“Democracy has not saved us from a distinct decline in the standard of our public men,” the Liberal prime minister William Gladstone told his biographer, John Morley, towards the end of his life. And he had no doubt that “For all this deterioration one man and one man only is responsible: Disraeli. He is the Grand Corruptor.”
No one can have paid even cursory attention to the presidential election that just ended without hearing echoes of this same lament from every quarter, though in our own case the man so roundly accused of being the “Grand Corruptor” was also the man who won the election: Donald Trump.
To speak of Trump in the same breath as Disraeli might seem incongruous, even ludicrous. Disraeli, after all, was a professional politician, not an inspired bounder. Indeed, after “climbing to the top of the greasy pole”, he led two conservative administrations as prime minister and could boast of many political achievements: not least the passing of the Reform Bill of 1867 and his diplomatic triumph during the Congress of Berlin (1878), which helped thwart Russia from invading Constantinople and led to Bismarck famously exclaiming, “Der alte Jude, das ist der Mann.”
Disraeli was also one of Victoria’s most gifted authors. Trump, too, is an author, of sorts, though neither he nor his ghostwriter will ever figure in any American Parnassus. Disraeli wrote and spoke as brilliantly as he did because he had all of the gusto of the Georgians, without losing any of the moral seriousness of the Victorians. To dip into his novels, speeches, and table talk is to encounter a man of consummate wit. “I will not go down to posterity talking bad grammar,” he insisted while correcting proofs of his last Parliamentary speech. And for evidence of how successful he was in this regard we need only point to his quotability. Speaking to the editor of Victoria’s correspondence, Lord Esher, Disraeli summed up a good deal of his political life: “I never deny; I never contradict; I sometimes forget.” Speaking with Matthew Arnold, he revealed how he became Queen Victoria’s favorite prime minister: “Everyone likes flattery, and when you come to Royalty you should lay it on with a trowel.” Speaking with Mark Twain, he even managed to be aphoristic, no small feat in the presence of someone renowned for his aphorisms: “There are three kinds of lies,” Disraeli told the American humorist, “lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
In such badinage, we can see why Disraeli dazzled the hostesses of Mayfair as well as the heads of foreign courts. Yet there was also something of a political philosopher in him. In Coningsby (1844), for example, he has occasion to remark: “Conservatism… having rejected all respect for antiquity… offers no redress for the present, and … no preparation for the future.” In a speech to the Mansion House in 1879, he declared: “One of the greatest of Romans, when asked what were his politics, replied, Imperium et Libertas. That would not make a bad programme for a British Ministry.” And yet to the popular historian Bulwer Lytton, he was categorical: “Damn your principles! Stick to your party!”
Many prejudices, even anti-Semitism, might have been at the bottom of Gladstone’s unfair gibe about Disraeli being the “Grand Corruptor,” but certainly Disraeli’s own gibes against Gladstone had to have played a part. How did Disraeli describe his greatest political opponent? For the acid-tongued Tory, who could never stomach the sort of hypocritical sanctimony for which our own Progressives are so notorious, Gladstone was “A sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity.” Since Gladstone was the champion of the liberal chattering classes, this was no scattershot salvo. Yet, Gladstone also wished to see a kind of moralism in politics, even a surrogate religion. And here was where Disraeli found his opening. The man about town in Disraeli knew enough about English society to know that the two classes that detested the humbug in which Gladstone specialized were the classes that were generally thought to have the least in common: the aristocracy and the working class. Indeed, in Sybil (1845), he himself had eloquently deplored the unnecessary alienation between the two classes, which he characterized as:
It was to bridge the chasm between these two nations that Disraeli devised what he called ‘One Nation Conservatism,’ which would result in his 1874-80 government passing a number of legislative reforms expressly designed to improve the lives of the working classes, including the Public Health Act, the Artisans Dwelling Act, and various Factory Acts. According to Lord Blake, Disraeli’s finest biographer, “taken together,” these reforms “constitute the biggest instalment of social reform passed by any government in the nineteenth century,” though he is right to stress that they were not meant to be any repudiation of laissez-faire conservative orthodoxy. On the contrary, they were passed to make more substantive state intervention unnecessary. They gave the working class the means to be self-reliant, not dependent on state subsidy.
After Disraeli’s death, Winston Churchill’s father, Lord Randolph Churchill would rename Disraeli’s nascent movement ‘Tory Democracy,’ which the Merriam Webster Dictionary nicely defines as: “a political philosophy advocating preservation of established institutions and traditional principles combined with political democracy and a social and economic program designed to benefit the common man.”
Although Lord Randolph would not live to take advantage of Tory Democracy, he recognized clearly enough the empty promises in which so much Gladstonian liberalism resulted. Indeed, to make his point, he resorted to an amusing analogy. Gladstone, he charged, promised the subjects of the Queen “much legislation, great prosperity, and universal peace, and he has given them nothing but chips. Chips to the faithful allies in Afghanistan, chips to the trusting native races of South Africa, chips to the Egyptian fellah, chips to the British farmer, chips to the manufacturer and the artisan, chips to the agricultural labourer, chips to the House of Commons itself.” Although addressed to the party faithful in Blackpool over a hundred years ago, the speech still resonates with any audience familiar with the chips that President Barack Obama has given to our own compatriots, not to mention our allies, over eight long unprofitable years.
In taking issue with ‘Tory Democracy,’ Gladstone adumbrated many of the criticisms that our friends on the Left continue to level at conservatives whenever they appeal to the interests of the working class. “Tory Democracy,” Gladstone told Morley, “is… demogogism living upon the fomentation of angry passions…” Disraeli’s riposte was of an unanswerable acuity: “Man is only truly great when he acts from the passions.”
Like Disraeli, President-Elect Trump is an audacious outsider; in many influential quarters, he is thought temperamentally unfit to hold high office; he is seen as not only raffish but disreputable. But also like Disraeli, Trump is alive to the grievances of the working class; he knows that traditional conservatism has not always been appreciative of those grievances; and he is convinced that the entrepreneurial rich and the working class (especially those languishing in the Rust Belt) share many of the same values, whether they be family, faith, liberty or freedom. Hence, Trump’s determination to remove the shackles of regulation that continue to stymie the small and larger businesses that employ the working class.
Now, it might be true that Disraeli’s aristocracy and working class shared tastes different from those of our own upper and working classes. Less tame than their American counterparts, they delighted in gambling, drink, the music hall and blood sports. By and large, they preferred zest to respectability. But the fact remains that Trump knows, as Disraeli knew, that the conservative party, if properly led, can unite the upper classes and the working classes by providing them with the freedom they need to exercise their talents as they see fit, not as the interventionist State dictates that they exercise their talents. Those still in the Never Trump camp might complain that Trump is dividing conservatives by pitting old principled conservatives against the new working-class conservatives, who may not be proper conservatives at all. But this is false. Private enterprise, economic growth and constitutional liberty will always appeal to both.
Forgetting this abiding common ground and enmeshing ourselves in the suppositious differences between Donald Trump and what is loosely referred to as the Republican Establishment is as futile as it is counter-productive.
When Trump won the presidency on Election Day, he was widely credited with achieving one of the greatest political upsets in American history and, in the process, revolutionizing the country’s political landscape. He also ushered in a renewed opportunity for an overdue American version of Tory Democracy. Does this make Trump the American Dizzy? It certainly makes him and his movement reminiscent of something that one of Dizzy’s characters says in Coningsby: “I have ever been of opinion that revolutions are not to be evaded.”
Edward Short is the author, most recently, of Adventures in the Book Pages, published by Gracewing.
