Oh, hapless Liberals, learn from Disraeli

Social Issues

Dispensing with traditional conservative positions on trade and foreign policy, the term "conservative" in Australia today has instead tended to be reduced those just interested in talking about traditional social issues. But even here they need to learn from Disraeli. Gladstone often engaged in highly moralistic rhetoric when it came to criticising the underbelly of Victorian society. In a sense he engaged in the culture wars, just as Sky News Australia evening hosts are always urging their viewers to be. The "Grand Old Man" of the British Liberal Party would famously head to the West End to lecture "fallen women" about the error of their ways. The equivalent today, I guess, would be Tony Abbott logging on to OnlyFans to give Bonnie Blue a stern lecture. Disraeli would not have condoned or waived away her behaviour either. But the question is whether moralistic rhetoric is alone an effective way to address such social ills.

The mistake that many on the liberal right in Australia make today is to believe that important social institutions and traditional morality can endure within a liberal framework which constantly stresses the importance of individual freedom above all. Disraeli recognised this thinking was flawed:

"The tone and tendency of liberalism … is to attack the institutions of the country in the name of reform and to make war on the manner and customs of the people under the pretext of progress."

Disraeli knew that the state could not be neutral in the type of society it wished to encourage and that laws were needed to mould and protect social institutions. Otherwise, liberalism would inevitably destroy all institutions and even the definitions of words themselves. This is what people like historian David Starkey are getting at when they say that liberalism caused "woke".

More fundamentally, Disraeli knew that you could not expect a more moral society in a nation without improving the material conditions of its people. To this end strong worker protection was required along with a national role in building infrastructure. While not an economic determinist, he understood that it was nevertheless unrealistic to expect middle class morality without a stable and broad middle class.

Then as now people need houses and stable employment if they are to form families and keep them together. Trying to 'remoralise' them with Gladstonian evangelicalism to say they "just need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps", or "man up and form families" is not enough, and often comes across as clueless and cruel when the rest of your policy framework means they must compete with Third World labour and often hostile actors in the global market.

Individual Rights

Most fundamentally, Disraeli understood that nations are more than a bundle of liberal axioms. That a nation is "not a mere aggregation of individuals, but a living body, with a history, a faith, and a destiny".

The great American-born and British-naturalised tory TS Eliot got to the heart of this attitude in his lines:

"When the Stranger says: "What is the meaning of this city ?
Do you huddle close together because you love each other?"
What will you answer? "We all dwell together
To make money from each other"? or "This is a community"?