The Trouble With Disraeli
Posted on November 13th, 2009
by Daniel McCarthy |
Noel O’Sullivan puts it well:
In the Vindication of the English Constitution he had indeed professed allegiance to the ideal of a balanced constitution, and consequently insisted that the House of Commons alone could not be regarded as the representative of the nation; it was, on the contrary, merely the representative of one estate of the nation, even though that estate might be the most numerous. The ‘people,’ or the ‘nation’ as a whole, was represented only in the three mutually counterbalanced parts of the constitution — the throne, the peers, and the Commons — when taken in conjunction with one another. Disraeli could accordingly proceed to justify extension of the suffrage by maintaining that no increase in the number of voters could ever entitle the House of Commons to regard itself as the true representative of the will of the people. A number of his contemporaries, however, were not slow to point out how unrealistic unrealistic was the assumption that an elected chamber would prove to be as modest as Disraeli hoped it would be about its position in the constitution. Claiming the support of the electorate, it would hardly be likely to accept opposition to its will from the monarch or an hereditary House of Lords as entitled to the same respect as its own wishes. And that, of course, is what subsequently happened: the likelihood of a royal veto on legislative measure supported by the Commons was a remote eventuality by the time Victoria died, and the House of Lords was already on the defensive long before the Liberal onslaught upon it in the first decade of the [20th] century. It was to the idea of a strong popularly-based leadership, then, rather than to the old Burkean ideal of a balanced constitution, that Disraeli’s deeper sentiments and policies actually seemed to point.
That’s from O’Sullivan’s Conservatism, which is pretty good. In a later chapter, he describes the three-way crossroads at which traditionalists and paleos are liable to find themselves:
Let us suppose with Eliot and Dawson that the modern psyche is really rotten to the core, whether because of the decline of religion or culture, or both. In that case, only three responses are possible at the political level. One is despair, which means in practice doing nothing; the second is the advocacy of a spiritual revolution so profound that it is incompatible with a stable version of conservative ideology; whilst the third is a resort to more modest reforms which are bound, however, to appear totally inadequate remedies for the disease they are intended to cure. It is the third solution to which both Eliot and Dawson resort. Eliot writes nostalgically of the parish as an example of what he means by organic community, whilst Dawson suggests that the kind of institution which would satisfy the need for spiritual harmony, supra-political leadership and cultural unity would be one modelled upon the English public school system.
… The real challenge to the imagination of the conservative statesman is to spot those parts of a rickety structure which, when strengthened by modest reforms, will give greater stability to the whole. To attempt more than that — by reforming religion, culture, or men’s beliefs about society and the universe at large, for example — may of course be possible; but the price of success is likely to be the destruction of liberty and legality.