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The historical origins and modern psychology of Anglo-Saxon conservatism; Rightism Defined
Topic Started: Feb 24 2013, 01:51 AM (556 Views)
Mountainrivers
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Pat
Feb 25 2013, 02:15 AM
If you dig even further into modern western governing and philosophy, you go back to England for most roots. At a time when feudal Europe was a mismatch of tribes with warrior leaders. England was too, but changed all that with the first form of central governing---the King. They invested it. but the lands also had noblemen who ruled districts yet agreed to come under the banner of one central figure. Studying the history of the British monarchy to modern day is fascinating.

How does the above come into play with this topic? It was the Earls of Britain/England/Saxony that kept the Kings somewhat subdued. The Catholic rulers were knee deep in it too, but it was the Earls who when I can't remember if it was Stephen or Henry 1/2 who got too fancy plus was a poor leader, that decided to step in. The magna carta was penned as the very first agreement that gave ordinary people rights. And dampened the concept of supreme big government and big government intrusion in our lives. Another fascinating study. So it was the conservative ruling class that stood up for liberty and freedom, not so those who felt comfortable with a King's thumb on their heads and telling them how to live.
Somehow, I can't imagine a king being a liberal.
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or the church in the middle ages. This is some sort of revisionist crap, Bertie is trying to foist on us. Too bad for him, we are smarter than he is. Well not as susceptible to propaganda may be a better way to put it. I am not sure he is dumb, but you don't have to be dumb to be gullible, just dumber than the propagandist who is trying to convince you of something that only exists in an alternate universe..
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Berton
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Yet not one of you can show where the paper is wrong.


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Brewster
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I did, Bertie.

I showed where Disraeli was anything but what your author claimed.

I could easily find more, but what's the use?

You'll never admit your author was, as Telco says, full of revisionist crap.
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This is the same revisionist that he quoted re Mussolini. Just shows how gullible Bertrude really is. Some people are far more susceptible to propaganda than others. That is how Hitler took power in WW2, by creating false bogeymen. Bertie woudl have fit right in.
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Berton
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Brewster
Feb 25 2013, 01:19 PM
I did, Bertie.

I showed where Disraeli was anything but what your author claimed.

I could easily find more, but what's the use?

You'll never admit your author was, as Telco says, full of revisionist crap.
No, all you did was give an opinion, which as one liberal members says is worthless without facts to back it up.

Strange that liberals are unable to enter a discussion without childish name calling.
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Apparently you missed what brew posted:

Disraeli was sympathetic to some of the demands of the Chartists and argued for an alliance between the landed aristocracy and the working class against the increasing power of the merchants and new industrialists in the middle class, helping to found the Young England group in 1842 to promote the view that the landed interests should use their power to protect the poor from exploitation by middle-class businessmen.


Look at the section on "progressive conservatism" HERE. You will find Disraeli listed under it along with Stanley Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain, Winston Churchill, Harold Macmillan, and present Prime Minister David Cameron .

If you want to take ownership of Disraeli then you had better take ownership of Chamberlain as well. LOL

I am getting tired of having to whack your pee pee all the time. Get your head out of the ass of all those wacko blogs.
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Thumper
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Oh boy, Bertrude is back. LOL
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Berton
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Across the Channel, however, there was a form of conservatism that was ultimately more successful. Bismarck's great English contemporary, Benjamin Disraeli, certainly presided over a great increase in British prosperity but, in addition, he was far more successful at containing domestic unrest. Like Bismarck he saw the need for worker-welfare legislation as a means of buying social peace and both men were notable welfare innovators -- THE welfare innovators, it might be said. So what was the secret of Disraeli's success? Fundamentally, it was sentimentality. Although he was always vocal about his own Jewishness, Disraeli had a sort of love-affair with the English people that was only surpassed in more recent times by the love-affair that Ronald Reagan had with the American people. And the results Disraeli got were arguably as transformative as the results Reagan got. Disraeli voiced a great love and respect for English traditions and preached the virtues of Englishness incessantly. And he included in his embrace the ordinary English working people -- whom he said were "angels in marble" -- people with great and good potential. He actually trusted the working-class -- an almost unheard-of idea among all the governing classes in Europe at that time. So he sponsored legislation that gave the workers the vote on a greatly increased scale. And they rewarded his trust by being far less susceptible to the political and social agitation that plagued their contemporaries in Europe. They developed a lasting trust in their national institutions that did far more for lasting peace and civility than anything else could have done.

