Posted by Geoff Beck on February 06, 2005, 06:25 PM | #

Guessedworker:

A valiant effort is your rebuttal, but it matters not.

Like a child curious about his evacuation, Jon Ray only wishes to smear excrement, to see if it smells the same afterwards

The idea of someone being a ‘founder’ of conservatism is preposterous. Conservatism isn’t found in some manifesto compiled by some egghead or politician.

But isn’t that the image that Jon Ray projects… that of an egghead ideologue. Oh that that prattle about “ACADEMIC JOURNALS”. Oh, and the pretentiousness of

. Every time I see that link I must chuckle; those endless pedestrian comments about Hitler. Hasn’t he heard of Daniel Pipes? So confident of his intellect he proclaims:

I seem to be doomed to challenging conventional ideas about the nature of the political spectrum

A legend in your own mind.

Posted by ben tillman on February 06, 2005, 07:15 PM | #

The idea of someone being a ‘founder’ of conservatism is preposterous. Conservatism isn’t found in some manifesto compiled by some egghead or politician.

My thoughts exactly.

Posted by jonjayray on February 06, 2005, 07:22 PM | #

LOL

Fun comments—febrile rage in lieu of argument

David is quite right that Dizzy invented much.  That was after all the point and the title of my post.  What David seems to overlook was that the alternative was the complete ascendancy of liberalism/socialism.  Toryism would have been reduced to the spluttering rage of a few isolates like Wintermute and Ben Tillman without Dizzy

Posted by Geoff Beck on February 06, 2005, 07:54 PM | #

Wintermute has been silent in all this?

Posted by Guessedworker on February 06, 2005, 08:24 PM | #

Three questions in that, really, John.

a) Was Conservativism doomed by 1832?

b) Was Disraeli’s “invention” the only form in which Conservatism might go forward?

c) Intentionally or otherwise, did Disraeli merely guarantee liberalism for the future?

To (a) I would answer that the Reform Act did not gift the country a working solution to the problem of enfranchisement of a working class growing in wealth and education.  There was a dynamic at work here.  In actuality, it may not have been antipathetic to that maintenance of balanced Constitutional interests upon which Conservatism depended.  But the issue was never put to the test.

It should have been.  Even with a widened franchise the evidence in the years after 1832 for the electoral death of Conservatism is pretty thin.  A basis for survival might have been created in the 1850’s and again in 1875, had anyone but Disraeli been in the driving seat.

Since it was Disraelii in the driving seat, it’s all too easy to assume that question (b) answers itself, much as Blair’s New Labour is seen as the only form in which the old Labour Party could march again, post-Thatcher.  He who has control of the history books writes the history, and who wonders anymore what a Labour Party of John Smith might have looked like.?

There is never only one possible answer to such a question.

The answer to (c) is a decisive ‘yes’.  This is the central thrust of the case against Disraeli.  The birthright was sold for a mess of potage that, from 1902 to 1979, offered no Conservatism worthy of the name.  Thatcher was only Conservative in limited areas, and seems never to have understood the metapolitical victory of liberalism.

Today, in any case, the Disraelian compromise is in its turn very weak ... possibly dying.  The sap of that ancient tribalism which you so dislike, John, is rising.  The old interests of class and property are being slowly reborn in a new form to which the left cannot minister.  If this development remains wholly informed within what I keep banging on about as a liberal zeitgeist, the consequences could be negative (narrowly nationalist).  An opportunity is approaching - in maybe two decades time - to change the political water again.  I hope, away from liberty this time and towards a more holistic politic of the right.  One has to be optimistic at my age.

Posted by wintermute on February 06, 2005, 09:16 PM | #

Wintermute has been silent in all this?

Bemused, more like.

Was there something of substance to respond to? Another of Gelernter’s laughable claims?

Six months ago he was telling us all how both Greece and Judea were important for the development of the West, but that in a pinch, we could discard the Greek inheritance.

Two weeks ago, he was describing his new ideology, Americanism, which - wouldn’t you know it - also seems to be heavily dependant on Judiasm. He was working on a Thanksgiving Hagaddah, so that us clueless goyim could have some understanding of the country we built.

