohesiveness of religion even if he does not practice himself.

Insistence on natural negative liberty

The Restorationist is, at his heart, a fish who swims in the waters of ancient English traditions and recognises these have created the most successful prospering nations in human history because freedom and prosperity are intrinsically coupled. Rights only make sense when existing in and of the state of nature as an uniquely individual corporeal human being, given from God; pre-existing both government or politics; out of either’s jurisdiction. Rights and liberty oblige inaction and they should be free by default from interference or external restraint, whether the offending action originates with the state or other people. He rejects entirely the modernist notion of a “social contract,” or the state has jurisdiction to issue artificial permissions such as origin-less “human rights.”

Enthusiasm for Austrian economics

The concept one can press levers to control nature trade between humans, or centrally plan the movement of economic forces, is objectively absurd to the Restorationist as attempting to manipulate the weather. Moreover, GDP is not the most important thing. As a keen analyst of historical trends (such as Singapore and Hong Kong), he rejects the invasive excesses of Keynesian economics, Nixon shock, and Modern Monetary theory for the Austrian model for as minimal interference by the state in business as possible, while favouring decentralised cryptographic systems which bypass gatekeepers. Interference by the state decreases individual prosperity because it decreases freedom, and vice versa.

Trust but verify

Unlike when the radio and television monopolised public opinion as a pulpit for weekly ideological promises, the Restorationist intuitively only trusts public figures who have rarely, if ever, changed their stance, and been the same person without pandering or flip-flopping in the political winds. He recognises, because of the folly of the “blank slate,” one’s beliefs should be considered an extension or byproduct of one’s temperament and character as a product of a time and place, formed from moral sentiment and common sense political conviction. The righteousness of one’s cause, and their loyalty to it, are separate from the purity of one’s behaviour.

Autodidactic by default

As a curious mind, the Restorationist is more self-taught than he is taught. Three-hour podcasts allow him to evaluate who an author really is; YouTube videos provide pausable instructions; eBooks live in a folder on his desktop; AI models answer his endless questions at his own pace, whether fast or slow. In an encyclopaedic universe with all human knowledge in his pocket via the smartphone, he reaches first to do his own homework before sitting at a desk looking at a blackboard to passively receive information.

Drawn to technological futurism

The Restorationist is driven by a pragmatic fascination with the possibilities technology invites to the future, not by rosy nostalgia for an arguable past. He lives in a world of instant global communication where knowledge, currency, and memory are digitised, imagining imminent exploration of Mars. What was unmade can be made again; what was ruined can be renewed; what has not been seen can be realised. His is a science fiction world immersed in perceiving how the world he leaves to his grandchildren could look, as he appreciates and values what it evolved from before.