Like many other politicians, Disraeli chopped and changed in his policies as he went through life (both Churchill and Reagan started out as liberals in their early years but ended up as luminaries of conservatism) and this has led to bitter denunciations of him as hypocritical and self-serving. And Disraeli's inmost thoughts may indeed have been as his critics describe them but it his pronouncements and policies when in power that influenced events so it is to those that we must look. Given the discrimination against Jews of his day, he may in his heart have despised the English people but it was his proclaimed love of them that got results. And his proclamation of the Tories as the party that cared about the nation as a whole rather than sectional interests (the "One nation" claim) was at the least clever, no matter how it was motivated. And no-one has ever doubted Dizzy's cleverness.

At one of the great international political conferences of the time (Berlin Congress of 1878), Germany was represented by Bismarck and Britain by Disraeli. To Britain's considerable benefit, Disraeli ran rings around all of them -- causing Bismarck to make his famous admiring remark: "Der alte Jude. Das is der Mann" ("The old Jew. THAT is the man"). Coming from Bismarck, that was a compliment indeed. Disraeli himself attributed the greater social peace of 19th century England to Englishness but to a considerable extent it was also his own personal achievement.

I am always a bit amused at how well Disraeli's propaganda has lasted. Although the idea was NOT original to him, it is mainly Disraeli whom we have to thank for rebranding the British Tories in the 19th century as the "Conservatives". And the reason Disraeli did that is a very modern and rather clever one. Disraeli and the Tories did indeed want to conserve SOME things from traditional British ways and customs but, under Disraeli's leadership, the Tories ALSO became a great party of reform. As already mentioned, it was Disraeli who introduced some of Britain's first worker protection laws and who extended the vote to many working class people who had never had it before. So Disraeli chose a name that was certainly accurate in one respect but which also disguised another major part of his agenda -- which was CHANGE! He named his party in a way that deflected attention from its belief in the need for change in certain areas -- in order to confuse his opponents and reassure his allies. Communists do something similar when they label their governments as "Democratic".

So why did Disraeli lead the Tories so far down the road of reform? Basically because he saw that the pressure to give the vote to the workers would in the end be irresistible. There had long been agitation for it and that agitation was getting ever more energetic. So what he wanted to do was to avoid another French Revolution. He wanted the transition to majority rule to be peaceful, orderly, non-destructive and non-tyrannical. He succeeded brilliantly. He succeeded in moving the Tories away from being a party of the rich to being a party for all Englishmen and he rightly saw that working class Englishmen could be relied on for patriotism and good sense just as well as more prosperous Englishmen could be. And that is true to this day.

So while it is true that Disraeli wanted to conserve what was best from the past, conserving anything was for him primarily a means to an end. And if that end needed reform to achieve it, that was fine too. So what was he aiming at achieving by his reforms? What WAS the end he was aiming at? Unlike Leftists, he was not aiming at equalizing everybody or creating the worker-led tyranny that his contemporary, Karl Marx, was advocating. He was aiming at the opposite of that. He wanted to preserve civility and avoid tyranny. He wanted people to be free to get on with their lives in their own accustomed way without interference from other people or from the State. He attached himself to that great tradition in English politics that values individual liberty and suspects the State. And that tradition goes back a long way in England -- right back to the time when Britannia became England about 1500 years ago. The advocates of the individual versus the collectivity have not always been called conservatives but in England they have always been there -- as I will set out at length in the rest of this article.


Leftists, of course, have always been happy to misrepresent conservatism as resistance to ALL change -- something that all conservative thinkers that I know of explicitly reject -- including both Edmund Burke and Disraeli (as we shall see) -- but even conservative intellectuals these days are still sometimes misled by Disraeli's old propaganda trick (see e.g. here or here) and assume that the PRIME aim of conservatives is to conserve -- but in so doing they simply show their ignorance of history. There are only SOME things that conservatives want to conserve and those things that conservatives do want to conserve they want to conserve for a reason, not as an end in itself. And the end they seek is safety and liberty for the individual to live his own life in his own way with minimal interference from others and from the State. They realize that the State and society generally are sometimes needed to secure that freedom but do not lose sight of the fact that freedom for the individual is the end of political policy, not an optional extra. And present day politics are much like the politics of Disraeli's day. Conservatives don't want to conserve our disastrous educational and social welfare systems, they want to reform them. And they want to reform them by empowering the individual -- just as conservatives have always done.