Now John J. Renfield, fresh from plastering this site with propaganda regarding Iraqi elections from the demonstrably unbalanced Stephen Schwarz, continues his work as water carrier/ all around golem by proclaiming Gelernter’s dizzy theories far and wide, free from what would undoubtedly be a stinging encounter with critical thought.

What more is called for than a laugh?

Posted by Arcane on February 07, 2005, 12:15 AM | #

I guess conservatives aren’t allowed to make compromises to halt more extreme forces from destroying everything. In that respect, I guess Bismarck wasn’t a conservative, since he created various social welfare programs to stem the tide of socialism in Germany. As a result, Germany never became socialist. The closest it ever came to being socialist was the creation of the “social market” model by the CDU which is still practiced today, and there isn’t much that is socialist about the “social market.”

So, like Bismarck, Disraeli made some compromises. I don’t see the problem with that, since politics is all about compromise. If there is no compromise, there is no peace, so in a world where you guys would never compromise to stem more extreme forces, you wouldn’t practice politics; you’d practice war. Only in war can you have total victory and total defeat. In politics, you can have both victory and defeat, and still be happy about the outcome.

Posted by Guessedworker on February 07, 2005, 03:10 AM | #

Arcane,

Conservatism developed into a party political force over a period of three centuries.  It was not an inflexible dogma but a sound basis upon which people might be loosed into their own hands for the purpose of their own increase.

As such it contained the Lockean principles of liberty and the consent of the governed.  The crisis it faced in the early decades of the 19th Century was, broadly, that the mushrooming demand for liberty threatened the consent of the governed.

It is a matter of conjecture as to whether the natural capaciousness of, say, Liverpool’s Conservatism would have been sufficient to absorb that demand and maintain that consent.  The politicians who had succeeded him were, in any case, practising a weak-tea Conservatism that was capable of absorbing nothing.  It was made a simple matter for Disraeli to abolish the whole shooting match and write his own historical fantasy in favour of defeatism and radicalism at home and adventurism and empire abroad.

That isn’t compromise.  Gelernter is right in linking Marx and Disraeli.  They were both revolutionaries.

Posted by Effra on February 07, 2005, 10:49 AM | #

Salisbury despised “the democracy” and abominated Dizzy’s Whig-dishing extension of the franchise on much the same grounds as my favourite mid-19C Liberal, Robert Lowe.

Although Dizzy was waspishly “nice” to Salisbury, procuring the Garter for him when he got it himself after the Congress of Berlin, Salisbury on becoming PM set out to tone down Dizzy’s Tory democracy. He allowed himself, privately sneering, to become a patron of the Primrose League and seemed to bless from on high efforts to capture the petit bourgeoisie and Crown-and-cottage, Alf Garnettesque working class for the Conservative Party. But at heart Salisbury was pessimistic about how Dizzy’s gaudy opportunism had poisoned the wellsprings of Tory England and (to vary the metaphor) introduced a fatal ratchet-effect syndrome into domestic politics.

Henceforth both big parties would nervously watch the vote-furnished proles for signs of independent organisation (e.g. Lib-Labs and the ILP) and would try to outbid each other for the votes of the great unwashed with schemes for “improving the condition of the people”. Dodging ever-rising taxes would preoccupy the traditional, landed governing class. It would become selfish and distrait, and politics would pass into the hands of middle class careerists and demagogues on Dizzy’s own model.

Salisbury was the last true Conservative prime minister, and his Cassandra-like foresight (quoted extensively in Andrew Roberts’s biography) reads all too true a hundred years later.

In fairness to Dizzy, it could be said that the Toryism of the old country party died when Peel split it, and “Conservatism” (a neologism of William IV’s time IIRC) was always an implicit and dangerous compromise with post-1832 England’s novelties. Whereas Salisbury harked back to Pitt and Wellington, Dizzy recognised and rode that wave as the Lloyd George or Harold Wilson of his day. Trying to find an ideology or set of principles in his shenanigans is like trying to build a mountain of mercury with tweezers.

Posted by ben tillman on February 07, 2005, 12:59 PM | #

What David seems to overlook was that the alternative was the complete ascendancy of liberalism/socialism.

Have we not already realized that alternative?