The Trouble With Disraeli
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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.
Filed under: Books, Conservatism
“… 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.”
Does that apply to the idea that cutting back the welfare state will make people more responsible? I’m not trying to score an ideological point against paleos or other conservatives, just wondering if there wasn’t something unrealistic about that project as well. Perhaps that wasn’t a modest goal either, or if it was, what about the idea that freeing up financial markets would make money men more prudent?
Those are still fairly limited policy objectives, whether they’re right or wrong. The sweeping cultural vision of a T.S. Eliot or a Christopher Dawson is what O’Sullivan has in mind, and the propensity of that kind of vision to shade into politics that resemble those of Charles Maurras. O’Sullivan points to “liberal-conservatism,” which he associates with Hayek and Roepke, and Japanese-style corporatism as alternatives to a radical traditionalism that requires a complete reconstruction of culture. He has some paragraphs looking at why, from a hard cultural-conservative perspective overt totalitarian systems such as Communism might actually be preferable (at least in the abstract) to covertly totalitarian liberalism — he cites some lines from Dawson about how we’re not really free in a democracy or free market, because advertising is shaping our minds. O’Sullivan argues that Dawson and Eliot actually do wind up choosing reformist paths, however, rather than pursuing to the most radical implications of their thought.
To put it another way: is it enough to limit the effects of liberalism (however one understands that term) or to make liberalism “conservative”? Or is liberalism so terrible that it must be extirpated?
Thanks for the response. To put it another way, are the “thick” variants of conservatism developed in an age of big ideas and universal narratives (socialism, Marxism, Freudianism, Darwinism) really appropriate for an age that’s come to question such comprehensive ideologies? Or is 21st century conservatism bound to be more modest?
I can see that diminishing resources and increased competition may make the welfare states 20th century liberals dreamed about a thing of the past. People may become more self-reliant and work harder out of necessity, but I still wonder if the idea of getting back to older virtues through greater reliance on market discipline may not be too much to expect from this generation of Westerners.
After I posted I remembered David Frum’s great u-turn from a very “dry” market-based conservatism to the wettest welfare-state conservatism. Whatever one thinks of Frum, is the idea of reforming character through government austerity perhaps too much of an unrealizable dream?
That’s a very good point — the fragmentation or “sectarianism” of the Right is usually seen, not least by conservatives themselves, as a defect. But the differentiation of the Right into a plethora of micro-conservatisms might be the most appropriate thing for an age of narrative fragmentation. On the other hand, the thrust of philosophical conservatism at least since Coleridge has been against the fissiparous tendencies of modern culture and politics. In practice, though, I’d like to see American conservatism become less monolithic (or for that matter bipolar) and more realistically complex.
I’m skeptical about getting back to older virtues, simply because I don’t think human beings are ever very virtuous. But it does look to me as if the welfare state encourages bad habits. It’s not just the welfare state, though — the right-wing “investment” state, the mentality that home prices will always go up and stocks will always turn a profit, is also deranged, to the extent (which in fact is a very great extent) that it encourages unrealistic expectations and then invokes government (which itself is insolvent) to rescue or correct the markets.
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