The most loved and most influential conservative leader of the 20th century knew what conservatism was about, of course. He said: "If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism..... The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom". And if Ronald Reagan did not know what conservatism was all about, who would?

Although the term "conservatism" first acquired a political use in the 19th century, that does not of course mean that thinking now generally called conservative arose for the first time in that era. Political labels come and go and ideas that are at one time associated with one political party can at a later time come to be associated with another party. It is my basic thesis in this article, however, that there has long been an important polarity in politics that has survived the comings and goings of political parties and I aim to trace that polarity through history at some length. As a matter of historical interest, however, I set out below a potted history of the term "conservatism", which I owe to Martin Hutchinson, author of Great Conservatives:


"The etymology of Conservatism is straightforward. The term was first used as a description of a political party in a 50 page article, probably by John Wilson Croker, in the January 1830 Quarterly Review, a publication that generally supported the great Tory governments of 1783-1830, then in their last months of power before losing definitively to the Whigs in November of that year. The "Conservative" party was indeed the party that sought to preserve what was already there; in this case the specific constitution and policies of those Tory governments, which were by that time embattled.

After the series of Tory disasters in 1830-32, the term "Conservative" was picked up by Sir Robert Peel, leader of the Tory remnants, and was used to do three things. First, it was used to reassure traditionalist voters that the party was opposed to further destructive change. Second, it was used to give the party a "new image" that might appeal to moderates. Third, by stigmatizing them as not "Conservatives" but "reactionaries" it was used to de-legitimize the remnants of the Tory right, such as the Duke of Wellington and more distantly the aged Lord Eldon, who were a threat to Peel's dominance.

By the time Disraeli became leader of the Conservative Party in 1868, the term had been in use for nearly two generations. It had been set aside after the 1846 split over the Corn Laws, when the party divided into "Peelites" and "Protectionists" but had been brought back into full use by Disraeli's predecessor as leader, the 14th Earl of Derby, after Peel died in 1850 and the party abandoned protectionism in 1852".


But it was Disraeli who was by far the most eloquent advocate of the virtues of conservatism and it was he who is generally credited with bringing the term into common use as the name of his party. How much of Disraeli's often-expressed sentimental attachment to almost everything traditionally English was propaganda and how much was sincerely felt, we can really only speculate but that his deeds served the preservation of English liberty and civility well there can be no doubt. There were none of the big 19th century upheavals in England that there were in Europe. Calling on the accumulated wisdom of English traditions to both guide and limit reform was certainly a practical, popular and political success.

This is not the place for a full discussion of the many huge social and economic changes that took place in the 19th. century, so I have contented myself with a quick mention of just Disraeli and Bismarck. Those two do not remotely, however, exhaust the list of interesting conservatives from that time. There were in fact many conservatives of the time who acted in ways that upset stereotypes popular today. A good place to start exploration of that would probably be any history of the life and works of Richard Oastler. He was a notable predecessor of Disraeli in worker-welfare agitation and legislation yet was also, like Disraeli, a high Tory. By modern standards he would be the most hopeless reactionary yet he was also a passionate and effective advocate for the welfare of the workers. History is very good at overturning simple theories! And I think it should already be clear that the concept of conservatism as opposition to change is one of the silliest of all theories.

I might note at this stage that this article is not intended as a simple chronology (there are already plenty of political histories that do that) but rather as the development of an argument, so for the purposes of that argument I will skip back and forth through history to some extent. For that reason I will not say any more about Disraeli and the 19th century at this stage but we will meet him on several occasions below. See for example here and here. I might also mention that this article is intended as a survey of the facts rather than as a statement of my personal beliefs. For anybody who is interested in what my personal views on political matters might be, there is a brief summary of that here.
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